“Yes. But without so many smells In it.”
“This frozen daiquiri, so well beaten as it is, looks like the sea where the wave falls away from the bow of a ship when she is doing thirty knots. How do you think frozen daiquiris would be if they were phosphorescent?”
“You could put phosphorus in them. But I don’t think it would be healthy. Sometimes people in Cuba commit suicide by eating phosphorus from the heads of matches.”
“And drinking tinte rápido. What is rapid ink?”
“It is a dye to make shoes black. But most often girls who have been crossed in love or when their fiancés have not kept their promises and done the things to them and then gone away without marrying, commit suicide by pouring alcohol on themselves and setting themselves on fire. That is the classic way.”
“I know,” Thomas Hudson said. “Auto da fé.”
“It’s very certain,” Honest Lil said, “They nearly always die. The burns are on the head first and usually all over the body. Rapid ink is more of a gesture. Iodine is au fond a gesture, too.”
“What are you two ghouls talking about?” Serafín the barman asked.
“Suicides.”
“Hay mucho,” Serafín said “Especially among the poor, I don’t remember a rich Cuban committing suicide Do you?”
“Yes,” Honest Lil said. “I know of several cases—good people, too.”
“You would,” Serafín said,
“Señor Tomás, do you want something to eat with those drinks? ¿Un poco de pescado? ¿Puerco frito? Any cold meats?”
“Sí,” Thomas Hudson said. “Whatever there is.”
Serafín put a plate of bits of pork, fried brown and crisped, and a plate of red snapper fried in batter so that it wore a yellow crust over the pink-red skin and the white sweet fish inside. He was a tall boy, naturally rough spoken, and he walked roughly from the wooden shoes he wore against the wet and the spillage behind the bar.
“Do you want cold meats?”
“No. This is enough.”
“Take anything they will give you, Tom,” Honest Lil said. “You know this place.”
The bar had a reputation for never buying a drink. But actually it gave an uncounted number of plates of hot free lunch each day; not only the fried fish and pork, but plates of little hot meat fritters and sandwiches of French-fried bread with toasted cheese and ham. The bartenders also mixed the daiquiris in a huge shaker and there was always at least a drink and a half left in the shaker after the drinks were poured.
“Are you less sad now?” Honest Lil asked
“Yes.”
“Tell me, Tom. What are you sad about?”
“El mundo entero.”
“Who isn’t sad about the whole world? It goes worse all the time. But you can’t spend your time being sad about that.”
“There isn’t any law against it.”
“There doesn’t have to be a law against things for them to be wrong.”
Ethical discussions with Honest Lil are not what I need, Thomas Hudson thought. What do you need, you bastard? You needed to get drunk which you are probably doing even though it does not seem so to you. There is no way for you to get what you need and you will never have what you want again. But there are various palliative measures you should take. Go ahead. Take one.
“Voy a tomar otro de estos grandes sin azúcar,” he said to Serafín.
“En seguida, Don Tomás,” Serafín said. “Are you going to try to beat the record?”
“No. I’m just drinking with calmness.”
“You were drinking with calmness when you set the record,” Serafín said. “With calmness and fortitude from morning until night. And you walked out on your own feet.”
“The hell with the record.”
“You’ve got a chance to break it,” Serafín told him. “Drinking as you are now and eating a little as you go along, you have an excellent chance.”
“Tom, try to break the record,” Honest Lil said. “I’m here as a witness.”
“He doesn’t need any witness,” Serafín said. “I’m the witness. When I go off I’ll give the count to Constante. You’re further along right now than you were the day you set the record.”