Havana Best Friends. Jose Latour

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СКАЧАТЬ I cooked for myself, he cooked for himself. As you can see, he kept his room locked. My TV set is the old black-and-white in the living room, I don’t own a VCR. Pablo never showed me those videos. For many years we agreed on one issue only: swapping this apartment for two smaller units, so each of us could live alone. But we never found the right swap; either he didn’t like the apartment he’d move to or I disliked mine. So, I’m probably the least informed person about my brother.’

      Trujillo lifted his eyes to the witnesses. Kuan remained impassive, but Zoila gave him a slight nod. The captain reinserted the cassette into its box, returned it to the carton, then produced another one. Its label read thirty-four.

      ‘Sorry to hear that, Comrade Elena. It slows down the investigation. Let’s see what’s here. Probably a movie.’

      Elena shrugged her shoulders and returned to the doorway. Trujillo found the remote control under a shirt on top of the writing table. He inserted the cassette and pressed the play button.

      Blue. White clouds on a clear sky, the camera gliding slowly down to the horizon, the sea, then panning gradually to a sandy beach. Two young women holding hands approach the camera, laughing and jumping over tame little waves which break and die under their feet. Both wear straw hats, dark glasses, and minimal two-piece bathing suits. Fade out. Same girls under a shower, naked, playfully splashing water on each other. The game loses momentum, with a lecherous stare the brunette gently caresses the blonde, they embrace and kiss hungrily…

      Trujillo stopped the VCR and ejected the cassette. ‘I will take all these tapes with me to the Department,’ he said.

      The captain resumed the search. Elena tore off another layer of forgetfulness from her mind. At what age had sex become the driving force in her brother’s life? She didn’t know. It had been early on, though. She recalled the disgusted looks of her high-school girlfriends when a drooling Pablo ogled them. One afternoon she caught him masturbating in the hall as an unsuspecting schoolmate, sitting on the living room’s Chesterfield in faded denim short shorts, legs tucked under her, concentrated on a list of questions for an upcoming exam. How old was he? Thirteen? Perhaps only twelve.

      Elena shook her head in denial and clicked her tongue. This made Zoila steal a glance at her that went unnoticed.

      Had her brother been bisexual? Judging by appearances alone, among the people who visited him at home there were as many gay men and lesbians as heterosexuals. But she suspected that Pablo, despite his promiscuity, had never been in love. Probably he belonged to those who, following a few days, weeks or months at the most, long for the delicious early stage of all relationships and must chase after someone new to fantasize about.

      It seemed as though he was one of the increasing number of individuals capable of comprehending the meaning of infatuation, lust, sex, perhaps even romance, but not love. Men and women who try to conceal, under a veneer of sophistication or cynicism, their inability to involve themselves spiritually beyond a certain point, who believe that the absence of commitment is the greatest expression of individual freedom. Unmarried, generally childless people who profess to love their blood relations and friends, those socially stereotypical human bonds which hardly ever demand forgiveness and understanding and self-sacrifice on a daily basis.

      Elena wondered whether she belonged to a disappearing breed that people like Pablo, if given the chance, feast on. She thought she had fallen in love, with varying intensity, on three occasions out of a total of eighteen men. She had never been casual, never gone to bed with a guy just for the hell of it, for what he could provide materially, or because she felt lonely or sad. Not once had she pushed aside feelings, a minimum of physical attraction, and yet…life had not rewarded her senti-mentalism, naïveté, foolishness, or whatever it was with the lasting, mature, intense, fulfilling relationship she had always dreamed of. Were people like Pablo the precursors to a new stage in what humans call love? Heirs to the characters so masterfully described over two centuries earlier by Pierre de Laclos in Les Liaisons Dangereuses? The kind of people the human race demands to counteract disappointment, infidelity, jealousy, the high divorce rates, the one-parent homes, and the population explosion?

      As though prodded by death, Elena continued the second serious philosophical exploration of her life. Certainly the institution of marriage, probably the oldest social stereotype, seemed to be in intensive care. She had never married, but it appeared to her that forced cohabitation and self-repression based on moral obligations did not provide the foundation for extending love beyond the initial passion experienced by almost everybody. Contrary to what the famous song argued, love and marriage don’t go together like horse and carriage. Eventually people should? could? would? establish long-lasting love affairs built on affinities and feelings, not on a signed document.

      Kuan gasped; Zoila covered her mouth with her hand; Elena returned to reality. Trujillo had found a thick manila envelope under the mattress and had extracted from it a wad of hundred– and fifty-dollar bills an inch thick.

      ‘Comrade Kuan, Comrade Zoila, would you please count this money?’ Trujillo requested.

      The witnesses stared as if they had been asked to fly to the moon.

      ‘You have a problem with that, comrades?’

      Kuan shook his head; Zoila said ‘No.’ They approached the captain, took the cash, and started counting it by the writing desk.

      The search brought no further surprises. Trujillo sat on a chair, produced from his briefcase two sheets of semi-bond paper with the DTI’s letterhead, a sheet of carbon paper, and recorded in longhand the seizure of forty-three video cassettes and twenty-nine hundred US dollars in cash found in the bedroom of Pablo Carlos Miranda Garcés. The serial numbers of fifty-four bills followed. All four present signed, Elena was given the copy, and the captain and the neighbours left. Around a minute later, as she sat on the Chesterfield holding her head in her hands, elbows on her knees, the buzzer startled her. It was Trujillo, asking whether it would be possible for Elena to be at the IML at eight the following morning to identify the body. She limited her reply to a nod and closed the door.

      Half an hour later, still angst-ridden, lying in bed on her right side with the night lamp on, Elena suddenly realized she was doing something she hadn’t done in the last thirty-one years – sucking her thumb. She pulled it out in disgust. What was the matter with her? Regressing to childhood? Totally freaked out? Next she turned the lamp off and tried to relax.

      Her unruly memory began replaying her greatest personal calamity, the one which had made her reflect philosophically for the first time about life, love, and God. Her angelic son, the most beautiful child in the whole world, in his white small coffin, eyelids closed, flowing golden locks framing his head. No! Death wouldn’t govern her thoughts any more tonight. No more wading through the saddest moments of her past, either. To divert her mind from all the problems assailing her, Elena turned the light back on. She would make espresso and read until daybreak, then call her mother.

      Captain Felix Trujillo drove the Ural back to his outfit, on Marino Street between Tulipán and Conill, got receipts from the storeroom clerk for the video cassettes and the money, returned the motorcycle, then walked back home. He lived ten blocks away from DTI headquarters, in a one-storey wooden house with a red-tile roof at 453 Falgueras Street, municipality of Cerro.

      No living soul could say for certain when the house was built, but late nineteenth century would be a good guess, just before most of the remaining dwellings on the block were erected. Over the years the twenty-foot structure had tilted to the right – by reason of the gradual sinking of the subsoil, the building inspector diagnosed – and now it leaned against a quite similar wooden house, as if tired after a century of sheltering people. This oddity, considered amusing by some passers-by, worried its residents and neighbours. Whenever СКАЧАТЬ