All the Lights Read Online Free

Three or four years? I can’t remember exactly. Before you start puzzling or look all the way to the bottom, where I’ve written ‘With best wishes, Wolfgang’, I can’t help laughing now because I’ve only just started writing.
     
    He put one finger on the line he was reading and smoothed the paper with the other hand. Wolfgang. He only knew one Wolfgang, his old schoolfriend Wolfgang, who he’d grown up with round here. What on earth was Wolfgang doing in Cuba? He’d been out of work, just like him, he’d been waiting, just like him. Two years ago or so Wolfgang had called him from Berlin, said he had better chances of finding work there.
    You’ll be wondering what I’m doing in Cuba. It’s all muddled up in my head, because I’m on my way to South America. Brazil. Remember how we used to dream of Brazil? Pelé, the great Pelé. The white Sugarloaf Mountain and the girls on the beach, remember that? We were ten back then, the 1970 World Cup. That was in Mexico. Brazil versus Italy in the final. We watched it at my uncle’s bar. And the semi-final too, West Germany versus Italy. That was a great game, 4–3 for Italy, I remember it really clearly because my uncle threw a bottle of spirits at the screen after extra time. Rudi had a bet on that Germany would be world champions. You do remember my Uncle Rudi, don’t you? That little bar down by the park. Is the building still there? What’s in there now? Uncle Rudi sold his bar in summer ’89 and went to the West. But you probably know that yourself anyway.
So you still live in our part of town, that’s good, someone has to keep the flag flying, even when times are hard.
Frank, I’ve got rich. No, don’t worry, I haven’t robbed a bank like I joked about once, years ago. I don’t think I could have done it, just walked into a bank and pulled out some gun. Even if I’d been out of work to the end of my days, I’d have tried to get through it with decency.
Frank, I’m almost a bit embarrassed to write to you from Cuba that I’ve got rich. I heard things aren’t going all that well for you, and you’re still my oldest and best friend, even though we haven’t seen each other for so long, and I hope my letter gives you strength and courage. One of the old guard has made it!
But you know I’ve always been a bit boastful, so I have to backtrack a bit. I haven’t got really rich of course, but it’s more money than I’ve ever had in my life. If I invest it well and spend it a bit carefully I’ll probably be able to live off it a few years, but you know me, I’ve never been that good with money and I’ll probably never learn to be, even though I’m trying not to spend it like water. But I want to see a little piece of the world and tell you about it. I’m forty-six now, like you, but I don’t want to start on about how time passes, because you know that just as well as I do. I’m just drinking thirty-year-old rum, do you remember, thirty years ago, maybe a bit longer even, we got really drunk for the first time. We puked our guts out in Uncle Rudi’s bar, but I still like thinking about that night, and I am right now, as I’m drinking this wonderful rum, it’s really dark in the glass, almost black. I’m sitting on the balcony, in a small hotel right on the sea. A beach I’ve never seen the likes of, all white, and the sea’s green and then further out it goes blue again. Turquoise – I’d only seen it in photos. And I want to write about the evening sun, which is so huge, but I can’t help thinking of us sitting at Uncle Rudi’s bar and drinking that cheap blended rum and imagining we were in Rio de Janeiro drinking the very finest rum with fresh mint in it, with the sea and Sugarloaf Mountain outside, and coffee-coloured Brazilian beauties dancing tango on the beach. Tango in Brazil. And we were happy somehow when we daydreamed like that, even though we usually puked really badly afterwards. Yesterday I was in a bar in Havana where