Leonardo Padura - Havana Gold

Suspicion returned to the faces of the smokers who’d stayed in the lavatories, momentarily placated by the offer of a ciggie. They stared at the Count as he knew they would, and some of them exchanged glances, as if to say, “Watch out, this guy’s got to be police.”

“Yes, I’m a policeman. I’ve been ordered to investigate the teacher’s death.”

“I was,” spoke up a pale, skinny youth, one of the few who’d kept smoking when the Count violated the collective privacy of the lavatories. He took a drag on his minimal fag end before taking a step towards the policeman.

“This year?”

“No, last year.”

“And what was she like? As a teacher, I mean.”

“And if I say not much good, what will happen?” probed the student and the Count thought he’d met up with Skinny Carlos’s alter ego : far too suspicious and sarcastic for his age.

“Nothing whatsoever. I told you I’m not from the Ministry of Education. I want to find out what happened to her. Whatever help you can give me…”

The skinny lad held out a hand to ask a friend for a cigarette.

“No, she was really nice-natured. She was good to us. She helped those who were in trouble.”

“They say she was a friend to her pupils.”

“Yeah, she wasn’t like the old fogeys who’re on a different wavelength.”

“And what was her wavelength?”

Skinny looked at his smoking-den mates, expecting a helping hand that never came.

“I don’t know. She went to parties, things like that. You get me?”

The Count nodded, as if he got him.

“What’s your name by the way?”

The skinny fellow smiled and nodded. As if to say: I knew it…

“José Luis Ferrer.”

“Thanks, José Luis,” said the Count, shaking his hand. Then he looked at the group. “And please, if somebody knows anything that might help, tell the headmaster to ring me. If the teacher was really that nice, I think she deserves that much. See you,” and he went out into the passage, after crushing his cigarette in the sink and reflecting for a second on the ideological conundrum etched on the wall.

Manolo and the headmaster were waiting in the playground.

“I was a pupil here, you know,” he announced, without looking at their host.

“You don’t say. And you’ve not been back for some time?”

The Count nodded and paused before answering.

“Quite a number of years, in fact… I spent two years in that classroom,” and he pointed to the corner of the second floor, on the same wing as the lavatories he’d just visited. “I don’t know if we were very different to the boys you have now, but we hated our headmaster.”

“Headmasters do change from time to time,” he replied, slipping his hands into the pockets of his guayabera . He seemed about to launch into another harangue, to demonstrate his insights and skilled control of that performance space. The Count looked at him for a moment, to see if such a change were possible. Possibly, but he’d take some convincing.

“If only. They sacked ours for fraud.”

“Yes, we all know about him.”

“But what nobody said was that several teachers were implicated. They threw out the headmaster and two heads of department, who were apparently the ones most involved in the affair. Perhaps the odd one of those teachers is still festering here.”

“You trying to alarm me?”

“I’m just telling you the truth, maybe because that headmaster got rid of the best teacher we had, one who taught Spanish and did things the way Lissette did. She preferred to be with us and taught lots of people to read… Have you read Hopscotch ? She thought it was the best book ever and said so in such a way that for many years I believed her. But I don’t know if these youths are very different. Do they still smoke in the lavatories and play truant over the wall in the PE yard?”

The headmaster tried to smile and took a few steps towards the middle of the playground.

“Did you truant?”

“Ask Julián the guard-dog, the caretaker on the door. He probably still remembers me.”

Manolo padded stealthily over, and stood next to his boss, but a long way from the conversation. Conde knew he must be eying up the girls, enjoying the scent of so many maidenheads under threat or freshly sacrificed, and then imitated him, but only for a few seconds, because he immediately felt old, terribly remote from those young blossoming girls, their yellow smocks cut to their thighs, cool as he would never be again.

“Well, I do apologize, but the fact is I…”

“Don’t worry, headmaster,” replied the Count, smiling at him for the first time. “We must be off. But I’d like to ask you a question… a difficult one, as you might say. Have you heard any rumours about your youngsters smoking marijuana?”

The headmaster’s smiling face, which had expected another kind of difficult question, turned into a caricature of a bad frown. The Count nodded: yes, you heard me aright.

“Hey, why do you ask?”

“No reason in particular, just to find out whether they are really that different.”

The man thought for a moment before answering. He seemed at a loss, but the Count knew he was searching for the most politically tactful response.

“I really don’t think so. At least I don’t believe it to be the case, though anything can happen at a party in their barrios, I don’t know if the drop-outs smoke… But I don’t think so. They maybe couldn’t care less and are rather frivolous, but I wouldn’t say they were evil, you know.”

“Nor would I,” said the Count shaking the headmaster’s hand.

They walked towards the exit where several students were trying to persuade Julián the caretaker to let them out on a really urgent errand. No, don’t go spinning tall stories. If you don’t have a headmaster’s note then nobody’s leaving, Julián was surely telling them, repeating the spiel he’d been rehearsing the past thirty years. So, they’re not so different, it’s the same old game, thought the Count, who, as he walked past the caretaker, looked him in the eye again, and while the man was opening the gate to let them out, he said: “Julián, it’s me the Count, the one who used to get out over the back to go and hear the episodes of Guaytabó,” and he happily left the past to return to the gusts in the present blowing away the last spring blossom from the majaguas . Only then did he notice that they’d cut down the two trees nearest to the steps, beneath which he’d won a couple of girls to his love. Sad, isn’t it?

“I’m sorry, but I’m not free till about seven,” and the Count thought that recently everyone was saying they were sorry and that the woman’s voice was still as charming and confident as when she’d stated publicly that long hair down to the jaw best suited an angular face. “I’m finishing an article I have to give in tomorrow. Is that time all right?”

“Of course it is. We’ll be there. Goodbye,” he answered, checking his watch and seeing it was barely three-thirty. He hung up and walked back to the car, as Manolo started the engine.

“Well, what did she say?” he asked sticking his head out of his window.

“Not till seven.”

“Blast her,” responded Manolo hitting the steering wheel with both hands. He’d already told the Count he’d be going out tonight with Adriana his current girlfriend, a mulatto with the firmest butt you ever did touch, tits that got you horny and a face to… you know what. Look what she’s done to me, he’d said, opening his arms, blaming his latest sexual conquest for the irretrievable deterioration in his physique.

“Come on, drop me home and pick me up at six-thirty,” suggested Lieutenant Mario Conde, thinking he was not prepared to bus it to Casino Deportivo because Manolo had a desperate need to finger Adriana’s backside.