Havana Gold by Leonardo Padura

experienced it more than once. His mixture of pigheadedness and pessimism, of nonconformity and pugnacious intellect were components of a mind that was too strange and effective to be a policeman’s. But the sergeant admired him, as he’d never admired anyone else, for he knew that working with the Count was at once a party and a privilege.
    â€œSee you, Conde,” he said before making a U-turn in the middle of the main street.
    The Count looked at his watch: it was almost four and Karina would never ring him before six. Will she
call? He wondered as he walked into the wind, not even bothering to take a quick look at what was showing at the cinema it had taken ten years to refurbish. Although his body was desperate to be horizontal in bed, the speed at which ideas were spinning round his head would defeat any attempt to shorten his wait with the oblivion of sleep. Anyway that solitary stroll through the barrio was a pleasure the Count allowed himself from time to time: his grandparents, father, uncles and aunts and he himself had been born in that exact location and wandering down that high street – that had carpeted the ancient path along which came the best fruit from the groves in the south – was to go on a pilgrimage into himself, to boundaries that now belonged to memories he had acquired from his family elders. From the time the Count was born to that moment that route had changed more than in the previous two hundred years – when the first Canary Islanders founded a couple of villages beyond the barrio and began to trade in fruit and vegetables, later to be joined by a few dozen Chinese. A dust track and a few wood-and-tile houses on the outer limit gradually brought those remote ends of the earth to the hubbub of the capital and, in the era when the Count was born, the barrio was part of the city, and was filled with bars, liquor shops, a billiards club, ironmongers, chemists and a modern, efficient bus station, set up to make it possible for the barrio to participate in city life. Nights started to
become long, busy and lit up, with a poverty-stricken, laid-back cheerfulness the Conde could only remember. As he walked into the wind on his way home, letting the gusts sweep away these idle reflections, Conde felt once more the sentimental communion tying him to that dirty, badly painted street where many things that had featured in his ragbag memories had long disappeared: Albino’s fry-up stall, next to the school where he studied for several years; the bakery, where he went every afternoon to buy large warm loaves; the Castillito bar and its juke-box voices that found drunks to sing along with; Porfirio’s liquor shop; the bus-drivers’ union; Chilo and Pedro’s barbers’ shop, destroyed by the only really fierce fire in the barrio’s history; the dance hall, turned into a school, where one day in 1949 a couple of adolescents found mysterious emotional bliss after only just learning of each other’s existence, becoming his parents a few years later; and the notable absence of the cockpit where his grandfather Rufino the Count forged his dreams of greatness, now a barren waste without a single trace of those big cages, the smell of feathers, the fighting arenas and even the prehistoric shapes of the tamarinds which he’d learned to climb under his grandfather’s expert gaze. Despite his sadness at the gaps, and his nostalgia for what was gone for ever, that was the space where he’d grown up and learned the first laws of a twentieth-century jungle as raw in its dictates
as the rules of a Stone Age tribe: he had learned the supreme code of masculinity that stipulated that men were men, something you had no need to trumpet, only to demonstrate whenever the opportunity arose. And as the Count had had to demonstrate several times in that barrio, he wasn’t worried about having to do so once more. The image of Fabricio unleashed a rage he couldn’t