(CHAPTER 3 … …)
Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo
No it wasn’t.
It was JAAD.
Calling me from the quiet early morning in Spain. Six years or six-hours difference between my writer friend and me.
I heard him joking, almost happy. After decades of paralysis because of rather pedestrian politics, he had won his first literary contest. And not just any. The Hucha de Oro prize. Euros, many euros his broken street-bookseller pockets. With pinworms and lice, but with an incandescent brain. Indecent.
JAAD singing boleros into the receiver. It was a remix with themes of Habana Abierta: we were friends of Orlando, what a riot, an incredible riot …
He quoted full sentences of his winning story. The beginning was apparently the greatest: It had an ass of sixty and some tits of twenty, but wasn’t even fifteen…
JAAD would be free now. Finally.
Lack of money was drowned him as a child. He himself was a ruined character of JAAD. Or of Pedro Juan Gutiérrez. Or of Charles Bukowsky. Or of Lino Novas Calvo. Or of Roberto Arlt. A tragic guy. Always dying between suicide and semen and the upcoming toothache.
JAAD hung uo between his own applause and my congratulations.
I loved that man, but it was already too late for anything. For everyone.
Fuck you in your Europe of successes and Japanese whores touring with flashes in the museums of Valencia without leaving the whole of adolescence. Have zen sex in the lotus position under their hentai vulvitas. Vomit within the vaginas of the First World all your subnational hatred. Fuck with your cock the good news that soon you will not know how to write, nor to sing with your ding dong, balls. Rest in pus.
JAAD, the family idiot. JAAD, the pornographic genius of my generation. Coito ergo sum. Everything you touched turned to horror. The Hucha of Horror.
I wish you know a kitsch story of Kim Ki Duk. I wish you a rhizomatic death. I wish you all that the future molecularly holds for you.
Goodbye, JAAD.
I spent a lot of time listening to the static of the hung up telephone in Havana, first and only free territory of America.
Outside could be heard the early morning horns on Porvenir Avenue. Occasionally a train on the Crucero de Luyanó. From time to time a boat adrift on the oil in the port.
I wrapped the coiled wire around my neck.
Only then I hung up.
