“Don’t talk that way, Tamara: I’m not used to anybody needing me. Not even myself.” Now he was the one kissing her, with the brevity demanded by a farewell as necessary as it was undesired. “Don’t worry. I’ll be back tomorrow. After the hurricane has come and gone.”
As soon as he set foot in the street, he was convinced he’d made a mistake, as usual, and should run to the tree of self-flagellation in order to whip his buttocks. The taste of ripe fruit that Tamara’s breath had left in his mouth was something sustained and tangible, like the feel of her breasts against his chest: he was going, leaving behind him a woman full of longings, who even said she needed him, only to meet the sodden hostility of rain and wind, as he floated his melancholy on the air and wondered how many more times he would get it wrong in life. Every time. Now, he told himself, he needed to see the hurricane come and go, to see whether the devastation it wrought would create a new face to pitch against such a vision of failure and frustration and grief and gloom. His whole body soaked by the rain, its force lashing his arms and face, the Count ran down the centre of the street, feeling the rain and air purifying him in those early hurricane hours that were to mark the first day of his new life. As he ran, he realized that the speed was causing his body to abandon his soul, always so ponderous and pretentious, which now chased after him in vain. A strange sensation of purity and total freedom began to flow through him, after so many attempts, ideas, plans and desires to feel free. He ran down the lonely street, savoured the rain racing down his cheeks, broke through the air with his chest, refusing to think: wanting only to wallow in that freedom, but his brain denied his wish and he had to think. And he thought: I’m not the same person anymore. Anymore?
“Yes, fuck you, get here quick,” he yelled at the threatening sky, without slowing down, convinced, for the first time in many years, that he was doing exactly what he wanted to do and should be doing: running, and with his last breath, singing against the night:
Finally, fatal world, we go our separate ways,
The hurricane and I stand alone.
The end of the world had come: a strong, insistent blast of wind almost blew out his bedroom window and the Count warily opened his eyes, their lids gripped by fear. No physical pain haunted him, but his uneasy conscience had received scant relief from those brief hours of sleep and oblivion. The window panes filtered a slow, sickly light that didn’t fit with that time of the morning, and the wind thrust and beat unceasingly against the city as the hurricane tightened its steely vice, and the rain came in waves, sheet after sheet, like a battering-ram determined to break its way through, demolishing every obstacle, everything that longed for permanence.
The Count was surprised by a long forgotten feeling of worry about someone who was dependent on his tender care. He got up and, without putting his shoes on, quickly made for the back door, opening it a crack for fear Felix might take advantage of the fissure to penetrate his own home. He whistled, and Rubbish’s wet, shivering shape appeared before him, his tail drooping between his legs. “Come on, come inside,” he said, and before closing up the Count used this moment of courage to take a look at the patio. The old clump of mangos sown over fifty years ago by his grandfather Rufino lay on the ground, its dislocated fragments covered by alien branches, incongruous leaves, come from wherever. The Count imagined the physical pain the tree must have suffered, and not a single bar from Mozart’s Requiem at the moment of death. But the tops of the trees that were still standing also seemed ready to fly, as if wanting to go far from where they’d been planted. The world bowed in defeat before the presence of a curse that had unleashed its invincible weapons on the city.
He put on the flame a last remaining spoonful of coffee, mixed with the dregs he’d extracted from the coffee pot. While he waited for that dark liquid that might perhaps taste of coffee to come to the boil, he concentrated on drying out Rubbish’s filthy coat with a cloth he’d found in the kitchen cupboard. The animal was still scared and kept looking at the windows, rattled in turn by the blasts from water and wind.
Finally the infusion was ready and he drank a cup of greyish brown liquid. It’s not so bad, he told himself, and regretted not having a drop of milk to offer the dog. I warned you, my friend, and he stroked the head of the animal, who had taken refuge under the table. Then the power of the wind gusted as mighty as thunder and he heard an explosion. The neighbourhood was being demolished by a gale force of over one hundred and fifty miles an hour and there was little you could do against that perversion from the heavens, except wait and pray.
The Count, who had rejected the second of those options thirty years ago, thought it would probably be best to go back to bed, and he put his head under the sheet while nature performed its macabre purifying ritual. He knew that calm would descend in two hours: the rain would stop and the sun would come out, to throw more light on the disaster. What would be left of that aged, much castigated city the Count carried in his heart, even though his amorous longings went unrequited? What would survive of that neighbourhood from which he couldn’t and didn’t wish to escape, the only place on the planet where he felt it possible to enjoy a minimal space to drop down dead – or continue with life? Possibly nothing at alclass="underline" in truth, the devastation had begun long ago, and the hurricane was only the fierce final blow sent to finish off the sentences already begun… Memories would perhaps remain, yes, memories, thought the Count, and the certainty of that saving grace made him forsake his bed, walk to the kitchen table and place his old Underwood on a surface stained by cigarette burns, lemon juice and old rum-inspired patches. Yes, now was the time to begin. He placed that promisingly white sheet of paper against the platen and began defiling it with letters, syllables, words, speeches and paragraphs with which he intended to recount the story of a man and his friends, before and after every disaster: be it physical, moral, spiritual, matrimonial, work-related, ideological, religious, emotional or familial, from which the only thing saved was the cell originating friendship, timid yet stubborn like life itself.
And the Count wrote, trusting that his story about a policeman, a wounded youth, a lad who wanted to be a great baseball player and fell in love with a woman ten years older than himself, a man determined to remake history, a beautiful, svelte woman with rock-hard buttocks, a writer prostituted by his environment, and a whole hidden generation, would prove to be so squalid and moving that not even the disaster of that October day and every other day in the year would be able to undermine the magical act of extracting from his brain that chronicle of love and sorrow, experienced in a past so remote that memory tried to paint it in more favorable hues, so it became almost bucolic. Pasado Perfecto: yes, that would be the title, he told himself, and another blast reached him from the street, warned the scribbler that the demolition was proceeding apace, but he merely changed the sheet and started a new paragraph, because the end of the world was drawing nigh, but had yet to come, since memories remained.
Mantilla, November 1996 – March 1998
Leonardo Padura
Leonardo Padura was born in Havana in 1955 and lives in Cuba. He has published a number of novels, shortstory collections and literary essays. International fame came with the Havana Quartet, all featuring Inspector Mario Conde, of which Havana Black is the second to be available in English. The Quartet has won a number of literary prizes including the Spanish Premio Hammett. It has sold widely in Spain, France, Italy and Germany.