“I love pornography…”
“Child porn, Conde!”
“Hey, there are some fourteen-year old girls I’ve seen…”
“Fuck off, you never change.”
“So, do you?”
Manolo smiled and put one of his hands on top of the hand Conde had placed on the bar.
“I’m trying to avoid it… How about a ciggy?”
“Another shot of rum?” asked the Count pushing the packet and lighter his way.
“No, what I just sank will do me for the moment…”
“Christ!” the Count called to the barman. “I’ll have another… What’s up then, Manolo? Is it true the end of the world is nigh? Why are people more buggered by the day?”
Manolo sighed and exhaled smoke.
“I keep asking myself that question. I don’t know, too many people who don’t want hard toil any more and take the easy way out. There are a lot, too many, who’ve grown up watching half the world steal, counterfeit and embezzle, and now it seems so normal they do it as if they weren’t doing anything wrong. But the violence is the worst of alclass="underline" they’ve no respect for anything and when they want something they’ll do whatever it takes…”
The Count sipped his refill.
“I’ve got a partner in the book business. His theory is that people no longer believe in anything and that’s why things are like this. Do you remember when we turned Havana upside down because three lads in Pre-Uni in La Víbora smoked the odd joint?”
“Happy days, Conde, I can tell you. Now they’re on crack, coke, parkisonil with rum and amphetamines, when they can get them. If not, any anti-depressant with alcohol and even the stuff for anaesthetizing animals, will do… They used to inhale petrol, paint, varnish, industrial rubber… You know what the latest is? They set light to CDs and sniff them. And go to heaven but shed a load of neurones on the way… And don’t think it’s just a handful… If you drop by the Psychiatric Clinic, you’ll see how many are tied to the stake like Hatuey the Indian. You know, whenever there’s a public dance or dog fight, or they’re bored, they get off on whatever they can find and start wanting to kill each other: really kill each other… And get money from all ends and sides, almost always by thieving, pimping or selling drugs to other people. Or by deciding to burgle, steal stuff, and kill two or three people while they’re about it. In Cold Blood? Wasn’t that the title of a book you gave me once? Well, I saw a case like that last week. Five murdered in one house, tortured, mutilated… and all for two thousand pesos and a television set.”
“The newspapers never report these things… Doesn’t anyone ask why it’s all happening?” enquired the Count, alarmed by the panorama sketched by his former colleague and congratulating himself for being so far removed from that gloomy, ever expanding reality.
“I don’t know, but someone, somewhere, should be. I’m a policeman, Conde, an ordinary cop: I pick up the shit, I don’t dish out the grub…”
“So, we’re done for, Manolo. I’d like to know when the test tube broke, as Yoyi says, and it all started to mess up.”
“Yeah, it would, but enough philosophizing. I’m in a hell of a rush. Tell me what you’re after.”
“My request is less horrific but probably more difficult… I need to track down a person who was lost sight of forty-three years ago.”
“Lost, disappeared, what’s the story?”
“She vanished and nobody remembers her. I don’t know if she’s dead or alive, although she’d be sixty or so now, I really don’t know…”
“Tell me her name and I’ll look in the files.”
“That’s the first bloody problem: she was a singer and I only have her name as an artiste. No one was ever really called Violeta del Rio.”
“Violeta del Río?”
“You heard of her?”
“No, no, and no again…”
Manolo stretched his arm out, grabbed the Count’s glass and took a sip.
“Do you or don’t you want another shot?”
Manolo shook his head and added: “Let me have a look anyway, she may come up under her alias… Why are you after her?”
“I don’t know,” the Count admitted. “At least I don’t think I’ll really know until I’ve found her. That’s why it’s so important.”
Rogelito might well be the last of the dinosaurs, a kind of fossil who’d survived the natural extinction of his contemporaries and made it to the twenty-first century from a geological era only recorded in the old books shifted by the Count. His mythical beginnings belong to the year 1921, just after the end of an increasingly historic First World War, when as a mere seventeen-year old he joined the great Tata Alfonso’s danzón orchestra and started to weave his very own legend as a brilliant timbalero, playing in all the remarkable orchestras and jazz bands that drifted through the crowded Cuban musical scene for over sixty years, the ones who pursued him for what he’d always been: the best.
It was said of Rogelito that back in 1920 he’d been lucky enough to be a pupil of Manengue the fantastic, eccentric, alcoholic timbalero who’d wanted novel resonances from his primitive instrument and had enriched it by incorporating a cowbell’s metallic percussion and the rhythmic beat from the snare and a little Japanese wooden box, that with its sharp, torrid sounds became the basic percussive instrument for the danzón.
Despite this epic story, Conde wasn’t shocked to find the eternal Rogelito living in one of those narrow, crammed “passageways” in the barrio of Buenavista, in a tiny flat with flaking, damp-oozing walls, with no view of the street, squeezed between two other tiny flats equally sentenced to stare at the wall separating them from next door’s similarly dark, damp passage. As with all the musicians in his era, enough money must have passed through Rogelito’s hands to have bought, rented or even built a luminous, airy house. Like most, however, Rogelito had dressed swankily, and drank, smoked and fucked every peso away – not a bad option, come to think of it, Conde told himself – while finally taking shelter, with a clear conscience, in one of those asthmatic flats where old age and oblivion had caught up with him. Might the once high-living Violeta del Río be holed up in one of those dismal rooms?
After asking the Count to wait for a few minutes, the great-granddaughter responsible for caring for Rogelito, a creamy-white mulatto with over thirty solid, steamy years behind her, owner of nipples intent on drilling through her flimsy blouse and jutting buttocks where a man could sit, led the old man to a sprung armchair with extra cushions that looked like a throne for a patriarch fallen on bad times. Rogelito tottered out of his bedroom on his great-granddaughter’s arm, now unable to lift legs that had once danced in Havana’s best venues and the Count had the impression he was watching a candle burning the last thread of its wick. Apart from his irrepressible ears, that had once belonged to a man of average build, and his false teeth, keen to lend him a permanent, grotesque leer, everything about the old man seemed about to vanish and turn to dust as a consequence of the implacable chemistry of time.
Sitting back in his armchair, eyes wide open, trying to reap benefit from the light, Rogelito looked like a chick prematurely hatched from a giant egg, and the Count concluded that excessive old age might be the worst punishment ever meted out to man.
“Why did you want to see me, young man?”
“First of all to greet a real maestro,” replied the Count, thinking it would be rather indelicate to plunge straight into the reason for his visit.
“That’s strange. Nobody ever remembers me now.”
“Lots of books mention you. And there are old records…”
“That don’t put no food on the table.”
“True enough,” agreed the Count now hit by the aroma from the coffee percolating in a kitchen mixed with a poverty-stricken smell of burnt kerosene. “When did you stop playing, maestro?”