One of the blessings Mario Conde never ceased to be thankful for was the fact he had three or four good friends. The almost fifty years spent in this world had taught him, sometimes perversely, that few states are as fragile as the state of friendship, and hence he fiercely protected his many layered camaraderie with Skinny Carlos, Candito and Rabbit, because he considered it to be one of his most precious gifts from life. Several years earlier, Andres’s departure to the United States had provoked a sense of desertion among the remaining friends, but, at the same time, it had had the beneficial secondary effect of bringing them closer together, welding their connections, making them more tolerant of each other and transforming them into life members of the party of eternal friendship.
The permanent threat represented by Carlos’s physical deterioration meant the Count never failed to safeguard the time he spent near his old friend, dedicating all the hours he could to him, aware it was the best way to act in preparation for a future emptiness, the arrival of which drew nearer by the day.
In spite of Carlos’s insistence that his friend should set time aside to write the stories he invented and frequently promised to put on paper, the Count felt strangely fulfilled when he spent his evenings and nights in lethargic conversations meandering through the unpredictable labyrinths of memory, obstinately chasing a no doubt imaginary state of grace they dredged up from a rosetinted past, spurred on by dreams, projects and desires reality had crushed long ago. In these repetitive exchanges, refusing to discover anything new, they allowed themselves to be swept along by the illusion they’d once been really happy, and while they spoke, drank and reminisced, put despair to one side and resurrected the happiest moments from their sad lives.
That night the Count lamented Rabbit’s absence, then started to tell Carlos and Candito about the recent events he’d been implicated in and his corrosive reflections on the duties of a policeman that had come to him when he was being put on file. He concluded by telling them of the decision he’d taken that afternoon after the conversation with Silvano Quintero: to start searching for the once famous Lotus Flower, real name Elsa Contreras, about whose existence the journalist had received some vague but reliable information about ten years ago.
“So, after all that, you’re back to being a policeman, but on false pretences?” smiled Carlos as he poured himself a shot of the genuine rum they could now drink thanks to the Count’s economic good health.
“Ironies of destiny, as a good bolero might say. Although you said it: on false pretences.”
“Do you want me to help you look for her?” Candito ventured, and the Count shook his head.
“No, not now. I might need you to give me a hand later, but I’d rather start off by myself. I don’t want to kick up any fuss and frighten her off.”
“And do you really think that business is connected to what’s just happened?” enquired Carlos.
“How the hell should I know, Skinny? I’d certainly like to find out what happened to Violeta del Rio. Yesterday I promised to forget her, but now she won’t budge from here…” and he hit his forehead with the palm of his hand, “at least until I know why the fuck she committed suicide. Or had it committed for her…”
“You’ve got it bad,” said Candito and the Count nodded vigorously, weighing up if that was the moment to relate the strange story of his father’s platonic love affair. But he opted to keep that under wraps.
“From the minute I first saw that picture something strange happened: it was as if I’d once known something about her and had forgotten whatever it was. I don’t know where the idea came from, but if I find out what happened to her, I’ll probably discover why I had that feeling… Later on, when I heard the record, she really did start to complicate things.”
“I’d liked to have seen her sing as well. Nobody sings like that nowadays, do they?” asked Carlos.
“Maybe it’s because we’ve spent the last twenty years listening to the same old singers?” asked Candito.
“Twenty?” reflected the Count. “You mean thirty plus… Fuck, you know, we’re just a bunch of old farts.”
“Do you remember, Conde, when they shut the clubs and cabarets because they said they were dens of vice and relics of the past?” recalled Carlos.
“And as a reward they sent us to cut cane in the harvest in 1970. All that sugar that was going to save us from underdevelopment at a stroke,” Candito remembered. “I was cutting cane for four months, every single day God brought.”
“I sometimes think… How many things did they take away, ban, refuse us for years in order to catapult us into the future and make us better?”
“A hell of a lot,” declared Carlos.
“And are we any better for it?” enquired Red Candito.
“We’re different: are we three-legged or one-legged? I’m not exactly sure… The worse thing was we weren’t allowed the chance to live to the rhythms people were enjoying on the rest of the planet. To protect us…”
“Do you know what most pisses me off?” Rabbit interrupted, sticking his teeth round the door. “They killed dead our dream of going to Paris at the age of twenty, which is the right time to go to Paris… Now they can stick Paris up their asses and Brussels too, if there’s room.”
“What kept you, Rabbit?” the Count welcomed him, handing him the bottle of rum, after he’d helped himself.
“All the time, day in, day out we’ve been living out our responsibility for this moment in history. They were bent on forcing us to be better,” said Rabbit, but the Count shook his head, hardly able to restrain himself.
“And why do so many young people now want to be rastas, rockers, rappers and even Muslims, and dress up like clowns, abuse themselves putting rings everywhere and even tattooing their eyelids? Why do so many do the hardest drugs, why do so many become whores, pimps, and transvestites, and wear crucifixes and voodoo necklaces though they don’t even believe in their own fucking mothers? Why do so many cynics swear one thing and believe another, and why do so many live by thinking up what they can steal to get money so they don’t work themselves to death? Why do so many just want to leave the island?”
“I have a name for that,” the group’s historian picked up the baton: “historical exhaustion. After being so exceptional, so historical and so transcendent, people get tired and want a bit of normality. As they can’t do that, they decide to be abnormal. They want to be like other people, not like themselves, that’s why they are rastas, rappers or whatever, and drug themselves up to the eyeballs… They don’t want to belong, don’t want to be forced to be good. Above all they don’t want to be like us, their fathers, a load of failed shits…”
“These aren’t the ones that piss me off most,” the Count reflected. “The ones who make me want to vomit are those who look perfect and trustworthy but are in fact a bunch of opportunists.”
Rabbit nodded and sipped on his rum. Something prickly and sour refused to go down his throat.
“Have you ever considered what kind of place we were lucky enough to be born in? Have you or haven’t you?” he waited for an answer that never came and spelt it out. “Well, you should. This is a country pre-destined to exaggeration. Christopher Columbus started the rot, when he said that this was the most beautiful land ever seen by man and all that jazz. Then we had the geographical, historical misfortune, to be where we were when we were, and the bliss or bad luck to be like we are. And you see, there was even a time when we produced more wealth than this island needed and we thought we were wealthy. Aside from that considerable misconception, we have produced more geniuses per inhabitant and square yard than we had a right to and long thought we were better, more intelligent, stronger… This exaggeration is also our greatest burden: it threw us into the midst of history. Remember how Marti wanted to put the whole world to rights from here, the whole world mind you, the entire planet as if he’d got his hands on the blasted lever Archimedes was after. And you can see the consequences… A
