“No, I’m not writing.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know, I try occasionally but nothing comes.”
“It happens, right?”
“I think so.”
“Give me another cigarette. If I’d got any coffee, I’d invite you, but I’m up shit-creek. Not even ciggies, you hound. How’s it going, any sign of the guy yet?”
“No, he’s not put in an appearance,” said the Count trying to make himself comfortable in the sofa-chair, despite the spring that kept poking into him.
“When Carlos told me you were after Rafael, I almost pissed myself laughing. You must agree it’s funny.”
“It’s not funny at all as far as I’m concerned.”
Baby-Face Miki crushed his cigarette on the floor and coughed a couple of times.
“Rafael and I had some trouble five or six years ago. Did you know that? No, most people don’t, and the old crowd from high school I keep bumping into ask me about him and think we’re still good pals. It used to annoy me no end lying to the effect that everything was fine. You can’t spend your whole life making out everything’s fine… Don’t you have the slightest fucking clue what might have happened to Rafael? Do you reckon he’s gone off with a little number and will turn up acting as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth?”
“I don’t know, but I don’t think so.”
“What’s up, man? You’re very downbeat. Look, I have this strange thing with Rafaeclass="underline" I sometimes think I still like him, because once we were as close as brothers, and at others I pity him a little, just a very little, and then I feel indifferent, as if I don’t care a fuck what’s happened to him, because I didn’t deserve all the trouble he got me into with the party check-up.”
“What trouble?”
“Well, that’s why I told Carlos you should make sure you saw me today. Listen, Conde: I know Rafael is up to his neck in something big. I don’t know if what I’m going to tell you will be much use, maybe, you’ll tell me. And if I’m telling you, it’s because you’re the policeman in charge of this case, because if it were someone else, he’d never find out. Look, the trouble came about because when they were vetting him for the party, Rafael gave them my name as a person they could ask, and the couple doing the audit on him did come to see me. I remember it happened when I’d left the Youth Organization, and they told me it was just routine, that if I’d known Rafael well from his time as a student that was all they needed. Imagine, had I known him? Then they started to question me, and I answered, and everything went just fine. Well, kid, two months later Rafael showed up here in a right rage: he said it was my fault they’d deferred his joining the party, that I shouldn’t have said his mum went to church or that he went to see his father when he came back to the country, that his old man was more fucked than a dog without teeth, a poor sucker who was still a third-rate Miami plumber, although he and his mother told people his father was a drunkard and dead. And what most got his goat was that I said he still loved his dad and was very pleased they’d seen each other again after twenty years, because since we’d been at primary school he’d been traumatized by what happened to his father and the fucking fact he’d left the island. You know, I looked for the human side of the story… I only wish Yoly was here to tell you. He went mad, shouted in my face that I was a cunt, that I was jealous of him plus a few excremental pleasantries. But that’s not the worst of it, and don’t look at me like that. The worst is that I went to the office where he worked and talked to the guys who questioned me because I didn’t think any of what I’d said was that bad, and that’s what they said, that it was just another element in his dossier, and of no great consequence because they could understand he’d wanted to see his father but that they had deferred his entry into the party because he’d shown signs of arrogance and been in a silly dispute with the union, I don’t remember what, but they were sure he’d get there, blah, blah, blah. That was the spot of trouble.”
“I had a vague idea about all that. Sounds just like him,” said the Count, and he anticipated Miki’s desires. Gave him a cigarette and lit his. “But what’s all that got to do with the trouble he’s causing now?”
“It has to do with the fact that, in his eyes, I’m a liar. The truth is that he thought I’d told the investigation that he accepted the suitcase of clothes his father had brought and that they went to the Diplomat Shop and that I even gave him one hundred and fifty pesos for jeans that were too big for him. But I said nothing of the sort but said what I said to defend him, not because I’m naturally a liar, but because those days all that was lethal ammunition to militants and I’d invented a sentimental tale about him and his…”
“Hell, Miki…”
“Hey wait a minute, don’t start on me, I don’t need your absolution. I didn’t ask you to come here to make a confession to you. The nitty-gritty is that Rafael came back here on the afternoon of the thirty-first, at about three pm, after years of ignoring me. Now you’re interested, I bet, Conde. I know you only too well.”
“Why did he come, Miki?”
“Now wait another minute, let me turn the record over, the one Rafael gave me for New Year. He knew I’m addicted to the Mamas and the Stones… I was very, very surprised to see him round here, but I was really pleased, as I’m not one to harbour a grudge. Well, I borrowed a packet of coffee from my next-door neighbour, and we drank the pint of rum I had left, and we chatted as if nothing had ever happened. We raked over a stack of shit about secondary school, high school, the barrio, the usual. Rafael had a chip, you know? In the end he was the one who envied me, and he told me so right where you’re sat now. He told me I’d always done what I damned well wanted and lived as I wanted: fancy, me as fucked as I am, with three books published that I reckon are pure cow dung I don’t even like opening. When I told him that he laughed his head off. He always thought I was joking.”
“But what did he want, man? Why the hell did he pay you a call?”
“He came to say he was sorry, Count. He wanted me to forgive him. You know what he said? He said I’d been his best friend.”
Mario Conde couldn’t help himself: yet again he had visions of Tamara stripping off and felt sure he was being sucked into a deadly quagmire.
“Was he a cynic or just an asshole?”
Miki repeated the exercise of crushing his cigarette end on the floor but destroyed it carefully, and after he’d destroyed it, kept stomping his foot down.
“Why talk like that, Count? You’re another one with a chip, right? That’s why you’ll never be a mediocre writer like me, or an elegant opportunist like Rafael or even a good person like Carlos. You will never make it anywhere, Conde, because you want to sit in judgement on everyone but yourself.”
“You’re talking shit, Miki.”
“I’m not talking shit at all, and you know it. You’re afraid of yourself, and you’ll never face up to it. Why aren’t you a real policeman? You’re always going off at half cock. You’re the typical representative of our hidden generation, as a professor of philosophy at the university once told me. He said we were a faceless, aimless, gutless generation. That we didn’t know where we stood or what we wanted and so preferred to hide. I’m a lousy writer, I don’t want to get into trouble over what I write: I know that much. But what are you?”
“Someone who doesn’t give a fuck about what you just said.”