hand, had downed so much alcohol on binges others would find unforgettable and that he’d forgotten and blurred in terms of quantity and incident, cause and effect. And something similar happened with the sons of whores: he knew such a quantity that to classify them according to maternal trade and time of birth would have required a real investment in cybernetics. But the bar’s facade managed to activate the magnet: Lieutenant Mario Conde looked at the swing doors and found the bar semiabandoned at high noon, occupied by a few drinkers beyond salvation. Yes, he did like that place. But it was the deep, rancid smell of a place dedicated for over fifty years to the sale of alcohol that propelled him remorselessly into the cool, welcoming inner reaches – or at least so he thought – of that dirty, irresistible bar.
“What rum you got?” he asked the mulatto bartender as if it were important or as if it were at all likely he would be able to choose brands and quality in a down-at-heel bar where the only matter of true significance was the availability (or not) of any distilled liquid to drink.
“White Legendario, Padre,” the mulatto replied, flashing a golden gleam of his teeth his way.
“And what’s the damage?”
“A peso a tot, Padre…”
The Count sunk a hand deep into his pockets and extracted all the notes and coins he could find. Placed them on the shiny wood of the bar and managed to assemble three pesos ten cents. Put away the useless surfeit and looked at the mulatto.
“I’ll have a triple and don’t call me Padre again, I never even made it to altar boy.”
The mulatto looked him in the eye. Took the bottle of rum and poured four tots into his glass.
“I asked for a triple…”
“But the fourth is on the house. Padre… Reckon you’re in need, don’t you?”
The Count looked at the liquid filling his glass to the brim, its fake pearl colour and scent of perdition, and told himself that that mulatto, expert in handling alcoholics and melancholics, both depressed and desperate, was quite right: more right than lots of people in this world, and duly acquiesced: “Yes, you’re right, Padre… I think that’s what I need,” and downed a first gulp before he heard a voice approach from behind, and from an evil corner of his memory.
“Give me the same as this guy.”
Leaning on the bar, the Count felt a nasty shudder as the sound of the voice turned into a mental image. And thought: It can’t be, before turning round and concluding that yes, it could be and was.
“Don’t I get a salute, Lieutenant Mario Conde?”
Ex-Lieutenant Fabricio’s ruddy face tried to conjure up its usual sardonic laugh but the Count refused to give him the pleasure of the sight of his teeth. The last conversation they’d had, six months ago, had led to mutual recall of their respective mothers, before giving way to the liberation of violence: they’d set to punching each other in the middle of the street and even now the Count could feel the lacerating pain from the leathering Fabricio had dealt to his face.
“What’s up? You still sore?” Fabricio asked, leaning back on the bar and almost touching Mario Conde’s shoulder.
“Ask yourself the same question. You look as if you’ve got the mange.”
Fabricio reeked of cheap liquors that had fermented each other. He smiled drowsily and the Count, who knew a thing about such things, surmised he was drunk.
“You don’t change, do you, Mario Conde?”
“Nor do you apparently,” retorted the latter, making it clear he didn’t like that conversation, which could sour the pleasure of his beverage.
“I’m well and truly fucked, Mario Conde, I’m done for… I don’t even have a pistol, like you,” and, saying that, he pointed to the Count’s belt, where a weapon’s presence made itself felt.
Clearly he was well and truly fucked: the ex-policeman looked as if he was in the phase prior to delirium tremens. The Count could imagine the rest. Lieutenant Fabricio, one of the detectives at Headquarters, had always been one of those guys who liked to be a policeman because of the social distinction and everyday power the job conferred. He usually wore his uniform and stripes, and had more than once used the pistol that was now a requisitioned subject for nostalgia. In the end he’d discovered his police status brought him other advantages: more money than his monthly wage packet contained, among other things.
“It was of your own making…” the Count finally said, trying to concentrate on his rum.
“I was stitched up. I didn’t do anything. They’re sons of bitches.”
“So why did they kick you out?”
“I don’t know, you know what they’re like. Those guys are like hunting dogs: once they bite, they won’t let go, until they pull your guts out.”
“But did you or didn’t you?”
“That’s neither here nor there. Once you fall into their clutches, watch out.”
“Thanks for the advice,” said the Count, and he tried to down his last swig.
Something in his throat prevented him. The sacred ritual of swigging rum, at the knowing, grimy bar of a dive like The Two Brothers, while listening to a toothless, alcoholic black man, with the face of a boxer defeated in a thousand fights, who had begun to sing in crystalline tones a beautiful bolero written at least a hundred years ago, bore no relation to the bad vibrations and worse memories triggered by Fabricio.
“I heard they did for your buddy Rangel…”
The Count put his glass on the bar, and in the same slow, subdued key he’d used thus far addressed the other fellow, staring him in the eyes: “Hey, I don’t want to hear Rangel’s name in your filthy mouth… He got fucked because he trusted shitty types like you…”
And he tensed his muscles, ready to enter the fray. It was only his basic ethics as a drinker of alcohol that stopped him going on the offensive: the Count would never have begun a fight with a drunk and, if it weren’t filthy petulant Fabricio, with whom he had accounts to settle, he’d even have taken a first blow without reacting. But Fabricio smiled, with that sour distinctive twitch of his.
“So you’re still buddies…”
“Don’t push me any further, Fabricio.”
“No, I won’t mention your mate again… After all, he’s as fucked as I am. Did they take his pistol away too?”
He couldn’t stop himself now: the Count smiled. Fabricio felt mutilated by the absence of a weapon that fulfilled him as a man and his drunkenness was truly pathetic. He realized the guy was as dead and castrated as Miguel Forcade. Relieved by this thought, his throat opened up again and he downed the last swig of warming rum.
“You know, Fabricio, at the end of the day it has been a real pleasure talking to you. I am delighted you’re so fucked and I couldn’t care a fuck and I can’t and won’t forgive you. I’m glad to see how you bastard police end up… So stew in your own juice and don’t raise a fist, because I’ll do you in…” he concluded, letting go of his glass, moving away from the bar, and shouting from the swing door: “Hey, Padre, thanks for the liquor and keep an eye on that fellow, he’s a nark and an evil bastard, and when he was police he liked to blackmail people like you,” then went into the street, feeling he’d swept the soot from a hidden corner of his consciousness.
He watched him come in, clutching a plastic cup and spoon of calamine in his left hand and nervous indecision in his right. It was as if he didn’t know what to do with that second arm, which should be doing something and, in its enforced leisure, felt ill at ease and superfluous, as if it was in fact a third, unexpected extremity. Conversely, his face revealed a degree of satisfaction the Count attributed to the lunch he’d just downed in the canteen of the nearby factory. Adrian Riveron was finally back in his office in the Municipal Offi-Record, the hub for organizing the system of ration cards and lists of consumers that lots of people, perhaps possessed by sharp poetic imaginations, used to call Offi-Queue, packing into a desperate neologism everything engendered there: that office being the mother-begetter of all queues, a national institution forged by a demand that always overwhelmed the strict offers ruled by a ration book that had become eternal, and through which everything was distributed from cigarettes to shoes, from sugar and salt to underpants (one or two pairs a year? wondered the Count. Or none at all?).
When Adrian spotted him, all the contentment in his belly visible on his face began to evaporate, and his right arm searched for something in his shirt pocket that it didn’t find despite a thorough check.
“Something wrong, Lieutenant?”
Mario Conde muttered good afternoon, as he placed a cigarette between his lips and returned the packet to its
