Havana Gold (18 page)

He went inside and saw it was almost 3 p.m. He heard a cry of panic rise from the darkness of his gut. It would be quite wrong to go to Josefina at that hour in the afternoon and beg for a plateful of food: he imagined her in front of her television, nodding off, yawning like a good early riser and lapping up the Sunday films, so he decided to earn himself even more merit points by preparing his own lunch. How I need you, Karina, he thought when he opened the fridge and eyed the dramatic loneliness of two possibly prehistoric eggs and a piece of bread that could easily be a survivor from the siege of Stalingrad. He dropped the two eggs in heterodox fat tasting of mutually hostile fry-ups, toasted the two slices of bread on a flame that managed to melt their heart of steel on the end of his fork. A hundred per cent socialist realism, he told himself. He downed the eggs thinking of Karina again and the date they'd agreed for tonight, but not even dreams of their meeting
could temper the taste of that food. Although he sensed the daring sexual adventures of the previous day were unique and unrepeatable, full of discoveries, surprises, revelations and signs of portentous paths to explore, a second encounter, after that experience, might break all the records from his real and imaginary sexual expectations and knowledge: as he swallowed two greasy eggs with leaking yolks, the Count saw himself, on that very chair, at once the beneficiary and object of a mindblasting fellatio that left him exhausted until, two hours later, Karina began her third victorious offensive against defences that were apparently down. And tonight she'd come, armed with her saxophone . . .

“Don't ring me, because I'll probably have to go out. I'll come at night,” she'd said.

“With your saxophone?”

“Huh-huh,” she said imitating the man's intonation.

The Count sang as he washed the dishes, frying pan and cups where the previous day's coffee and lusts still lingered. He'd once heard it said that only a woman who'd been well served sexually could sing as she washed up. Surreptitious machismo: simple sexual determinism, he concluded as he sang on, “Good morning, star shine, / I say hello . . .” As he dried his hands he critically surveyed the state of his flat: tiles covered in grease, dust and grime more ancient than envy didn't make his place an especially magic spot for passionate dates, saxophone
included. It's the price love pays, he told himself, looking with male love at the broom and duster, preparing to present Karina a clean, well-lit haven.

It was gone four-thirty when he finished his cleaning and proudly contemplated the rebirth of that place abandoned by female hands for over two years. Even Rufino, his fighting fish, had been favoured by that overdue springclean and swam in clear, oxygenated waters. “You're a bastard drop-out, Rufino, you good-for-nothing . . .” The Count was so pleased with himself he even considered giving a lick of paint to walls and ceilings in the near future and putting potted plants in the right places and even getting poor Rufino a mate. I'm horribly in love, he told himself, and dialled Skinny Carlos's number.

“Listen to this, savage: I've washed my sheets, towels, shirts, pants and even two pairs of trousers and just given the house the once over.”

“You're horribly in love,” his friend confirmed and the Count smiled. “Have you taken your temperature? You must be in a bad way.”

“And what are you up to?”

“What do you think I'm up to?”

“Watching baseball?”

“We won the first game and the second is about to start.”

“Playing who?”

“The bozos from Matanzas. But the interesting games
start on Tuesday, against those fucking bastard Orientales . . . Speaking of which, Rabbit says if nothing untoward happens he'll drive us to the stadium on Tuesday. Brother, I'm dead keen to go to the stadium. Hey, are you or aren't you coming today?”

The Count glanced at his spick-and-span house and felt the hollowness left by the two fried eggs in his gut.

“I'm seeing her tonight . . . What did Jose cook for lunch?”

“You animal, you missed a treat: chicken in rice juicy enough to bring back the dead. Guess how many helpings I knocked back.”

“Two?”

“Come off it, three and a half!”

“And is there any left?”

“I don't think so . . . Although I heard the old girl saying she might keep some for you . . .”

“Hey, can't you hear something?”

“What?”

“Your doorbell ringing. Tell Jose to open up, it'll be me,” and he hung up.

 

LOVE IN THE TIMES OF CHOLERA

by Caridad Delgado

 

I have always defended freedom in love. The fulfilment it brings, the beauty one discovers, the anguish it can
usher in. But now Aids has given a bitter reminder to those of us who live in the common home that is our planet Earth, that we can remain aloof from nothing that happens anywhere: wars, nuclear tests, epidemics, let alone love. Because the world gets smaller by the day.

And although happiness is always possible in these turn-of-the-century times, a scourge is whipping love and making it a difficult, dangerous option. Aids threatens us and there is only one way to avoid it: by carefully choosing one's partner, seeking safe sex, way beyond necessary measures like the use of condoms.

My readers shouldn't think I'm trying to deliver them a moral lecture or an instant lesson in self-denial. Nor do I want to restrict the free choice of love that likes to surprise us with its mysterious, warm presence. No. And even less to use my position to interfere in matters of an entirely private nature. But the fact is that danger haunts us, whatever our sexual inclinations.

I don't aspire to reveal what has already been revealed, when I remind you that promiscuity has been the main means of transmitting the apocalyptic scourge across our planet. Consequently, I'm shocked when I talk to some people, in particular the young people my work brings me into contact with, who seem unaware of the danger implicit in certain attitudes towards life, and practise sex as if it were a simple game of cards one will
win or lose, for, as they sometimes say, “You've got to die from something . . .”

 

The Count shut his newspaper. For how long? he wondered. A promiscuous daughter had died three days ago from a motive much less novel and romantic than Aids and she was capable of writing that rubbish about
fin-de-siècle
sexual insecurities. The bitch. Right then the Count lamented his pathetic manual clumsiness. Never, not even when it was a compulsory task in class, had he managed to make a little paper aeroplane, or even a glass for drinking water or coffee, despite the efforts of the teacher he fell in love with. But he now put every effort into it, almost lovingly tore the page from the newspaper, and separated out from the article he'd just read from. He stood up, leaned slightly forward, and with the skill brought by practice wiped the striated remains of his defecation on the article with a well-honed flourish. He dropped the paper in the basket and pulled the chain.

 

Only when he was in love did Mario Conde dare to think, mouth-wateringly, about the future. Switching on lights of hope for the future had become the most visible symptom of real amorous satisfaction, able to chase from his consciousness the nostalgia and melancholy he'd experienced in more than fifteen years of repeated failure. From the moment he had had to abandon
university and shelve his literary aspirations, burying himself alive in an information bureau, classifying the horrors committed every day in the capital, in the country (types of crime, modus operandi, for hundreds of crimes and police reports), his paths in life had taken the most malevolent turnings: he'd married the wrong woman, his parents died within a year and Skinny Carlos came back from Angola in a wheelchair, with a broken back and languished like a tree stunted by bad pruning. Happiness and the joys of life had been trapped in a past that turned ever more utopian and out of reach, and only a propitious breath of love, in a fairytale, could restore them to his reality and life. Because, although in love with a remarkably lascivious redhead, Mario Conde knew his destiny was on course for the darkness of a lunar night: hopes of writing, feeling and behaving like a normal person with a stake in Lady Luck's capricious lottery were increasingly remote, because he also knew his life was linked to Skinny Carlos's fate – when Josefina left for ever he'd not allow his friend to waste away, sad and neglected, in a hospital for the disabled. Though he wasn't at all prepared, sooner or later he'd have to confront fear of the future which kept him awake and made breathing difficult. Solitude was like an endless tunnel because – and this was one of the many things he did know – no woman would agree to share with him that tougher test that destiny – destiny? – held in reserve.

Only when he fell in love did Mario Conde allow himself the luxury of forgetting that life sentence and feel a desire to write, dance and make love, to discover that the animal instincts released by the sexual act could also be a happy spur to give body and memory to life's dreams and forgotten promises. That was why, on that unique day in his amorous curriculum, he felt the desire to masturbate watching a naked woman blowing a viscous melody on a golden saxophone.

“Take your clothes off, please,” he asks and Karina's winning and winsome smile accompanies the act of removing her blouse and trousers.

“All your clothes,” he demands and when he sees her naked, he represses one by one his desires to embrace, kiss, at least touch her, and undresses, watching her all the time: he's surprised by the stillness of her skin, darkened only by her nipples and the hair around her sex, that's a more subtle red, and by the precise origins of her arms, breasts and legs, joined elastically to the whole. Her slightly withdrawn hips, good for birthing, are much more than a promise. Everything on his learning curve with this woman is a surprise.

He then undresses the saxophone and feels its cold firmness between his fingers for the first time, assessing the unexpected weight of an instrument embedded in his erotic fantasies that is about to become a most palpable reality.

“Sit here,” he points her to the chair and gives her the sax. “Play something beautiful, please,” he asks moving to another chair.

“What do you want to do?” she enquires, stroking the metal mouthpiece.

“Eat you,” he says and repeats, “Play.”

Karina is still fingering the mouthpiece and smiling hesitantly. She lifts it to her lips and sucks, dribbling saliva that hangs likes silver threads from her mouth. She makes her bum comfortable on the edge of the chair and opens her legs. She places the sax's long neck between her thighs and closes her eyes. A jagged, metallic lament begins to issue from the instrument's golden mouth and Mario Conde feels the melody pierce his chest, while Karina's serene figure – eyes shut, legs open towards fleshy, redder, darker depths, splitting her down the middle, breasts shaking to the music's rhythm and her breathing – take his desires to unimagined, unbearable peaks, while his eyes scour her every cranny and his two hands slowly run the length and mass of his penis, which begins to ooze drops of amber that make handling easier, and he closes in on her and her music to caress her neck and back, vertebra by vertebra, and her face – eyes, cheeks, forehead – with the purplish head of his member, as if erupting and leaving behind the wet trail of a wounded animal. She breathes in deeply and stops playing.

“Play,” the Count insists, but his order comes out in a plaintive whisper and Karina exchanges cold metal for hot skin.

“Give me some of that,” she asks and kisses his inflamed head, triangular in its latest incarnation, before her whole mouth sets out in search of a melody she can join . . . Tongues in thrall they walk to his bedroom and make love on the cleanest sheets, that smell of sun, soap and Lenten winds. They die, resurrect, only to die again . . .

 

He completed the ritual of foam creation and poured out the coffee. She had pulled on one of the sweaters the Count washed that afternoon and, when she sat down, it covered the top of her thighs. She wore the sandals made by Candito. He had wrapped a towel round his waist and pulled a chair over very close to hers.

“Are you going to stay the night?”

Karina tasted her coffee and looked at him.

“I don't think so. I've got a lot of work on tomorrow. I'd rather sleep at my place.”

“So would I,” he added not without irony.

“Mario, it's early days. Don't get too demanding.”

He lit a cigarette and stopped himself from throwing the match in the sink. He stood up and looked for a metal ashtray.

“I get very jealous,” he said trying to smile.

She asked him for a cigarette and puffed twice. He felt he was really jealous.

“Have you read the book yet?”

She nodded and finished her coffee.

“It depressed me, you know? But if you like it so much it's because you're a bit like one of Salinger's children. You like a tormented life.”

“I don't really. It wasn't my choice. I didn't even choose you: something placed you in my path. When you're over thirty you learn to be resigned: you'll never do what you haven't yet done, and everything's a repeat. If you've triumphed, you'll have more triumphs; if you've failed, get used to the taste of failure. And I am used to it. But when something like you appears, you tend to forget all that, even the advice given out by Caridad Delgado.”

Karina rubbed the palms of her hands over her thighs and tried to extend the scant cover given by the pullover.

“And what will happen if we can't go on together?”