Havana Red hq-1

by Leonardo Padura

  The policeman followed in the footsteps of the Marquess, a route he marked out across the old avenue, flanked by oleanders getting more battered by the day, and by the queues which swelled and lengthened at each bus stop. The surviving street-lights lit up the dirty terrain which, for the first time, the Count began to imagine as a boulevard.

  “Did you know this road is a tropical replica of the Ramblas in Barcelona? They both peter out in the sea, have almost the same buildings on either side, although the birds they sell in cages in Barcelona once flew free and wild here. The last delight this place lost was its long-beaked toti birds that came and slept in the trees. You remember them? I used to enjoy watching their evening flights in bigger and bigger flocks as they got nearer to Prado. I never found out why those black birds chose to sleep in these trees in the centre of Havana every night. It was magic seeing them fly, like black gusts of wind, weren’t they? And they disappeared because of an act of witchcraft. Where can those poor totis be now? I once heard the sparrows blamed for their departure, but the fact is neither’s around now. Were they kicked out or did they go voluntarily?”

  “I don’t know, but I can ask if you like.”

  “Well, ask then, because any day now you’ll wake up and the bronze lions will have gone too… It’s pitiful, this place, isn’t it? But it still retains some of its magic, as if it had an invincible poetic spirit, right? Look, though the ruins keep spreading and grime’s winning, this city still has soul, Mr Count, and not many cities in the world can boast they have soul, bubbling on the surface… My friend the poet Eligio Riego says that’s why there’s such a flowering of poetry here, although I don’t think the country deserves it: it’s much too frivolous and sun-loving…”

  The Count nodded silently. He wanted to sidestep that metaphysical turn in the conversation and drift back to levels of concrete reality.

  “Well then, what are we doing?”

  “Well,” the Marquess readjusted his blond wig and said: “Didn’t you want a close-up of the nocturnal habits of Havana gays?”

  “I don’t know… I wanted to get a sense of the scene…”

  The Marquess looked in front, just after they’d walked by a group of youths who’d brazenly eyed them over. “Well, you’ve just seen a bit

  … And what you want to see and know isn’t that pleasant, I warn you. It’s sordid, alarming, stark and almost always tragic, because it’s the result of loneliness, eternal repression, mocking, hostility, contempt, even of monoculture and under-development. Do you understand?”

  “I understand, but I still want to take a look,” the Count insisted, covering the nostrils of consciousness as a prelude to jumping into that dark, bottomless pit of invert sex.

  “Well, let’s take a stroll and then go to a little party at Alquimio’s place, a mate of mine and an alchemist by any other name. .. There’ll be people there who knew Alexis, though I did my detective enquiries and he’d not been there for more than a week. You know, I’m beginning to like being a bit of a policeman…”

  Casting off his wig, as if it were plebeian headgear, the Marquess declared: “This man’s a noble, like me, though he’s only a Count. Sit here, Mr Count,” and almost pushed him, so the policeman’s bum fell hard on to a cushion on the floor, while his material and spiritual guide yielded himself up to multiple embraces, wet kisses on the cheeks, which the dramatist soaked up, laughing coquettishly, like an insatiably greedy pagan god fond of being worshipped. The reception room in that big house had large balconies open to the mysteries of the night and a high ceiling peopled with friezes, angels blinded by fossilized dust and cornucopias born from the forgotten fruits of the earth, and almost thirty people were gathered there, bent on offering the tribute which the presence of Alberto Marques apparently deserved, next to whom a Havana chorus had formed, no doubt keen to hear the grisly details of the red death of Alexis Arayan. God, how horrible, exclaimed a girl who had stayed on the periphery, whose thighs the Count inspected from his favourably lower position – he was the only one sitting down – watering at the mouth, thighs visible to within a quarter of an inch of the petite bun of that sparrow fallen from the nest. After two months of manual diet his sexual hunger was stirred and disturbed by a whiff of food, rationed but fresh, distant but tangible.

  The praise provoked by the Marquess’s presence lasted more than ten minutes, until gradually the chorus deserted and picked up cushions, and the dramatist took his nearest listener by the hand and led him to the Count, signalling to him not to get up.

  “Look, Alquimio,” he said, and the policeman thus discovered he was his host at that party, “this is my friend, the Count… He is a regrettably heterosexual writer and also knew Alexis…”

  “Pleased to meet you,” said Alquimio, extending a gentle hand which slipped on the runaway moisture of the Count’s. “If you’re a friend of the Marquess, you’re a friend of mine and everything in this house is yours. Even me… Tell me, what would you like to drink?”

  “Give him rum, my boy,” interrupted the Marquess. “As he reckons he’s a creole macho…” and he smiled as he lurched round and swayed towards a corner where a lad with the face of a fresh fish seemed to be expecting him.

  “I’ll get you a rum right away, Conde. Do you want it in a glass or a goblet?” Alquimio asked, and the Count shrugged his shoulders: in such cases the content, not the container, were what mattered. Then his smiley host also went off, but in the direction of what must be the kitchen. Meanwhile someone had put on some music, and the Count heard Maria Bethania’s voice and assumed she must be a regular visitor to the scene. From the metaphysical, objective solitude of his cushion he could concentrate on scrutinizing aspects of the party: there were more men than women and despite the music nobody danced, they conversed in groups or couples, always changing their place or composition, as if perpetual movement were part of the ritual. It was as if they had itchy behinds and couldn’t keep still, the Count concluded. On his visual tour the policeman alighted on various oily glances directed his way, dispatched by pansies of the languishing type who seemed to lament his immaculate heterosexuality, just proclaimed by the Marquess. The Count surprised himself by taking out a cigarette in would-be Bogartian style, as if he wanted to raise his stock in that pink market: he felt desired, with all the accompanying ambiguity, and was enjoying that fatal attraction. Am I turning into a queer? he wondered, as a green goblet, cheerfully brimming with rum, appeared before his eyes.

  Sparrow bun smiled as she gave him his drink, and crossed her legs as she stood there before falling in yoga position on the cushion that had mysteriously appeared in front of the Count.

  “So you’re hetero?” she asked, examining him like a strange beast on the endangered list.

  “Nobody is perfect,” quoted the Count, and took a long swig that he felt circulate from mouth to stomach and from stomach to blood, like a necessary liberating transfusion.

  “I’m Polly, Alquimio’s niece,” she said, as her fingers combed back the fringe falling over her forehead.

  “And I’m the Count, though not of Monte Cristo.”

  Polly smiled. She must have been in her twenties and wore a purple baby-doll outfit from a sixties movie. She also wore round her neck a cameo brooch tied to a purple ribbon (from which movie did that come?), and though she wasn’t pretty or a bundle of visible fleshly charms, she belonged to the category of beddable item of the first order, according to the Count’s devalued erotic requirements.

  “What do you write?”

  “Me? The odd short story.”

  “How interesting. And are you postmodern?”

  The Count looked at the girl, surprised by that unexpected aesthetic interpolation: should he be postmodern?

  “More or less,” he responded, trusting to postmodernity and hoping she wouldn’t ask how much more or less.

  “I like painting, you know, and I’m really a mad postmodern queen.”

  “No kidding,” the Count said and finis
hed his rum.

  “God, you’re terrible, you really gulp it down… Give me your glass. I’ll get you a refill.”

  The Marquess waved to him from his corner. He was still there, the fish on his pedestal, and seemed happy with life, in the shadow of the blond locks he’d restored to a sparsely populated pate.

  “Here you are,” said Polly, and now his glass was full to the brim.

  “Thanks. And are you hetero?”

  She smiled again. Hers were a sparrow’s teeth, tiny and sharp.

  “Almost always,” she confessed and the Count gulped. Could she be a transvestite? With that little bun? “The fact is, if a person wants to reach their potential, all their bodily potential, they must try a homosexual relationship at least once. Hasn’t the Marquess told you that?”

  “No. He knows I follow a macho-Stalinist line.”

  “Your choice… But you’re lacking something very important in life.”

  “I’ve managed so far. Don’t you worry. Hey, did you know Alexis?”

  She stroked her cameo and sighed: “What they did to him was horrible. The poor boy. He never harmed anybody, did he?… Others are more violent and go too far with men, the types who go prospecting in lavatories and such like. But he didn’t. I’m a would-be painter, as I told you I think? And I liked talking to him, when he came to see my uncle. He knew heaps about painting, particularly Italian painting.. . And when I talked to him he said his problem was that he really fell in love and couldn’t stand changing partners every other day.”

  “But they’re into lots of changes, aren’t they?”

  “Yes, not many have very long relationships, which was what he wanted. He was more a woman than a man, a woman in the head, you know what I mean?”

  “No, I don’t think I do.”

  “Well, he’d have liked to live in a house with a man, as if he were his husband, and nobody else’s, and just be that man’s wife. Do you get me now?”

  “More or less. What I don’t understand is why he walked down the street dressed as a woman, as if he’d gone searching for a man.”

  “Yes, that’s very odd, because he was really quite a prude. And I should tell you the real transvestites are scared stiff now because they say this might be the start of a serial lynching. But that must be them being hysterical.”

  “So they’re hysterical?”

  “Transvestites? Completely. As they want to be women and there’s no woman who isn’t hysterical. But Alexis wasn’t, I don’t think he was hysterical, though he was a champion manic depressive…”

  “Polly,” the Count then took a risk, “you know, I’d like to write about this scene. Tell me a bit about the people here today.”

  She smiled again, she could always put on a smile and look ingenuous. “Anyone would think you were police.”

  The Count had recourse to all his powers of bluff: “And you’re like a postmodern sparrow.”

  A gentle titter followed that left Polly’s brow resting on the Count’s knee. No, of course she’s not a transvestite, he tried to persuade himself.

  “My God, it’s horrible, there’s a bit of everything here,” she said, looking the policeman in the eye, as if making a confession.

  And the Count discovered that in that room in Old Havana, on first evidence, there were men and women who had made their mark because they were: militants on behalf of free love, of nostalgia trips, or of red, green and yellow parties, ex-dramatists with and without oeuvre, writers with ex-libris but never published, queers of every tendency and leaning: queens – drags on full beam and the perverted sort – luckless little duckies, hunters expert at high-flying prey, buggers on their own account who give it in the arse at home and go into the countryside if there’s horse on offer, inconsolably disconsolate souls and disconsolate souls in search of consolation, A-I cocksuckers with ass-holes sewn up for fear of Aids, and even freshly matriculated apprentices in the Academy of Pedagogy in Homosexuality, the chief tutor being none other than uncle Alquimio, winners of national and international ballet competitions, prophets of the end of time, history and the ration book; nihilists converted to Marxism and Marxists converted to shit, every kind of chip on the shoulder: sexual, political, economic, psychological, social, cultural, sporting and electronic; practising Zen Buddhists, Catholics, witches, voodoists, Islamists, santeria animists, a Mormon and two Jews, a pitcher from the Industriales team who pitches and bats with either hand; fans of Pablo Milanes and enemies of Silvio Rodriguez, expert oracles who know who will be the next Nobel Prize for Literature as well as Gorbachev’s secret intentions, the last pretty boy adopted as nephew by the Famous Person in the Higher Echelons, or the price of a pound of coffee in Baracoa; seekers after temporary or permanent visas, dreamers, femmes and hommes, hyper-realists, abstract artists and socialist realists who’d renegued on their aesthetic past; a Latinist; the repatriated and the patriotic; people expelled from everywhere one can be expelled from; a blind man who saw, disillusioned and deceivers, opportunists and philosophers, feminists and optimists, followers of Lezama (frankly the vast majority), disciples of Virgilio, Carpentier, Marti and one adept of Anton Arrufat; Cubans and foreigners; singers of boleros; breeders of fighting dogs, alcoholics, rheumatics, dogmatists and head-cases; smokers and non-smokers; and one macho-Stalinist heterosexual.

  “Yours truly… And transvestites? Aren’t there any transvestites?” he asked, angling his vampire-hunter look at her breasts.

  “There by the door to the balcony: that’s Victoria, though she prefers to be called Viki and her real name is Victor Romillo. The prettiest thing, isn’t she? And that dark-skinned lass who looks like Annia Linares by day is Esteban and by night Estrella, because she’s a bolero singer.”

  “Tell me one thing: there are about thirty people here… How can they do all the jobs you mentioned?”

  Polly smiled, inevitably. “They’re just multioccupational and like voluntary work… Look over there, the guy next to Wilfredito Insula, he does at least ten of the things I mentioned. God, how horrible, and you’re going to write about this?”

  “I don’t know, I probably will. But I’m really interested in transvestites.”

  “Then go to a party at Ofelia Belen Pacheco’s place, an old queer who lives around the Virgen del Camino, because there they do transvestite parties, live performances, the lot. That’s where Estrella sings boleros and a girl called Zarzamora does a striptease and you’ll shit yourself laughing.”

  “The Marquess never mentioned it.”

  “Of course he didn’t: Ofelia Belen Pacheco and the Marquess are sworn enemies, ever since Ofelia bedded one of the Marquess’s boyfriends. Although that was in the days when buses were made of wood

  … Well, they have fantastic parties and all the transvestite buddies of Havana go there. Sometimes thirty or more.”

  In the spacious living room, under the influence of music of a seemingly Barbra Streisand flavour, several couples of diverse make-up had started dancing and the Count stared at Estrella, dancing boleros and cutting an incongruous figure with her dance partner, a titchy black barely five feet tall, whom the Count supposed had bigger dimensions that were momentarily hidden. Viki was still standing by the balcony, and the Count was alarmed when he realized that if he hadn’t been warned he’d have thought her a woman who was desirable, if not beautiful.

  The atmosphere exuded a ghetto freedom, limited but capacious, as the dancers’ hands caressed their partners and muffled voices echoed the song. A distasteful chill ran through the policeman when he spotted a couple kissing shamelessly: two men – according to legal, biological codes – some thirty years old, moustachioed with jet black hair, soldering lips to facilitate a flow of tongues and saliva that injected the Count with a squeamish repugnance he tried to quell by gulping down another glass of rum. He knew then that he’d gone too far on that journey to hell and needed different air if he wasn’t going to suffocate or die of shock. A policeman who boasted he’d seen every possible barbar
ity, he now felt pain-stricken by a vibration born from a tight knot of male hormones, unable to resist that most disturbing negation of nature. He looked at Polly and tried to smile, as he turned his green goblet round, as if to demonstrate that the evaporation was damaging the atmosphere.

  “Should I put you on the alcoholics’ list?”

  “Put me down as an aspiring or discerning drinker… Hey, the Marquess says Alexis hadn’t been here for days.”

  “That’s right, I hadn’t seen him for some time.”

  “And when you saw him, did he tell you he was in love with somebody?”

  Polly looked up, as if seeking her reply in the visible part of her lank fringe.

  “I don’t think so. I think he was still with a painter whose name I’ve forgotten, one who did things with collages.”

  “Salvador K.”

  “Hey, you’re really in the know! You sure you’re not police?”

  “Really I’m not, love… And what did Alexis tell you?”

  “Nothing much, that he was really fed up and that if he split with the Salvador guy he wasn’t going to hitch up with anyone else. And he went off because he was going to mass at the cathedral.”

  The Count thought how Alexis Arayan must have been carrying his Bible, where perhaps the passage on the Transfiguration was already missing.

  “Why did you suddenly shut up?” enquired Polly, pressing one of his legs. “Do you want another drink?”

  “That’s not a bad idea. I’d like to have a drop with you.”

  And she smiled, as mischievous as ever.

  “Why not have a drink at my place? I live just round the corner.”

  “Are you a transvestite?”

  “Come and find out.”

  “The walk will warm you up,” said the Count, and compared Polly to a St Bernard on a rescue mission in the middle of a snowstorm. Averting his gaze from the kissing moustaches, he looked round for the Marquess. He wasn’t in the room, nor was his amphibian friend. Polly’s roll-call, he thought, as he stood up, still had a way to go.