Havana Red by Leonardo Padura Page B

served. When she’d passed the cups around, she left the tray on the table and flitted back into the inner recesses of the house.
    â€œMay I smoke?”
    â€œYes, of course. Would you like a cigar? I have some excellent Montecristos.”
    The Count thought about it: no, he shouldn’t, but he dared. “What the hell,” he told himself.
    â€œI’d be glad to accept one, to smoke later.”
    â€œYes, of course,” answered his host, and from the lower drawer of the table in the centre of the room he
offered the Count a cedar-wood box where a dozen Montecristos lay in perfect formation, finely scented and pale-hued.
    â€œThanks,” the Count reiterated, and put the cigar in his shirt pocket.
    â€œWell, Lieutenant, what can I do for you?”
    Only then did the Count become aware that he had nothing to say or had forgotten what he’d intended to say: he’d been dazzled by so much glitter and couldn’t clearly see the route he should follow. He had returned simply to comply with police routines in that perfectly ordered house, with its gleaming guayaberas and bald pates, black maids with wings on their ankles and ashtrays from Granada without a speck of dust, which seemed quite unrelated to the eschatological story of a queer who’d been strangled with two coins up his backside, after exhibiting himself through the city streets in a theatrical garment which would end up stained by major and minor effluvia – as Alberto Marqués might have said.
    â€œHow’s your wife?” he asked, looking for a way to broach the matter.
    Faustino nodded repeatedly.
    â€œIn very bad shape. Yesterday, when we got back from the funeral, Dr Pérez Flores, well, I’ll tell you his name because everybody knows who Jorge is, prescribed sedatives and tension-reducers. She’s asleep now. The poor woman can’t accept it. But I knew one day that boy would give us a big upset, and now look what’s happened.” He paused, and the Count decided not to interrupt. “Who knows what business he’d been mixed up in? From adolescence Alexis has been a constant headache. Not only because of his . . . problem, but because of his character. Sometimes, I’ve even thought he hated both me and his mother, and he was
particularly despotic with her. He always blamed us for the fact that we spent so much time outside Cuba and that he had to stay here with María Antonia and my mother-in-law. He refused to understand that my work forced me down that path. He couldn’t come with us, where would he have studied? Six months in London, three in Brussels, a year in New York, then back to Cuba . . . Can you imagine? I’d have preferred to give him a more stable life, for us to have brought him up here, and I can tell you I’d have kept him like that, under my thumb, but my work has always assigned me very important duties and my wife and I always made sure he had all he needed: the house, his grandmother, and María Antonia, who loved him as if she were his real mother, school, the home comforts he wanted . . . everything. If this seems like a punishment . . . I’ll confess something, so you see where I’m coming from: my son and I never got on. I think I was really to blame, I never made concessions to him, though to begin with I did speak to him and try to help. Now I think mine was the worst approach possible. And look what has happened, how it’s all turned out. I feel guilty, I don’t deny that, but he also behaved very badly towards me and his mother, right from adolescence. And afterwards, when he befriended that scoundrel, the Alberto Marqués guy, it was impossible to see eye to eye. That man brainwashed him, injected his head with poison, changed him for ever in every way: it isn’t that he started to write or waste paper trying to be a painter. No, it was worse than that. It was his moral, even political behaviour, and I