The transparency of time.., p.3
The Transparency of Time--A Novel, page 3
Yoyi was waiting for him on the porch of his house, dressed in white linen pants and a cleanly pressed shirt against which his pigeon chest strained. On his breastbone shone a heavy medallion, hanging from a thick gold chain … a medallion with the image of the Virgin, in Her incarnation as Our Lady of Charity, patroness of Cuba. At the curb, its hood pointing toward the city center, his 1957 convertible Chevrolet Bel Air was parked, shinier than ever thanks to the recent coat of lacquer that (only the Madonna knew how!) had reached Yoyi from the Ferrari factory itself.
The men shook hands and the visitor allowed himself to fall into one of the porch chairs, moving it to seat himself in front of his host.
“So, a client came to see you, eh?” Yoyi asked, feigning naïveté.
“Left my house an hour ago…”
“So, what did you think of Bobby? He’s a character … And when he told me what happened to him, I said to myself: ‘Business for Conde!’”
“But why didn’t you tell me about it first, man?”
“Damn, brother, because Bobby told me that you were a friend of his and because I know that you’re still fascinated with everything about high school in La Víbora, and … Oh, of course, since I’m your agent, I know you could stand to earn that hundred dollars a day…”
Conde raised a hand. “I’m sorry. How much a day?”
Yoyi stared Conde down, as though watching prey. Something was up. If Yoyi had one notable quality, it was his professional intuition. And if he had any others, despite behaving like an animal in business, it was that he managed to act on it with honesty and transparency. And if he had one major failing, it was his attachment to Conde himself, to Conde’s mind—because despite being about twenty-five years younger than his business partner, Yoyi professed that his friendship with the former policeman was permanent and incorruptible. Not only because Conde once saved him from a robbery that had devolved into a potentially fatal beating, but also because they simply felt comfortable doing business with each other, without any fear of possible betrayal. For years, Yoyi had shown his soft spot by protecting Conde: since he earned so much money with his diverse commercial enterprises—his reach wasn’t so much wide as practically unlimited—he tried to keep his less skilled friend both occupied and “liquid,” and, beyond that, every once in a while, even saved him—not that this took much effort for someone like Yoyi—from outright squalor. From the fuácata, as they called the broke-as-hell state in which the former policeman nearly always existed.
“I said a hundred, man,” Yoyi said, narrowing his eyes as if he needed to bring Conde, who was shaking his head, into better focus.
“I get sixty dollars a day and a thousand for recovering the Madonna…”
Yoyi jumped. “That son of a bitch! We settled on a hundred per day, plus expenses, and two thousand for the Madonna…”
Conde felt rage surge in his chest.
“But, Yoyi, so much! Just for Our Lady of Regla?”
“What do you mean ‘so much,’ Conde? That Virgin of Regla is a nineteenth-century carving brought from Andalucía and is surely worth a pretty sum … And Bobby is rotten with cash! Do you know how much he got out of two Portocarrero paintings, an Amelia Peláez, a Montoto, and some Bedia sketches he took to Miami?… After the initial investment, and after paying everyone he had to pay to get the paintings out of here, he was left with seventy large, free and clear, man. Seventy thousand dollars! You can’t even imagine who some of his clients here in Cuba are, and the things that Bobby’s sold! Didn’t you hear about those fake Tomás Sánchez landscapes making the rounds in Miami?”
Now Conde really lost it. Seventy thousand dollars in profit, and now counterfeiting too? And meanwhile, they all used to think that Bobby was a dumbass?
“Leave the money thing to me. Your thing will be looking for that little bugarrón and figuring out where on earth this Virgin got to … and earning that cold, hard cash.”
Under the influence of his astonishment, Conde nodded several times, rummaging around in each of his pockets in search of his pack of cigarettes, without remembering that he had placed it, along with a lighter, on the porch’s little wrought iron glass-top table. When he finally tracked down the pack, he lit up and took solace in nicotine.
“In high school, we always thought the guy was stupid … Stupid and kind of gay.”
The Pigeon smiled at last.
“Well, if he was stupid, he’s completely cured of that, because now he’s a tiger when it comes to buying and selling paintings and getting them out of Cuba when necessary … As for the other business, well, you guys clearly underestimated him there too—because he’s super gay, right? And he’s really living it up!”
Conde barely listened to Yoyi’s excited analysis, since his mind was caught up in calculations. One hundred dollars a day! Four or five years had already passed since the painter Elias Kaminsky showed up in Havana in need of help with fleshing out the story of his father, a Jewish man named Daniel. Kaminsky compensated Conde quite well for his services, but since then, Conde had spiraled down a dark tunnel as dealing in used books became ever less profitable—to the extent that he was even thinking about repurposing himself and finding another way to survive, like some of his colleagues were doing.
“Well, man, don’t worry about the money … Because you’re going to take the job, right?”
Conde was busy calculating to himself: What in the hell could he do to find, in Havana or God only knew where, a guy who didn’t want to be found?… I’ll have to get some help from the police, he answered himself.
“It won’t be easy,” Conde admitted and finished his cigarette.
“That’s what they pay you for, man … Well, allow me to invite you in for supper … I have a hot date in El Vedado at nine,” he said and pointed at his Bel Air.
“And what’s on today’s menu?” Conde asked, always ready to be dazzled by the dishes his partner served him. To satisfy his gourmet tastes, the former engineer Jorge Reutillo Casamayor Riquelmes, aka Yoyi the Pigeon, had hired himself a chef (the woman even dressed in white and wore a chef’s toque!) who could prepare all the exquisite dishes he craved, and who (because she had a soft spot for Yoyi) also ironed his pants, linens, and fine shirts. She did so exquisitely, with a touch she’d apparently inherited from her Filipino grandfather, who’d been in the dry-cleaning business.
“I told Esther to make something light, because if I’m going to see this chick later … well, you know … Anyway, she threw together some rice with vegetables, a very leafy salad, and some gazpacho. It’s good in this heat…”
With that anticlimactic menu, Conde was crestfallen. That was it? Rice and greens? Were these damn diets following him everywhere? Conspiring against his appetite? The Pigeon saw the look on Conde’s face and smiled.
“And two full steaks, Conde … Dutch-style, with lots of green pepper … Because I knew you were coming over! Look, man, it was a premonition, and I felt it here.” Yoyi jabbed his fingers below his left collarbone, anchored in the slope of his pigeon chest.
“Yoyi, stop fucking around. I’m the one who gets the nasty premonitions,” Conde said. “By the way, do cows still exist? Can you still get filets?”
* * *
With growing alarm, Conde felt surrounded, attacked even—everyone was trying to break him down. It was all very well and good to want to save themselves, but the most dangerous thing was that they were also trying to save him in the process. Chamomile tea instead of coffee! And without any sugar to boot! Did they really think he was so old and so fucked-up as that!
Conde watched as Tamara, cradling the porcelain teapot, poured the steaming liquid into her gold-rimmed cups. As always, he marveled at the elegance and precision of her gestures, so harmonious and aristocratic, a far cry from his own barbaric frustrated-ball-player mannerisms. Why does this woman put up with me … even sleep with me?
At fifty-seven, Tamara looked about ten years younger. Her diet, exercise, hair dyes, and creams (Italian, expensive, and efficient, sent from far away by her twin sister, Aymara) had as strong a positive effect on her as the negative effect of Conde’s own habits had on him—his haphazard eating, cigarette and alcohol consumption, and his constant exposure to the island’s dog-day sun during his daily book-trade pilgrimages. Furthermore, that night, as if to highlight what he’d been missing during his absences, Tamara was waiting for him dressed in a practically see-through nightgown, no bra, and a black thong that barely covered the small valley of her ever-protruding behind, firm and immune to the passage of time. When he arrived, he had looked her up and down, front and back, and congratulated himself as he felt a slight lift in his scrotum and delightful anticipation in his penis.
As they drank the chamomile tea—he refused to drink it without sugar—Conde relayed the big news of the day: Bobby emerging from oblivion. She found it incredible that their former classmate had become a Santero and a businessman, although she wasn’t too surprised by the confirmation of his sexual preferences, and smiled widely at the photo Conde showed her.
“You don’t break out in hives anymore when you have to deal with a gay man?” Tamara needled, since she knew each and every one of her lover’s prejudices.
“You know I was cured of that a long time ago … or at least, improved significantly.”
She nodded. Yes, Conde thought, watching: she is still beautiful.
“So, what are you going to do to find this Raydel?” she asked, and at that moment, Conde was positive that his skills as a detective had endured the same monstrously rapid decline and decrepitude as his body.
“I’m fucking clueless … I didn’t even ask Bobby if he had a picture of the guy. I hope he does…”
“So, if he went back to Santiago, what are you going to do, Mario?”
Tamara seemed truly intrigued. She knew that Conde was capable of going out to Santiago de Cuba and staying there for weeks and months, lost in a forest of rum bottles.
“Bobby thinks Raydel is here in Havana. The better to sell the loot. In Santiago, well, it seems people there are all in the fuácata, broke as hell. Worse than here…”
Conde carefully finished his tea and lit a cigarette. It took great effort to concentrate, faced with Tamara’s transparent apparel. Despite being on the verge of old age, or perhaps because of it, aggravated by its approach, his attraction to the females of the species was not only as vivid as ever, but seemed sometimes to have radically increased: to be more powerful than in the days of his greater vigor. Nowadays, Conde tended to swivel around, as though magnetized, every time a well-proportioned woman passed by (in his aesthetic and geometric canon, a pleasing appearance included an ample ass), and his eyes went running after every open blouse button, delighted in every pretty face. Throughout his life, the enjoyment of the contemplation of female beauty—assuming objective, material enjoyment wasn’t possible—was a constant, but rather than diminishing with age, it had developed along with his detective skills, gotten sharp like a bloodhound’s sense of smell: when Conde boarded a bus, his eyes zeroed in instantly on the most beautiful girl there; when he crossed paths with a well-endowed, well-proportioned woman, he felt his hormones rampage; when he watched a movie, he was driven into a frenzy by the promise, or actual display, of an actor’s feminine charms (how he admired Stefania Sandrelli in We All Loved Each Other So Much, Candice Bergen in Live for Life, or the number of times he masturbated recalling Sônia Braga’s nudity in Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands … How skinny and terrible the stars of today were, by God!). And despite knowing that his impulses were more physical than aesthetic, he couldn’t control them and tended to indulge himself at every appropriate opportunity. Even if only visual, his enjoyment of the female form was a source of nourishment to Conde: he took in the beauty and sexuality of women, and he savored his own curious desire to peer into every woman’s infinite physical and mental mysteries; like a vampire, when he plunged his fangs into them he was rejuvenated. Because of that, he’d never been able—nor would he ever be able!—to understand Bobby and his brethren: How was it possible to be attracted to a hairy, rough creature with one of those ugly things hanging between his legs, when there was another option out there, a being made up of delicate, perfect, inviting valleys, mountains, grottoes…? The great prize of Conde’s erotic life, and above all, the object of his utterly carnal creative drive, had arrived with the possibility of his taking Tamara to bed—Tamara, the most beautiful girl at La Víbora’s high school. The same Tamara who, when they were very young, made Conde and his classmates trip over themselves at the mere sight of her, and who looked down at the future detective as if he were little more than an insect. Years later, he reestablished contact with her, when, as luck would have it, he ran into her again in his capacity as a cop, working the case of her missing husband, who disappeared on the last day of 1988 (that son of a bitch Rafael Morín, a corrupt opportunist). He’d crowned it all by sleeping with her, and Conde entered a different phase of his existence: that of not believing what he had and held, that of asking himself over and over again how it was possible for that magnificent creature to feel any attraction to a disaster like him. Many years later, his relationship with this woman was so firmly established that they didn’t feel the need to legally formalize it, since they were satisfied living a kind of eternal courtship, a pleasant state of being that helped them enjoy each other’s company all the more by virtue of never dealing with the exhausting burden of cohabitation. Even so, Mario Conde looked at Tamara on nights like this one and asked himself, could it be true?
Aloud, he asked, “By the way, who gave you that pretty engagement ring you’re wearing?” He liked this little ritual so much that he started it up on every propitious occasion. Tamara humored him with the expected response.
She whispered, “My husband gave it to me.” Sounding very pleased with herself.
“Oh, you’re married?”
“No, just engaged,” she said, keeping to the script.
Conde felt he might as well accelerate the action.
“So, where’s the party?” he asked.
Tamara smiled. “Oh, I think it’s somewhere around here.”
“But did you really have to dress like that?” He ran his eyes all over her—his eyes, as well as the tip of his finger.
“Don’t you like it?”
“I love it.”
“Still?”
“More than ever.”
“But you haven’t come by for days…”
“I was exercising … To get strong … You have to keep in shape … At my age…”
“And did you get strong?”
Conde acted as if he were thinking the question over.
“Shall we find out?” And he stood up, crossed behind her and began kissing her neck, caressing her breasts, letting her feel his muscle, awake now, in the cleft between her buttocks—that it was willing to test its mettle: against gravity, against the years, with the aid of her beauty, the clean scent of her skin, and the taste of sweet fruit that always, always lingered in her saliva and on her breath.
2.
ANTONI BARRAL, 1989–1936
The sound of a door closing pulls him out of a deep sleep, as empty and prolonged as it is painless, timeless … He wants to call out to his wife, to know that he isn’t alone, to mock that abysmal and overwhelming solitude and the fear of greater solitudes, but he can’t manage to turn his thoughts into words. He feels abandoned, perceives his own etherealness; he knows he is almost at the end. He will go no farther than this. With the slowness of defeat, he opens his eyes and looks at his feet: it’s the best he can do, perhaps the only thing he can do. Whenever he’s been at a crossroads, he has, at some point, looked at his feet, conscious or not of why he’s doing it, pushed by some hidden impulse, as if responding to forces greater than him. He knows that other people have preferred to look at their own faces, their eyes, the shapes of their lips, to discover in those features, or at least try to, vestiges of joy, anguish, expectation: to find answers, even. Others look to their hands: hands that have done glorious, repugnant, irreversible things. And there are also those who like to contemplate their genitals, conscious of what drives human decisions, toward joy or ruin. Many times, he’s taken refuge there himself, shyly or shamelessly. But ever since he was a teenager in the mountains, it’s been his feet, his eyes pulled there by a strange attraction in which feelings of familiarity and strangeness, of proximity and distance, have mixed in varying doses. Those extremities, now deformed and useless, are in many senses the sum of what his life has and has not been, because it was with those feet, of course, that he walked down paths both chosen and imposed, that led him to the existence he was allowed to create for himself. His feet have led the way: from innocence to blame, from ignorance to knowledge, from peace to death, from a pleasant walk to hauling loads across the mountains to fleeing without a backward look, driven by fear. His feet first set him in motion and now, exhausted at last, they’re taking him down the final path. Antoni Barral knows he will soon take an irrevocable step, the step that will bring him closer to his mother, Paula; to his father, Carles; to his sad fool of a brother, l’Andreu, a useless and confused martyr of the war, his death the most terrible aspect of war. Yes, he will go no farther with his feet. Everything else will be silence.
