The Count lit a cigarette and went back to the bed. He pulled the wheelchair even nearer, and Carlos’s face was only an inch or two from his.
“Skinny: don’t be such a pansy,” he said. “Don’t give up, for Christ’s sake, because if you do, we’re all fucked. Do it for yourself, for me and old Josefina; don’t let anything fuck you up: a bullet, the past, the war, or this damned wheelchair,” he declared breathlessly, and, against his usual custom of thinking everything through, he took Carlos’s face between his hands and kissed him on a cheek. “Don’t give up, brother.”
“But what the fuck is this!”
Of course. It just had to be the hottest summer he’d ever experienced, he concluded while undressing before getting in the shower. For several days now the Count had been pinching memory and flesh to try to remember other August temperatures like this cruel year’s, but the wall-scorching sun, the haze from the ceiling, the moisture wrapping round him in bed and the deep depression, able to sap his will and his muscles, told him it was impossible to recall a similar muggy heat. Or did the heat come from his body rather than the infernal atmosphere possessing the island? He looked at his watch: yes, it was still early for Sergeant Palacios to call him and he still didn’t know whether he’d dare call the Marquess.
When he got out of the bath, streaming water, the towel round his shoulders like a defeated boxer, the Count decided to finish drying himself on the ecstatic gusts from the fan. He flopped on to his hot bed and for a moment enjoyed the minimal privilege of solitude, felt the draught massage his drooping testicles and hit his anus particularly deliciously. He closed his legs slightly. Then, to help the draught, and impelled by a straightforward burst of onanism, he started lifting up his wet penis, sliding his fingers to the head that had been surgically uncapped, only to let it drop in a free fall that gradually became an upward tilt transmitting a warm, erect hardness to his fingers. He hesitated for a moment over whether to masturbate or not: and decided he had no reason not to try. No woman was out there waiting for that spare ejaculation, and as he stroked himself, even the heat in the air seemed to have abated. But his decision hit fresh doubts: whose turn was it? Still grasping his member but reducing the rubbing rhythm, the Count opened his much-fingered book of erotic memories and began to flick through the pages of women he’d loved by remote control when seeking to protect himself against the successive departures, deceits and disappearances they’d inflicted on him: on the last page – he always began at the back when he read an issue of the magazine Bohemia – he found Karina, naked, sucking a dazzling saxophone whose intense music caressed her nipples as it moved between her open legs, but he let her go, humiliated her with mental indifference, a form of revenge on a woman too painfully close to be called upon, and the fact is he could still feel her scent of ripened fruit, between a mango and velvety plums, which mingled with the deep, animal dampness from her desire-swollen sex: “No, not you.”
He likewise abandoned Haydee, trying not to remember shared alcoholic belches, miserable wretched bouts of drinking, rums poured on mouths, breasts and a doubly moist pubis, and that was why he fled, he tried not even to brush against her – though he failed to resist that painful temptation – because she’d been his best lover, so hard-working in bed the Count’s productivity couldn’t keep up with her and she’d replaced him with an Olympic-class fornicator (whose anus was she now kissing with her drilling, eschatological, reptilian tongue?); but he did pass without major upset on the memory of Maritza, his first wife, too distant and faded to be of use even for a summery masturbation, that pink scent from her virgin skin hardly perceptible now, always washed to face sex, at once clean and apprehensive; he breathed, more nostalgic than horny, the essential feminine fragance that nurse gave off, a nymphomaniac on the thin side, whose name he’d now forgotten but whom he always remembered because she’d initiated him in the pleasure of the other’s hand which strokes, rubs, allowing one to discover the value of another’s skin, giving the act of masturbation an unexpected dimension, only because it comes from other hands, from another skin; and, when her turn came, he almost stayed with Tamara, felt her on his fingertips, on the wrinkled sac of his testicles, as he revisited her rumbadancer’s butt and black nipples, the dark depths of her curly patches of down, and breathed in the strong aromas from her male colognes – Canoe is my favourite, she’d confess, allergic to other subtle, feminine perfumes – and then his hand stopped on the album – and on a glans gorged and ready to spit – to reach a final conclusion: none of them… He stretched a hand out from the position he found himself in, slipped it under his bed and extracted the Penthouse that Peyi had lent Skinny and Skinny had lent him and went on an immediate search for that shameless blonde – lots of hair upstairs, next to none down – who in the same position as he – in bed, legs open to the breeze or other possibilities – made her professional nakedness stand out against red, photographer-ready sheets: if there was a breeze in the photo – and there had to be – it must smell of moist, ploughed earth, and the woman must surely have exuded the same fertile, primary fragance. Better you than one concocted from deceit and memories, he told the blonde, as he leaned forward and continued to rub until he could no longer see the woman and felt his life being drained by those white drops spilling without rhyme or reason on the dusty tiles of his room, which now emanated, like a disturbing perfume born of his painful solitude, the sweetness of ejaculation…
But sexual relief didn’t relieve the heat: his body and brain burned, and he understood all had been in vain: there was only one remedy against that specific heat and that was a real woman, not one made from memories, scents recalled, or glossy paper, but a tangible female, able to smash the desperate abandon burning him cell by cell, without recourse to more or less individualist soothing, remedies or dilatory techniques.
Then from his bed he spotted Rufino, the new fighting fish who lived in his goldfish bowl. He’d been his companion for some ten days, ever since he’d gone hunting for a replacement for the old Rufino, who’d greeted the day face up, fins awry, as if searching for a non-existent wind in the pallid deep purple of the death of a fighting fish. Now young Rufino had stopped, as if exhausted by the effort of swimming in a sea of lava; the Count could almost see the drops of sweat as his eyes stared at the glass and he barely moved his tiny fighting piscatorial entrails: then he entered a slow descent, without a struggle, without fluttering a fin, as if defeated definitively, and the Count assumed that descent as his own, a bitter mirror, the reflection of a free fall from which he didn’t want or couldn’t escape, like the much heralded decline of the West or the now inevitable collapse of a flaccid, empty penis. Suicidal inclinations?
The Count lit a cigarette and embarked on another slow, pleasant suicide.
“But what the fuck can it be now!” he said, about to go back into the shower, when the telephone rang.
“It’s me, Conde.”
“Wait a minute, Conde, just a minute, don’t go chasing off. No, I really needed to speak to you in the street, you and me and no bother. And a cigarette for me too while you’re about it. Wait… Look, I don’t know what more they want to find out about you, because they know everything and know nothing, and I reckon they’re throwing stones at all the dummies to see if they get a hit. I’m not kidding, Conde, just listen, man. Fuck, it’s much hotter than yesterday, isn’t it? They wanted chapter and verse on you, on me as well, just so you know, but they’d already got all the answers, you bet they had. It’s incredible, man: they even know how many cigarettes we smoke a day, but I’m not daft and could see they didn’t really have anything to go on. There’s a reason why I’m police, I suppose? They wanted to find out what kind of relationship you have with the Boss, if you were friends or not, the whole of Headquarters knows that, whether I thought the Boss favoured you and if he’d ever covered up for you, that kind of thing. They went on and on, and I don’t know whether it was because of you or Major Rangel. What do you reckon? They’re already investigating him, that you know… Then they asked me if your fight with Lieutenant Fabricio was related to work or personal gripes, what we think about the investigations they’re carrying out, whether I thought you were an alcoholic, why you lived by yourself, just incredible. They also asked me about your informers, and even mentioned Candito’s name, whether you gave him protection so you could do clandestine business and such like, as if nobody did that, huh? And, listen to this, they knew you’d had a relationship with Tamara when you were on her husband’s case. Who did you tell that to, Conde? Well, they know about it, and that you didn’t see each other again afterwards, they know that too. And a thousand stupid little things as well, though nothing important: they asked me why you like going into churches, why you tell people you’d like to live in a house near the sea, if you still think about being a writer and the kind of things you like writing. Well, I just told them you liked writing things that were squalid and moving and so I got them off that kick. But, man, they know everything, you know? The worst fucking thing, Conde, is you suddenly feel like you’re living in a glass bowl, or a test-tube, I don’t know, that they watch you shitting, pissing and picking your nose, and know if you make little balls to throw or stick under a table. That scared me: they’ve got us down to a T, know everything we do and everything we don’t, and are interested in everything. I’m probably peabrained, but I didn’t imagine it was like that. It really makes you scared, Conde, really. No, there were three of them, I don’t know them, a captain and two lieutenants, they said, but they were in field dress and
