down the first bottle almost in one go. Now he was only irritated by the aggressive volume of the music and the sensation of vulnerability he felt at turning his back on the other customers, but he realized it was Candito who had to survey the remaining tables and decided to stop worrying when the blond guy replaced the empty bottle with a full one. Efficiency was returning to the island.
“What are you up to, Conde?” Candito drank in small gulps. “I’ve not seen you in ages.”
The Count tried the ham.
“I’m in the doghouse, because they suspended me after I had a row with an idiot there. They’ve put me on form-filling and won’t let me as much as look into the street… But you’ve switched tack completely.”
Candito took a long swig from his bottle.
“No choice, Conde, and you know it: you can’t let yourself get burnt in any business. The shoes thing was half down the shoot and I had to change track. You know it’s real hard in the street and, if you don’t have a peso, you’re no longer a player, you know.”
“If you get caught, you’ll be in dire straits. God won’t spare you one hell of a fine… And if they catch me here, I’ll be in the doghouse for the rest of my life.”
“Don’t get like that, Conde, I tell you there’ll be no dire straits.”
“You still go to church, I suppose?”
“Yes, sometimes. You’ve got to keep on good terms with some people
… Like the police, for example.”
“Stop talking shit, Candito.”
“Leave off, gents,” interrupted Skinny. “These beers are dead and gone. Tell them to pour me another, Red.”
Candito lifted his arm and said: “Three more.”
The fair-haired guy served them again. The melodious drunken voice of Vicentico Valdes was now playing on the cassette recorder – confessing he was sure he knew where to find the moon’s missing earrings – and, as he downed his third beer, the Count felt he was relaxing. The fact that he’d been in the police for more than ten years had created tensions which pursued him. Only in a few places, like Skinny’s, could he get rid of certain obsessions and enjoy the gut pleasures of old times, the times they were talking about now, when they were students at La Vibora high school and dreams of the future were possible and frequent, because Skinny was skinny then, walked on both legs and hadn’t been injured in the war in Angola, Andres wanted to be a great pitcher, Rabbit insisted on rewriting history, Candito showed off his effervescent, saffron Afro hair and the Count devoted himself to beating out his first tales as an aborted writer on an Underwood.
“Do you remember, Conde?” Candito asked, and Mario said of course he remembered that story, a story he hadn’t even listened to just now.
Blondie brought a fourth round of beers, and Cuqui a second plate of titbits, which Skinny Carlos threw himself at. The Count was bending over to get a piece of ham, when Candito stood up, making his chair fall over.
“Bastard!” somebody shouted.
With no time to get up, the Count turned his head and saw a mulatto put his hands to his face and totter backwards, as if in flight from the big blond bruiser standing in front of him holding a bottle. Then the prehistoric black came up behind the guy, shouting bastard, bastard, stood firm on his simian fighting legs and delivered a quick flurry of hooks to the guy’s kidneys that brought him to his knees. Big Blondie, meanwhile, had turned his back on his companion to look at the rest of the tables, hands on hips, threatening: The first to try it… But nobody else did.
The Count, now on his feet, saw Candito walk past him, reach the penitent mulatto and grab his shirt collar. Blood spurted from one of his eyebrows, as the small black, on the other side, gripped his hair and whacked him round the ears with a wash-brush.
“Let him be,” shouted Candito, but the black kept on with the brush. “Let him be, for fuck’s sake,” he shouted and let go of the mulatto’s shirt to grab the hand of the black, who only then loosened his grip. The Count observed with almost scientific interest the collapse of the macerated mulatto: he fell to his right and his head resounded on the cement like a dry coconut. No, he wouldn’t have stood much more.
Blondie walked over to the cassette recorder and changed the music: Daniel Santos was the latest guest for the night. Then, in no great hurry, he went after the mulatto, held him up under the armpits, while the little black took his ankles. They went out though a door at the back of the yard which the Count hadn’t noticed.
Candito looked at his other customers. For a moment only Daniel Santos’s voice could be heard.
“Nothing happened, get it…?” he said finally. “If anyone wants another beer, then ask me, right?” and he lifted up the chair knocked over by his speed of take-off.
The Count had already sat down and Skinny was wiping away the sweat that had started to bathe every inch of his fat body.
“What happened, Red?” Skinny took a long, long swig.
“Don’t worry. As they say: aggro that goes with the trade.”
“The guy was after me, right?”
Now Candito gulped down his beer and took a piece of cheese without looking up.
“I don’t know, Conde, but he was after somebody,” he breathed loudly, still chewing.
“And how the fuck do you know, Red, if the guy didn’t say a word?” Skinny couldn’t get over his shock.
“You don’t give them time to speak, Carlos, but he was after somebody.”
“Fuck, they almost killed him.”
Red smiled and wiped his forehead: “The real bitch is that’s how it’s got to be, my friend. Here it’s the law of the jungle: respect is respect. Now neither that guy or any of the people here or anybody who hears the story of what happened will dare try it on.”
“And what will they do with him now?” Curiosity gnawed at Skinny, who was sipping his drink nervously.
“They’ll put him out to rest till he cools off. And after he pays for what he’s drunk, we’ll send him home because he needs to get some early shut-eye today, don’t you reckon?”
Skinny shook his head, as if he’d understood nothing, and looked at the Count who was still silent, apparently absorbed in the bolero Daniel Santos was singing.
“Did you see that, you rascal?”
“You bet I did, you animal.”
“And do you get it?”
“No. I swear by my mother every day I understand less… Hey, come on, Red, let’s have another beer.”
The worst thing was this sense of the void. As the alarm clock rang, it drilled into the Count’s brain a quarter to seven, a quarter to seven, and his eyelids struggled against lethargy and the recent burden of beer, a quarter to seven, the void started to reclaim its space like an oil slick suddenly released and spreading over the sea of consciousness; but it was a colourless slick, because it was void and nothingness, the end which recommenced, day after day, with an unstinted capacity for self-renewal against which he lacked any defences or valid argument: a quarter to seven was all that was tangible in the depths of that void.
Recently he’d started to imagine death might be somewhat similar: waking to an absence of atmosphere, onerous yet painless, stripped of expectation and surprises because it was only this: a bottomless, empty void, a dark, padded cloud cushioning him definitively. He also tried to recall the time there hadn’t been a sense of void or premonitions of death, when dawn rose like a curtain on a new performance, no matter whether imagined or improvised, at least it seemed right and appealed: a spontaneous desire to live another day. But it was like feeling sick and trying to think what it was like to be well, and he couldn’t, since the ubiquitous quease prevented him from reviving other pleasant sensations.
When he went out into the street, on such mornings that came hot with the dawn, a solitary taste of coffee lingering on his lips and no woman waving him farewell, no magnet drawing him into the future, the Count wondered what could be the latest incentive impelling him punctually to set his watch and alarm, given that time was the most objective manifestation of his void. And as he could find none – a sense of duty? responsibility? need to earn a living? movement by inertia? – he wondered yet again what the hell he was doing there, heading for a bus queue more crowded and violent by the day, smoking a cigarette that rotted his guts, seeing people who were less and less familiar, suffering a heat that got hotter by the minute, and he told himself it was his fast lane to hell. Then he touched his belt and realized, once again, that he’d left his pistol at home. He asked who was the last in the
