Havana Red hq-1

by Leonardo Padura

  “Would you like a cup of tea? I can give it to you ice cold, ice cubes included…”

  “Yes, I think I could do with that,” the Count nodded, and the Marquess disappeared down a corridor at the back of the peculiar stage set arranged in that dark room. Now, as he watched him walk, the policeman noticed that the dramatist had the unlikely springy step of a young lad tiptoeing at an impressive rate, like a rabbit or crane in a hurry. He doesn’t seem that old, thought the Count, but his mind wandered off to the interview awaiting Sergeant Palacios that afternoon. What the hell were they after? A slight but disconcerting feeling of fear lodged in his stomach. Experience screamed at him that an incisive investigation would light on annoying evidence, delicate truths, improbable but definitive clues, and that was why he’d begun to wonder what the hell they were after, while he’d opted to return to the Marquess’s house, driven by a need to find out more: he must log Alexis’s belongings, search for pointers. Meanwhile, Manolo had to carry on research at the Centre for Cultural Heritage on the transvestite and his pathetic friend Salvador K., and look for the Bible the painter had mentioned. But what the hell are they after? he wondered again as the Marquess tiptoed back like a young crane, a cup in each hand. He gave one to the Count and returned to his armchair.

  “Should I open the window?”

  “If it’s no bother…”

  The dramatist put his cup on the floor and opened the window behind him. All the very high windows in the room had grills, and the Count was curious to discover how the rented lovers Miki had mentioned went about taking the house by assault. As the Marquess sat back in his chair, the Count understood how it had all been prepared afresh: the sun, perfectly arranged, only allowed him sight of the man’s silhouette. He was expecting me, he thought.

  “Well, don’t prolong the torture… Are you on to something?” And he blinked insistently.

  “Very little, in fact… But this case has its curious features. Alexis was strangled but didn’t put up a fight.”

  “For God’s sake,” the old dramatist exclaimed softly, touching his neck as if to beat off a strangler’s approaching hands.

  “And after he was dead, the assassin stuck two coins up his anus.”

  “Ay, ay, ay,” repeated the dramatist, closing his legs as if to avoid possible monetary penetration.

  “Have you ever heard of anything like it?”

  “No, never… It’s like something out of a mafia film.”

  “Yes, you could say that… The other thing I did was to read a bit of the book you lent me and I learned several things about transvestites.”

  “Of interest, I hope?”

  “Yes, but a touch too conceptual. Is it really true transvestites go in for all this philosophy of mimetics and erasure?”

  In spite of the intense background glare, the Count thought he saw the Marquess smile.

  No other city in the world – not even Havana – can offer the miraculous harmonies of Paris. In Paris evening and night fuse in a tentative symphony, dawn seems a necessary consequence, shy yet inevitable, and if the spirit of man can penetrate by osmosis the sensibility in the breeze, stones, smells and colours of Paris, life in the city can be a gift from the gods: and that’s how I felt, that spring.

  Washed and perfumed, we got into the taxi and my hands sweated profusely on the drive, as my eyes twice saw the illuminated shape of the Eiffel Tower, the edifice of the Opera, the cheerfully lit Cafe de la Paix, until we turned down narrow, cobble-stoned side streets – cobbles that had become famous the previous year, when love, intelligence and ideology spawned revolutionary copulations behind barricades made from the very same cobbles – the sinuous streets of the Quartier Latin, and we stopped in front of a neon-lit joint advertising LES FEMMES, a gateway to a dive we anxiously desired. Muscles paid and said something to the taxi-driver – a Moroccan, who handed him a small envelope – while the Other Boy and I contemplated the shabbiness of the place; then the padded door creaked noisily open to give us our first vision of the cabaret: a blue glow.

  Muscles came over to us and for the first time that spring on my last visit to Paris I saw his round peasant face, still slightly uncouth, beam with happiness. A few days earlier, when I’d arrived in Paris, he’d told me about the end of his relationship with Julien, the young anthropologist he’d lived with over the last two years on a permanent honeymoon – as Muscles reported it, a man at other times so exquisite in his poetic images – and who’d humiliated him by leaving him for a woman: no more, no less than a Russian dancer – and corps de ballet, not even a soloist – who’d defected from the Bolshoi. As ideology had interfered in matters of love, I commented and queried: “Did the dancer carry the plague in her armpits and have a shotputter’s face like most of our Soviet sisters?” Women, what filth, we chorused, and Muscles could only laugh… But now, near that blue, yellow-lettered cabaret, Muscles seemed to rediscover his desire to live.

  “Come on,” he said, and took us by the arm (my left, the Other Boy’s right), and dragged us into the blue glow… Light shone from the floor and drew volutes of smoke, over-sweet even for Virginian cigarettes, which mixed its hypnotic emanations with the waft of acrid sweat and the heavy perfume of Arab essences that are sold wholesale in Paris’s apocryphal Persian markets. Their ears, in the meantime, were hit by the wild rhythms unleashed by the voice of Miriam Makeba (a Third World invasion), projected from a cubbyhole built in the wall. I felt strangely afraid to find myself at the vortex of that attack on all the senses, but Muscles and the Other seemed to have entered familiar territory where they moved completely naturally. Then I started to see fake Valkyries performing their ancient function as pourers of beer. They seemed to float on the blue, like phosphorescent, newly hatched chrysalises, parading the starched organdy and anorexic pleated skirts they modelled as the last word in retro chic. Each Valkyrie carried a tray of glasses in one hand and yellow (yellow?) flowers in the other. I was looking at those hands, too large even for a Valkyrie, even for such a genuinely Scandinavian item, when one exemplar brushed her tunic’s abrasive edge against me and I felt I’d been touched by a prehistoric insect.

  I was bewildered and grateful that Muscles pushed me towards a table, where the Other Boy was already seated, drinking an amber liquid I soon discovered wasn’t beer. How did he manage it, that innate ability of his always to get there first? Then the disc jockey switched from Makeba to Doris Day and I discovered that, like any good cabaret, Les Femmes had a stage where seven perfect – if not more than perfect – versions of Doris Day had settled – they must have settled – singing along to the recording to the delight of an enraptured audience, where I began to see men and women whose affiliations I doubted: too many opulent, peroxide blondes in best Marilyn Monroe style, dark-skinned beauties from post-war Italian cinema, black women with large, acromegalic hands and metallic robo-comic lips which regaled their colleagues around the table with kisses as intense and syncopated as Doris Day’s ballad.

  I was still nonplussed when Muscles invited me to go to the bathroom and waved the envelope the taxi-driver gave him. He knew I wouldn’t go, and so didn’t insist, but the Other Boy did go… It isn’t that I was a puritan. On the contrary, I must have been pretty daring in my life, I’ve tried everything, but my instinctive lucidity has always proved more useful, and that day, it was certainly having a party out there, expectant, wanting to digest everything my eyes could take in. And thanks to that lucidity I realized I’d come upon a giant happening, all transmutation and masks, that was less famous but more real and intense than a Venetian carnival. The idea of the chrysalis and the feeling that a huge insect had brushed against me held the key to what I was living and seeing: a party for insects. I remember thinking, among those transvestites, the movement’s cutting-edge pioneers, that man can create, paint, invent or re-create colours and forms he finds around himself and impose them on material, what is beyond his body, but is unable or powerless when it comes to modifying his own organism. Onl
y a transvestite can transform it radically and, like a butterfly, paint himself, make his body the subject for his master work, convert his sexual emanations into colour, through the bewildering arabesques and incandescent hues of physical adornment. It is a vital plastic surgery of the self, though those infinitely repeated replicas – seven Doris Days, four Marilyn Monroes, three Anna Magnanis in twenty square yards – could not avoid, at best, a coldly nostalgic perfection. What was most disturbing was to understand that this was the apotheosis self-conscious theatre people have dreamed about from the days of Pericles: the mask become character, the character carved out of an actor’s physique and soul, life as visceral performance of the dreamt… It was like an epiphany which had been waiting, crouched in that dirty corner of Paris, and in a few minutes I’d planned and staged the solution I’d been looking for my version of Electra Garrigo… What I could never imagine was that my genial idea would be the beginning of my last act as a theatre director. The end as a beginning without means…

  Then, when I went to tell Muscles about my illumination, I found he and the Other Boy had disappeared with one of those perverted insects. A delightful touch came the day after when they accused me of vanishing on the arm of a Sara Montiel. Anyway, I told Muscles what I’d felt there, and the ungrateful creature didn’t give me any credit for it in his book on transvestites, and I still think I could put between quotation marks whole paragraphs I dictated on the occasion. .. And certainly, as I didn’t have enough money, I had to walk home, but I’d never have gone with a Sarita Montiel, because the fact is, I never could stand la Saritisima.

  “This is by Salvador K., isn’t it?”

  “Yes, that’s his signature, SK. Such bad taste… Looks like a kind of medicine, don’t you think?”

  “Or beer.”

  The Marquess had taken him into Alexis Arayan’s bedroom, which turned out to be the old servants’ quarters. It had its own small, separate bathroom, and you could reach the room without entering the main house. Everything appeared meticulously ordered, as if its owner had arranged it with particular care before departing two days ago: shelves tidy, pictures dusted, clothing clean and hanging up in the small wardrobe, two pairs of underpants dry on the bathroom window, ashtrays without cigarette ends. The Count concentrated on the books, letting an envious finger run across various sizes and textures of spine where several appealing titles caught his eye.

  “Did Alexis smoke?”

  “No, he loathed tobacco. Particularly cigars.”

  “What do you make of this drawing by Salvador K.?”

  The drawing, framed and behind glass, represented a kind of woman’s head beneath a parasol. The angles were sharp, the colours aggressive.

  “He’s employing an ancient technique of wetting paper and making human figures like that. It’s like an etching on paper, or kind of collage, although he boasted that he’d discovered the warm water technique. And that drawing is a piece of shit, to put it Cubanly, as Muscles would say. The expressionists and cubists did this kind of portrait sixty years ago, when it really meant something, but now.. .”

  “And are you sure they had a relationship?”

  Now the Count could see the Marquess was smiling.

  “The walls of this room are paper-thin. If you like, go out, and I’ll whimper, and you tell me…”

  “That won’t be necessary…” The Count tried to frighten off the image of what the Marquess was suggesting. “Alexis kept this all very clean…”

  “He was scrupulous, as I was saying. And even worse, he tried to convert me, but always failed. Besides, Maria Antonia used to come here once a week, a woman who works as a maid in his parents’ house, and she helped him wash and clean, and sometimes prepared us meals for several days at a time. Do you know what? She’d steal tasty morsels from Alexis’s house and bring them here: some Spanish chorizo, smoked salmon, a couple of lobster claws, the things one can only imagine or find in the dollar-stores, you get me?”

  “What else can you tell me about Maria Antonia? She’s a woman with a certain…”

  The Marquess’s fingers tried in vain to comb the remnants of his hair.

  “You must forgive me, but yesterday I lied… It was Maria Antonia who called to tell me about Alexis. Please forgive me? She also warned me you’d be paying a visit.”

  The Count preferred to skip over any kind of reproach.

  “What did Alexis tell you about Maria Antonia and his family?”

  The Marquess sat on the edge of the perfectly made bed and smoothed the folds of his Chinese dressing gown over his legs.

  “Ever since his grandmother died, he’d been thinking of leaving. Alexis really loved her a lot, because she and Maria Antonia brought him up… And what I’m about to tell you may seem incredible, but it’s a hundred per cent true: you know Alexis was a specialist in Italian Pre-Renaissance art? Well, Maria Antonia knows as much as he did. That’s right. Alexis studied with her, lent her his books, and taught her what he was learning. If you are interested, talk to her some time about Italian Madonnas and especially Giotto, and expect a weighty dissertation… The person Alexis really couldn’t stand was his father, for a thousand reasons, but I think in particular because once, when he was some seven years old, he almost drowned on the beach, and someone else rescued him from the sea, because his father was drunk. And Alexis never forgave him and even said his father had left him to drown… I don’t know which damn Greek gave a name to that complex… Besides, his father hated him because he was, well, queer. Whenever he could, he made it clear he hated him… Just imagine, it was the worst disgrace imaginable for such a respectable man… But God must have shamed him as a punishment. You know what I mean: men who have sons who are going to turn out like them, strong, fond of skirt, tyrannical, and suddenly he turns out homosexual. But Alexis suffered a lot, suffered every way possible, and if they hadn’t killed him, I’d have said he’d committed suicide.”

  “Did Alexis talk to you about suicide?”

  The Marquess stood up and pointed at one of the bookshelves.

  “Look for yourself: Mishima, Zweig, Hemingway, my poor friend Calvert Casey, Pavese… He was fascinated by suicides and those who committed suicide, a morbid fascination, to be sure. He kept saying everything in his life was a mistake: his sex, his intellect, his family, the times he lived in, and he would say that if one was conscious of such mistakes, suicide might be the solution: that way perhaps he would have a second opportunity. I think this mysticism was one of the things that turned him into a Catholic.”

  “Did he go to church?”

  “Yes, a lot.”

  “What about yourself?” asked the Count, led on by his spirit of curiosity.

  “Me?” smiled the Marquess, blinking. “Can you imagine me praying on a hassock?… No, you must be kidding. I’m too perverse to get on with those gentlemen… Though I prefer them to you lot…”

  The Count observed the Marquess’s duly perverse smile, and decided to cultivate it, because in some way the invitation was there. He checked his parachute and launched himself into the Sea of Sarcasm.

  “Do you hate the police?”

  The Marquess’s laugh was genuine and unexpected. His parchment body suddenly seemed a smooth kite ready to fly out of the nearest window, launched by the guffaws now convulsing it.

  “No, in no way. You guys aren’t the worst. Look, police do police work, they interrogate and imprison people, and even do it well, if the truth be told. It’s a cruel, repressive vocation, for which certain aptitudes are necessary, do forgive me. Like, for example, being ready to beat someone else into submission, or destroy their personality through fear and threats… But they are socially and sadly necessary.”

  “So who then?”

  “The real bastards are the others: the self-appointed police, volunteer commissars, improvised persecutors, unpaid informers, amateur judges, all those who think they own the life, destiny and even the moral, cultural and historical purity of a country… They
were the people who tried to finish off people like me, or poor Virgilio, and they succeeded, you know. Remember how in the last ten years of his life Virgilio never saw a single book of his published, nor a play performed, nor a study on his work published in any of those six magical provinces which suddenly became fourteen with a special municipality. And I was transformed into a ghost guilty because of my talent, my work, my tastes and my words. I was one huge malign tumour that had to be extirpated for the social, economic and political good of this beautiful, pre-eminent island. You see what I mean? And as it was so easy to parameterize me: whenever they measured me, whatever the angle, the result always came out the same: he’s no use, no use, no use…”

  The Count recalled yet again the meeting in his headteacher’s office at school, when they were informed that La Viborena was an inappropriate, inopportune and unacceptable magazine and they had to recant ideologically and literary-wise.

  “How did you find all that out?” he decided to ask, with a degree of historicist sadism, opening himself up to a flurry of darts poisoned with ironic resentment.

  “I’ve worked at it and for a few years even enjoyed telling the story. And now it barely hurts, you know? But before… And why are you so interested in all this?”

  “Curiosity pure and simple,” suggested the Count, unable to admit his real reasons. “I’d like to hear your version, right?”

  “Well, I’ll tell you. They’d already suspended the works we were performing that had been advertised while I was rehearsing Electra Garrigo, when they called us to a meeting in the theatre one day. Everybody went, except me. I wasn’t prepared to go and listen to what I knew I’d have to listen to. But afterwards they told me how they got the people together in the entrance hall and called them in, one at a time, like at the dentist’s. You know what it’s like waiting for three or four hours in a dentist’s waiting room, hearing the drill and the cries of the people going in? Inside they’d put a table on the stage, where there was still part of the set for Yerma, with its mournful atmosphere, draped in black… There were four of them, a kind of inquisitional tribunal, and they’d put one of those enormous tape recorders on the table and told people how they’d sinned and asked them if they were ready to change their attitudes in the future, if they’d agree to engage in a process of rehabilitation, to work in places where they’d be sent. And almost everyone admitted to sinning, even added sins their accusers hadn’t mentioned, and bowed to the need for that purifying purge to cleanse their past and spirit of pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-critical tendencies… And I understood them, I really did, because many thought it was right such accusations were made and even felt guilty for not doing the things that they were told they ought to have done, and became the most vicious critics.. . of themselves. They called a kind of mass meeting afterwards: the protagonists were still behind the table on the stage with the people in the stalls. All the lights were on… You ever been to a theatre with the lights on? Have you seen how it loses all its magic and the whole world of artifice seems fake and meaningless? Then they talked about me, as the main person responsible for the theatre’s aesthetic policy. The first accusation made was that I was a homosexual who flaunted his condition, and they added that in their view homosexuality had a clearly anti-social, pathological character and that the accords negotiated to reject such manifestations of milksop softness or its propagation in a society like ours should be even more draconian. They were in a position to prevent ‘artistic quality’ (people insisted the guy talking opened and closed the quotation marks, as he smiled) being used as an excuse to circulate certain ideas and fashions which were corrupting our selfless youth. (It has to be said that the guy doing all the talking was a mediocrity who’d tried to make it as an actor but was never more than a poseur, and his reputation was down to the fact his was tiny and he was nicknamed Titch.) Nor would well-known homosexuals like me be allowed to influence the training of our youth, and for that reason they would assess (he said ‘carefully’, this time the quotation marks are mine) the involvement of homosexuals in cultural bodies, and relocate all those banned from having contact with the young, and they wouldn’t be allowed to leave the country in delegations representing Cuban art, because we were not and never could be true representatives of Cuban art.”