Havana Gold Read Free Page B

ago.”
    And he got up wanting to give his friend a hug, but didn’t dare. There were hundreds and hundreds of things he never dared do.
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    Nobody can imagine what night-time is like for a policeman. Nobody can know what ghosts visit him, what hot flushes assail him, the hell where he simmers on a slow burner or where fierce flames shoot around him. The act of closing your eyes can be a cruel challenge, conjuring up troublesome figures from the past, who never leave your memory, who return, night after night, with the tireless regularity of a pendulum. Decisions, mistakes, acts of arrogance, even the frailties of generosity return like irredeemable sins to haunt a conscience marked by each petty act of infamy committed in the world of the infamous. José de la Caridad sometimes pays me a visit, that black truck driver who asked, begged me not to send him to jail because he was innocent, and I questioned him over four days, it just had to be him, it couldn’t be anyone else, as he collapsed and wept and repeated his innocence, until I put him behind bars to await a trial that found him innocent. Sometimes Estrellita Rivero returns, the girl I tried to hold back for a second before she took that fatal step and was shot between the eyes
by Sergeant Mateo who’d meant to hit the legs of the man running away. Or Rafael and Tamara waltzing out of death or the past, as if it were twenty years ago, he in a suit and she in a long white dress, like the bride she was soon to be. Nothing is gentle in the night of a policeman, not even the memory of that last woman or the hope of the next, because each memory and each hope – that will one day be a memory – is tarnished by the daily horrors in his life: I met her while investigating the death of her husband, the frauds, lies, bribes, abuses and fears of that man who seemed perfect from the heights of his power; I’ll remember her, perhaps, because of someone’s murder, another’s rape or sorrow. A policeman’s nights are murky waters: they reek foul and bear the colour of death. To sleep! . . . Perchance to dream! And I have learned there is only one way to defeat them: lack of consciousness, dying a little every day, and every dawn is death itself, when what should be joyful sunshine is torture to the eyes. Horror at the past, fear of the future: that’s how a policeman’s nights rush towards daytime. To catch, question, imprison, judge, sentence, accuse, repress, persecute, pressurize and crush are the verbs which conjugate the memories and entire life of a policeman. I dream I could dream other happy dreams, build something, possess something, hand something on, receive and create something: write. But it’s the futile
delirium of a man who feeds on what has been destroyed. That is why a policeman’s loneliness is the most fearful loneliness: it accompanies his ghosts, sorrows, guilt . . . If only a woman would play a lullaby on her saxophone to send this particular policeman to sleep. But, silence, only silence! Night has fallen. Outside an accursed wind ravages the earth.
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    The two analgesics weighed on his stomach like a great burden of guilt. Conde had swallowed them in a huge cup of black coffee, after noting that the remains of the last milk he’d purchased had become a pungent whey at the bottom of a litre bottle. Luckily he’d discovered he’d still two clean shirts in his wardrobe and had the luxury of choice: he voted for the white and brown striped option with long sleeves he rolled back to his elbow. His jeans – that had finished up under his bed – had endured a mere fortnight’s campaign and could resist another fifteen or twenty days. He tucked his pistol into his trouser waistband and felt he’d lost weight, though he decided it was no cause for worry: he wasn’t hungry, or cancerous, for heaven’s sake. Besides, apart from his stomach ache, everything was fine: he