Havana Blue

Dapena, a Spanish businessman /how did he get on with Rafael?/well, let me explain, Dapena owns a shipyard business in Vigo, and he helped us to import various things, though he wasn’t really in the same line of business, more into the fishing industry/and what was he doing at the party?/at the party? I expect he’d been invited, right?/ invited by?/by the owner of the house, I expect, naturally /and what were relations like between Rafael and Dapena?/to be frank, they were purely business, I don’t know if I should mention this but… /do please feel free/one day Dapena made a pass at Rafael’s wife… /and did it lead to problems?/no, don’t imagine that for one minute, it was all a misunderstanding, but Rafael found it difficult to tolerate him after that/and is the Spaniard a friend of yours?/he’s no friend of mine, after what happened with Tamara, Rafael’s wife, the Galician guy is one of those who thinks he’s God Almighty because he’s got dollars/and what happened to the previous head of the enterprise?/so what’s the relevance of that? I’m sorry, sergeant… nothing, a spot of dolce vita, as people say, he set himself up, well, you know what it’s like… /and was Rafael so inclined?/Rafael was quite the opposite to the extent that… /to the extent that what?/he was different, I mean/what time did you leave the party?/oh, right… about three/and did you leave together?/no, well almost, when I went, he was bidding farewell to the comrade deputy minister and… /and what?/no, nothing, I left… /you say you’ve no idea what might have happened to citizen Rafael Morin?/no, sergeant, not a clue…”

Rene Maciques must be around the fifty mark, balding, and wears glasses, the round sort, like a model librarian, thought the Count as he stared at the cassette recorder. Manolo’s work highlighted the man’s bureaucratic rhetoric and his strict ethics when it came to always defending his boss’s back until the opposite is proved to be true, wherever he may be, and now at least we don’t where the hell he’s got to, he told himself. Nevertheless, the sphere of Rafael’s relationships and friendships, the recorded interview with Maciques and his own conversation with Tamara were evidence of an important element in his search: Rafael was as squeaky clean as ever, and Conde shouldn’t let his prejudices get the better of him. His memories were scars from wounds he’d thought had healed a long time ago and a case under investigation was quite another matter, and investigations have antecedents, evidence, clues, suspicions, hunches, intuitions, certainties, comparable statistical data, fingerprints, documents and many, many coincidences but nothing as tricky and treacherous as prejudice.

He stood up and walked over to the window in his cubicle. He’d looked out so often on that fragment of landscape that it had become his favourite vista. The leaves on the laurel trees moved slightly, rustled by a northern breeze bringing a patch of dark heavy clouds that were gathering on the horizon. Two nuns clad in dark winter outfits left the church and got into a VW Beetle with a naturalness that was simply post-modern. His empty stomach fluttered like the leaves on the laurel trees, but he didn’t want to think about food. He thought about Tamara, Rafael, Skinny Carlos, Aymara in Milan and Dulcita, who was God knows where, about the twins’ spectacular fifteenth birthday party and about himself, in that office which was so cold in winter and so hot in summer, contemplating laurel leaves and engaged in a search for someone he’d never have chosen to look for. Everything was so perfect.

He rested his fingertips on the icy windowpane and wondered what he’d made of his life: whenever he revisited his past he felt he was nobody and had nothing, only his thirty-four years and two abandoned marriages. He left Maritza for Haydee, and Haydee left him for Rodolfo, and he couldn’t bring himself to look for her, although he was still in love with her and could forgive her almost anything: he was afraid and preferred to get drunk every night for a week, and in the end he couldn’t forget that woman; and the terrible truth was he’d been magnificently cuckolded, and his detective instinct had never alerted him to a crime that had been months in the making before reaching its grand finale. His voice grew hoarser by the day because of the two packets of cigarettes he smoked daily, and he knew that apart from going bald, he’d end up with a hole in his throat and a check scarf round his neck, like a cowboy eating a snack, perhaps talking via an apparatus that would make him sound like a stainless steel robot. He hardly read nowadays and had even forgotten the day when he’d pledged before a photo of Hemingway, the idol he most worshipped, that he’d be a writer and nothing else and that any other adventures would be valid as life experience. Life experience. Dead bodies, suicides, murderers, smugglers, whores, pimps, rapists and raped, thieves, sadists, twisted people of every shape, size, sex, age, colour, social and geographical origins. A load of bastards. And fingerprints, autopsies, digging, bullets fired, scissors, knives, crowbars, hair and teeth extracted, faces disfigured. His life experiences. And the plaudits at the end of every case solved and the terrible frustration, disgust and infinite impotence at the end of every case that was filed unsolved. Ten years wallowing in the sewers of society had finally conditioned his reactions and perspectives, revealing to him only the sourest, most ornery side of life, even impregnating his skin with a stench of rot he’d never cast off and, worse still, one he only smelled when it was particularly offensive, because his sense of smell had gone forever. Everything as pleasant and perfect as a good kick in the balls.

What have you made of your life, Mario Conde? he asked himself daily as he attempted to reverse the time machine and one by one right his own wrongs, disappointments and excesses, anger and hatred, cast off his errant ways and find the exact point at which to begin afresh. But does it make any sense? he also wondered, now I’m almost bald, and he always responded in the same fashion: Where was I? Oh, I mustn’t be prejudiced, but the fact is I love prejudices, he muttered as he rang Manolo.

The story was called “Sundays” and it was a true story, autobiographical to boot. It began one Sunday morning when my character’s mum (my mum) woke him up, “Up you get, my boy, it’s half past seven”, and he understood how on that particular morning he couldn’t eat breakfast or stay a bit longer in bed or play baseball later, because it was Sunday and he had to go to church, as he did every Sunday, while his friends (“they’ll all perish in hell,” said his/my mother) spent the only morning when there was no school dossing around the barrio and organizing handball or baseball games in the alley on the corner or on the wasteland by the quarry. I felt very anticlerical, I’d read Boccaccio and in the Prologue they’d explained what it meant to be anticlerical, and the fact I was forced to go to church made me anticlerical as well because I wanted to be a baseball player, so I decided to write the story, merely hinting at the anticlericalism, not being in your face about it, like the iceberg Hemingway talks about. That was the story I took to the workshop.

The feeling you are a writer is really fantastic. Although the workshop was more like a beggars’ banquet. There was a bit of everything: from Millan and black Pancho, the only two known queers at school, to Quija, the basketball team captain who wrote the longest of sonnets; from Adita Velez, who was so pretty and delicate it was impossible to imagine her in the daily act of shedding a turd, to Baby-Face Miki, the school Romeo, yet to write a line and still looking for a chick to lay; from Afon the black, who almost never came to class, to Olguita the teacher of literature, who was in charge, and myself and Lamey, who was the life and soul of the workshop. People used to say “he’s a real poet” because he’d published poems in The Bearded Cayman and wore white shirts with stiff collars and sleeves rolled back to the elbow not because he was a poet or anything of that sort, but because those white shirts were all he had to wear to school and he had to make the most of the splendid collars and ties his father had worn as a sales rep in the fifties in Venezuela when Lamey was born, who was consequently a Venezuelan living in La Vibora and he was the one who had the idea of doing a literary workshop magazine, and unawares he had let all hell loose.

We met every Friday afternoon under the carob trees in the PE yard, and Olguita the teacher brought a big thermos of cold tea, and night would creep up on us as we criticized each other’s stories and poems to death and were hypercritical, always looking for the other side of things, the historical framework, whether it was idealist or realist, what was the theme and what was the subject and other idiocies they taught us in class to put us off reading ever again, although our teacher Olguita never mentioned such things and read us a chapter of Cortazar’s Hopscotch every week; you could see she really liked it because she would be almost in tears when she told us this is literature, and I thought she got more and more like la Maga, and I almost fell in love with her, although I was Cuqui’s boyfriend and in love with Tamara, and besides Olguita’s face was pockmarked, and she was ten years older than me, and she also agreed it would a good idea to bring out a monthly magazine with the best pieces from the workshop.

That was the other bone of contention: the best pieces. Because we all wrote the most brilliant texts and we needed a book to pack it all in, and then Lamey said that with issue zero – and I was really surprised by that number zero, if it was in fact number one, because zero is zero and I couldn’t get it out of my head, that it was like a magazine with blank pages or at best a magazine that never existed, you following me? – we should be very demanding, and he and Olguita selected the pieces, and they got our vote of confidence just this once. And they selected “Sundays”; and I couldn’t keep my bum still, thinking I was really going to be a writer, and Skinny and Jose