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For our last task you are going to write a reflection of at least 2.5-3 pages that includes:Definition of the detective novel and identify in Padura’s novel these elements. (the researcher, secondary characters, plot, scope, the murderer etc. )Write a synopsis about the novel they have chosen Identify in the novel two moments of description of the city.Padura’s comments on writing and the city of Havana https://static0planetadelibroscommx.cdnstatics.com/libros_contenido_extra/41/40978_1_39836_Agua_por_todas_partes.pdfThe chosen novel is called “Vientos de Cuaresma” and I am attaching a translated pdf since this is a Spanish task
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In the infernal days of the Cuban spring when the hot winds arrive from the
south, coinciding with Lent, Lieutenant Mario Conde, who has just met
Karina, a beautiful and dazzling woman, fond of jazz and sax, is assigned a
delicate investigation. A young chemistry teacher from the same high school
where the Count studied years ago has been found murdered in her
apartment, where traces of marijuana also appear. Thus, when investigating
the life of the professor, with an impeccable academic and political record,
the Count enters a world in decomposition, where careerism, influence
peddling, drug consumption and fraud reveal the dark side of Cuban
society. contemporary. At the same time, the policeman, in love with the
beautiful and unexpected woman, lives days of glory without imagining the
devastating outcome of that love story.
Leonardo Padura
Winds of Lent
Mario Conde: The Four Seasons – 2
For Paloma and Paco Taibo II
And again, and as always,
for you,
Lucía
SPRING 1989
He is the one who knows the mystery and the testimony.
The Quran
It was Ash Wednesday and with the punctuality of the eternal an arid and
suffocating wind, as if sent directly from the desert to commemorate the
sacrifice of the Messiah, penetrated the neighborhood and stirred up the dirt
and anguish. The sand of the quarries and the oldest hatreds mixed with the
resentments, the fears and the waste of the overflowing brass, the last dry
leaves of winter flew melted with the dead smells of the tannery and the
spring birds disappeared, as if they had sensed an earthquake. The
afternoon withered with the cloud of dust and the act of breathing became a
conscious and painful exercise.
Standing in the doorway of his house, Mario Conde observed the effects
of the apocalyptic gale: the empty streets, the closed doors, the defeated
trees, the neighborhood as if ravaged by an effective and cruel war, and it
occurred to him to think that after the sealed doors could be raging with
hurricanes of passion as devastating as the street wind. Then he felt a
predictable wave of thirst and melancholy begin to grow within him, also
fueled by the hot breeze. He unbuttoned his shirt and walked toward the
sidewalk. He knew that the emptiness of expectations for the approaching
night and the aridity of his throat could be the work of a higher power,
capable of shaping his destiny between infinite thirst and invincible
loneliness. Facing the wind, receiving the dust that gnawed at his skin, he
accepted that there must be something cursed in that Armageddon breeze
that broke out every spring to remind mortals of the rise of a son of man to
the most dramatic of all. holocausts, there in Jerusalem.
He breathed until he felt his lungs sink, loaded with dirt and soot, and
when he thought he had paid a price of suffering to his revealed masochism,
he returned to the shelter of the doorway and finished taking off his shirt.
The feeling of dryness in his throat was then much greater, while the
certainty of loneliness had run amok and was more difficult to locate in any
corner of his body. It flowed unstoppably, as if it were running through his
blood. “You’re a remembering bastard,” his friend, Skinny Carlos, always
told him, but it was inevitable that Lent and loneliness would make him
remember. That wind made the black sands and debris of his memory float,
the dry leaves of his dead affections, the bitter smells of his guilt with a
persistence more perverse than the thirst of forty days in the desert. I’m
damned if I’m windy, he told himself then, thinking that he shouldn’t dwell on
his melancholies anymore because he knew the antidote: a bottle of rum
and a woman—the more whore it is.
better—were the instant and perfect cure for that depression that was
somewhere between mystical and enveloping.
The rum thing could be remedied, even within the limits of the law, he
thought. The difficult thing was to combine it with that possible woman that
he had met three days before and who was causing him that hangover of
hopes and frustrations. It all started on Sunday, after having lunch at Flaco’s
house, who was no longer skinny, and realizing that Josefina was in
dealings with the Devil. Only that butcher with the infernal nickname could
encourage the sin of gluttony into which his friend’s mother threw them;
incredible but true: Madrid stew, almost as it should be, the woman
explained when she led them into the dining room where the plates of broth
were already served and, circumspect and overflowing with promises, the
platter of meats, root vegetables and chickpeas.
—My mother was Asturian, but she always made Madrid-style stew. A
matter of taste, right? But the problem is that in addition to the salted pork
feet, the piece of chicken, the bacon, the chorizo, the blood sausage, the
potatoes, the vegetables and the chickpeas, it also has green beans and a
large cow’s knee bone, which It was the only thing I needed to achieve.
Although it tastes good, right? —she asked, rhetorically and pleased, to the
sincere astonishment of her son and the Count, who threw themselves into
the food, agreeing from the first spoonful: yes, it tasted good, despite the
subtle absences that Josefina regretted.
“Bloody hell, rediez,” said one.
“Hey, leave it for the others,” the other warned.
“Damn, that chorizo was mine,” protested the first.
“I’m going to burst,” the other admitted.
After that unimaginable lunch their eyes closed and their arms felt heavy,
in a clamorous organic request for a bed, but Skinny insisted on sitting in
front of the television to make dessert with the double ball game. The
Havana team was finally playing a season as it should, and the smell of
victory carried over after each team game, even when it was only broadcast
on the radio. He followed the destiny of the championship with a fidelity that
only someone like him, terribly optimistic, could provide, even after having
won for the last time in the year and remote from 1976, when even the
baseball players seemed more romantic, sincere and happy.
“I’m going to hell,” the Count then said, at the end of a yawn that stirred
him. And don’t get your hopes up to die of disappointment, savage: in the
end these people screw up and lose the good games, remember last year.
“I’ve always said it, beast, I love seeing you like this: excited and with
that joy…” And he pointed at him with his index finger. You’re a dirty little
bitch. But this year we did win.
—Well, there you go, don’t tell me later that I didn’t warn you… It’s just that
I have to write a report to close a case and every day I leave it until
tomorrow. Remember that I am a proletarian…
—Don’t mess around, you, today is Sunday. Look, boy, look, today Valle
and the Duke are pitching, this is a piece of cake… —he said and
questioned him with his eyes—. No, lie, you are going to do something else.
“I wish,” sighed the Count, who hated the placidity of Sunday afternoons.
It always seemed to him that the best metaphor for his writer friend Miki
Cara de Jeva was to affirm that someone is more of a faggot than a Sunday
afternoon, languid and calm. “I wish,” he repeated and stood behind the
wheelchair in which his friend had been living for almost ten years and led
him to the room.
—Why don’t you buy a pomo and come at night? —Flaco Carlos then
proposed.
—Savage, I am without a means.
—Take money from the nightstand.
“Hey, I have work early tomorrow,” the Count tried to protest, but he saw
the route marked by his friend’s warning finger pointing to the place of the
money. The yawn was linked to the smile and he knew then that there was
no possible defense: I better give up, right? Well, I don’t know, let’s see if I
come at night. “If I get the rum,” he still struggled, trying to save some of his
cornered dignity. I’m going down.
“Don’t buy mofuco, you,” Carlos warned him and the Count, already in
the corridor, shouted:
—Orientales champion! —And he ran so as not to hear the insults he
deserved. He left on the midday steamer with the scale in his hand and his
eyes as if blindfolded. I’m fair, he thought, weighing duty and the
peremptory needs of his body: the report or the bed, although he knew that
the verdict was already decreed in favor of a nap as Madrid-like as stew, he
told himself as he turned the corner in search of something. the Calzada del
10 de Octubre, but before seeing it he sensed it.
That experiment almost never failed, when he got on a bus, when he
entered a store, when he arrived at an office, even in the darkness of a
cinema, the Count practiced it and was pleased to verify its effectiveness: a
hidden sense of a trained animal always He guided his eyes towards the
figure of the most beautiful woman in the place, as if the search for beauty
were part of his vital demands. And now that aesthetic magnetism capable
of alerting his libido could not have failed. Under the glare of the sun the
woman shone like a vision from another world: her hair is red, fiery, curly
and soft; The legs are two Corinthian columns, ending in the attributes of the
hips and barely covered by ablue-jean cut and frayed; the face reddened by
the
heat, half hidden by dark glasses with round lenses, under which she
displayed a pulpy mouth of a vital and convinced enjoyer. Mouth for any
imaginable craving, fantasy or need. But how good she is, damn it!, he said
to himself. It is as if it were born from the reverberation of the sun, hot and
tailored to ancestral desires. It had been a long time since the Count had
suffered street erections, the years had made him slow and too cerebral, but
suddenly he felt that in his stomach, just below the protein layers of the
Madrid stew, something was disordered and the waves caused by the
movement began to form. They subsided until the unexpected solidity that
began to form between his legs. She was leaning against the rear fender of
a car and, upon looking again at her bottomless runner’s thighs, the Count
discovered the reason for her sunbathing on the deserted street: a deflated
tire and a hydraulic jack leaning against the restraint. The sidewalk
explained the desperation he saw on her face when she took off her glasses
and with alarming elegance wiped the sweat from her face. I can’t think
about it, the Count demanded, anticipating his laziness and shyness, and
when he reached the woman he said to her, with all his courage:
-Do I help you?
That smile could pay for any sacrifice, including the public immolation of
a nap. The mouth spread and the Count came to think that the brightness of
the sun was not needed.
-Really? —She hesitated for a moment, but only for a moment—. “I left
to go get gas, and look at this,” he lamented, showing the mortally wounded
rubber with his grease-stained hands.
—Are the clans strong? —he asked, just to say something, and clumsily
tried to appear skillful in the act of putting the cat in its place. She crouched
next to him, in a gesture that wished to express her moral solidarity, and the
Count then saw the drop of sweat that was launched down the mortal slope
of her neck and fell between two small and, without a doubt, well planted
breasts. and free under the blouse moistened by their perspirations. She
smells like a fatal and healthy woman, the persistent bulge that she tried to
hide between her legs warned the Count. Who saw you in this, Mario
Conde?
Once again, the Count was able to verify the cause of his eternal
seventy points in manual labor and work education. It took her half an hour
to replace the flat tire but in that time she learned that screws are tightened
from left to right and not the other way around, that her name is Karina and
she is twenty-eight years old, she is an engineer and she is separated and
lives with her mother and a tarambana half brother, musician of a rock
group: Los Mutantes. The Mutants? That you have to hit the clan key with
your foot and that the next morning, very early, she left in her car for
Matanzas with a technical commission to work until Friday at the fertilizer
factory, and that yes, boy, He had lived there all his life, in that house across
the street, even though the Count had been there for twenty years.
years spent almost every day there, on that same street, and that he once
read something by Salinger and thought it was fabulous (and he even
thought about rectifying it: no, it is squalid and moving). And he also learned
that changing a flat tire can be one of the most difficult tasks in the world.
Karina’s gratitude was happy, total and even tangible when she
proposed that if he accompanied her to get gas she would take him to her
house, look how you have sweated, you have grease even on your face,
what a shame, she had told him, and the Count He felt his little heart flutter
with the words of that unexpected woman, who knew how to laugh and
spoke very slowly, with a magnetic sweetness.
At the end of the afternoon, after waiting in line for gas, knowing that it
was Karina’s mother who had tied the blessed guano leaf to the rearview
mirror of the car, talking a little about flat cars, the heat and of the winds of
Lent, and of having coffee at the Count’s house, they agreed that she would
call him as soon as she returned from Matanzas: she would returnFranny y
Zooey, It is the best thing that Salinger wrote, the Count had told him,
without managing to contain his enthusiasm, when he handed him that book
that he had never lent since he was able to steal it from the university library.
Well, that’s how they looked and talked for a while longer. Alright?
The Count had not stopped looking at her for a second and, although he
honestly recognized that the girl was not as beautiful as he had thought
(perhaps, in truth, her mouth was too big, the drooping of her eyes seemed
sad and she was somewhat scarce in the department of the buttock, he
critically acknowledged), he was impressed with his determined joy and with
his unexpected ability to raise, in the middle of the street, after lunch and
under a murderous sun, the wingless and legless end of his manhood.
Then Karina accepted a second cup of coffee and the revelation came
that would drive the Count crazy.
“My father was the one who got me addicted to coffee,” she said and
looked at him. I drank coffee all day, any amount.
—And what else did you learn from him?
She smiled and shook her head, as if shooing away ideas and
memories. —He taught me everything he knew, even how to
play the saxophone.
-The saxophone? —he almost shouts, incredulously—. Do you play the
saxophone? —Well, I’m not a musician at all. But I know how to blow it, as
the jazz players say. He loved jazz and played with many people, with
FrankEmilio, with Cachao, with Felipe Dulzaides, the people of the old
guard…
The Count barely heard her talk about her father and the trios, quintets
and septets in which she had occasionally participated, about downloads in
the Grotto, in Las Vegas and in the Copa Room, and he didn’t even need to
close his eyes to imagine Karina with the mouthpiece of the saxophone
between the lips and the neck of the instrument
dancing between her legs. Could this woman be true? He doubted.
—And you like jazz?
“Look… it’s one thing I can’t live without,” he said and opened his arms,
to mark the immensity of that pleasure. She smiled, accepting the
exaggeration. —Well, I’m leaving. I have to prepare things for tomorrow.
—So you’re calling me? —and the Count’s voice bordered on pleading.
—Sure, as soon as I get back.
The Count lit a cigarette, to fill himself with smoke and courage, on the
verge of the decisive blow.
—What does separated mean? —he blurted out, with the face of a
less-than-advantaged student.
“Look it up in a dictionary,” she suggested, smiled and shook her head
again. He picked up the car keys and walked towards the door. The Count
accompanied her to the sidewalk. Thank you very much for everything,
Mario,” she said and, after thinking about it for a moment, she asked: “Hey,
but you haven’t told me what you are, have you?”
The Count threw the cigarette into the street and smiled as he felt that
he was returning to safe ground.
“I’m a police officer,” he said and crossed his arms, as if the gesture
were a necessary complement to his revelation.
Karina looked at him and bit her lip slightly before saying, in disbelief:
“From the Canadian Mounted Police or from Scotland Yard?” “Yes, I knew it,
you have the face of a liar,” he said, leaning on the Count’s crossed arms
and kissing him on the cheek. Goodbye, police.
Investigative lieutenant Mario Conde did not stop smiling even after the
Polish Fiat got lost on the curve of the Calzada. He returned home jumping
with joy and a sense of happiness.
But it was still just Ash Wednesday, no matter how much he counted and
retold the hours until his new meeting with her. Three days of waiting, so far,
had been enough for him to imagine everything: marriage and children
included, passing, as a preliminary stage, through amorous acts in beds,
beaches, tropical grasslands and British meadows, hotels of various stars,
nights with and without a moon, sunrises and Polish Fiats, and then, still
naked, I saw her place the sax between her legs and suck on the
mouthpiece, to attack a pasty, golden and warm melody. He could do
nothing but imagine and wait, and masturbate when the image of Karina,
saxophone at the ready, was unbearably erogenous.
Deciding to settle again in the company of Flaco Carlos and the bottle of
rum, the Count put his shirt back on and closed the door of his house. He
stepped out into the dust and wind of the street, and told himself that,
despite the Lent that unnerved and depressed him, at that moment he
belonged to the rare breed of the policeman in
eve of being happy.
—And you’re not going to tell me what the hell is wrong with you, are
you?
The Count barely smiled and looked at his friend: what should I say? he
thought. The almost three hundred pounds of that defeated body on the
wheelchair hurt his heart one by one. It was too cruel to talk about potential
happiness to this man whose pleasures had been reduced forever to a
conversation filled with alcohol, a gargantuan meal, and an unhealthy
fanaticism for baseball. Since he was shot in Angola and was permanently
disabled, Flaco Carlos, who was no longer skinny, had become a deep
lament, an infinite pain that the Count assumed with a guilty stoicism. What
lie am I telling him? Will I have to lie to him too? He thought and smiled
again, bitterly, as he saw himself walking very slowly in front of Karina’s
house and even stopping to try to glimpse through the open windows. to the
portal, the impossible presence of the woman in the darkness of a room
filled with ferns and taro leaves with red and orange hearts. How was it
possible that he had never seen her, if she was one of those women you
can smell from afar? He finished his drink of rum and finally said:
—I was going to tell you a lie.
—Do you need that anymore?
—I think I’m not what you think, Flaco. I’m not the same as you. “Look,
my partner, if what you want is to talk shit, you tell me,” and he raised his
hand to mark the pause he requested while he took another drink of rum. I
get in tune quickly. But first remember one thing: you are not the best thing
in the world, but you are my best friend in the world. Even if you kill me with
lies.
“Savage, I met a woman there and I think…” he said, and looked into
Skinny’s eyes.
-Balls! —Exclaimed Skinny Carlos and also smiled—. It was that. So that
was it. But you don’t have a cure, do you?
—No shit, Flaco, I would like you to see it. I don’t know, maybe you’ve
even seen her, she lives here around the corner, on the other block, her
name is Karina, she’s an engineer, she has red hair, she’s very hot. “I have it
stuck here,” and he pressed a finger between his eyebrows.
—Damn, but you’re going crazy… Hold on, hold on. Is she your girl?
“I wish,” the Count sighed and showed his face as a disconsolate man.
He poured himself more rum and told him about his meeting with Karina,
without omitting a single piece of information (the whole truth, including that
he was doing poorly in the rear, knowing the value that a good ass had in
Flaco’s aesthetic judgments), not a single hope. (including the adolescent
street espionage practiced that night). In the end he always
He told his friend everything, no matter how happy or terrible the story was.
The Count saw that Skinny stretched without reaching for the bottle and
handed it to him. The level of the liquid was already lost behind the label
and he calculated that this was a conversation of two liters, but finding rum
in La Víbora, at that hour, could be a vain and hopeless task. The Count
regretted it: talking about Karina, in Flaco’s room, among tangible nostalgia
and old posters discolored by time, he began to feel as calm as in the times
when for them the world revolved only around a good ass, some hard tits
and, above all, that magnetized and amazing orifice that they always talked
about in terms of fatness, depth, capillary population and ease of access
(No, no, buddy, look how she walks, if she’s a lady and I’m a helicopter, I
used to say Skinny), without caring much about who those clear objects of
desire belonged to. —You don’t change, beast, you don’t even know who
the hell that woman is, but now you’re in like a crazy dog. Look what
happened to you with Tamara… —No, old man, don’t compare.
—No shit, you, you are… And do you really live there around the
corner? Hey, isn’t it a story?
—No, old man, no. Hey, Flaco, I have to pick up that woman. Either I flirt
with her or I kill myself or I go crazy or I become a faggot.
“Better a faggot than dead,” the other interrupted and smiled. —Really,
savage. My life is like yogurt. I need a woman like that: I don’t even know
who she is, but I need her. El Flaco looked at him as if to say: You have no
choice, you.
—I don’t know, but I get the slight impression that you’re talking shit
again… How you like to spin the handle… You’re a police officer because
you can’t do it. Does not suit you? Quit, boy, and to hell with everything…
Now, don’t come and tell me later that deep down you liked to screw up the
lives of sons of bitches and bastards. I’m not going to put up with that tooth.
And what happened to you with Tamara was already written in blood, my
partner: that girl was never in your life for guys like us, so just forget about
her once and for all and note in your autobiography that at least you got rid
of her itchy and you could have hit it hard. And fuck up the world, savage.
Give me more rum, come on.
The Count looked at the bottle and lamented its agony. He needed to
hear from Skinny’s mouth the things that he himself thought, and that night,
while outside the Lenten wind was stirring dirt and deep within him fluttered
a hope in the form of a woman, to be in the room of his most dear friend,
talking about the human and the divine, was clean and encouraging. And
what will happen if Flaco dies? he thought, cutting the chain that led to
spiritual peace. He opted for alcoholic suicide: he poured more rum for his
friend, poured another drink into his glass and then noticed that they had
forgotten to talk about baseball and listen to music. Better music, he
decided.
He stood up and opened the cassette drawer. As always, he was
alarmed by Flaco’s mix of musical tastes: anything possible between The
Beatles and The Mustangs, including Joan Manuel Serrat and Gloria
Estefan. —What would you like to hear?
—¿Los Beatles?
—¿Chicago?
—¿Formula V?
-The steps?
—¿Credence?
—Anjá, Credence… But don’t tell me that Tom Foggerty sings like a black
man, and I told you he sings like God, right? —And the two nodded, yes,
yes, admitting their deepest agreement: the bastard sang like God.
The bottle expired before the long version ofProud Mary. El Flaco put his
glass on the floor and moved his wheelchair to the edge of the bed where
his police friend was sitting. He placed one of his fluffy hands on the Count’s
shoulder and looked him in the eyes:
—I hope things turn out well for you, my brother. Good people deserve
to have a little more luck in life.
The Count thought he was right: Flaco himself was the best person he
knew and luck had turned in his favor. But that seemed unacceptably
pathetic to him and, looking for a smile, he replied:
—You’re already talking shit, asere. The good ones ran out a while ago.
And he stood up, intending to hug his friend, but he did not dare. He never
dared to do hundreds and hundreds of things.
Nobody imagines what a police officer’s nights are like. No one knows
what ghosts visit him, what ardor attacks him, in what hell he simmers—or is
engulfed in aggressive flames. Closing your eyes can be a cruel challenge,
capable of awakening those painful figures from the past that never leave
your memory and return, night and night, with the tireless persistence of the
pendulum. Decisions, errors, acts of arrogance and even the weaknesses of
kindness return as priceless guilt to a conscience marked by each small
infamy committed in the world of the infamous. Sometimes José de la
Caridad visits me, that black truck driver who begged me, begged me, not to
send him to jail because he was innocent and I interrogated him four days in
a row, it had to be him, it couldn’t be anyone other than him, while he He
collapsed and cried and repeated his innocence, until I put him behind bars
to await a trial that would declare him innocent. Sometimes Estrellita Rivero
returns, the girl I tried to hold on to for a second before she took the fatal
step and received that shot between her eyebrows that Sergeant Mateo
tried to direct at the girls.
legs of the fleeing man. Or they come from death and the past Rafael and
Tamara, dancing a waltz, like twenty years ago, he in a suit, she in long and
white, like the bride she would soon be. Nothing is sweet in the nights of a
police officer, not even the memory of that last woman or the hope of the
next, because each memory and each hope—which one day will also be a
memory—carries the stain etched by the daily horror of life. from the police:
I found her while I was investigating the death of her husband, the scams,
the lies, the blackmail, the abuses and the fears of that man who seemed
perfect from the height of his power; I will remember her, perhaps, for the
murder of one, the rape of another, the pain of someone. The nights of a
police officer are murky waters: with putrid odors and dead colors. Sleep!…
Maybe dream! And I have learned only one way to overcome them:
unconsciousness, which is a little bit of death every day and is death itself
every dawn, when the supposed joy of the sun’s shine is torture in the eyes.
Horror of the past, fear of the future: this is how the policeman’s nights run
towards the day. Catch, interrogate, imprison, judge, condemn, accuse,
repress, persecute, pressure, crush are the verbs in which the memories,
the entire life of the police officer, are conjugated. I dream that I could dream
other happy dreams, build something, have something, give something,
receive something, create something: write. But it is a useless nonsense for
those who live off what is destroyed. That is why the policeman’s loneliness
is the most fearsome of loneliness: it is the company of his ghosts, his pain,
his guilt… If only a woman with a saxophone would play her lullaby to put
the policeman to sleep. But, silence!… The night has arrived. Outside the
damned wind is burning the earth.
***
The two duralginas weighed on his stomach like a guilt. The Count had
swallowed them with a gigantic cup of black coffee, after verifying that the
remains of the last milk purchased was a fierce whey at the bottom of the
liter. Luckily, in thecloset He had discovered that he still had two clean shirts
left, and he had the luxury of selecting: he voted for the one with white and
brown stripes, with long sleeves, which were gathered up to elbow height.
Heblue-jean, that had ended up under the bed, it barely had fifteen days of
fighting after the last wash and could last another fifteen, twenty days more.
He adjusted the gun against the waistband of his pants and noticed that he
had lost weight, although he decided not to worry: it wasn’t hunger, but
neither was cancer, what the hell. Furthermore, except for the burning in his
stomach, everything was fine: he barely had dark circles under his eyes, his
incipient baldness did not seem to be the most corrosive, his liver continued
to show courage and the headache disappeared and it was already
Thursday, and tomorrow, Friday, he had the fingers. He went out into the
wind and the sun and almost began to mistreat an old love song.
More than a thousand years will pass, many more,
I don’t know if I have love, eternity,
but there just like here…
He entered the Central Office at eight fifteen, greeted several
colleagues, read with envy on the tablet in the lobby the new 1989
resolution on retirement and, smoking his fifth cigarette of the day, waited for
the elevator to report to the officer on duty. . He had the beautiful hope that
they would not yet hand him a new case: he wanted to dedicate all his
intelligence to a single idea and, in recent days, he had even felt the desire
to write again. He reread a couple of books that were always capable of
stirring his mood and in an old school notebook, with yellow paper lined in
green, he had written down some of his obsessions, like a forgotten pitcher
who is sent to warm up his arm to throw a decisive game. His reunion with
Tamara, a few months ago, had awakened lost nostalgia, forgotten
sensations, hatred that he thought had disappeared and that returned to his
life summoned by an unexpected reunion with that essential piece of his
past, with which it would be worth getting involved sometime. agree, and
then condemn it or absorb it, once and for all. Now I thought that in all of
that perhaps there was some material to put together a very moving story
about the times when everyone was very young, very poor and very happy:
Flaco, when he was still skinny, Andrés determined to be a baseball player,
Dulcita, who didn’t. was gone, the Rabbit, of course, would be a historian,
Tamara, who had not married Rafael and was so, so pretty, and even he
himself, then he dreamed more than ever of being a writer and only a writer,
while from his bed he observed a photo of old Hemingway,
hanging on the wall, and I tried to discover in those eyes the mystery of the
gaze with which the writer retraces the world, seeing what others do not
see. Now I thought that if I ever wrote all that chronicle of love and hate,
happiness and frustration, I would title itPerfect past.
The elevator stopped at the third floor and the Count turned to the right.
The floors of the Central were shining, freshly swept with sawdust
moistened with bright light, and the sun that penetrated through the tall
aluminum and glass windows painted the long corridor with its newly
awakened clarity. It was decidedly so clean and well lit that it didn’t look like
a police station. He pushed the double glass door and entered the guard
room, which at that time of the morning was experiencing its most hurricane
moments of the day: officers delivering reports, investigators protesting
against some measure of the court, auxiliaries asking for help and even the
Lieutenant Mario Conde, with an insistent bolero on his lips – “In my life, I
give the good / I am so poor, what else can I give…” -, and a cigar between
his fingers, which when approaching the duty officer’s bureau , that morning
occupied by Lieutenant Fabricio, could barely hear:
—The oldest says you should go see him. Don’t even ask me, I don’t
know anything about things and this is really shit today, and you know that
your boss gives you your cases, there’s a reason you’re his sweet boy.
The Count looked at Lieutenant Fabricio for a moment, he seemed really
dazed between papers, telephone rings and voices, and he realized that his
hands had started to sweat: it was the second time that Fabricio treated him
that way and the Count was He said no, he wasn’t willing to put up with that
nonsense. A few months ago, in the investigation of a series of robberies in
several hotels in Havana, Major Rangel had ordered that the Count, after
closing a case, relieve Fabricio in the investigation. The Count tried to
refuse but there was no escape: the Old Man had decided, This cannot be
delayed any longer, and he chose to apologize to Lieutenant F
