“Fucking hot.”
“Your face looks really shit awful.”
“I can imagine,” the Count agreed, as he coughed and spat out of the window in the direction of the yard. Skinny Carlos watched him from his wheelchair and shrugged his shoulders. He knew when his friend behaved that way it was best to ignore him. He’d always said the Count was a long-suffering bastard, a sucker for nostalgia, a total hypochondriac and the most difficult person to console in the world, and today he didn’t feel he had time or stamina to relieve the fierce onslaught of melancholy his friend was suffering.
“Should I put some music on?” he asked.
“You feel like it?”
“Only asking. Just to pass the time, you know?”
The Count went over to the long row of cassettes on the top of the shelves. His eyes ran over titles and singers, and this time was hardly surprised by Skinny’s eclectic taste in music.
“What do you fancy? The Beatles? Chicago? Formula V? Los Pasos? Credence?”
“Hey, Credence,” they agreed again: they liked to hear Tom Foggerty’s tight voice and the elemental guitars of Credence Clearwater Revival.
“Theirs is still the best version of Proud Mary.”
“That’s not even up for discussion.”
“He sings like a black, or rather sings as if he were fucking God.”
“Fucking right.” And were surprised as they looked each other in the eye: both felt simultaneously the painful inevitability of the morbid replay they were engaged in. They’d repeated that same dialogue, the same words, on other occasions, often, over twenty years of friendship, and always in Skinny’s room, and its periodical resurrection brought back the feeling they were entering an enchanted realm of perpetual, cyclical time, where it was possible to imagine all was pristine and eternal. But so many visible signs, so much skulking behind shame, fear, rancour and even affection, gave notice that only the remastered voice of Tom Foggerty and the Credence guitars had any permanence. The baldness threatening the Count and not-so-skinny Skinny’s sick flab, Mario’s inveterate sadness and Carlos’s intractable illness were all too conclusive proof, among a thousand others, of a wretched decline entirely in the ascendant.
“It’s some time since you saw Red Candito?” Skinny asked when the song came to an end.
“No kidding.”
“He was here the other afternoon and told me he’d given up his line in shoe-making.”
“What’s he into now?”
Skinny looked at the cassette player, as if suddenly something about the machine or song had distracted him.
“What’s up, you sly bastard?”
“Nothing’s up… He’s got a piloto and he’s selling beer…”
The Count nodded and smiled. He could smell his friend’s intentions from several miles.
“And he asked me why we didn’t go and pay him a visit one of these days…”
The Count nodded and smiled again.
“You know I can’t go to that kind of place, Skinny. It’s illegal and if something happens…”
“Mario, don’t fuck around. In this heat, with your shit-awful face
… and it’s only a couple of minutes to Candito’s place… A few beers. Come on, let’s off.”
“I can’t, you bastard. Fucking remember I’m a policeman…” his weak-willed arms feebly hoisting flags proclaiming SOS… “Don’t keep on, Skinny.”
But Skinny did. “I’m damned desperate to go and I thought you’d jump at the chance. You know I never get out, I’m more bored than a toad under a rock… A few cold beers. Just for my birthday, right? And you’re practically not a policeman any more…”
“But what kind of bastard have you turned into, Skinny? Your birthday’s not until next week.”
“All right. All right. If you don’t want to, we won’t…”
The Count brought the wheelchair to a halt outside the entrance to the building. He wiped the sweat away again, as he looked at a passageway lined with doors on both sides. His arms hung heavy after the effort of pushing his friend’s two hundred and fifty pounds more than ten blocks, and the two hills he’d gone up and down. A light flickered in the dark at the end of the passage and the glare from television screens and voices of the characters in the latest soap emerged from every open door in the place. “Tell me, Mama, who’s to blame for everything that’s happened? Please tell me, Mama,” asked someone who’d surely suffered terrible things in that life in daily episodes that craved to be the real thing. Then he put his handkerchief away and walked towards Candito’s door, the only one still shut. As he pushed the wheelchair he tried to hide his face between his arms: I’m still a policeman, he thought, as the temptation from those clandestine beers drew nearer, with the cool, delectable oblivion their consumption would deliver.
He knocked and the door opened as if they were expected. Cuqui, the mulatta who now lived with Candito, had only to stretch out her arm to turn the door handle. Like all those living in the block, she too was watching the soap, and her face seemed to reveal the astonishment of the character finally discovering the whole truth. “I’m to blame,” the Count thought of saying, but he restrained himself.
“Come in, come in,” she insisted, but her voice retained something of the hesitancy of the character in the soap: she refused to believe, and perhaps that was why she shouted into the room, and kept her eyes trained on the newcomers: “Candito, you’ve got visitors.”
Like in a puppet theatre, Red Candito’s saffroncoloured head peered out from behind the curtains hiding the kitchen and the Count got the code: having visitors was different to having customers, and Candito should show himself cautiously. But as soon as he saw them, the mulatto broke into a smile and walked over.
“Fucking hell, Carlos, you persuaded him,” he said, as he shook hands with his two old school friends.
“I told you I’d come and here I am, right?”
“You bet, come inside. I’ve still got some stuff left. Hey, Cuqui, get a nice snack for these mates of mine and forget the soap, go on. Whenever I look at it, they’re spewing out the same bullshit…”
Candito sorted the furniture so Skinny’s chair could cross the room, raised the curtain which hid the kitchen and opened the patio door: some six tables, all full, halted the Count in his tracks. Candito looked him in the eye and nodded: yes, he could go in. But for a moment from the kitchen the Count scrutinized the customers: they were almost all men, only three women, and he tried to identify the odd face. He instinctively touched his belt to check his pistol wasn’t there, but calmed down when he didn’t recognize anyone. Any of those characters could have had run-ins with him at Headquarters and the Count didn’t like the idea of bumping into them in a place like this.
The cheap marble tables were round, iron legged and piled high with bottles. A cold bright light lit the space and a cassette recorder played at top volume the mournful songs of Jose Feliciano, whose voice did its best to drown out the drinkers’ voices. By the sink, two metal tanks sweated ice against the heat. Candito walked over to a table in one corner, occupied by two awesome-looking specimens. He spoke quietly. The men agreed to give up their seats: one was huge, fair-haired, a good six feet tall with long, dangling arms, a face as cratered as the moon’s surface; the other was smaller, his skin so black it was blue, and he just had to be a direct grandson and universal heir to Cro-Magnon man himself: Darwin’s theory of evolution was reflected in the exaggerated jutting of his jaw and the narrow forehead where the eyes of a wild beast of the jungle glinted yellow. Red Candito gestured to the Count to push Carlos’s chair nearer and to the men to bring three beers.
“What did you tell that pair of troglodytes?” the Count mumbled as they sat down.
“Calm down, Conde, calm it. You’re anonymous here, right. Those guys are my business legs.”
The Count turned to look at the big blond, who was now approaching the table with their beers; he placed them on the table and then, without a word, walked over to the tanks.
“They’re your bodyguards, you mean?”
“They’re my legs, Condesito, and they have a hundred uses.”
“Hey, Candito,” Skinny butted in. “What’s a lager cost these days?”
“Depends how you get it, Carlos. Right now it’s tricky and I sell it for three pesos. But yours is on the house, and no arguing, OK?” And he smiled as Cuqui appeared with a plateful of strips of ham, and cheese with biscuits. “All right, darling, carry on relaxing with that soap.” And he stroked her backside farewell.
The ice-cold beer restored a degree of peace to the Count’s over-heated spirit, and he regretted gulping
