Havana Blue

“Well, please tell me if you do find anything,” she said as they walked down the passage. She still had her arms folded, and Mario Conde, after winking at the ruddy exuberant Flora framed and hanging on the best wall in the room, wondered how Tamara Valdemira could possibly spend her time in a house that was so empty. Looking at herself in the mirror?

Skinny Carlos is in the centre of the group. Arms splayed out, head tilting to the right, as if crucified, although at the time he didn’t think he’d ever be bearing a cross. He always fixed it so he was in the centre, in order to be the centre, or perhaps we nudged that way to turn him into the group’s navel, where he and we could feel good. He could deliver a joke a minute, make a wisecrack about the silliest thing that would drop from anyone else’s mouth like a lead balloon and earn a couple of polite smiles. He wore his hair long; I don’t how he managed to get through school-gate inspections; he was still very skinny, although we were in thirteenth grade and that day we’d done our university pre-enrolment. For his first choice he’d put civil engineering; he dreamed of building an airport, two bridges, and most of all, creating the design for a contraceptive factory, with distinctive production lines according to size, colour, taste and shape, able to meet all the requirements of the Caribbean, the place on earth where people screwed the best and the most, for that was his obsession: getting laid. His second choice was industrial engineering. Between Skinny and Rabbit, Dulcita was then Skinny’s fiance, and if Skinny hadn’t been crucified, he’d surely have been touching her up and she’d be smiling, for she too liked a touch of porn. Her skirt, with the three white stripes on the hem, was the shortest of the lot, well above the knee: she was the most expert at rolling it up round the waist as soon as she set a foot outside school; her knees were rounded, her thighs compact and long, her legs appeared well-thrown and handmade, and her buttocks – as Skinny would say, using one of his catastrophically poetic similes – were as hard as hunger at five am, and yet all that was balanced out, compensated as it were, he added, by her not having an inch of tit. Dulcita is smiling happily because she’s sure she’s going for architecture to work with Skinny on his projects, and she’ll do the designs. And as second choice, she chose geology, since she was crazy about going into caves, especially with Skinny, to satisfy their joint obsession: a good lay. At the time Dulcita was perfect: she’d kill to help you, a terrific friend, sharp, intelligent and never stopped for anything: she’d bail you out in an exam or soften a girl up for you. She was top mate, a real good gal, and I never understood why she went to the United States. When they told me, I couldn’t believe it; she was one of us, what’s happened…? Rabbit can’t avoid displaying his teeth. God knows whether he ever laughed, with those teeth-and-a half you never knew; he too was very skinny and had gone for a history degree as his first choice and for teaching history as a second, and at the time he was quite convinced that if the English hadn’t left Havana in 1763, Elvis Presley would probably have been born in Pinar del Rio, or River Pine City, or whatever the hell he’d have said, in those cane-cutter’s boots that were his school shoes, for going out every night as well as to Saturday-night parties. He was really thin, because he had no choice in the matter; in his place they chewed cable, not literally, but real cable, the ones Goyo brought from his work as an electrician; he’d say, spaghetti cable, cable and chips, cable croquettes. Tamara looks serious though she always looks best like that: she’s more… beautiful? The light brown lock of hair hanging languidly and rebelliously over her forehead and her right eye giving her airs of Van Gult’s Honorata, and there right next to Dulcita, they’d say Dulcita was always better, but Tamara’s something else, more than beautiful, nice and tasty, as delicious as the crack of a baseball cleanly hit, hot enough to give Mahomet a hard-on: but, no, you felt like eating her bit by bit, clothes and all, I told Skinny once, even if I’d shit rags for a week. And you also felt like sitting with her on a manicured lawn one afternoon, all alone, and leaning your head back on her bounteous thighs, lighting a cigarette, hearing the birds chirp and enjoying happiness. She’d chosen dentistry as her first choice and medicine as second, and it’s a pity to see her looking so serious, as if the future dentist had teeth that would never visit a dentist, and Rabbit would be her first customer, when I get you in my chair, she’d say, I’ll do my doctorate trying to get your buckteeth under control. My awful face hasn’t changed a bit: I’m on the far right, next to Tamara naturally, as always whenever possible; and look, with my trousers cut round the knee so my mum can turn the leg upside down, with the knee which is broader at the bottom and the bottom which is narrower sewn at the knee, it being the only way to get a spot of flares, which were the rage then. And gym shoes without socks, both patched over the toes: mine are crooked and always poked a hole through the same place: I’m also smiling, but it’s a forced smile, only halfway across the lips, on my starving scary face, with bags under my eyes, and I’m thinking I’m sure I won’t get literature, for they’ve almost shut down literary studies this year, I’m in a good position but it’s a lottery and I so much want to get in, and I put down psychology for second choice and not dentistry. That was Tamara’s fault, for I can’t stand the sight of blood so perhaps history would be a better option like for Rabbit, I don’t know, a psychology degree leads to somewhere, but I never knew how to decide. Taking decisions was always torture, and it makes sense that I didn’t feel like laughing in that photo we took coming down the steps at high school, on the eve of our final exams that we were all going to pass because in thirteenth grade they don’t fail anyone, unless there’s another Viboragate scandal and they set special exams in order to fuck us up, as happened to thirteenth grade last year, to Dulcita who’s so intelligent but is repeating a year because of all that, but we would pass, for sure. On the back of the photo it says June 1975, we were all still very poor – that is, almost all of us – and very happy. Skinny is skinny. Tamara is more than beautiful, Dulcita is one of us, Rabbit is dreaming of changing history, and I’m on my way to being a writer like Hemingway. The photo has yellowed with age: it got wet one day and one corner is cracked, and when I look at it I get a real guilty conscience because Skinny is skinny no more and Rafael Morin is the invisible presence lurking behind the camera.

He pressed the bell four times, thumped on the door, shouted. There was nobody at home, and he jumped up and down, the almost palpable lavatory had aroused an urgent desire to piss, he couldn’t hold on and thumped on the door again.

“I’m hungry, so hungry and nearly pissing myself,” the Count blurted out before greeting her or kissing her on the forehead and then rushing to lower his head to receive her womanly kiss. It was a tradition from the time when Skinny Carlos was very skinny and the Count spent every day in that house, and they played ping-pong and tried with dubious success to learn how to dance and studied physics in the early hours before their exams. But Skinny Carlos was skinny no more, and only he persisted in calling him that. Skinny Carlos now weighed in at more than two hundred pounds and moved around in fits and starts in a wheelchair. In 1981, in Angola, he’d got a bullet in the back, waist-high, and it severed his spinal cord. None of the five operations he’d undergone since had improved things, and Skinny awoke each morning with a new pain, another nerve or muscle that had been stilled forever.

“Hey, my boy, you look bloody awful,” said Josefina when she saw him coming out of the lavatory and handed him a glass of watery coffee.

“I’m on my last legs, Jose, and incredibly hungry.” And gave her the glass back after taking only one sip of coffee.

Much relieved and cigarette already lit, he entered his friend’s room. Skinny was in his wheelchair, in front of the television and looking worried.

“They say they’re seeing to the ground, and the game will go ahead. Hey, no, for Christ’s sake, no,” he protested as he saw his friend unwrapping a bottle of rum.

“We need to talk, my brother, and I need two shots of rum. If you don’t…”

“Fuck, you’ll be the death of me,” rasped Skinny, and he started to swing his chair round. “Don’t give me any ice, that Santa Cruz is so sweet.”

The Count left the room and came back carrying two glasses and a corkscrew.

“Well, how are things going?”

“I’ve just been to Tamara’s, Skinny, I swear to you, the wench is hotter than ever. She doesn’t get older. She just gets better.”

“Women are like that. Do you still want to marry her?”

“Fuck off. You’re right about this rum. It’s really good.”

“My friend, take it gently today. You look really shit.”

“It’s a combination of sleep deprivation, hunger and incipient baldness,” he said, pointing to his receding hairline before taking another sip. “No news, the man’s still missing and no clue as to where the fuck he’s got to or why he’s vanished, whether he’s dead or alive…”

Skinny was still edgy. He glanced at the television where they were showing music videos until the baseball game started. Of the people the Count knew, Skinny was, and by a long chalk compared to himself, the one who most agonized over baseball, ever since he’d been skinny and centerfield in the high school team. The Count had