“I think so.”
“Huh, I’ll be waiting on the steps at Pre-Uni, at seven? At seven then, and don’t bring the car,” he’d said, with the morbid, premeditated idea of a possible journey into the world of melancholy. Skinny can go to hell, he told himself, he’d agreed his last love date seventeen years ago in that place that constantly hit at him from past and present, like a magnetic pole of memory and reality he couldn’t and didn’t want to escape. He was all set to dive into a swimming pool overflowing with nostalgia.
He got there at a quarter to seven and, between the reddish light of dusk and the lamps on the high plinth of the columns, he tried to read the day’s paper while waiting. Sometimes weeks went by without him stopping to read the paper, he checked out the headlines and ditched it without remorse or hesitation: he wasn’t at all gone on the idea of wasting precious minutes devouring news and comment that was self-evident. What might Caridad Delgado be writing about three days after her daughter’s death? He should look out for that newspaper. The wind had died down; he could open the pages of the daily as he had nothing better on offer. The front page informed him that the sugar campaign was progressing slowly but surely to another record of success and high figures; Soviet cosmonauts were still in space, breaking new records for staying up, indifferent to the disturbing pages of international news that spoke of the degeneration of their – previously so perfect – country, and oblivious to the war to the death unleashed between Armenians and Azeris; tourism in Cuba was marching – and this was a perfectly chosen verb – in giant strides, and had already tripled hotel capacity; for their part, workers in the culinary arts and services in the capital had already begun their arduous inter-municipal struggle to win the right to be provincial host for the 4 February celebrations, the Day for Workers in their trade: to that end they’d implemented initiatives and improved the quality of their services and striven to eradicate lacunae, that kind of ontological fatality the Count thought was a beautifully poetic way to describe the most basic of thefts. Then, no change in the Middle East: it got worse and worse, everything was getting shittier and on course for outright war; violence was on the increase in the United States; there were more disappearances in Guatemala, more murders in El Salvador, more unemployed in Argentina and more destitute in Brazil. Didn’t I just land on a wonderful planet? What was a teacher’s death among so many deaths? Could Long Hair and his tribe be right? And then, the baseball league was advancing – a less sporting synonym for marching – towards the final strait with Havana in the lead; Pipín was about to beat his own record for apnoea immersion (and he recalled he was always promising to look that word up in the dictionary, perhaps there existed a less horrible synonym?). He closed the newspaper convinced that everything was marching, advancing or continuing on schedule and turned his mind to contemplating the sunset, also on schedule for that exact moment, 18.52, normal time. As he observed the sun’s rapid descent he thought he would like to write something about the emptiness of existence: not about death or failure or disillusion, only emptiness. A man facing the void. It would be worthwhile if he could find a good character. Could he himself be that character? Sure he could, recently he’d been feeling too much self-pity and the result might be more than perfect: the entire darkness revealed, the entire void in a single individual… But that can’t be, he told himself, I’m waiting for a woman and I feel fine, I’m going to shaft her and we’ll get drunk.
Only he was a policeman and, although he sometimes thought he wasn’t, he always thought like a policeman. He was in the territory of his own melancholy, but also in the domains of Lissette Núñez Delgado, and he thought that the void and death seemed too alike and that death in the singular, even on a planet strewn with corpses that had been more or less foreseen, still weighed as a risk on the scales of that most necessary equilibrium: life. Only six days before, perhaps sitting on that same step on those stairs, a twenty-four year-old girl, full of the desire to live, might have enjoyed the beauty of that splendid sunset, oblivious to the world’s wars and the anguish of a record apnoea, looking forward to the new pair of trainers she would soon own. Now nothing remained of the hopes and upsets of that woman: perhaps the memory with which she marked that building inhabited by millions of other memories, like his own; perhaps the amorous frustrations and even possible guilt of a head teacher who felt rejuvenated, perhaps the uncertainty of pupils who thought they’d pass in chemistry with ease thanks to that unusual teacher. By 18.53 the sun had sunk into the world’s end – like memory – leaving in its wake the light from its last rays.
Then he saw her advancing under the blossoming majaguas and felt his life filling up, like his lungs, replete with the air and scents of spring, and he forgot about the void and death, the sun and nothingness: she could be everything, he thought, as he walked down the steps of Pre-Uni at the double and met a kiss and body that clung to his like a promise of the most desired, close encounter of the first kind.
“What’s your opinion of nostalgia?”
“That it was invented by writers of boleros.”
“And apnoea immersion?”
“That it is unnatural.”
“And haven’t you ever been told you’re the most beautiful woman in La Víbora?”
“I’ve heard the odd comment.”
“And that a good policeman’s after you?”
“I realized that, from the interrogations,” she said and they kissed again, in the middle of the street, as shameless as adolescents in full flood.
“Do you like being wooed in parks?”
“It’s a long time since I’ve been wooed in a park. Or anywhere.”
“Which park do you prefer in La Víbora? Take your pick: Córdoba, Los Chivos, either of those on San Mariano, the Parque del Pescao, the one in Santos Suárez, on Mónaco, the one with the lion cubs in Casino and the one on Acosta… The best thing about this barrio are its parks, the most beautiful in Havana.”
“Are you sure?”
“More than sure. Which do you fancy?”
She looked him in the eye and ruminated. The Count lost himself in the depths of her eyes like an infatuated policeman.
“If you’re only going to woo me, I’d prefer the one on Mónaco. If you’ve got itchy fingers, then the Parque del Pescao.”
“Let it be the Parque del Pescao then. I’ll not be held responsible for myself.”
“And why don’t you invite me to your place?”
She surprised him, anticipated an invitation he’d not dared to issue when they spoke on the phone and confirmed his suspicion that this woman was a woman and a half and there was no point in beating about the bush. Like Tarzan lusting after Jane.
“I ignored what you said,” she said with a smile. “I parked the car on the corner. Will you or won’t you invite me? I like the coffee you brew.”
His hands shook as he united the two halves of the coffee pot. He was disturbed by the intimacy of love as intensely as in the old days of amorous initiation and he improvised on themes that flowed easily: the secrets about coffee he had learned from Josefina; “we must go and see my best friend Skinny and her, I can’t understand how you’ve never met,” and he peered at his coffee pot to see whether percolation had begun, “they live round the corner from your house”; his preference for Chinese cuisine, Sebastian Wong, “the father of Patricia, a colleague at headquarters, prepares some amazing soups”; the idea for a story he wanted to write, on solitude and emptiness… He poured the first drops of coffee in the jug where he’d put two small spoonfuls of sugar which he beat into an ochre, caramelized paste; “while I was waiting for you I thought about writing something along those lines, I’ve been wanting to write for several days,” and he poured the remaining coffee into the jug and yellow, probably bitter foam formed on the top, and he poured it into two big cups and announced, “Espresso coffee,” as he sat down opposite her. “Whenever I fall in love I think I can write again.”