can’t stand each other and there’s nothing else to go on… Nothing!”
The Count put out his cigarette and suddenly wanted to be well out of there. It was already complicated enough looking for rapists, thieves, swindlers and murderers of mystical transvestites without becoming the subject of suspicion oneself.
“Talk to Manolo and tell him what’s at stake. But talk to him away from here. OK? If anyone finds out I told you this, I’ll be the one who’ll get it in the balls. OK?”
The Count didn’t reply.
“OK, Conde?” the Major persisted.
“OK, Boss… I’m off…” And he stood up.
“Just a minute. How’s the case going?”
The Count shrugged his shoulders. Suddenly he wasn’t overly interested in his case.
“So so… I’ve got a dead man who occasionally had visions of God, and a suspect who’s too suspicious, but no proof against him.”
“So what next?”
“I’ll carry on searching.”
“What the fuck,” said the Boss as he opened the drawer and took out the Montecristo. He broke off the end with his teeth in the traditional manner and briefly chewed on it. He spat the end in the basket and then, when he went to put the lighter-flame next to the end of his cigar, something stopped him and he shook his head. “It’s too good to light now. This at least deserves a cup of real coffee.” And he put it back in the drawer. “There’s one more thing I’ve got to tell you, Conde. Someone phoned me and asked me for discretion in everything around this case. He told me something I didn’t know: the dead man was old Arayan’s son and you know what that means. They want everything to stay a problem unconnected to the family so links can’t be made between them and that mess of tranvestites and queers their son was mixed up with. So now you know: first I said trasvestites because that’s what came to me, and don’t hassle the family much and try to resolve this quickly, without creating too much of a stir, get it?”
“Yes, Siree, as they say,” the Count riposted and left the office, without saying goodbye to the Major. Now he wanted to abandon everything even more. And he thought: what a load of shit. They don’t even have a decent cup of coffee to go with a decent cigar.
“What do you reckon?”
The Count smiled, looking at the faded, parched pages of what had aspired to be the school literary review, and thought how all that might as well belong to another life, one too distant to be the one he was still living: his story on the back of the title page with the print of the Jesus del Monte church, and the pompous title of La Viborena, which hid so many expectations and longings severed by the brutal chop from the hatchet of intolerance and incomprehension.
“Naive and without depth. I remembered it as being more squalid and more moving,” he said, and reclined back on Carlos’s bed. “Far too many ‘thats’ and far too few commas…”
“And why did you want to read it?”
The Count poured more rum into his glass and moved the bottle towards Skinny’s glass.
“I didn’t know if I wanted to remember what the story said or what they said to me about the story.”
Carlos downed some rum and grimaced far too dramatically for the owner of a throat burnt by the slow fire of a sustained daily habit.
“Who remembers any of that now, Conde…”
“I do,” he rasped and took a long, possibly excessive gulp.
“Hey, hold on, man… What the fuck’s up with you today? You were perfectly fine yesterday, and today…”
The Count looked at his friend: an ever more amorphous mass in his wheelchair. He closed his eyes, like the character in his story and thought, like him: if only it weren’t true. He would have liked Skinny still to be skinny, and not that fat type keeling over, like a sinking boat, taking with it in the wreck Mario Conde’s last chance of happiness. He wanted to play on the street corner again, for all his old friends to be there and nobody to exclude him from a place which so much belonged to him. At the same time he wanted to forget everything, for good.
“Won’t you tell me what’s wrong?” Carlos insisted, moving his chair to the edge of the bed where his friend had flopped down.
“I’m fucked, Skinny. They don’t even want me as a policeman any more… Today they’re going to talk to Manolo about me. They’ll probably retire me. What do you reckon? Retired at thirty-five…”
“Are you serious?”
“As serious as Desiderio’s arse.”
Skinny laughed. The bastard couldn’t help it.
“You’re done for, man.”
“That’s what they say. Pour me some more rum. I’m running shit-scared.”
“Why, you idiot? Are there real problems?”
“I don’t know, but I can’t stop being scared… More rum.”
“You’ve got to forget all this, man… Conde, you’re well fucked, but you’re a good man. I know you’ve done no wrong, so quit being scared, right?”
“All right,” the other agreed, not overly convinced.
“Did I tell you Andres came to see me this morning?”
“Yesterday you told me he was going to come. What did that lunatic want?”
Carlos poured himself out more rum, downed a murderous gulp and pulled his wheelchair over until he was in front of his friend.
“Dulcita’s coming,” he said.
“Dulcita?” Conde was taken aback. “Dulcita?”
Dulcita had left for the United States more than ten years ago, and the Count remembered how often he and Skinny had spoken about the departure of the girl who’d been Carlos’s girlfriend for two years at school. Intelligent Dulcita, perfect Dulcita, the great laugh, who’d then left, leaving them to wonder why, oh why did it have to be her. And now she was coming back: “How come?”
“She’s coming to see her grandmother, who is apparently dying. Andres knows because they talked to him in order to get the medical certificate the Red Cross requires to negotiate the travel permit.”
“Fantastic, right?” the Count went on, getting over his shock.
Skinny finished his rum and put his hands on the Count’s knees, which felt the moist, red-hot heat of those voluminous extremities.
“More than fantastic, it’s brilliant. Do you know what Dulcita’s sister said to Andres? That if we weren’t angry and it wouldn’t hurt, she’d like to see us. But above all she wanted to see me.”
The Count started to smile, moved by an inevitable feeling of happiness that immediately languished and killed the stillborn smile.
“You tell me, Conde, do you think it right for Dulcita to see me like this?” He used his obese hands to indicate his body overflowing the wheelchair.
Mario Conde stood up, went over to the window and spat venomously. It wasn’t right, he thought, remembering that photo featuring Pancho, Tamara, Dulcita, Skinny and himself, coming down the stairs at school the day they’d put in for their university courses. Skinny, who was very thin in those days and walked on two legs, was in the centre, arms open wide and head to one side, as if awaiting crucifixion: Carlos and Dulcita had been a beautiful, lovely couple, eager for sex, life, happiness and love… No, it wasn’t right, he kept thinking, but he said:
“Hey, if she comes to see you and you want to see her, let her: you are you and always will be, and the person who loved you must still love you, or should go to hell.”
“Don’t talk shit, Conde, things aren’t like that.”
“Aren’t they? Well, they are as far as I’m concerned, because you’re my brother and it has to be like that… But if you don’t want to see her, well, don’t, and forget it.”
“That’s the fucking point, Conde, I do want to see her. But whatever way, it’s not exactly going to be a party for her to see me like this. Get me?”
