Leonardo Padura - Havana Gold

“All right, all that’s true, except for the idea I killed her and went to bed with her, I swear on my mother. I didn’t kill her and wasn’t with her either that day, and Luis and Yuri will tell you that’s so, you’ll see. Yes, she thought up the party, told me about it during break at Pre-Uni, hey Lacho – that’s what she called me – you know what? Why don’t you drop by tonight for a while, I’ll have rum? She and I, you know, were an item for a few months, from December, she partied with me and I’m only human and we started to go to bed, but nobody knew in Pre-Uni, and I told only Luis and Yuri and they swore not to tell, and that was it, nobody knew. Then I told them, come one, let’s go and have a drink or two, and had the bright idea of going to Lando’s and stealing a few of the joints he liked smoking, I knew he put them inside a packet of Marlboro, one of the cardboard kind, in a pocket in his jacket in his bedroom, because I saw him take one from there once and I went and stole a few but only two or three times. And that was all, I met up with my pals on the street corner near her house and we went up at about eight-thirty, started to drink, listen to music and dance and I lit a joint and we smoked but she didn’t because she said she wanted more rum. Yuri went as far as El Niágara and bought two more bottles with the money she’d given him, and that was all, she was half drunk when we left at about eleven, we were incredibly hungry because she never had any food in the house, and we went to the stop and caught our buses, they the number 15 and me the 174, that drops me nearer my house, and that was all, that was that. We found out the next day and were incredibly scared and decided it would be better not to say anything to anybody, because somebody would jump to conclusions, like you have. That was all, I swear to you. I didn’t kill her or go to bed with her that night. I swear I didn’t. You ask Yuri and Luis who were with me, you ask them, go on…”

Far too many mysteries by half, the Count told himself. He wanted to think about the mystery concocted around Lissette’s death, but the unexpected riddle of Karina’s disappearance kept getting in the way, where could she have got to last night, he rang her again after speaking to Lázaro and the same female voice as on the previous night spoke to him: “No, she didn’t come here yesterday, but she phoned and I gave her your message. She didn’t ring you?” That statement was like a gust coming from the poop deck, swelling the sails of his doubts and fears and setting them off at top speed across a choppy, uncertain Sargasso Sea. He knew the company Karina worked for was based in El Vedado, but his enthusiasm prevented him doing his policeman thing and he’d never asked her for her exact address, after all, she lived around the corner from Skinny, and he didn’t dare ask the woman at the other end of the line. Karina’s mother? Something irrevocable had happened, as on the night of the eighteenth, he thought. Leaning against the window in his office, he looked at the defiant crests of the weeping figs and their evergreen leaves that resisted everything. He wished time would fly, so he could go home and wait next to his phone. She’d ring him with a good excuse, he tried to tell himself. I was on duty and forgot to tell you. We had a work crisis and I stayed back, and you know how terrible the phones are, I couldn’t get through, my love. But he knew he was lying to himself. A miracle? Only a miracle of springtime, old Machado would say, also touched by a love that finally eluded him.

He heard someone open his office door. Manolo, carrying a sheaf of papers, flopped down in the big chair, imitating the exhaustion of a victorious runner. He was laughing.

“It’s a real pity about the lad, but he’s shot it, Conde.”

“He’s shot it?” asked the lieutenant, allowing the flow of his thoughts to get back on track. “What has the laboratory got to tell us?”

“The semen belongs to Lázaro. No doubt about that.”

“And Yuri and Luis?”

“What you’d thought, they caught the bus first and left Lázaro at the stop. They say they always went together to the stop in La Víbora and then got off to go to Acosta Avenue, but that night he told them to go, that he was going to catch the 174 so as not to have to walk so far.”

“And the white shirt?”

“Yes, it was his and he’d taken it that night. She’d sometimes wash clothes for him. Poor Lázaro, and he had it all on a plate, didn’t he?”

“Yes, poor Lázaro, he doesn’t know what will hit him. And what did they tell you about the party?”

“It was different to the one Lázaro invented. They say that when she got drunk she got very stroppy because Lázaro told her to give him the physics and maths exams and she started to talk straight, she wouldn’t give him any more exams, because he played the big man with everyone else saying what was going to come up and he would get her into trouble, that was all he wanted her for, apart from it , they say she said, and then told them to clear off. Luis says it’s true Lázaro used to sell the answers to the exam questions, but she didn’t know. Sly sod, wasn’t he? Well, Lázaro tried to calm her down but she insisted on the three of them going, and even almost pushed Lázaro out when Yuri and Luis were already on the stairs. They both told the same story, step by step. Then, when they found out about the teacher’s death they went to talk to Lázaro and decided it would be best not to say they’d been there that night. They thought it best in order not to create problems for themselves, but Yuri says it was Lázaro’s idea they should keep quiet.”

The Count lit a cigarette and glanced briefly at the data Manolo had brought from the central laboratories. He left them on the table and went back to his window, stared at a single scrap of skyline and said: “Then Lázaro went back from the bus stop. He didn’t have a key, so she opened the door. He persuaded her she’d made a mistake and they had sex on the living room sofa. A great reconciliation, I can almost hear the background music. But why did he kill her?” he wondered, and lost sight of the scrap of skyline he’d selected when he saw Lázaro on Lissette, saw his face at last, as he tightened the towel round her throat, tighter and tighter, until his oarsman’s arms slackened after all that effort and the enigmatically beautiful face of the girl locked for ever in that absurd rictus, between pain and uncertainty. Why did he kill her?

The blue smoke smells like spring: fresh and sharp. Steamy and evanescent, the smokes floats from mouth to lungs, from lungs to brain and dawns behind the eyes, which perceive the glint of a new day in everything, a heightened perception and sensitivity revealing shafts of mother-of-pearl lucidity never grasped before. The world, the whole world, becomes broader and nearer, and shiny, while the smoke disperses, transforms into breath lost to each blood cell and neuron that is awake and on full alert. Life is beautiful, isn’t it, people are beautiful, your hands are big, your arms powerful, your knob huge. Thanks, smoke.

Marijuana was among the things Christopher Columbus discovered without imagining he had. Those Indians “with charred sticks in their mouths” looked too happy to be mere smokers of tobacco on the verge of emphysema. Dried grass, dark leaves, blue smoke that made it possible to mistake sad, disconsolate Columbus for a pinkish god out of a mystery lost in the Indians’ mythical memory. A good joint. A leaf too lethal by far when they discovered that Columbus wasn’t God, and they weren’t his chosen spirits.

But smoking it is a pleasure, is to float over the dust of hours and days, knowing we are all powerful: able to create and believe, to be and not to be where nobody can be and not be, while the imagination soars as blue as the smoke and breathing is easy, seeing is easy, listening supreme joy.