“She’s coming to see her grandmother, who is apparently dying. Andres knows because they talked to him in order to get the medical certificate the Red Cross requires to negotiate the travel permit.”
“Fantastic, right?” the Count went on, getting over his shock.
Skinny finished his rum and put his hands on the Count’s knees, which felt the moist, red-hot heat of those voluminous extremities.
“More than fantastic, it’s brilliant. Do you know what Dulcita’s sister said to Andres? That if we weren’t angry and it wouldn’t hurt, she’d like to see us. But above all she wanted to see me.”
The Count started to smile, moved by an inevitable feeling of happiness that immediately languished and killed the stillborn smile.
“You tell me, Conde, do you think it right for Dulcita to see me like this?” He used his obese hands to indicate his body overflowing the wheelchair.
Mario Conde stood up, went over to the window and spat venomously. It wasn’t right, he thought, remembering that photo featuring Pancho, Tamara, Dulcita, Skinny and himself, coming down the stairs at school the day they’d put in for their university courses. Skinny, who was very thin in those days and walked on two legs, was in the centre, arms open wide and head to one side, as if awaiting crucifixion: Carlos and Dulcita had been a beautiful, lovely couple, eager for sex, life, happiness and love… No, it wasn’t right, he kept thinking, but he said:
“Hey, if she comes to see you and you want to see her, let her: you are you and always will be, and the person who loved you must still love you, or should go to hell.”
“Don’t talk shit, Conde, things aren’t like that.”
“Aren’t they? Well, they are as far as I’m concerned, because you’re my brother and it has to be like that… But if you don’t want to see her, well, don’t, and forget it.”
“That’s the fucking point, Conde, I do want to see her. But whatever way, it’s not exactly going to be a party for her to see me like this. Get me?”
The Count lit a cigarette and went back to the bed. He pulled the wheelchair even nearer, and Carlos’s face was only an inch or two from his.
“Skinny: don’t be such a pansy,” he said. “Don’t give up, for Christ’s sake, because if you do, we’re all fucked. Do it for yourself, for me and old Josefina; don’t let anything fuck you up: a bullet, the past, the war, or this damned wheelchair,” he declared breathlessly, and, against his usual custom of thinking everything through, he took Carlos’s face between his hands and kissed him on a cheek. “Don’t give up, brother.”
“But what the fuck is this!”
Of course. It just had to be the hottest summer he’d ever experienced, he concluded while undressing before getting in the shower. For several days now the Count had been pinching memory and flesh to try to remember other August temperatures like this cruel year’s, but the wall-scorching sun, the haze from the ceiling, the moisture wrapping round him in bed and the deep depression, able to sap his will and his muscles, told him it was impossible to recall a similar muggy heat. Or did the heat come from his body rather than the infernal atmosphere possessing the island? He looked at his watch: yes, it was still early for Sergeant Palacios to call him and he still didn’t know whether he’d dare call the Marquess.
When he got out of the bath, streaming water, the towel round his shoulders like a defeated boxer, the Count decided to finish drying himself on the ecstatic gusts from the fan. He flopped on to his hot bed and for a moment enjoyed the minimal privilege of solitude, felt the draught massage his drooping testicles and hit his anus particularly deliciously. He closed his legs slightly. Then, to help the draught, and impelled by a straightforward burst of onanism, he started lifting up his wet penis, sliding his fingers to the head that had been surgically uncapped, only to let it drop in a free fall that gradually became an upward tilt transmitting a warm, erect hardness to his fingers. He hesitated for a moment over whether to masturbate or not: and decided he had no reason not to try. No woman was out there waiting for that spare ejaculation, and as he stroked himself, even the heat in the air seemed to have abated. But his decision hit fresh doubts: whose turn was it? Still grasping his member but reducing the rubbing rhythm, the Count opened his much-fingered book of erotic memories and began to flick through the pages of women he’d loved by remote control when seeking to protect himself against the successive departures, deceits and disappearances they’d inflicted on him: on the last page – he always began at the back when he read an issue of the magazine Bohemia – he found Karina, naked, sucking a dazzling saxophone whose intense music caressed her nipples as it moved between her open legs, but he let her go, humiliated her with mental indifference, a form of revenge on a woman too painfully close to be called upon, and the fact is he could still feel her scent of ripened fruit, between a mango and velvety plums, which mingled with the deep, animal dampness from her desire-swollen sex: “No, not you.”
He likewise abandoned Haydee, trying not to remember shared alcoholic belches, miserable wretched bouts of drinking, rums poured on mouths, breasts and a doubly moist pubis, and that was why he fled, he tried not even to brush against her – though he failed to resist that painful temptation – because she’d been his best lover, so hard-working in bed the Count’s productivity couldn’t keep up with her and she’d replaced him with an Olympic-class fornicator (whose anus was she now kissing with her drilling, eschatological, reptilian tongue?); but he did pass without major upset on the memory of Maritza, his first wife, too distant and faded to be of use even for a summery masturbation, that pink scent from her virgin skin hardly perceptible now, always washed to face sex, at once clean and apprehensive; he breathed, more nostalgic than horny, the essential feminine fragance that nurse gave off, a nymphomaniac on the thin side, whose name he’d now forgotten but whom he always remembered because she’d initiated him in the pleasure of the other’s hand which strokes, rubs, allowing one to discover the value of another’s skin, giving the act of masturbation an unexpected dimension, only because it comes from other hands, from another skin; and, when her turn came, he almost stayed with Tamara, felt her on his fingertips, on the wrinkled sac of his testicles, as he revisited her rumbadancer’s butt and black nipples, the dark depths of her curly patches of down, and breathed in the strong aromas from her male colognes – Canoe is my favourite, she’d confess, allergic to other subtle, feminine perfumes – and then his hand stopped on the album – and on a glans gorged and ready to spit – to reach a final conclusion: none of them… He stretched a hand out from the position he found himself in, slipped it under his bed and extracted the Penthouse that Peyi had lent Skinny and Skinny had lent him and went on an immediate search for that shameless blonde – lots of hair upstairs, next to none down – who in the same position as he – in bed, legs open to the breeze or other possibilities – made her professional nakedness stand out against red, photographer-ready sheets: if there was a breeze in the photo – and there had to be – it must smell of moist, ploughed earth, and the woman must surely have exuded the same fertile, primary fragance. Better you than one concocted from deceit and memories, he told the blonde, as he leaned forward and continued to rub until he could no longer see the woman and felt his life being drained by those white drops spilling without rhyme or reason on the dusty tiles of his room, which now emanated, like a disturbing perfume born of his painful solitude, the sweetness of ejaculation…