or continue with life? Possibly nothing at all: in truth, the devastation had begun long ago, and the hurricane was only the fierce final blow sent to finish off the sentences already begun… Memories would perhaps remain, yes, memories, thought the Count, and the certainty of that saving grace made him forsake his bed, walk to the kitchen table and place his old Underwood on a surface stained by cigarette burns, lemon juice and old rum-inspired patches. Yes, now was the time to begin. He placed that promisingly white sheet of paper against the platen and began defiling it with letters, syllables, words, speeches and paragraphs with which he intended to recount the story of a man and his friends, before and after every disaster: be it physical, moral, spiritual, matrimonial, work- related, ideological, religious, emotional or familial, from which the only thing saved was the cell originating friendship, timid yet stubborn like life itself.
And the Count wrote, trusting that his story about a policeman, a wounded youth, a lad who wanted to be a great baseball player and fell in love with a woman ten years older than himself, a man determined to remake history, a beautiful, svelte woman with rock-hard buttocks, a writer prostituted by his environment, and a whole hidden generation, would prove to be so squalid and moving that not even the disaster of that October day and every other day in the year would be able to undermine the magical act of extracting from his brain that chronicle of love and sorrow, experienced in a past so remote that memory tried to paint it in more favorable hues, so it became almost bucolic.
Leonardo Padura
Leonardo Padura was born in Havana in 1955 and lives in Cuba. He has published a number of novels, shortstory collections and literary essays. International fame came with the
