Havana Blue Read Online Free PDF Page B

Count tried to think of Josefina’s lunch, of tonight’s baseball game, of
the damage he was self-inflicting by smoking so many cigs a day. He wanted to see off the mixture of melancholy and excitement overcoming him as the car approached Tamara’s house.
    â€œHey, Conde, you still on holiday? What do you reckon?” asked Manolo as they sped past the National Theatre.
    â€œI think more or less the same as you, that’s why I said nothing. I’m sure he’s not hiding or going to attempt an illegal exit,” he replied and took another look at the photo.
    â€œWhy do you think so? Because of his position?”
    â€œYes, right. Just imagine him travelling abroad ten times a year . . . But particularly because I’ve known him for twenty years.”
    Manolo missed a gear, and the car almost stalled on him. He accelerated and managed to judder along. He smiled, nodded and looked at his colleague.
    â€œDon’t tell me he’s a friend of yours.”
    â€œI didn’t say that. I said I knew him.”
    â€œTwenty years back?”
    â€œSeventeen, to be precise. I first heard him speechifying in 1972 at high school in La Víbora. He was president of my student federation.”
    â€œAnd what else?”
    â€œYou know, Manolo, I don’t want to prejudice you. The fact is he always made me feel sick to my back teeth, but that’s irrelevant now. He should just put in a quick reappearance so I can go to bed.”
    â€œYou really think it’s not relevant?”
    â€œGet a move on, catch the green light,” he countered, pointing to the traffic light onto Boyeros and the El Cerro highway.
    The Count lit another cigarette, coughed a couple of times and put Rafael Morín’s photo back in his file.
The memory of Tamara telling them of her forthcoming marriage to Rafael had resurrected itself violently and unexpectedly. He could now see the three white stripes on her tunic, her stockings rolled down round her ankles and hair cut in a symmetrical oval. After they’d left high school they’d seen each other barely four or five times, and each time the mere sight of her and her female sensual allure made his skin tingle. They were progressing along the Santa Catalina highway, but the Count wasn’t looking at the houses where some of his old school friends lived or the welltrimmed gardens or tranquillity in that eternally tranquil barrio where he’d partied so often with Skinny and Rabbit. He was thinking of another party, Tamara and Aymaras’ fifteenth birthday party, almost at the start of the second year at high school, on the second of November, his memory recalled to the day, and the big impression made on him by the house where the girls lived. The garden was like a well kept English park: there was room for tables under the trees, on the lawn and next to the fountain where an old statue of an angel, rescued from some collapsing colonial establishment, pissed on lilies in full bloom. There was even a space where the Gnomes could play, the best, most famous, most expensive of the combos in La Víbora, and more than a hundred couples danced; there were bouquets for every girl and trays of meat croquettes, meat pies and fried cheese balls that were unimaginable in those years of perpetual queues. The twins’ parents, ambassadors in London at the time and previously in Brussels and Prague and later Madrid, knew how to throw a party. And Skinny, Rabbit, Andrés and himself were sure they’d never been to a better one. A bottle of rum to each table! “It’s like a party in another country,” pronounced Rabbit, and they
all agreed. Then he thought how even the great, great Gatsby would have enjoyed that gala do. In conquistador mode, Rafael Morín spent the whole night dancing with Tamara, and the Count could still remember the twins’ white lace dresses flying though the air to the inevitable “Blue