“Course I remember… The bastard is I’m broke and can’t buy anything.”
“Forget it: it’s your birthday… So come by early on. The old girl says better not eat during the day, because she’s going to cook a lot.”
“She’s mad, she’ll get put away… Hey, I called you for two reasons… Don’t know about you but I’m really worried about Andrés. There’s something up with that bastard, I’ve never seen him so aggressive.”
“Yeah, he’s as queer as a coot. I spoke to his mother and she says he’s odd with her as well. Something not quite right with our prince of Denmark. What was the other thing?”
“Oh, I’d like your opinion; you’re an intelligent man, would you believe anything from a woman who dyes her hair?”
“What colour?”
“Blonde.”
“Not a word.”
“Why?”
“Because blondes who aren’t blondes are whores or liars. Or both at once, which is when they’re best…”
“Yes, you’re right. Hey, thanks for the advice. Tell your mother I’ll fast in her honour.”
“I’ll tell her. But don’t get caught up, and come early, my friend.”
“You bet… See you tomorrow, my friend.”
The Count gulped down his mélange of coffee and rum and felt that, although he was tired and sleepy, he should strike a few keys on his decrepit Underwood: he needed to lance a painful boil and say something he didn’t dare to express verbally to Skinny Carlos and perhaps the story of friendship, pain and war he’d been concocting in his head for several weeks was finally ready to see the light, tonight of all nights. His spirit now carried a high enough dose of love and squalor to commit it to paper and, without more ado, he put the typewriter on the dining table and read the last of the pages he’d left on the platen on the distant morning of the previous day.
The youth slumped to the ground, as if pushed, and rather than pain he felt the millenar y stench of rotten fish issue forth from that grey, sterile land. The dust irritated his eyes and blocked his nose, making it difficult to breathe, if not almost impossible when the pain finally came: it began mid-waist and started to extend its feelers towards his legs and over his chest, barely dampened by the blood devoured by the infirm, pestilent earth.
Almost without thinking the Count put his fingers on the worn keys and felt as if his hands were thinking for him, while the letters etched themselves on the fresh paper in the platen.
Before losing consciousness he realized he was wounded, that he couldn’t move and soon perhaps everything would be over: he thought the idea strange but logical, for although he was only twenty-two and was not used to thinking of death, the fact he was in a war put that hitherto remote possibility on the wheel of fortune.
He woke up to hear the noise of engines and a voice said: Keep calm, we’re going to the hospital, and from his position, flat on his face, he saw the tops of fleeting trees, made small by the height of the helicopter, but the dead sea stench from the ground still lingered in his nostrils, as insistent as the pain that made him faint again.
In fact the young man never found out where the bullet came from that broke two vertebrae and destroyed his spinal cord. Then he remembered how, before falling to the ground, he’d been thinking about the things he had to do when he got back home. They were simple plans, full of everyday simplicity, supported, as ever, on two feet: dreams of love, the future, life projects postponed by the decision to participate in that distant war. Consequently, when he regained his lucidity and felt an empty numbness towards the south of his body, he asked the nurse whether they’d cut his legs off and she smiled, assuring him they hadn’t, and when he asked her if he’d walk again, she just shook her head and tugged his hair, in a gesture of possible consolation for the inconsolable.
Why had that particular bullet chosen to hit him of all people and change his whole life in less than a second? He knew that was one of the risks of war but it seemed to him too cruel for everything to come to an end like that. He, who’d never thought of wars, who’d detested the cold weight of guns, and who’d said yes ever since he had use of his reason, thinking obedience would take him to a very different place from the bed where he now lay, an invalid for the rest of his days: a bullet with no return to sender had hit him of all people, aimed by a faceless being and shot with a hatred he had never felt or shared.
And the Count wondered: is this the moving story I want to write? No, it was but the prologue to an episode summing up the cruel experience of a generation and the burning reflection of another’s guilt assumed as his own, for he always thought his back should have been the one to get “a bullet with no return to sender” and not Skinny Carlos’s, the finest man he’d ever known. He struggled with the dilemma of continuing in that vein or tearing up the sheet of paper, when he grasped the real extent of his doubts: was he able to say all, without hiding anything, about what he felt, thought, believed, wanted to write? Could he be honest enough with himself to commit to paper his fears, dissatisfactions and incurable pain. Could he say what others silenced and that someone, some time, should say? The Count lit another cigarette, closed his eyes and accepted that he too was afraid.
He boldly opened his eyes, in the certain knowledge that he had reached the horrendous age of thirty-six and that it would indeed be his last day as a policeman, and what he saw no longer shocked him: an empty goldfish bowl, a bed only slept in in its most sunken half, a few books burdened by dust, deferred longings and envy, a bottle of Caney rum squeezed as dry as a rag, a murky, threatening future and, framed by the narrow angle the window now offered, a scrap of sky, once again that goddamned persistent blue. But he hardly thought about hurricane Felix, which was probably just round the corner, at an obedient halt, waiting to be invoked by the Count before it took to its preferred route of the Calzada and carried through its general clear-out, but rather he scrutinized his watch, which warned there were still six hours to go to the change of age: as if that were at all important. His mother had told him he was born at one forty-five p.m. on 9 October and each year when they were together she patiently waited for that moment before she went over, hugged him and gave him the third of the four kisses they exchanged in the whole year. The three others corresponded to her birthday, 15 April, Mother’s Day, always the second Sunday in May, and the last kiss came on 31 December, just as the bells rang out the final seconds of the year and they swallowed grapes, if there were any: as many as twelve, if they could. When the Count grew up and decided to see the New Year in with his friends, at street parties or at Skinny’s house, the annual kisses were reduced to three, and Mario Conde now regretted that irreversible dearth of affection and love he and his mother established in a deep yet timid relationship where they were unable to express physically what they felt within themselves. Because many other events might have deserved the natural congratulation of a kiss: his graduation from high school, perhaps; the publication of his short story ‘Sundays’ in the bulletin of the school literary workshop; his first communion, when he was so pure and ready to receive Christ’s flesh and spirit and she was all in white in that crackling starchy lace dress the Count remembered better than the moment he was unsure whether she had or hadn’t kissed him. Nevertheless, his mother showed him other forms of affection he treasured in the holiest sanctuary of his memory: for example, the day he went into the bathroom without knocking and saw her naked. Mario must have been around nine and already thought he knew something of the secrets of female nakedness, and his mother’s wet, shiny body, those luscious breasts, crowned by large, brown nipples and her jet-black abundant bush, froze momentarily before he half turned to flee that feminine vision he knew was prohibited, and she called to him and said: “Come, Mario,” and he turned round slowly, looking his mother in the face so he didn’t see her breasts and dark sex again, and she repeated, “Come, I am your mother,” and she took his arm and placed his hand on her wet belly and said to him: “Take a good look at that scar,” and he saw an ancient red weal on her skin, which started under the navel and disappeared into her pubic hair, and she said: “You came into the world through that gash,” and he engraved on his mind for ever that eternal sign of an unrepeatable oneness that used to bind him to a woman he did not wish to see naked again until the day she died, when, contrary to all he could have predicted, he decided he’d be the one to clean the still body with her favourite cologne, and stroked again the gash from which he originated and gave her the first and only kiss for that year, since she died on 16 January, three months before his birthday. The number of kisses still pending was so great the Count always wondered why the kiss was the highest sign of love: totally Eurocentric and Judaeo-Christian, sexual, labial nonsense, he’d tell himself then, and told himself now, remembering how on his eighth birthday there was an additional kiss, granted after the inevitable one forty-five p.m. kiss, an evening kiss specially permitted for the last birthday photo with cakes and cold drinks, an occasion on which, for the last time, he’d be snapped with so many cousins later lost to remote paths of exile, and with Grandad Rufino, who died a few years after. He preferred not to look at those photos, consigned like stigmas to a box of festering nostalgia, in order to conceal the truth that he’d once been so happy and loved, an active member of that vanished concept of the family, garnering his mother’s kiss and a hug from the old patriarch of the Conde clan, on whose vanquished legs he’d already sat, in order to smile at Oliverio’s camera, as his arm fell round the neck of the old man who’d given him his first notions of the real world: for example, the one about not playing if you aren’t sure you can win. Old Count Rufino, eternal bard of his youthful feats, was still a strong presence on that piece of card, a far cry from the final image of a man corroded by an illness about to waste him entirely, after softening his legs of stone, legs that accepted defeat and decreed the end of his rule as a cock-fighter when mid-flight they told him they were no longer up to helping him escape a police raid on clandestine organizers of cock-fights. In the last memorable photo of that memorable birthday, the Count remembered one by one the relatives gathered there, all smiles behind an eight-candle cake, as if they knew that conjunction of the third, fourth and fifth generations of the family of Teodoro Conde, the Canary Islands escapee who’d reached Cuba a century and a half ago, was to become an alarmingly final image: diaspora, death, distance and memory-loss haunted that family photographed on 9 October 1961 and already predestined never to meet up again, not even at the wake of Grandad Rufino, who saw his greatest desire perish as he lived: to embark on death surrounded by all his children and grandchildren. Destiny’s a bastard, thought the Count, and violently repelled that image now captured in his brain in order to recall, with the tiniest grin he could manage, his private celebration of his eleventh birthday, held in the solitude of the bathroom at home. It was an irrefutable axiom for him and his friends at the time that only at the age of eleven, at the exact moment your eleventh year began, did your penis start to be of use for more than shedding urine several times a day: now the peter, knob, thingy, willy was transformed, via the workings and grace of the age attained, into a weapon of struggle called cock – or dong, or tool, or prick, or wick, or meat, anything but the polite member it wasn’t – and could shoot out white drops full of new potential, including a harvest of pleasure. And, following wise advice, Mario Conde shut himself in the bathroom with uncle Maximiliano’s old magazine, which his cousin José Antonio had requisitioned, in which several women had allowed themselves to be photographed showing their tits, arses and even hairy twats (one shaved). José Antonio, jerker extraordinaire if ever there was, skilled practitioner of the phantom jerk, the Capuchin, the two-hander, the soap-sudder, the mongrel and seven other varieties (including the suicidal jerk of the bat, the one you could only achieve by hanging by one arm from the eaves of a house, as you looked through a bathroom window and rubbed away with the other), had advised him that the best way to do it (especially if it was the first time) was by moistening yourself with saliva: saliva’s hot and slippery as if you’d put it up a woman or a sow… But the Count was worried by the absence of other complementary signs of his sexual debut: not a single wisp of hair had sprouted in his armpits or pubis, his voice was still childish and reedy, and – no doubt worst of all – he preferred baseball to women. But he was eleven years old, eleven on the dot and his time had come: contemplating the steamy photos of naked women, he felt a flicker of current in his genitals and a degree of hardening of his small member, on which he spat a couple of gobs of saliva before beginning a rhythmic rub, back, forward, back, forward, that hardened his ex-peter, now transformed into an adult, masculine cock, which got harder and harder, and grew like a snake charmed by magic pipes, back, forward, more saliva, until something stirred in a spot on his body that he couldn’t locate and a few drops of white amber ran along his hand, which reeked of sweat and saliva, leaving him empty and wondering: is this the shit that’s supposed to be so wonderful? which he wasn’t convinced of on his eleventh birthday, only understanding his extremely serious lack of appreciation when, nigh on a year later, he glimpsed the breasts of his neighbour Caridad, popping out of an indiscreet neckline, which stirred his scrotum and forced him to run home, shut himself up in the bathroom again, where, seized by an urgency he’d never before experienced, and forgetting all about the saliva, began to rub himself with Caridad’s breasts in his mind’s eye – two hard protuberances, he knew, inflamed at their tips by earth-coloured nipples – and taken almost unawares felt a brutal shudder, heat coming from all his pores, a burning sensation coming from his testicles and shooting up his back, and the white, gleaming spillage, which propelled itself from his penis and splattered the tiles on the wall, and he knew why his cousin José Antonio had earned himself a diploma for jerking-off: that was the life… he concluded and, after smoking a cigarette that made him cough, he returned to his saliva and enjoyed a second adult masturbation. From then on he practised two or three times a week, until he discovered, almost on the day of his twentieth birthday, that there was an even better life to be lived: provoking the same spillage on a much better place than bathroom tiles: a woman’s vagina.