I’ve been a good doctor, haven’t I? On my way I made a good marriage with a woman I still like, I had two children, I became a specialist and everything seemed so ideal that you even started to envy me: you said everything had turned out right for me, that I had a good family, a good job and even a good future… But there were things that weren’t as I wanted them and I don’t know if I am right or have a right to ask for those other things. I wanted my life to be more than getting up in the morning, helping to dress the children, going off to the hospital, working all day, coming back in the evening and sitting down to see how my children do their homework while my wife cooks, and then having a bath, eating, watching television for a while and going to bed in order to get up the following day and do the same as I’d done the day before, and so on and so forth… Perhaps one of you thinks that is what life is about, but if that’s true, then life is shit. Because it’s a routine that’s got nothing to do with what I want… The worst thing is, when you start to think you discover that this routine began much earlier, when other people, other necessities, other turning points decided your life should follow one pattern and not another, without your really having the right to choose and write the story you wanted to write, don’t you agree, Rabbit…? What would have happened if I hadn’t let Cristina go, if I’d gone after her, carried on with her, even though she was ten years older than me, and even you lot thought she was a whore because she’d had several husbands? Or if I hadn’t given up baseball to devote more time to my schooling and become a good student of medicine, as I had to? Who would I be now if I’d done what I wanted to do and not what you were supposed to do and what everyone forced me to do…? Because some ten years ago something happened that stirred me up and I started asking myself some of these questions: my father wrote me a letter, after I had heard nothing from him for a long time, and he said he was sorry for abandoning me and explained why he had left: he told me that there had come a moment after my sister’s death when he needed to change his life and that he would have preferred to take us with him, but dear Consuelo was opposed and insisted on staying where she was rather than follow him wherever he was bound. As far as I was concerned that explanation didn’t in any way justify his selfishness, although I saw my father differently for the first time, not as the guilty man I, my mother and the world around us had created… Now he seemed a man, with his own needs, anguish and hopes, a man like any other who’d sacrificed part of his life to have another, the one he thought he needed and had decided to choose, you know? Perhaps it’s all stupid, but that’s how I felt, and I told him so, and he replied by saying that if he could help me in any way, I could count on him, that despite what he’d done, he was still my father. That made me feel better towards him, but that was all, because my life continued to be perfect, almost impossible to improve on, until one morning I got up not wanting to go to work, or dress the children, or do any of what I was supposed to do and I felt as though my life was all a big mistake. Does this ring any bells, Conde? The knowledge that something diverted the route you should have taken, that something pushed you along a path that was not yours. The dreadful feeling when you discover you don’t know how you’ve got where you are, but that you are somewhere you don’t want to be. It was all shit. Why did it have to be like this? And my first thought was to run out of the house, as I did when I fell in love with Cristina and ended up drunk on wasteland in Old Havana: but now I’d have to run much further, to throw off myself and that feeling of claustrophobia and routine I couldn’t stand a minute longer. But one thing held me back: the sight of my two children dressing themselves to go to school. If I left, I’d be leaving them just as my father left me and I didn’t want them to suffer that. But if I didn’t break out of my own routine I was condemning them to live like me, teaching them to obey and be people who’d receive orders for the rest of their lives, to become a second round of the hidden generation. Miki, do you remember the hidden generation? In the end they’d be as fucked as I was, faceless no-hopers with nothing to tell their own children. There and then I took the decision to leave, to go anywhere, but with them, and when I returned from the hospital that evening I told my wife, and she said I was mad, understood fuck all, and what the hell were we going to do and I said: ‘I don’t know, but I’ve made up my mind,’ and I asked her: ‘Will you come?’ And she said she would. She said yes straight away… Then I wrote to my old man and explained how I now needed the help he had promised… That was the only way I could get far away, try to change my life, and if I was making a mistake I might as well be mistaken big-time, right? And for once in my life make my own mistakes. That was a year and a half ago, and all this time I’ve been doing the necessary paperwork to leave, without anyone finding out till something was for sure. I couldn’t even tell you lot, who are my brothers and will understand me, and if you don’t understand me you won’t condemn me, will you, Carlos? Red? And you, Miki, would you dare write this story in one of your books…? Today, when I went to see the director of the hospital, a man who was a comrade in the faculty, he couldn’t believe what I was saying and he even tried to dissuade me, but when I told him it was a decision I wouldn’t go back on and even had the letters asking for permission to leave, he put his hands to his head and said: ‘Andres, you know I’ll have to take this upstairs,’ and he even looked up, when he should really have been looking down, because I now know I’ve got to work in a Policlinic in a barrio till they give me my letter of liberation, yes that’s what it’s called, a letter of liberation, and they let me leave, and it will take one or two years, maybe more, but I’m not worried: it is my decision, my madness, my mistake, and for the first time I feel as if I own my decisions, my acts of madness and my mistakes, even the fact that I’ve acted like shit with you and not told you before what I wanted to do, but you know I couldn’t tell you, more for your good than mine, because you’re staying and, if Jehovah wishes, as Candito says, in two years I might be right off the map… But right now, though I feel calm I’m also afraid I’m shooting myself in the foot, because I’m probably doing to my own children what my father did to me, except in reverse. And I’m going to miss you people, because I love you from my heart and balls…” he said this, then started to cry, as was right, as he needed and wanted to do, and he moved Tamara and Niuris to weep, provoked a tear in Skinny Carlos’s eyes, a blasphemy in the mouth of Candito, who shat on Jehovah, and a sigh from the Count, who stood up, hugged Andres’s head, and told him: “And we love you too, you pansy,” and pressed him hard against his chest, which seethed with a bunch of shared stories, mixed up with political prejudices, fear of the future, reproaches against the past and tot after tot of rum: the horrific sum of their flawed lives.
Andres’s confession killed off the impact of alcohol on the Count’s brain. An unhealthy lucidity spread through his mind, placing a question mark over his own life, now reflected in the mirror of Carlos’s life, which he intended to write up, and Andres’s, which Andres himself had just outlined: his own frustrations took on a sharper relief in the light of his friend’s words, and the Count totally understood why he had left the police: he needed to escape, even though he was incapable of changing location. Too many nostalgic memories tied him to the house where he was born and lived, to the neighbourhood where he grew up and where his father and Grandad Rufino grew up, to the friends he had left, whom he could never abandon, to certain smells and plagues, to many fears and epiphanies: his anchor was fixed in such a way he almost didn’t need to know how it was secured: he simply possessed irrevocably a physiological need to feel that he belonged in one place.
The bitter burden of Andres’s words had decreed an end to the fiesta, and the break-up began, sadly and with everyone feeling they’d experienced something final and beyond appeal. Today it could be Andres’s departure, tomorrow it might be the death of Carlos, sentenced to his infamous wheelchair; another day would bring Miki’s betrayal, another Rabbit’s lunacy till they reached the apocalypse, he thought, as Tamara’s car advanced along Santa Catalina on the way to her house. The Count, who had so wanted her to ask him to provide the company he longed to give, was hardly surprised when she said: “Will you come home with me?”
“Of course,” he’d answered, convinced Andres was provoking all this, and not entertaining the possibility that Tamara might have wanted it long ago, perhaps even as much as he had.
The wind had risen with nightfall and an opaque drizzle hit the car windscreen, blinding the couple’s vision.
“The world is coming to an end.”
“Or already has,” she corrected him, turning the car towards the garage entrance.
“I’ll open up,” he offered, stepping out into the rain and out of the way of the car, which shone the full beam of its headlights on the amalgam of shapes that recalled Lam’s and Picasso’s bestiaries, hybrid animals, ready to leap, terrified by the machine bearing down on them.
“Did you get very wet?” she asked, getting out of the car after she’d locked its doors.
“Hardly at all.”
“Come in, I’ll put the coffee on,” she suggested as she opened the door to her house.
He recalled the last time he was there: that morning they’d made love with the fatal sensation that a divergent past had come between them, along with a future in which it would be difficult for them to get along: because nobody loved a loser, because she’d be unable to share his sad policeman’s life, because he’d never overcome the phantom of a dead husband called Rafael Morin asleep, perhaps, between their bodies, he thought that day, and
