Havana Gold Read Free

Ash Wednesday, however much he counted and re-counted the hours to their next meeting. The three days he had to wait gave him time enough to imagine the whole works – marriage and children included, after a prior period of lovemaking on beds, beaches, tropical foliage and British meadows, in hotels of diverse constellations, on moonlit and moonless nights and dawns, in Polish Fiats – and then he’d see her, naked, sax between legs, sucking the mouthpiece, before launching into a mellow, golden melody. All he could do was imagine, wait and masturbate, as the image of Karina, sax at the ready, became unbearably erotic.
    As he’d decided yet again to settle for the company of Skinny Carlos and a bottle of rum, Conde pulled on a shirt and shut the door to his house. He went out into the dust and wind on the street, muttering that, though he found Lent enervating and depressing, right then he
belonged to a rare breed of policemen on the brink of great happiness.
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    â€œAren’t you fuckin’ well going to tell me what you’re up to?”
    The Count smiled vaguely at his friend: what do I tell him? he thought. The almost three-hundred pounds of defeated body in that wheelchair creased his heart. He felt it too cruel to talk of imminent bliss with a man whose pleasures in life had been reduced forever to alcohol-powered conversations, gargantuan meals and a morbid fanaticism for baseball. Ever since he’d been shot in Angola and become a life-long invalid, Skinny Carlos, who was no longer skinny, had become a dirge, an infinite pain the Count bore with guilt-ridden stoicism. What lie shall I tell? Do I have to lie even to him? he wondered, smiling bitterly, as he saw himself walking slowly past Karina’s, even stopping and trying to glimpse through the porch windows the woman’s impossible presence in a shadowy room crammed with ferns and red and orange-hearted malangas . How come he’d never seen her, given she was the sort you scented a mile off? He downed his rum and declared: “I was going to lie.”
    â€œDo you still have to do that?”
    â€œI don’t think I am what you think I am, Skinny. I’m not the same as you.”

    â€œLook, guy, if you want to talk shit, just get it out,” he said, lifting his hand to signal the pause necessary to knock back another rum. “I’ll just put myself on fastforward. But remember one thing: you may not be one of the wonders of this world, but you are the best friend I have in the world. Even if your lies will be the death of me.”
    â€œSavage, I met a woman out there and I think . . .” he looked Skinny in the eye.
    â€œFucking hell!” exclaimed Skinny Carlos, also smiling. “So that was what it was all about. You’re incurable, aren’t you?”
    â€œGive me a break, Skinny, I’d like you to see her. You know, you probably have, she lives just round the corner, in the next block, her name’s Karina. She’s an engineer, a redhead and fantastically sexy. I can feel her right here,” and he pressed his finger on the space between his eyebrows.
    â€œHey, you bastard, slow down . . . you’re going too fast for me. Is she your latest?”
    â€œIf only,” the Count sighed, looking forlorn. He poured himself more rum and recounted his meeting with Karina, down to the tiniest detail (the whole truth, even about the shortfall in her rear, knowing full well how highly a good rump rated in Skinny’s aesthetic judgements), and his future expectations (even the adolescent spying from the street he’d practised that
night). In the end he always told his friend the whole story, however happy or wretched it might be.
    The Count saw Skinny stretch but not reach the bottle and gave it to him. The level of liquid was already down behind the label and he calculated that theirs was a twolitre conversation, but hunting for rum in La Víbora at that hour of the