Rangel and Manolo looked at each other. They’d have liked to crack a joke, but experience urged caution: the Count’s hunches usually had surprising links to reality. Old Rangel contemplated his cigar and smiled.
“Conde, it’s ten years since I asked you this… and I won’t die without getting a proper answer from you. Why the hell did a fellow like you join the police?”
Conde smoked his cigar, with a slightly sarcastic smile, prompted by cherished memories.
“Truly, truly, I didn’t know why for a long time,” he said, no longer smiling. “Although I sometimes liked what I was doing, I hardly ever felt happy as a policeman. Then I decided it was the fault of those bastards who do things and usually get away with it… But then, when I saw what was happening in the big, wide world, I think I imagined I’d sort it out a bit so it wasn’t so fucked up, and I swallowed the story about police being able to do that. A romantic dream, right? I know I was swimming against the tide, but I don’t regret what I did, although I’d never do it again. I’d not enlist again, even at gunpoint. Not even with a chief like you. I used to be agnostic, but I’m a total disbeliever now… Boss, I don’t even believe in the four noble truths a friend of mine talks about… At most, in friendship, memories and a few books. It may sound cynical, but it’s the truth. I don’t like what I see every day and couldn’t cope with it if I was in the force. I feel happier selling old books, wielding no power over others and being at ease with myself. At forty-eight I’ve learned that’s important too. When I can, I enjoy the small pleasures in life, as faraway as I can possibly be from any whiff of power and the idea I have a right to think on behalf of other people and having to obey orders I sometimes didn’t want to obey. You see? I’m much clearer about why I don’t want to be a policeman than why I was one for ten years.”
He abandoned his bed feeling as if he’d had another encounter with his friend J.D., though this time he didn’t remember the essence of their dialogue: meditation and reincarnation. I expect, the bastard’s into all that and doesn’t want to write, he thought, while trying to get up as surreptitiously as his aches and pains would allow so as not to wake up Tamara. Back on his feet, he turned round and fleetingly observed the sleeping woman, her mouth slightly open, her nightdress rucked up, baring thighs as firm as ever as they climbed to the promising mound of her buttocks. Conde bent over, breathed in and filled his lungs with the smell of hot sheets and sweet saliva, ruffled hair and female vapours from that almost inert body and was surprised by the thought that he’d now crossed every frontier of self-preservation because he unreservedly loved a woman he felt to be his own, with whom he’d exchanged the most intimate secrets. He recalled the almost inaudible splash of Tamara’s tongue in the well of her mouth and the seemingly pitiful purr she’d emit seconds before passing from wakefulness to sleep, and, when she lapsed definitively into unconsciousness, the way her body juddered and alarmed the Count. For her part, she was familiar with and suffered from the night-time snoring of a smoker with one nostril blocked from when a baseball hit him long ago, from the anxiety pursuing him in his deepest dreams, which, so she said, made him assume strange postures like sleeping face down, leaning on his elbows his forehead against the pillow, as if enduring a Muslim form of penitence. The quota of secrets they shared from years of passionate encounters encompassed knowledge of phobias and fears, of things admired and held in contempt, and the vital possession of the most subtle, efficient keys to release the springs of sexual pleasure. The Count recalled how she liked his tongue to lick her clitoris in quick violent movements, letting his saliva run down to her vaginal and anal orifices, as the palms of his hands rubbed her erect nipples and he finally felt the tension in her belly, the changes in her breathing, the build up to the silent eruption of her orgasm. Then he felt his scrotum recede and a lascivious tingle run down his urethra, and pleasurably recalled the arts applied by Tamara to give him maximum enjoyment, licking his nipples, caressing his anal sphincter, revisiting his penis and testicles with her tongue and, opening her legs so that, when he knelt and penetrated her, he could eye her pink fleshy parts wet with saliva and tasty secretions, and watch his honourable member drill the hot insides of a body surrendering wholeheartedly to love and pleasure.
When the Count saw the hard on his imaginings had prompted, he wondered if the years hadn’t transformed them into something more than two lovers: theirs was a well-established blend of knowledge and tolerance that, at some moment, they would have to accept was a definitive bond, but both liked to procrastinate, selfishly defending the last remains of a freedom reduced to the enjoyment of periods of solitude, a solitude that was too pleasurable because it was quickly ended by a short ride from one district of Havana to another, where they always found the life-saving sense of security, solidarity and belonging they gave each other.
When he entered her bathroom, after discarding the idea of masturbation which had been his goal, Conde stood in front of the mirror and told himself he was fed up of looking like a badly packaged mummy; he ripped the bandages from his eyebrow and the back of his ear. The sight of the three stitches on his bruised skin produced a slight queasiness and he looked away, horrified by his own scars.
After a coffee and his first cigarette of the day, he ran over a possible agenda: he decided he’d try to talk to Amalia Ferrero, now that Dionisio’s funeral rites had been performed, and concluded he should go back to Elsa Contreras, the once famous Lotus Flower, now sheltering behind the name and terrifyingly real skin of the ravaged Carmen Argüelles.
Tamara took him by surprise as he was lighting his second cigarette, after a second cup of coffee.
“How do you feel?” she asked, lifting his chin to get a better view of the state of his injuries.
“Like shit, but ready for battle,” he said. “The coffee’s still hot.”
She went to get the coffeepot and Conde, still with the morning hunger provoked by his musings, watched her well-endowed buttocks move under the flimsiest of nightdresses. Unable to hold back, he jettisoned his cigarette, went in hot pursuit, kissed her neck, and put his hands on her buttocks that he opened like the pages of a beautiful book.
“So you woke up with love on your mind?” she smiled.
“Seeing you makes me feel like love,” he replied, rocking her gently against the small table.
“Can I drink my coffee?” she asked.
“Only if I can do other things afterwards…”
“You’re ill.”
“It’s not catching. And we’ve been sleeping together for three days like brother and sister. I can’t stand it any more. It’s your fault I was about to jerk off and break my fast…”
“Mario, I’ve got to go to work.”
“I’ll give you a day’s pay.”
“Like a whore!”
Conde’s memory flashed back. He glimpsed the mercenary mulatta’s lascivious tongue, her pert nipples, and even heard her would-be temptress’s voice. He felt his parts rapidly recede, like a timorous animal running into a cave.
“All right, off you go to work,” he replied, picking up his cigarette that was still smoking and almost smoked out.
“What’s the matter?” she asked, alarmed by his reaction.
“Nothing much really, I’m worried,” he whispered and went off to get the telephone. He came back to the kitchen and, as if making his first ever confession, asked: “Haven’t you ever seriously thought we should tie the knot?” and, seeing the startled look on Tamara’s face, added: “Only joking, don’t worry…” and left.