After shaving, he sprinkled on his best cologne. Right then he was confident the night would turn out as promising as he needed it to be. After checking the irrepressible Rubbish wasn’t in the vicinity, he emptied some leftovers on his tray. He then stepped out into the street, and putting into practice his new status as a moneyed man, hailed a taxi and offered the driver thirty pesos to deviate from his route and take him to Santos Suárez.
Opposite Tamara’s house, Conde said a quick prayer to Lady Luck, since of all the possible places known to him, it was the place where he could find the most telling relief for the restless sexual urges he’d been fobbing off for days. Cigarette between lips, sheltering behind a bunch of glowing sunflowers he’d bought on the way, he crossed the garden and greeted, as usual, the concrete sculptures that adorned the mansion, forms that were half human and half animal, between Picasso and Lam.
Tamara opened the door. Her eyes, limpid as ever, like two moist almonds, surveyed the newcomer and lingered on the bunch of flowers. Her sense of smell reacted first.
“You smell of whores. Not of flowers,” she observed, smiling.
“We all smell of whatever we can…”
“And this miracle? Five days, no, a week ago…”
“I’ve been working like crazy to get rich.”
“And?”
“I’ve made it. At least for a week. And a promising future as a businessman looms ahead. One must change with the times, Tamara. You know, it’s not a sin to be a businessman… Quite the contrary in fact. Do you remember that Guillén poem that began ‘I’m sorry for the bourgeois’?…”
“Of course… But what is one supposed to do when one is rich?”
“First one doesn’t travel by bus. Secondly, one gives flowers to people,” he handed the bouquet to Tamara, “and to round the day off one imagines one is Gatsby and puts on a fancy meal for one’s friends, though before doing that one looks out one’s girlfriend and asks her to accompany one.”
“Oh yes? And who is Gatsby’s impossible love?”
She took the flowers. He tried to smile and threw his cigarette butt into the street. He took aim carefully. If his next shot missed it could be fatal.
“The usual culprit, you know? The girl he met in the Pre-Uni in La Víbora in 1972 and…”
She smiled with a brief, unmistakable puff of sweetness, and the Count realized he’d won the match.
“Mario Conde, you’ve one hell of a nerve. Thanks for the flowers… Come in, I was about to put the coffee on. But what’s that perfume you’re wearing?…”
Conde followed her into the kitchen, relishing the rhythm of that first class piece of flesh he watched shimmy under her dressing gown, already imagining what he might soon elicit from that body he’d explored so often over so many years. Tamara’s journey down the dangerous ravine of the forties had been pleasant and harmonious, although she’d helped herself with push ups and abdominal exercises, step-classes and creams destined to give her muscles more tone, her skin more sheen, and the Count appreciated such female cares of which he periodically was the direct beneficiary.
“What’s all this about being rich then,” she asked, putting the coffee on to boil.
“I’ve found a book-mine and am earning real money. It’s that simple. That’s why I asked old Jose to prepare a dream of a meal tonight, whatever the cost… Sometimes, you feel more than just hungry…”
“So you’ve come here for your apéritif?” She turned to see how the coffee was doing.
This tension always devastated the Count, who went for silence coupled with a frontal assault, though he began his attack on the mountainous rearguard: he went up close to Tamara, rammed his pelvis against her buttocks, and started to kiss her neck, sliding his hands from her stomach to her breasts, swinging free under the light material, and found them softer than fifteen years ago, when he’d caressed them for the first time, but still shapely. Conde sensed something preparing to take a rise between his legs, at once wary and bold. He greedily inhaled the smell of clean, female skin, not noticing how his hands, nose, and tongue were after one woman, while his frenzied brain was groping for yet another lost in the mists of yesterday.
15 November
My dear:
Tell me the truth: don’t you ever miss me? Don’t you think that squandering my love, and living far from me and from all I ever gave you, is quite unfair, even towards yourself? Don’t you ever imagine, at some time in the day, that my hands are caressing your hair after I’ve placed before you a dish to nourish you and delight your taste buds? And wouldn’t it be better to have me warming you in bed rather than to be lonely and distant? Without consulting you, (for the first time in all these years), I have dared take a decision: to move to your bedroom and occupy the side of the wedding bed I feel I have a right to. Every night, before going to bed, I fold back the bedspread, shake the sheet, as you liked me to do, slap your pillow to flatten it out, and give it the shape that is most comfortable for your bedtime reading. I switch on your night lamp and place by it the glass of water with a few drops of lemon juice and sweetened with honey that you used to drink to relieve your night-time coughing. Which book would you like me to get from the library for you to read as you move towards sleep and shake off life’s worries? (I remember the last one you asked for was The Slave-trader, by Novás Calvo… how often did you read it? What did you see in that book that you wanted to read it time and again?) Then I strip off, looking at that half of the bed where I can see you, lying there, waiting, and I usurp one of the many nightgowns you’d decided to keep as mementoes of your wife, and feel, at the touch of the loving silk, how my skin becomes that of a lady who owns that half of the bed, where she nightly welcomes strong, embracing arms, a male smell of cologne and tobacco, the tingle on my skin from the freshly shaved cheeks and moustache brushing against me. I turn over, my whole body sweats, set on fire by fever and craving that only has one cure, one you know well, for you often supplied it, the cure I must now seek myself in my solitude. I ask you, at my age…
I sometimes toss and turn the whole night. And think: what can I do to convince you of my innocence? I think so hard, that in these exhausting bouts of restlessness, I sometimes fear lunacy is prowling, closing in, threatening to occupy the empty half of the bed, to marry and drag me into its world of darkness.
On such turbulent nights I have shuffled all the possibilities within my reach to explain what happened and find a reason for the tragedy that has inflicted this wretched separation upon us. All I can think is that we women have a surfeit of inner depths, we are too unfamiliar even to ourselves and are, consequently, capable of unimaginable acts. Who, apart from me, could benefit from an act as irreversible as her death? I am sure that is the question also echoing around your mind, but I swear: the truth is I don’t know. She alone knows the reasons that led her to end her own life as she did or the reasons that she aroused in someone else who was intent on securing her disappearance and able to carry out that atrocious act. Think of it like this and be sincere: how much did you know about her, about her previous outside lives (I’m sure she had several) that you never even imagined whether they existed or not? Men’s ingenuousness, even when they think they are so strong, makes them transparent and predictable, whereas women… Who can know the infinite recesses of their souls, what they would do to save or ruin, revenge or humiliate, hide or expose themselves as they think fit? Do you really think she was that naïve girl who drove you mad with love?