“Well, I can see a bat, Lieutenant: look up there,” replied the policeman and the Count looked up: between roof-tiles and iron beams there lay a wooden bat, crouching as conclusive as death itself.
The last time Mario Conde had played baseball was at university. He was in the third year of his degree and, as usual, volunteered to be part of the worst baseball team in the whole history of Cuban university sport. It was as if the central-European scientific model for the planning of economic and social life proposed by Gómez de la Peña had also penetrated the hidden recesses of the student body, and it was considered necessary, one fine day, to restructure – yet again – the country’s universities and their faculties. That’s why one morning the School of Psychology, which had always been part of the science faculty, was transformed, through some mysterious administrative design, into an independent faculty, as rigorous as all the other university faculties. Then, in order to meet all the necessary norms and obligations, the faculty had to participate in the University Games with its own teams, in which inevitably the names of the same athletes cropped up again and again because of the lack of students matriculated in that new faculty, more renowned for its intellectual activities than its crude physical aptitudes. And that last year when the Count played baseball he also kept goal for the football eleven, defended for the basketball team, ran for the 4×400 relay team, as well as playing first base and third bat in the baseball team… The Count as third bat…! Because the Psychologists’ only sporting virtue was their enthusiasm: although they were doomed to come last in almost all competitions, they were proud to hold aloft the Olympic motto that competing was more important than winning – for they almost never won; among other reasons because of the exhaustion their sportsmen accumulated over a week of non-stop action.
The last day he played baseball, the Count felt he could hardly lift his arms up and failed three times with the bat when it was his turn at the end of the eighth innings and they were trailing two zero to the Philology Tigers. Because of a mistake, a base and a dead ball, the Count had a historic opportunity to enter the batter’s box with the possibility of an advantage at first base, even though two of his team were out and it was at that precise moment that he suffered one of his first memorable hunches: like all his colleagues, the Count now preferred to use one of those newfangled aluminium bats, which were considered more efficient and sturdier than the old wooden bats. But his hunch warned him that perhaps the old scorned bat made of green-veined majagua hardwood that nobody now used might be the only one able to achieve the miracle and save that last championship game – which, without his imagining it, would also be the last time he’d play. Before the astonished gaze of his colleagues and shouts of alarm from Skinny Carlos, who was still skinny and who almost hurled himself from the terraces to stop his friend committing such an idiocy, the Count slung his aluminium bat to the ground, went over to the bench for the wooden bat and got ready to bat. After passing on two hits, making no attempt to strike the ball, in spite of Skinny shouting, “Hit it, for fuck’s sake,” the Count looked towards Carlos and calmly executed the dramatic ritual he’d practised in his years as an amateur playing for fun: he asked the referee for some time, moved away from the home-plate, picked up some earth in one hand and spat in the other, rubbed them both together and wiped them on the backside of his trousers. After that he placed the blade of the bat between his legs and cleansed it of impurities, rubbing it on the material, before he spat once more on the ground and returned to the batter’s box, where he played out the final act of his mise en scène: he scratched his balls and looked Dog, the Philology Tigers’ best pitcher, in the face… Only someone whose wrists have felt the crisp thud of solid ball against compact wood, produced in a microfraction of a second, one that can send the white sphere flying amazing distances, is endowed with the understanding of what Mario Conde felt at that moment when he steadied himself, carried through his swing and the blade of the bat hit the ball and sent it hurtling into the far depths of the park on the right, so he could run like crazy round the bases, as if he hadn’t been doing baseball, football, basketball and athletics for almost twenty-four hours a day throughout the whole week, and calmly reach third base, to the jubilant cries of a skinny Carlos, who had thrown himself on the pitch shouting: “Fuck, what you need is real balls!” and hugged the Count’s three companions who had scored thanks to his great batting, which put the game at three – two in favour of the Psychologists, who finally won their only game the day Mario Conde played baseball for the last time, in the 1977 University Games.
“So what’s the story on the bat?”
Sergeant Manuel Palacios nodded and the Count felt a shiver run down his spine: the adrenalin hoping that that bat might tell the whole story, ending up in the hands of Adrian Riverón, a batter of forbidden balls, was similar to the adrenalin hoping the other guy would be guilty and not that useful suitor. Once again his policeman’s craft confronted him with the sordid evidence of human intrigue that transcended the limits of what was permissible and wrecked people’s lives for ever: and he started to function again as the choreographer of that performance, giving it a final structure, finding a sadly satisfactory end before the definitive fall of the curtain.
“That was the bat,” said Manolo, flopping into the armchair where Miriam had been sitting.
The sergeant, who was always alert, now seemed tired, bored or disappointed.
“What’s the matter, Manolo?”
“You’ve found Miguel Forcade’s killer. Now you’ll leave the force. Hey, is that really what you want to do?”
“Uh-huh,” mumbled Mario Conde after a moment, and he tried to redirect the conversation. “What did they find in the laboratory?”
“First of all, the fingerprints are all Riverón’s, so he was the only one to touch the bat. Secondly, the blood: although the blade of the bat was wiped with a cloth soaked in spirit, there were blood cells on the wood fibres. The blood group was O, the same as Forcade’s. Finally, other traces of blood were found on the bathroom floor that the water hadn’t washed away and they are also O, and it’s almost certain they belonged to the dead man.”
The Count left his armchair to look out of the window: gusts of wind were beginning to comb the tops of the trees, as a precursor of worse evils to come. In the churchyard, on the other side of the street, skirts and coifs blowing in the wind, nuns were nailing planks on the doors to the holy precinct, to prevent the tentacles of the Evil One entering the Lord’s house in the form of rain and wind. This was an autumn landscape different from the one imagined by Matisse, in rational, measured Europe: the tropical sign of autumn had nothing in common with leaves that fell at a precise change in the seasons or light filtered through high clouds. The trees the Count could see never let go of their leaves if a force superior to gravity didn’t snatch them away, and the light in the country had only two real dimensions: either the intense blue of a clear sky, able to flatten objects and perspectives, or the deep grey of the storm, which mired the atmosphere and brought on nightfall. But the hurricane now pushing against the island’s southern coast, wanting to take it with her, was the most tragic climax to autumn in that part of the world where nature was dispensed in exaggerated measures: rain, wind, heat, thunder and waves, and where evergreen leaves only fell under the weight of those catastrophic arguments. It was a nature that periodically decided to demonstrate to man his inability to control her and warn of her infinite scope for revenge.