“That it is unnatural.”
“And haven’t you ever been told you’re the most beautiful woman in La Vibora?”
“I’ve heard the odd comment.”
“And that a good policeman’s after you?”
“I realized that, from the interrogations,” she said and they kissed again, in the middle of the street, as shameless as adolescents in full flood.
“Do you like being wooed in parks?”
“It’s a long time since I’ve been wooed in a park. Or anywhere.”
“Which park do you prefer in La Vibora? Take your pick: Cordoba, Los Chivos, either of those on San Mariano, the Parque del Pescao, the one in Santos Suarez, on Monaco, the one with the lion cubs in Casino and the one on Acosta… The best thing about this barrio are its parks, the most beautiful in Havana.”
“Are you sure?”
“More than sure. Which do you fancy?”
She looked him in the eye and ruminated. The Count lost himself in the depths of her eyes like an infatuated policeman.
“If you’re only going to woo me, I’d prefer the one on Monaco. If you’ve got itchy fingers, then the Parque del Pescao.”
“Let it be the Parque del Pescao then. I’ll not be held responsible for myself.”
“And why don’t you invite me to your place?”
She surprised him, anticipated an invitation he’d not dared to issue when they spoke on the phone and confirmed his suspicion that this woman was a woman and a half and there was no point in beating about the bush. Like Tarzan lusting after Jane.
“I ignored what you said,” she said with a smile. “I parked the car on the corner. Will you or won’t you invite me? I like the coffee you brew.”
His hands shook as he united the two halves of the coffee pot. He was disturbed by the intimacy of love as intensely as in the old days of amorous initiation and he improvised on themes that flowed easily: the secrets about coffee he had learned from Josefina; “we must go and see my best friend Skinny and her, I can’t understand how you’ve never met,” and he peered at his coffee pot to see whether percolation had begun, “they live round the corner from your house”; his preference for Chinese cuisine, Sebastian Wong, “the father of Patricia, a colleague at headquarters, prepares some amazing soups”; the idea for a story he wanted to write, on solitude and emptiness… He poured the first drops of coffee in the jug where he’d put two small spoonfuls of sugar which he beat into an ochre, caramelized paste; “while I was waiting for you I thought about writing something along those lines, I’ve been wanting to write for several days,” and he poured the remaining coffee into the jug and yellow, probably bitter foam formed on the top, and he poured it into two big cups and announced, “Espresso coffee,” as he sat down opposite her. “Whenever I fall in love I think I can write again.”
“Do you fall in love so quickly?”
“I don’t always linger so.”
“Love of literature or of women?”
“A fear of loneliness. A panic attack. Is the coffee to your liking?”
She nodded and looked at the window and the night.
“What have you found out about the dead girl?”
“Not much: she expected too much from life, was able and ambitious and changed boyfriends as often as her bras.”
“And what does that mean?”
“She was what the ancients and some moderns would call a little whore.”
“Why did she change boyfriends? Is that what you think about women? Are you the kind that would like to marry a virgin?”
“That’s what every Cuban man aspires to, I suppose? I don’t aim so high now: I’ll settle for a redhead.”
She gave no sign she accepted his compliment and finished her coffee.
“And if the redhead was a little whore?”
He smiled and shook his head, indicating she’d misunderstood.
“I said little whore because that’s what she was: she could go to bed with a man for a pair of shoes,” he explained and regretted telling her the truth: he wanted to bed her and intended to give her a pair of shoes, in fact. “I’m only interested in her changes of boyfriend as a policeman: that may be why she was killed. The dead have no privacy.”
“It’s incredible, isn’t it? That they can kill someone, like that, on any pretext?”
The Count smiled and finished his coffee. He lit the cigarette, his mouth urgently craving that complement to the enduring taste of the infusion.
“It’s what usually happens. Someone is killed for no real reason, probably on the spur of the moment. It’s often a mistake: criminals prefer not to murder but sometimes cross that line because they can’t avoid it. It’s a chemical chain reaction… I feed on such incontinence. It’s sad, isn’t it?”
She nodded and then took the offensive: she stretched her hand across the dark formica table top and took the forearm of the man who seemed to relish sadness, and started caressing it. A woman who knows how to caress, he thought, not a phantom passing…
“Oh, how beautiful you are, my love, how beautiful you are! Your eyes are like doves!”
He declaims biblically like Solomon, when, feeling as beautiful as Jerusalem, she abandons her coffee and chair and advances on him, never letting go of his arm, and pulls his mouth down to her breasts – like twin gazelles “that graze among the lilies” – so with his free hand he can fumble to undo her blouse and find himself not before two gazelles, but warm, wild tits, with ripe plum nipples that stir anxiously at the first flickering touch of his reptilian tongue, and, a baby again, he sucks, starting a journey to the origins of life and the world.
He penetrates her slowly, as if afraid to shed a petal, sitting on his chair, picking her up by the waist, light and amenable, lowering her on to his pole, like a sacred banner in need of protection against the rain and dusk. Her first cry takes him by surprise, she arches between his hands as if wounded by a silver bullet shattering her heart, then he hugs her tighter to feel the black forest of her magic triangle on his pubes, and lowers his hands to her buttocks to run over the perfect furrow dividing them ands lets his eager finger run unhurriedly, never pausing, from anus to vulva, from vulva to anus, carrying wet heat, feeling the urgent thickness at the root of his penis, rigid and prickly as it drilled, and the padded softness of her opulent, knowing lips that suck him like eager quicksand, and then he lets his finger wander between the folds of her anus and feels the louder cry provoked by the double penetration now becoming triple with the savage tongue that tries to silence her, when all silence is impossible, because the deep sluices are open and the deepest rivers of their desires flow to a glory on an earth that has been recovered. The renascent gusts of the Lenten wind wrap them in tight embrace.
“You’ll be the death of me,” are the words of love he articulates.
“I’ll be the death of myself,” she laments, as she shivers all vulnerable, perhaps because of the wind, perhaps because of the moral and physical certainty of consummation.
Several days later, while ruminating on the tangible opportunities that come policemen’s way – to find happiness and change their lives – Detective Lieutenant Mario Conde began to grasp the real extent of that suicide on a well-ridden saddle… But he can’t think now, because Karina dismounts as if levitating and, rescuing the pants still hanging from one of the Count’s thighs, she cleans the spume from his penis and, kneeling like a penitent, swallows it as if she’d been starving for days and now it’s the Count who cries out, “Fuck, cunt,” the words he utters, astounded by the beauty of the prostrated woman whose head he can barely see, that says yes and yes again, with total conviction, and a reddish hair that opens up in the centre of the head in an unexpected cleft. While his penis begins to grow beyond what is possible, unimaginable, even permissible, the Count feels himself powerful, animal, in full possession of his senses, until dictator-like he exercises the power he has been given, takes the woman’s head in his hands and forces her to hit bottom and beyond, until he pours into her throat, that prisoner under sentence, an ejaculation he feels descend from the innermost reaches of his brain. You’ll be the death of me. I’ll be the death of myself… They kiss, on the brink.
I came across a quite unexpected facade yesterday. I must have passed that hitherto anodyne, filthy spot on
