“You’re just like your son,” nodded the Count, abandoning a chicken bone stripped of meat on the edge of his plate.
“Are you hungry?”
“When isn’t he?” asked Skinny as he came into the kitchen.
“You ate my chips, you animal.”
“Forget the chips and wash your hands, because Andres is on his way.”
“And where are you off to? If one might be so bold,” asked Josefina, clearing the dishes from the table.
“To Red’s place,” said Mario, lighting up. “Your son says he’s turned Baptist. Or Mormon? But I swear on my life I don’t believe a word of it.”
On the slippery slope to his fortieth year Red Candito was sure he was destined to die in the same place he’d been born: a rundown, promiscuous rooming house in Santos Suarez, walls falling apart, electric cables dangling from the eaves like poisonous tentacles. Being born and growing up there had moulded his way of life with an irremediable domestic fatalism: from early on he’d learned that you have to defend even your minimal playing space, with fists if necessary, and when he grew up he also learned how fists opened up other doors in life: respect between men, for example. That is perhaps why he befriended the Count and had remained a friend even when Mario entered the prickly clan of the police: he’d once seen him defend with his fists a dignity that had been hurt by the theft of a tin of milk, when they had gone together to a school in the countryside, and Candito had come to his defence then and ever since. Because loyalty also formed part of the code of his turf, and he practised it, whenever it was called for.
When they met, Candito had already twice repeated the first year of high school and was one of the first to let his hair grow long, to create from red, rebellious ringlets a saffron afro that earned him the nickname he still bore: he was Red and would always be so, even when he was active in a Protestant, Lutheran or Calvinist sect. At the time they got to know each other, Candito expressed himself with a peculiar level of violence that also had its own morality: nobody ever saw him abuse anyone smaller or weaker than himself and the respect his friends felt for him grew till it became a harmonious friendship. Then, when the Count and his other friends went to university, fate or destiny placed Red at the edges of a marginal existence bordering on illegality where he earned his living in the chinks left by state shortages and inefficiency: and the Count, as a policeman, had taken advantage of that situation. In exchange for the street wisdom Red brought him and for information useful in solving some of his cases, the lieutenant offered him, alongside friendship, the pledge of unconditional protection if it were ever necessary in his conflicts with the law. It was an agreement between gentlemen, backed by a single guarantee, the sense of honour and friendship they’d learned in the barrios and meeting-places of Havana, when such words still rang true.
Recently, however, Candito must have experienced a kind of mystical revelation. Contrary to what happened in his usual circles, where African religions ruled firm, promising pragmatically and comprehensively all kinds of protection and help in the material world (as well as in questions of love and justice, hatred and revenge), Red had begun to gravitate towards the Catholic Church, where, so he claimed, he was searching for a peace denied to him by the hostile, aggressive outside world. So, from time to time, he would go to mass or spend time in church, never taking confession, but praying his way, which meant asking God to grant peace and good health to him and his loved ones, including the three men who invaded his home well after ten o’clock at night.
Cuqui, the sinewy, obedient little mulatta now living with Red, opened the door and smiled when she recognized the new arrivals, who greeted her with a kiss.
“And where’s your husband?” Carlos asked, looking into the small room where someone was monologuing on television about the excellent forecasts for the next sugar cane harvest.
“He’s in church.”
“At this time of night?”
“Yes, he sometimes gets back at eleven…”
“He’s got a bad case,” interrupted the Count, and Cuqui nodded.
She knew Candito’s friends had a right to certain confidences that were denied her.
“If you want to go and look for him, it’s just around the corner.”
“What do you reckon, Conde?” hesitated Carlos. “He might not like that.”
“I spend my life dragging Candito out of churches. Come on… Cuqui, get the coffee on, we’ll have him here in no time,” the policeman assured her, as he started pushing Carlos’s chair again.
You could never have identified the Christian temple from its architectural appearance; it looked more like a warehouse, with a high tiled roof and double door, which when open hid the cross set there to indicate its function. Nevertheless, religious ecstasy spilled out of the place: the shouting and clapping of the faithful, intoning a rhythmic hymn of love to Jehovah, came down the street, impelled irrepressibly by a faith too vehement by half, and strong enough to halt the three friends in their tracks.
“That has to be it,” commented Skinny Carlos.
“You really think we should go in, Conde?” asked Andres, always on the reticent side, as Carlos and Mario exchanged glances. The chorus now sounded a couple of decibels louder, and the clapping quickened, as if the Jehovah they invoked was nigh.
“No, better not go in. I’ll just take a peek to see if Red can see me.”
Without thinking why he did so, the policeman pulled down his shirt, as if trying to tidy his unkempt appearance, and crossed the small doorway to put his head inside the sacred precinct. And he was moved by what he saw: that church had nothing in common with the concepts of church stored in the Count’s Catholically trained brain. To begin with, there was no altar, always dominated by the image of the church’s patron saint; all there was on the clean, whitewashed wall was a simple wooden cross that bore no crucified Christ. The walls, also unadorned by saints and decorations, had large windows open to the night. Nonetheless, there wasn’t enough ventilation, and the Count’s face hit a hot, sweaty atmosphere exuded by the heaving mass of faithful gathered there, clapping like the possessed, while they sang in chorus with the short, thin black man who, without dog-collar or soutane, acted as the leader of that communion with the divinity, shouting periodically: “Yeah, you are, Jehovah!” enthusing the flock, which bellowed “Yeah, hallelujah!” The Count finally spotted Candito’s red head in the front rows and took a first step inside the church, when he was struck by a shocking disparity: he realized he was surrounded by people who knew of God’s existence and praised Him with an apparently inextinguishable physical and spiritual vehemence, and he was forced back to the door, driven by his evident inability to belong to that crowd of redeemed believers. Tidying his shirt yet again, beneath which he carried a gun, the Count returned to the street, racked by doubt: who was mistaken: he or all those people gathered in that church without altars or Christ? Those people who believed in something that could save them or he, a man who could hardly think of a couple of things worth saving?
“Fucking hell,” he said to himself, as he reached his friends, and Carlos looked at him in alarm.
“What happened, Conde, did they throw you out?”
“No… Yes… Listen, I think we’d better wait outside.”
“Hey, Candito, what the fuck are you doing as an Adventist, you, a half-Catholic who take your problems to an African high priest?” asked the Count, when they were finally able to rearrange the furniture in the small room to make space for Skinny Carlos’s wheelchair.
The smell of the coffee Cuqui was preparing wafted their way from the kitchen, and, still marked by the evidence of faith he’d just observed, the Count’s mind was now filled with the image of a rampant Candito clad in white castigating the evil one before a legion of the faithful.
“Don’t fuck around, Conde, don’t start interfering in people’s lives,” interrupted Carlos, and turned to Candito: “Hey, Red, so now you can’t have a little drink, smoke or swear, or…” and lowering his voice to a whisper, “or have a fling with a bit of skirt that offers itself?”
Candito shook his head: there was no hope for these guys.
“It’s not like you think. I’ve not been baptized yet. I don’t think I’m ready. I just go to the church every now and then and sit there.”
“Singing and clapping?” asked the Count incredulously.
“Yes, and listening to people speak of love, peace, goodness, cleanliness of spirit, hopes of salvation, quiet and forgiveness… Hearing things people don’t say elsewhere, spoken by people who believe in what they say. It’s better than selling beer or buying stolen leather to make shoes, isn’t it?”
