“Hey, Manolo, it’s still early. Let me buy you a drink. I need to cool down.”
“Isn’t the game you’re playing a bit dangerous, my friend?”
“Yeah, the lottery. And I won a wristwatch,” he said and then smiled.
“We’ve been whipping ourselves far too long.”
“Turn down Lacret and park on the corner before you get to Mayía.”
Sergeant Manuel Palacios did as he was told and eased the car in between a lorry and a taxi. A space Mario Conde could never have entered even on a bicycle. They locked the doors. Manolo disconnected the aerial, and they walked towards Mayía Rodríguez, where there was a surprisingly clean, well-lit bar that was almost always empty around midday. Bottles lined the top of the freezer, bottles of Santa Cruz rum, their labels boasting of a fake royal lineage, a few Havana Club creams and an absinthe no Creole drinker dared ask for even in times of direst shortages.
“Two doubles of Carta Blanca rum, my friend,” the Count placed his order with the barman and went over to the bench where his friend had already taken a seat. Just a few regulars were in the bar fighting off Sunday lunchtime lethargy by drinking rum from those little jam-jars which forced you to throw your head right back to get at the last drop, while the barman’s cassette recorder played a selection of boleros for daytime drinkers: Vicentico Valdés, Vallejo, Tejedor and Luis, Contreras were recounting a long chronicle of heartbreaks and tragedies that went better with rum than with ginger ale or Coca-Cola. It was inevitable: the Count was always casing no-hopers in high-noon saloons and trying to imagine why each individual was there, what had gone wrong with their lives for them to invest time and money year after year listening to the same sorrowful songs that only aggravated their loneliness, their disenchantment, the neglect and betrayal they’d suffered, and pour me another, bro, downing gut-rot and firewater as their hands began to shake from the dosage. He exhausted his last efforts as a would-be psychologist and in the process psychoanalysed himself though without sticking the knife in, wondering what he was doing there and dodging his real answers: simply because I like dossing around, feeling damned and forgotten, asking for another drop, bro, listening to others chatter, talking to myself and feeling time go painlessly by. He’d sometimes ask for a drink in order to think a case through or forget it, or to celebrate or remember or just because he felt happier in that kind of place than in a bar with tall glasses and colourful cocktails, one of those elegant bars he’d not seen the inside of in a million years.
“What would you like to do now, Manolo?” he asked his colleague, who was quite taken aback by such a question after just one shot.
“Don’t know, have a few here and then head off to Vilma’s and get a bit of quiet till the morning, I suppose,” he replied with a shrug of his shoulders.
“And if you weren’t off to Vilma’s, I mean?”
Manolo scrutinized his glass like a connoisseur, and the pupil of his left eye progressed smoothly towards the bridge of his nose.
“I think I’d like to listen to music. I always like listening to music. I wish I had a good hi-fi system, with all those equalizers and fucking gadgets and a couple of those speakers, so I could stretch out on the floor with my head between them, my ears right up against them, listening to music for hours on end. Just imagine, man, my old dad couldn’t even give me a hundred and forty pesos to buy myself a guitar! I’d have been the happiest soul on earth playing that guitar, but you land up the son of a bus driver with a wage that has to look after six people, and happiness has to come in at a sight less than a hundred and forty pesos.”
The Count thought how right you are, happiness could be a very expensive business and ordered another double. He looked out on the cold sunlit street, where few cars drove by, and felt completely at ease with his conscience. It was a good time to have a few drinks and sleep with a woman, as his colleague was about to, or catch a bus with Skinny and suffer for four hours in the stadium. It was a good time of day to be alive and happy, with or without a guitar, his throat reacting gratefully to each sip of rum – the familiar gentle heat of white rum – he thought how he’d often been happy and would be again some day, that loneliness isn’t an incurable disease and perhaps one day he’d rekindle old expectations and own a house in Cojímar, right on the coast, a house made of wood with a tile roof and a writing room and never again be in thrall to murderers and thieves, attacked and attackers, and Rafael Morín would vanish from his nostalgic reveries and only good memories would surface, the way they should, the ones time rescues and protects so the past isn’t a nasty horrible burden and you don’t have to walk to the bridge and throw your love in the river, as in the Vicentico Valdés song they were now listening to.
“Listen to that,” he said to Manolo with a smile. “Just what you want to hear after you’ve downed a couple: ‘To the river I’ll go to throw your love in the river/ watch it fall into the void/float off on the stream…’ Almost what you call beautiful!”
“If you say so,” nodded the sergeant, looking back at his glass.
“Hey, Manolo, are you or are you not squint-eyed?”
Manolo smiled, keeping his eyes on his glass, his left eye in free float.
“One day on, one day off,” the sergeant replied and downed his drink. He looked at his colleague and pointed to his empty jar. “And what would you like to do right now?”
The Count also downed his drink and hesitated a moment before answering:
“Spend time with your big hi-fi, stretched out on the floor listening to ‘Strawberry Fields’ ten times on the trot.”
I never took to that outfit. It made you look like a hoodlum – a jailbird – protested Alexis the Yankee, and it was true: the purple socks, cap, wording and sleeves on a chicken-yellow khaki background, the trousers that were far too wide and which we couldn’t narrow as people normally did because Antonio the Fly, our teacher-cum-manager, made it plain that when the championship was over we would have to return everything, in the same or a better state than when we got it, what a fucking joke, as if anyone would want to hang on to outfits that earned us a great nickname: “The Víbora Violets”. The championship involved six high schools and, as usual, we got a bad deal. After Water-Pre we got shat on from all sides, from the camps for rural labour to our baseball outfits, we always got the worst, because they dug deep and discovered first that we topped the exam league tables as a result of fraud and second that we won the cane-cutting competition because someone at the central store gave us cane cut by other schools, and then they discovered a whole string of other things.
Andrés, our usual first baseman, refused to have anything to do with the game after he injured himself and couldn’t play for the National Youth Team. They let me take first base, despite being only the eighth batter in the line-up, in front of Arsenio the Moor, who was condemned to be last as he was a fuck-up dressed as a player – or jailbird – in one of those uniforms.
When we came out to warm up it was already dark and they’d switched on the lights, and the Habana High School team ran onto the field, enormous blacks about to slay us alive as they already had other teams, but we were cocksure and shouted at the pre-game huddle, we’re going to beat the skinny liquorice sticks, fuck ’em, said Skinny, and even the Moor and I thought we would. The worst bit was our gear, because the stadium had had a fresh lick of paint, the floodlighting was great and half of the terraces were full of people from Havana and the other from Víbora, and there was a fantastic din, and we wore this disguise that belonged to the days when one played baseball in a bowler hat and gaiters.
And our team had Skinny, Isidrito the Joker – our pitcher for the day – and Pello and me – dubbed Foul, because all I ever hit were foul balls – and almost everyone from our class went to the games, starting with Tamara, who was in charge of the Achievement Committee because participation in activities counted and The Inter-School Games were an activity, and people always preferred a baseball game to the other kind – a museum visit or yawning through a performance of the school choir, for example. And the class invented a chorus they shouted whenever we played: “Violet team, Violet team/go for the brass”, but the opposition went one better and sang: “Violet team, Violet team/the donkey’s prick up your ass”, so the cure was worse than the illness. Anyway, I was thrilled to be in the team, playing under the lights and feeling you could see things from a different angle: because sure it’s not the same watching the players from the terraces as wearing the gear and watching the people on the terraces. It’s something else.