“I know you think I’m a bastard, you’re probably right. You tell me. But I have a job to do, Candito. Thanks for the drink. Say hullo to your little raver. And remember that I want to give some sandals to a little piece I met,” and he shook the calloused, gluey palm Red Candito offered up from the depths of his armchair.
The wind combed the main street in his barrio as if trawling for dirt and dust were its only mission in the world. The Count found it hostile and resolute, but decided to take it on. He asked Manolo to drop him on the corner by the cinema though he didn’t tell him he only wanted to walk, to walk round his barrio on a day that didn’t favour such exercise for legs and spirit, because the stress of waiting seemed as if it would be the end of him. Sergeant Manuel Palacios had learned from almost two years of working and co-existing with the Count that there was no point asking questions when his boss asked him to do something unusual. Conde’s reputation as a lunatic at headquarters wasn’t mere gossip and Manolo had experienced it more than once. His mixture of pigheadedness and pessimism, of nonconformity and pugnacious intellect were components of a mind that was too strange and effective to be a policeman’s. But the sergeant admired him, as he’d never admired anyone else, for he knew that working with the Count was at once a party and a privilege.
“See you, Conde,” he said before making a U-turn in the middle of the main street.
The Count looked at his watch: it was almost four and Karina would never ring him before six. Will she call? He wondered as he walked into the wind, not even bothering to take a quick look at what was showing at the cinema it had taken ten years to refurbish. Although his body was desperate to be horizontal in bed, the speed at which ideas were spinning round his head would defeat any attempt to shorten his wait with the oblivion of sleep. Anyway that solitary stroll through the barrio was a pleasure the Count allowed himself from time to time: his grandparents, father, uncles and aunts and he himself had been born in that exact location and wandering down that high street – that had carpeted the ancient path along which came the best fruit from the groves in the south – was to go on a pilgrimage into himself, to boundaries that now belonged to memories he had acquired from his family elders. From the time the Count was born to that moment that route had changed more than in the previous two hundred years – when the first Canary Islanders founded a couple of villages beyond the barrio and began to trade in fruit and vegetables, later to be joined by a few dozen Chinese. A dust track and a few wood-and-tile houses on the outer limit gradually brought those remote ends of the earth to the hubbub of the capital and, in the era when the Count was born, the barrio was part of the city, and was filled with bars, liquor shops, a billiards club, ironmongers, chemists and a modern, efficient bus station, set up to make it possible for the barrio to participate in city life. Nights started to become long, busy and lit up, with a poverty-stricken, laid-back cheerfulness the Conde could only remember. As he walked into the wind on his way home, letting the gusts sweep away these idle reflections, Conde felt once more the sentimental communion tying him to that dirty, badly painted street where many things that had featured in his ragbag memories had long disappeared: Albino’s fry-up stall, next to the school where he studied for several years; the bakery, where he went every afternoon to buy large warm loaves; the Castillito bar and its juke-box voices that found drunks to sing along with; Porfirio’s liquor shop; the bus-drivers’ union; Chilo and Pedro’s barbers’ shop, destroyed by the only really fierce fire in the barrio’s history; the dance hall, turned into a school, where one day in 1949 a couple of adolescents found mysterious emotional bliss after only just learning of each other’s existence, becoming his parents a few years later; and the notable absence of the cockpit where his grandfather Rufino the Count forged his dreams of greatness, now a barren waste without a single trace of those big cages, the smell of feathers, the fighting arenas and even the prehistoric shapes of the tamarinds which he’d learned to climb under his grandfather’s expert gaze. Despite his sadness at the gaps, and his nostalgia for what was gone for ever, that was the space where he’d grown up and learned the first laws of a twentieth-century jungle as raw in its dictates as the rules of a Stone Age tribe: he had learned the supreme code of masculinity that stipulated that men were men, something you had no need to trumpet, only to demonstrate whenever the opportunity arose. And as the Count had had to demonstrate several times in that barrio, he wasn’t worried about having to do so once more. The image of Fabricio unleashed a rage he couldn’t restrain that boomeranged round his memory. And I won’t have any truck with him, he told himself, as he arrived home and tried yet again to cast out that troublesome image and think of a future full of hopes and possible loves.
A quarter to six and still no call. Rufino, his fighting fish, quickly circled the interminably spherical goldfish bowl and came to a halt very near the bottom. Fish and policeman looked at each other. What the hell you looking at, Rufino? Get swimming, fish – and as if to obey him, the fish resumed its eternal rondo. The Count had decided to divide the time into quarters of an hour and had already counted off five equal slices of time. At first he tried to read, looked on every shelf of his bookcase and gradually discarded every possibility that at other times he’d thought more or less tempting. It was true he could no longer resist Arturo Arango’s novels, the guy wrote lots and lots, always about crazy types who wanted to go back to live in Manzanillo and reclaim innocence through a lost girlfriend; forget about López Sacha’s short stories, far too wordy and recherché and longer than a life sentence; he’d sworn never to read Senel Paz again, so many yellow flowers, yellow shirts, if only he’d write something a bit more devilish one day… he might suggest to him, for example, that he write a tale about a party member and a queer; and Miguel Mejides, forget him, to think he’d once liked his books, the yokel writes so badly and so pretentiously à la Hemingway. So much for contemporary literature, he muttered, and decided to try again with a novel that he’d thought the best from what he’d recently read: Horse Fever. But he couldn’t concentrate enough to enjoy the prose and barely got past the second page. Then he tried to put some order into his room: his house was like a storehouse of the forgotten and deferred and he swore he’d spend Sunday morning washing shirts, socks, underpants and even sheets. Washing sheets, what a horrible thought! And the quarters of an hour fell by the wayside, heavy, like clockwork. Telephone, for fuck’s sake, I’ll give you anything: just ring. But it didn’t. He took it off the hook for the fifth time to check it was working, and returned the phone to its cradle when he had recourse to the most desperate of measures: he would bring to bear all his mental powers, which were there to serve some purpose. He placed the telephone on a chair and another opposite the telephone. Naked, he sat in the empty chair and after critically eyeing his moribund testicles hanging in the air – and spotting two grey hairs – he concentrated, started looking at the gadget and thought hard: You’re going to ring now, you’re going to ring right now, and I’m going to hear a woman’s voice, a woman’s voice, because you’re going to ring now, and it’s going to be a woman, the woman I want to hear because you’re going to ring, now, and he jumped up, “Fuck”, his heart beating like mad, when the phone really did ring loudly and the Count heard – also for real, salvation at last – the voice of the woman he wanted to hear.