“Do you fall in love so quickly?”
“I don’t always linger so.”
“Love of literature or of women?”
“A fear of loneliness. A panic attack. Is the coffee to your liking?”
She nodded and looked at the window and the night.
“What have you found out about the dead girl?”
“Not much: she expected too much from life, was able and ambitious and changed boyfriends as often as her bras.”
“And what does that mean?”
“She was what the ancients and some moderns would call a little whore.”
“Why did she change boyfriends? Is that what you think about women? Are you the kind that would like to marry a virgin?”
“That’s what every Cuban man aspires to, I suppose? I don’t aim so high now: I’ll settle for a redhead.”
She gave no sign she accepted his compliment and finished her coffee.
“And if the redhead was a little whore?”
He smiled and shook his head, indicating she’d misunderstood.
“I said little whore because that’s what she was: she could go to bed with a man for a pair of shoes,” he explained and regretted telling her the truth: he wanted to bed her and intended to give her a pair of shoes, in fact. “I’m only interested in her changes of boyfriend as a policeman: that may be why she was killed. The dead have no privacy.”
“It’s incredible, isn’t it? That they can kill someone, like that, on any pretext?”
The Count smiled and finished his coffee. He lit the cigarette, his mouth urgently craving that complement to the enduring taste of the infusion.
“It’s what usually happens. Someone is killed for no real reason, probably on the spur of the moment. It’s often a mistake: criminals prefer not to murder but sometimes cross that line because they can’t avoid it. It’s a chemical chain reaction… I feed on such incontinence. It’s sad, isn’t it?”
She nodded and then took the offensive: she stretched her hand across the dark formica table top and took the forearm of the man who seemed to relish sadness, and started caressing it. A woman who knows how to caress, he thought, not a phantom passing…
“Oh, how beautiful you are, my love, how beautiful you are! Your eyes are like doves!”
He declaims biblically like Solomon, when, feeling as beautiful as Jerusalem, she abandons her coffee and chair and advances on him, never letting go of his arm, and pulls his mouth down to her breasts – like twin gazelles “that graze among the lilies” – so with his free hand he can fumble to undo her blouse and find himself not before two gazelles, but warm, wild tits, with ripe plum nipples that stir anxiously at the first flickering touch of his reptilian tongue, and, a baby again, he sucks, starting a journey to the origins of life and the world.
He penetrates her slowly, as if afraid to shed a petal, sitting on his chair, picking her up by the waist, light and amenable, lowering her on to his pole, like a sacred banner in need of protection against the rain and dusk. Her first cry takes him by surprise, she arches between his hands as if wounded by a silver bullet shattering her heart, then he hugs her tighter to feel the black forest of her magic triangle on his pubes, and lowers his hands to her buttocks to run over the perfect furrow dividing them ands lets his eager finger run unhurriedly, never pausing, from anus to vulva, from vulva to anus, carrying wet heat, feeling the urgent thickness at the root of his penis, rigid and prickly as it drilled, and the padded softness of her opulent, knowing lips that suck him like eager quicksand, and then he lets his finger wander between the folds of her anus and feels the louder cry provoked by the double penetration now becoming triple with the savage tongue that tries to silence her, when all silence is impossible, because the deep sluices are open and the deepest rivers of their desires flow to a glory on an earth that has been recovered. The renascent gusts of the Lenten wind wrap them in tight embrace.
“You’ll be the death of me,” are the words of love he articulates.
“I’ll be the death of myself,” she laments, as she shivers all vulnerable, perhaps because of the wind, perhaps because of the moral and physical certainty of consummation.
Several days later, while ruminating on the tangible opportunities that come policemen’s way – to find happiness and change their lives – Detective Lieutenant Mario Conde began to grasp the real extent of that suicide on a well-ridden saddle… But he can’t think now, because Karina dismounts as if levitating and, rescuing the pants still hanging from one of the Count’s thighs, she cleans the spume from his penis and, kneeling like a penitent, swallows it as if she’d been starving for days and now it’s the Count who cries out, “Fuck, cunt,” the words he utters, astounded by the beauty of the prostrated woman whose head he can barely see, that says yes and yes again, with total conviction, and a reddish hair that opens up in the centre of the head in an unexpected cleft. While his penis begins to grow beyond what is possible, unimaginable, even permissible, the Count feels himself powerful, animal, in full possession of his senses, until dictator-like he exercises the power he has been given, takes the woman’s head in his hands and forces her to hit bottom and beyond, until he pours into her throat, that prisoner under sentence, an ejaculation he feels descend from the innermost reaches of his brain. You’ll be the death of me. I’ll be the death of myself… They kiss, on the brink.
I came across a quite unexpected façade yesterday. I must have passed that hitherto anodyne, filthy spot on the 10th October Avenue a thousand times, by the street corner which harboured the cockpit where Grandfather Rufino had, eight times, put his fortune on spurs that enriched and impoverished him in equal measure. But yesterday for the first time an alarm bell, specially aimed at my brain, forced me to look up and there it was, waiting for me from time immemoriaclass="underline" in the middle of a roughly classical triangle, the coat-of-arms of a well-to-do Creole, atop a building that wasn’t at all well-to-do, worn by time and rain. Only the date remained mysteriously intact: 1919, on the chipped eave, under the battered shield. At the vortex of two cornucopias hurling tropical fruit into the air, the inevitable pineapples, soursops and anones, mangos and furtive avocados, no soft fruit, meat or greens, and where others would have placed castles or fields of azure, a prodigious canebrake to which the date, architectural wealth and fruit-filled shield necessarily paid tribute, to its source… I love discovering these unpredictable heights of Havana – second and third floors, out-of-date baroque, bereft of spiritual contortions, names of owners long forgotten, cemented dates and glass skylights broken by stones, balls and the passage of time – where I always thought there was an air path to the sky. At that height, beyond human reach, exists the purest soul of the city that further down is tarnished by sordid, heartbreaking stories. Havana has been a city in its own right for two centuries and imposes its own laws and selects its own adornments to mark its unique resilience. Why was this city, this proud, exuberant city fated to be mine? I try to understand this fate I can’t throw off, that I didn’t choose, as I try to understand the city, but Havana eludes me, always takes me by surprise with its forlorn blackand-white photo shots and my perception is as worn and cracked as the old coat-of-arms of those who luxuriated on wealth from mangos, pineapples and sugar. After so much rapture and rejection, my relationship with the city has been marked by a chiaroscuro painted by my eyes: the pretty young girl turned sad hooker, an angry man a potential murderer, the petulant youth an incurable drug addict, the old man on the corner a thief wanting peace. Everything blackens over time, like the city where I pace, between crumbling arches, petrified rubbish tips, walls peeled to the bone, drains overflowing like rivers born in the heart of hell and rocky balconies living on props. In the end the city that chose me, and I, the chosen one, resemble each other: we die a little each day, a long, premature death made from pinpricks, pain that is progressive, tumours that advance… And although I want to rebel, this city grips me by the neck and overwhelms me with its arcane mysteries. That’s why I realize the decrepit beauty of a well-to-do coat-of-arms and a city’s apparent peace are transient and mortal – a city I know I see through the eyes of love, that dares show me those unexpected delights from its sumptuous past. I’d like to be able to see the city through your eyes, she told me when I described my recent find, and I think it would be melancholically beautiful – perhaps, squalid and moving – to show her my city, but I know it’s impossible, for she could never wear my spectacles, as she’s beside herself with happiness, and the city will never reveal itself to her. Miller said Paris is like a whore, but Havana is more whorish: she only offers herself up to those who repay her in pain and anguish, and even then she doesn’t yield up her whole self, doesn’t surrender the innermost secrets from her entrails.