Havana Gold

The Count’s ego was having a ball. He’d always been vain and arrogant and when he could show off his gifts, he did so mercilessly. He stood in the entrance to his house and greeted every passing acquaintance and prayed Karina would pick him up when he had the biggest audience. He’d watch her drive up, all casual, and walk slowly over… Hey, look at that lucky Count. Hell, a chick with a car and so on. He knew the points that item was worth in the ratchet of values upheld by people in the barrio and he wanted to exploit it to the max. A pity the surly wind had scattered the group on the street corner, who’d scurried into some safe haven to down their twilight, troublesome alcohol, and a pity that they’re shutting the liquor store because nothing liquid had arrived to attract a queue. The afternoon was getting far too quiet for his liking. Besides, he’d put on his glad rags: pre-washed jeans he’d bought with Josefina’s help and a checked shirt, soft as a caress, sleeves rolled up to the elbows, worn for the first time to honour that special night. And he smelled like a flower: Heno de Pravia, a present from Skinny on his last birthday. He could have kissed himself.

He finally saw her drive past his place, twenty minutes after they’d agreed, reach the corner and U-turn before stopping on his side of the pavement, with a back wind and prow pointing promisingly towards the dark heart of the city.

“Am I very late?” she asked kissing his cheek warmly.

“Not at all. Three hours and no more is fine for a woman.”

“Got to the bottom of the mystery?” she smiled, starting the engine.

“Hey, it’s not a joke. I really am a policeman.”

“Yes, I know: a detective like Maigret.”

“All right, if you must.”

The small contraption jerked into motion, not quite ready for the off, then sped off down the half-empty street. The Count entrusted his fate to the god who’d blessed the greenback hanging in the window and thought of Manolo.

“So where are we headed then?”

She drove with one hand and with the other tidied away the unruly hair that kept falling over her eyes. Could she see the road? She’d made up immaculately and was wearing a loose-fitting dress: its mauve flowers on a green background and its precise cut aroused the Count’s desires; down south, where her knees were parted, and up north low down the back and deep into a swooping neckline. She looked at him before replying and the Count thought he had on his hands a woman who was too much of a woman, one he would fall hopelessly in love with: a feeling in his chest, a judgement that brooked no appeal.

“Do you like Emiliano Salvador?”

“Enough to marry him?”

“Ah, so you like a joke too?”

“Dearie, I worked as a clowning policeman in the circus and people loved it when I interrogated the elephant.”

“Seriously, if you like jazz, we can go to the Rio Club. Emiliano Salvador’s group’s playing. I can always get a table.”

“Anything for jazz,” the Count agreed telling himself it was a good idea to start with instruments that improvised everything in a life some great master had taped so well there was little margin for variation.

He thought the city seemed quieter, more promising, even cleaner from inside that car although he doubted his impressions were anything but circumstantial. But so what: he felt happy and relaxed with that chauffeur, sure he wasn’t going to die in any stupid traffic accident; Lissette, Pupy, Caridad Delgado’s decline, Fabricio’s loutishness and Candito’s reproaches meant little as they moved relentlessly towards music in the night and, of this he was more than sure, towards love.

“So I have to believe you’re a policeman. A real policeman, one who calls the shots and puts you in jail and fines you for bad parking. Tell me who you are and I’ll start believing in you.”

Once upon a time, a long time ago, there was a boy who wanted to be a writer. He lived peaceful and happy in a not very tranquil, or even beautiful dwelling, not far from here, and spent his time, like all happy boys, playing baseball in the street, hunting lizards and watching how his grandfather, whom he loved a lot, groomed his fighting cocks. But every day he dreamed of becoming a writer. First he decided to be like Dumas, the father, the real one, and to write something as fabulous as The Count of Monte Cristo, until he fell out forever with the infamous Dumas for writing a sequel to that promising book entitled The Deadman’s Hand: it’s a very petty act of revenge for all the happiness granted to Mercedes and Edmund Dantes. But the lad persisted and looked for other heroes who went by the name of Ernest Hemingway, Carson McCullers, Julio Cortazar and J.D. Salinger, who writes such moving, squalid stories like the ones about Esme or the tribulations of the Glass family. But the story of our lad is like the biography of all romantic heroes: life began to put hurdles before him to overcome, which didn’t always come in the form of dragons, the lost Grail or changed identities. Some arrived wrapped round in deceit, others were hidden in the depths of incurable sorrow, others were like a garden of forking paths, and he was forced to take an unexpected path that led him away from beauty and imagination and threw him, pistol in belt, into the shadowy world of bad guys, and only bad guys, among whom he must live thinking he was the good guy charged with re-establishing the peace. But our youngster, who is no longer so young, kept dreaming that one day he would spring the trap set by destiny and return to the original garden, back to the path he’d always dreamed of… In the meantime, he kept leaving behind affections that die on him, loves that putrefy, and days, endless days, devoted to walking through the city’s filthy sewers, like the heroes of The Mysteries of Paris. The lad is alone. To feel less alone he visits whenever he can a friend who lives in a cold, damp attic he can’t leave, because he’s been paralysed ever since the bad guys wounded him in a war. He was a great friend, you know? He was his best friend, a true knight who had been victorious in many a crusade and was only brought to heel by a treacherous wound, after being tied and gagged. So he goes to see his friend every night, and talks to him of his daily deeds, the wrongs he has to right, and tells him of his joys and his sorrows… Until one day he tells him he may have found his Dulcinea – from La Vibora, not from distant Toboso – and that he’s dreaming once again of writing and, more than dreaming, he is writing, of happy memories and nights of anguish, only because the magic halo of love that his princess Dulcinea wrapped round him brings him back to his dreams, to the most alluring… And everything must end happily ever after: the youngster, who is no longer so young, goes out one day to listen to music with his Dulcinea and they cross the city that is lit up, full of smiling, pleasant people who greet them because they respect the happiness of others, and they dance the night away, until the bell rings twelve times, and he confesses that he loves her, that he dreams of her more than of literature or the horrors from the past, and she tells him she also loves him and they live happily together and have lots of children and he writes lots of books… Oh, that’s if the evil genie doesn’t interfere and on the stroke of twelve Dulcinea doesn’t flee forever without even leaving a glass slipper behind. And then he’ll wonder: what can her shoe size be? And here ends this extraordinary story.

“And how much is true in all that?”

“Every word.”

She took advantage of the break the musicians took to ask him that, then stared into his eyes. He poured the rum out, adding ice and cola to her glass. The lights dimmed and silence brought relief that was almost unbearable. Every table in the club was full and the spotlights tinged in amber the cloud of smoke floating against the ceiling, searching for an impossible escape route. The Count contemplated those night birds assembled by alcohol and jazz, a style that was too strident and flamboyant for his own taste: from Duke Ellington to Louis Armstrong, from Ella Fitzgerald to Sarah Vaughan, his traditional bent had only very recently allowed him to bring into the fold – urged on by Skinny’s enthusiasm – Chick Corea and Al Dimeola and a couple of pieces by Gonzalo Rubalcava Jr. But the subdued lighting and glints gave the place a palpable magic Conde appreciated: he liked nightlife, and in the Rio Club you could still breathe a bohemian cellar atmosphere that existed nowhere else in town. He knew the deep soul of Havana was being transformed into something opaque and humourless, as alarming as any incurable disease, and he felt the nostalgia he’d nourished for a lost world he’d never known: the old dives by the beach ruled over by Chori and his bongos, the bars in the port where a now nearly extinct fauna spent hours with a bottle of rum next to a jukebox singing passionately along to boleros by Benny, Vallejo and Vicentico Valdes, the dissipated cabarets that shut at dawn, when people couldn’t stand another shot of rum or their headache. The Havana of the Sans Souci cabaret, the Vista Alegre cafe, the Market Place and cheap Chinese restaurants, a shameless city, at