Havana Black Read Free Page B

life? Where the fuck are the history books he was going to write? At what point did he give up on everything he said he wanted to be and never got to be in his life? Don’t piss me off, Carlos, at least grant me the right to believe my life is a disaster . . .”
    Skinny Carlos, who had long since ceased to be skinny, looked at Andrés. The friendship existing between them had been cementing for twenty years and there were very few secrets between them. But recently something had turned in Andrés’s brain. That man they’d first admired when he was the best college baseball player, applauded by all his comrades, with the manly merit of losing his virginity to a woman so beautiful, so crazy and so desirable that they all would have loved to give up everything, even their lives, to her. The very same Andrés who would become the successful doctor they’d all consult, the only one who had managed an enviable marriage, two children included, and had been privileged to have his own house and private car, was now revealing himself as a man full of frustrations and rancour, which embittered him and poisoned the atmosphere around him. Because Andrés wasn’t happy, was dissatisfied with his lot and made sure all his friends knew it: something in the projects he held most dear had failed, and his path in life – like all of theirs – had taken predetermined undesirable turnings to which they’d never consented as individuals.
    â€œAll right, let’s assume you are right.” Carlos nodded resignedly, drinking a long draught and then adding: “But you can’t live thinking like that.”
    â€œWhy not, wild man?” the Count intervened, puffing
out smoke and recalling that afternoon’s alcoholic suicidal impulses.
    â€œBecause then you have to accept it’s all a load of shit.”
    â€œAnd isn’t it?”
    â€œYou know it isn’t, Conde,” declared Carlos, looking at the ceiling from his wheelchair. “Not everything, right?”
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    He collapsed on his bed, head thick with alcoholic vapours and Andres’s lament for a generation. Lying there, he started to undress and throw each garment on the floor. He could already predict the headache he would have at daybreak, a just punishment for his excesses, but he felt his mind racing along enjoyably, strangely active, spawning ideas, memories and obsessions endowed with a feverish fleshly quality. With a supreme physical effort, he abandoned his bed and went to the bathroom in search of the analgesics that could thwart his recurrent migraine. He reckoned two would suffice, and dissolved them in water. He then walked to the lavatory, where he piddled a weak, amber trickle that splashed on the bowl’s already stained edges and made him consider the proportions of his member: he’d always suspected that it was on the small side and now he was certain – pitifully so – after the strip show he’d offered his friends that evening. But mentally he shrugged his shoulders at its nonimportance, for, even as it was, the currently moribund strip of meat had always been an effective companion to his binary or solitary erotic outings, even rising up rapidly when necessity required it to be on a war footing. Ignore those sons of bitches, he told it, looking at it head on, right in the eye: don’t feel pathetic,
because you’re a good’un, aren’t you? And he gave it a last shake.
    He was pleasantly surprised when he realized he didn’t have to go to work the following day, and, lungs full of the air of freedom and cigarette smoke, he decided to waste no more time in that lonely bed. You are going to change your life now, Mario Conde, he reproached himself, and decided on a useful wakefulness. The exercise of independence was one of the privileges of his new situation. He quickly went into the kitchen and put a flame under the coffee pot, ready to drink his