Leonardo Padura - Havana Blue

He pressed the bell four times, thumped on the door, shouted. There was nobody at home, and he jumped up and down, the almost palpable lavatory had aroused an urgent desire to piss, he couldn’t hold on and thumped on the door again.

“I’m hungry, so hungry and nearly pissing myself,” the Count blurted out before greeting her or kissing her on the forehead and then rushing to lower his head to receive her womanly kiss. It was a tradition from the time when Skinny Carlos was very skinny and the Count spent every day in that house, and they played ping-pong and tried with dubious success to learn how to dance and studied physics in the early hours before their exams. But Skinny Carlos was skinny no more, and only he persisted in calling him that. Skinny Carlos now weighed in at more than two hundred pounds and moved around in fits and starts in a wheelchair. In 1981, in Angola, he’d got a bullet in the back, waist-high, and it severed his spinal cord. None of the five operations he’d undergone since had improved things, and Skinny awoke each morning with a new pain, another nerve or muscle that had been stilled forever.

“Hey, my boy, you look bloody awful,” said Josefina when she saw him coming out of the lavatory and handed him a glass of watery coffee.

“I’m on my last legs, Jose, and incredibly hungry.” And gave her the glass back after taking only one sip of coffee.

Much relieved and cigarette already lit, he entered his friend’s room. Skinny was in his wheelchair, in front of the television and looking worried.

“They say they’re seeing to the ground, and the game will go ahead. Hey, no, for Christ’s sake, no,” he protested as he saw his friend unwrapping a bottle of rum.

“We need to talk, my brother, and I need two shots of rum. If you don’t…”

“Fuck, you’ll be the death of me,” rasped Skinny, and he started to swing his chair round. “Don’t give me any ice, that Santa Cruz is so sweet.”

The Count left the room and came back carrying two glasses and a corkscrew.

“Well, how are things going?”

“I’ve just been to Tamara’s, Skinny, I swear to you, the wench is hotter than ever. She doesn’t get older. She just gets better.”

“Women are like that. Do you still want to marry her?”

“Fuck off. You’re right about this rum. It’s really good.”

“My friend, take it gently today. You look really shit.”

“It’s a combination of sleep deprivation, hunger and incipient baldness,” he said, pointing to his receding hairline before taking another sip. “No news, the man’s still missing and no clue as to where the fuck he’s got to or why he’s vanished, whether he’s dead or alive…”

Skinny was still edgy. He glanced at the television where they were showing music videos until the baseball game started. Of the people the Count knew, Skinny was, and by a long chalk compared to himself, the one who most agonized over baseball, ever since he’d been skinny and centerfield in the high school team. The Count had only seen him cry twice, and twice it had been brought on by baseball and his lament was a bolero, with big tears and sobs, and he became inconsolable.

“Well, doesn’t life take funny old turns?” Skinny Carlos remarked as he looked back at his friend. “You looking for Rafael Morín.”

“Not that many turns, Skinny, you know. He’s exactly the same, an opportunist bastard who’s really wheeled and dealed to get to where he’s got.”

“Hey, not so, my friend,” retorted Skinny after lighting his cigarette. “Rafael knew what he wanted and went for it, and was made of the right stuff. It wasn’t for nothing that he got the best marks at high school and then in industrial engineering. When I went into the civil side, he was already being talked up like the star act at the circus. He was phenomenal: almost top marks right from year one.”

“Are you going to start defending him now?” asked the Count, looking incredulous.

“Hey, I don’t know what’s happened now, nor do you, and you’re the policeman. But things aren’t so simple, pal. The fact is he was good at school and, you know, I for one reckon he didn’t need to cheat at the exams when the Viboragate scandal broke.”

The Count ran a hand through his hair and couldn’t repress a smile.

“Fucking shit, Skinny, Viboragate. I thought nobody remembered that.”

“If I wasn’t on my hobbyhorse, I think I would have forgotten it,” replied Skinny, pouring more rum out. “You get me going. You know, Miki dropped by this afternoon. He came to see me because he’s going to Germany and wanted to know if I needed anything, and while he was about it he asked me to lend him ten pesos. But I told him about the Rafael business, and he said you should make sure you go to see him.”

“Why? Does he know something?”

“No, he only found out when I told him and it was then he said you should contact him. You know Miki’s always been a bit of a mystery.”

“And did Rafael survive Viboragate with a clean bill of health?”

“Pour yourself some more if it improves your thinking. Right, he didn’t have problems, when the headmaster got the push, he was already at university, and the guy who almost got the rap was Armandito Fonseca, the student president for that year, right?”

“Naturally, the shit went close, but it didn’t stick. Didn’t I tell you?”

Skinny shook his head, as if trying to say “you’re beyond the pale” but then added:

“That’s enough of that, Conde, you don’t know if he was involved or not, and the fact is they didn’t accuse him of fixing marks or letting out exam papers or anything like that. What always bugged you was that he fucked Tamara and you only jerked off thinking of her.

“And what made your hands so sore, too much groping in the playground?”

“And it also bugged you a lot, you told me as much, the fact we couldn’t study in Daddy Valdemira’s library anymore because Rafael had claimed that as his own…”

The Count stood up and walked over to Skinny Carlos. He stuck out his index finger and placed it between his friend’s eyebrows.

“Hey, are you with the Indians or the Cowboys? You know, I can’t curse your mother because she’s getting my dinner ready. But I can piss on you, easy as pie. Since when have you been a card-carrying time-server, hey?”

“I hope he gets it where it really hurts,” said Skinny, slapping the Count’s arm and starting to laugh. It was a body-shaking guffaw, rising from his gut, shaking all his huge, limp, almost useless body, a deep visceral laugh that threatened to kill off his wheelchair, flatten walls and hit the street, turn corners, open doors and make Lieutenant Mario Conde collapse in stitches on his ass on his bed begging for another shot of rum to deal with the bout of coughing. They were laughing as if they’d just learned how, and Josefina, drawn by the din, looked at them from the doorway, and her face was deeply gloomy behind the hint of a smile: she’d have given anything, her own life, her good health which was now beginning to fail her, for nothing to have happened and for those men who were laughing still to be boys who always laughed like that, even if they had no reason, if only for the pleasure of laughing.

“All right, that’s enough,” she said and walked into the room. “Time to eat. It’s almost nine o’clock.”

“Yes, mother darling, I’m the walking wounded,” said the Count and went over to Skinny’s wheelchair.

“Hey, just wait a minute,” asked Carlos when the music stopped on the telly and the presenter’s overeager smile appeared on the screen.

“Dear viewers,” said the woman, who wanted to look enthused and so happy at what she was about to say, “conditions are practically right in the Latino-americano Stadium to kick off the first game in the Industriales-Vegueros playoffs. While we wait for that interesting game to start, we will continue with our musical offerings.”