Havana Gold

bring her a few things back, isn’t it? Just remember she was also very young, this same generation… What a great pity, and she being so pretty…”

The bell brought an end to his oration: the previous gentle hum turned into the raucous shouting of an overflowing stadium and, youths rushed down corridors in search of the cafeteria, their boy or girlfriends and the lavatories where they’d inevitably indulge in a spot of clandestine smoking. While Manolo jotted down some details from the murdered woman’s work-record, and the address of the teacher by the name of Dagmar, Conde went out into the playground longing to smoke a cigarette and inhale the ambience from his memories. He found the corridors packed with white and mustard coloured uniforms, and smiled liked someone cursed. He was going to kill a friendly ghost, by lighting up right there, in the most forbidden place, in the middle of the playground, on the compass of winds that marked the heart of the school. But he held back at the last moment. Downstairs or up on the first floor? He hesitated for a moment about where to do it. I preferred upstairs, he concluded, and went up to the male lavatories on the top floor. The smoke escaping through the door was like a signal from the Sioux: he could read “here we smoke pipe of peace” in the air. He entered and caused an inevitable stir among the clandestine smokers; cigarettes disappeared and everyone suddenly had an urgent need to pee. The Count quickly raised his arms and said: “Hey, I’m not a teacher. I’ve come for a smoke too,” and tried to look relaxed as he finally lit up, the focus of the youths’ suspicious gazes. To compensate those who’d been cut short by his appearance he passed round his packet of cigarettes, although only three took up his offer. The Count kept staring at them, as if wanting to see himself and his friends in those students and once again he thought there’d been a change: either they’d been very small or these fellows were very big; they’d been smooth-cheeked and innocent and this lot had full grown beards, adult muscles and over-confident stares. Perhaps it was true that they were only interested in getting laid; so what? It was their prime time. At the age of fifteen had they ever worried much about anything else? Perhaps they hadn’t, for in those same lavatories, above the first sink, a famous piece of graffiti had captured the irrepressible desire of a sixteen-year-old: I WANT TO DIE DOING IT: DOING IT, EVEN UP AN ARSE. That legend had declared its basic erotic philosophy, now covered by paint, alongside generations of more intellectual graffiti like the one the Count now read: DO COCKS HAVE IDEOLOGIES? He decided to put a question to them when he’d put his packet of cigarettes away: “Were any of you Lissette’s pupils?”

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…

“Jose Luis Ferrer.”

“Thanks, Jose 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 Julian 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.