Havana Black

“Uh-huh,” replied the Count, all his gastric juices rising up in a proletarian rebellion. “Uh-huh, uh-huh, with toothpicks, go on…”

“Well, then let them sit, so the smells of the cheese, the meat and the bacon infiltrate each other and are then impregnated with the smells from the herbs. After that, heat equal measures of oil and butter in the frying pan, fry the steaks on a full flame for a couple of minutes on each side, so they go brown, and then leave them for another eight minutes on a low flame… Then put the fillets in a dish and place them in the oven, but on the lowest heat possible, so they don’t go cold or cook too much. Meanwhile, remove the fat left in the pan and put in butter, mixed with the juice of a Seville orange, which is better than the lemon in the traditional recipe. Remove the orange and butter sauce from the burner when it’s hot and add two spoonfuls of cream. Next you take the steaks from the oven, sprinkle on a good amount of parsley and pour the sauce over them, and now it’s ready to serve or you can put it back in the oven for a short time, but on very, very low, until the guest of honour arrives, who may even go by the name of Mario Conde.”

“And who has now arrived, Jose. Tell us what else you’ve done?”

“What, you want more…? Right, well, there is more, because the fillets are served with potato puree, made with the oil and butter fat we separated out after frying the fillets, you remember…? But, as I know the scene, I took the necessary precautions: it’s only one fillet per head, so be warned: though you can have as much as you want of rice, mushy black beans, stewed yucca, flash-fried green bananas, onions in breadcrumbs, tomato, watercress, lettuce and avocado salad, guava shells with cream cheese and coconut jelly in fruit juice with savoury cheese.”

“I do not believe it, I do not believe it: gentlemen, the age of abundance is upon us!” quipped Rabbit.

“And don’t we have any coffee?” asked Andres.

“Cafe from Oriente roasted and ground by yours truly,” the woman confirmed, looking into the feverish eyes of the Count, whose stomach, used to thirty years of strict food rationing, refused to believe what his ears had heard.

“Hey, Jose, now I’m no longer a policeman, you can damn well tell me: where the fuck do you find all these things?”

Carlos’s mother looked at the Count, then at her son and glanced at all the other friends, before turning to the Count, who was now in no doubt at all: Josefina was like the circus magician who conjured from nowhere an elephant dressed as a sailor.

“You really want to know, Condesito? Well, I get it out of here,” she said after a pause, and touched her temple: “out of this imagination of mine.”

From the first swig the Count’s experience of drinking had warned him that this mixture of rum, friends and old Beatles songs might be explosive. The special dinner served up by Josefina had prepared their stomachs to accept a larger intake of alcohol and bottles were emptying at a dangerous rate. After the meal Skinny had insisted on moving on to the presentation of the gifts that each guest had had to bring, including the two compulsory bottles of rum – a tax only Candito the Red had been spared because of his new religious affiliations. Seated at the head of the table, the Count received the presents in turn from his friends, and they catered for each and every one of his physical, material and spiritual cravings and desires. The first was Carlos, who gave him a small goldfish bowl with a fighting fish, for he’d heard of the death of his most recent Rufino.

“Great, now I’ve got a dog and a fish,” commented the Count, as he watched the fish’s slow, purplish flight.

Candito the Red presented him with a Bible with black, bound covers that, according to him, had more commentaries and maps than any other published in Spanish. Ever subtle and material, Tamara gave the Count the checked shirt he had always wanted: seemingly straight out of a Wild West film, and made of soft wool, just the job for the approaching winter, and in the pocket, behind the Levi’s label, a Schaeffer pen, ideal for the aspiring writer. Perhaps paying all his nicotine debts at once, Baby-Face Miki handed over a pack of twenty boxes of Popular cigarettes, and along with it, or so he said, the monthly allowance of one of the several children he’d scattered over the face of the earth. Gentle Niuris, in the full freshness of her sixteen years and obviously guided by Rabbit, gave him two cassettes of Chicago’s Greatest Hits, which the Count read from the top down: from “Make me Smile” to “Beginnings”, from “Saturday in the Park” to “Colour My World”, the titles sounded like cries of alarm at the huge number of years that had passed between the days when they’d listened to those songs together and that hurricane-force birthday-party night. With his loving eye for detail, Rabbit unfolded before the Count’s eyes a poster of Marilyn, asleep on a red sheet that emphasized the glow from her yellow (dyed, to be sure) hair, the precise undulations of her black woman’s buttocks and the magnetic pink of a single visible nipple. Andres, who had patiently waited his turn, faithful to his profession as a medic, placed in the Count’s hands two jars of Chinese pomade – one from the tiger, the other the lion – and an envelope with a hundred analgesics, a combination of pills and ointment that would save the Count from death by migraine during his next hangovers. Last in the queue, Josefina walked over to the thirty-six-year-old she’d known for twenty, when her son was skinny and walked on two legs and shut himself in with the Count to listen to music at full volume and dream of a future in which war did not figure; and, without uttering a word, she gripped his cheeks, made him feel the roughness of hands ravaged by washing up, cooking and laundering, and then kissed him on his forehead.

“Thanks, Jose,” the Count stammered, moved by the burden of tenderness that kiss carried.

Rabbit rescued him this time, insisting on a full account of the Count’s last case. Mario tried to refuse, but the screams from his audience won the day. Before starting, he looked at Tamara, at the opposite corner of the table, and tried to imagine how much of the story he was about to relate would remind her of the episode in which they had both been embroiled as a result of the death and disappearance of Rafael Morin, a man immaculate only in appearance, who married the twin and shattered Mario Conde’s heart into a thousand pieces.

“Once upon a time in China, at least fifteen or twenty centuries ago…” began the Count, preparing to begin at the beginning, and spoke for an hour to the best audience he’d ever known.

“Conde, Conde, how amazing,” exclaimed Rabbit when he heard the end of Adrian Riveron’s murderous confession. “Can you imagine, if the Hindu monks hadn’t gone to China, Miguel Forcade would have died differently.”

“Why don’t you write this down?” queried Baby-Face Miki, the only published writer among the Count’s friends.

“I might do one day,” replied the ex-policeman, thinking that yes, maybe he did have a story here that was at least moving, if not squalid.

But now, right now, for fuck’s sake, he wanted to write about a wounded man and the other scars left by less solid, but equally lethal bullets.

“More rum, more rum,” Skinny shouted from his wheelchair, and after helping himself, he asked: “And what the fuck are we going to do now?”

“Carry on drinking,” posited the Count.

“No, better that I tell you a story, another story,” interjected Andres from his chair, with such conviction in his voice that the others fell silent for a moment, and the doctor jumped in to fulfil his promise. “It’s a story that began long ago, but I can only tell you now… because I told the people at work today I wanted to leave Cuba…”

He suddenly threw down the dice, and glasses clattered on to the table, alcohol-scented mouths gawped, corks returned to the necks of their bottles and, beyond the walls, gusts of wind whistled no more, as if on orders from a higher command.

“Twenty-six years ago, when my father left and my mother refused to follow, something was broken for ever in our family. You remember, Rabbit, how my little sister Katia had died two years before and if there could have been any solution to that unjust death, my Dad’s departure took it with him: we’d never again be the family we’d once been and the best we could do was to start sharing out the blame for what had happened and what now would never happen… Dad was the most to blame, because he abandoned us just when we needed most to be together, and left his country and turned into a contemptible gusano, living in Miami… Life fucked me up and I was full of fears and reproaches, and if anything saved me it was finding a group of friends like you, who became as important to me as my family and never criticized me for my father’s decision. Then things began to go down a path that seemed for the best: my mother took it into her head that I should study medicine and I thought I should please her and was really happy that I could choose my career and become a doctor and I think