Havana Red hq-1

by Leonardo Padura

  Two captains, dressed in plainclothes, had arrived around midday and the Count explained the details of the case and handed over the paltry incriminating evidence: three gutted cigars, a medallion with the engraved figure of the Universal Man, two yellow coins and a page with a couple of chapters from the Bible which revealed to mankind the divine essence of Joseph the carpenter’s putative son and the nature of his huge sacrifice in the Kingdom of This World. He then pointed them in the direction of the laboratory, where they were still analysing the silk threads and mud from the river Almendares. The officers congratulated him on the speed and efficiency with which he’d brought the investigation to a conclusion and assured him they’d revisit his temporary suspension, because Cuba needed people like him. And explained – although you don’t need these explanations, you’re a policeman and know about these things – it was a case surrounded by special circumstances and required special treatment. The Count agreed, and they couldn’t imagine that, opening the door and going into the corridor, he only regretted not seeing Faustino Arayan’s face when they severed the ties of the mask which had finally become his face. Would he cry? Beg for forgiveness? Would he kneel down, stoop petulantly? Yes, he’d like to be there to witness the scene, the downfall of a man capable of judging and condemning, classifying, casting out and crushing people and lives like pesky flies in line with his rigid political and moral criteria. Human rights? Screw him, he finally regretted, yet again, he would miss out on that final performance after labouring so much time on the job… And then he thought there were additional regrets: he would like to know what Alexis had said to his father, what words provoked his homicidal anger, and also to know what was going on in Alexis Arayan’s mind when he donned the unbecoming gown of Electra Garrigo, on that suicidal night when he went out to manufacture his death, though he knew the truth had been lost, had departed for ever with the fears, hates and life of that part-time transvestite. And he’d also like to know – and naturally regretted not knowing – why such terrible events happened in the world where his trade obliged him to get enveloped, as in a tragic mantle… And Fatman Contreras? A corrupt policeman, who used his position, uniform and badge to screw everyone else? No, he still said, refusing to accept what apparently could no longer be denied.

  When he went out into the car park at Headquarters, the Count felt all the heat in the city descend on him, as must happen when you cross the black waters of the Styx, before the sulphurous doors of a world from which there was no return.

  “Did you take Maria Antonia back?” he asked Manuel Palacios, as he got in the car.

  “Yes, she told me to take her to Miramar. She wanted to collect up her things. She says she’ll go to her brother’s tonight.”

  “At least she’ll see the unmasking. I hope she enjoys it… Take me home, I need to sleep. Perchance to dream,” he quoted, lit a cigarette and spat into the street. “What a load of shit, right?”

  “Yes, Conde, and what shit… Hey, does it seem stupid if I ask you to forgive me for the silly things I said the other day?”

  The sweat woke him up, his skin as slimy as an eel. He looked for the red figures on his electronic clock and found a blank screen. The fan had also stopped turning. But how can the power go at this time of day, he protested, when he finally found his wristwatch and saw it was barely four o’clock. Penetrating the thickness of his curtains, the reflection from the sun drifted rudely into his room, like a favour imposed which he couldn’t refuse. He’d intended waking when it was dark. He got up and went after the mortal remains of the coffee he’d made that morning. As he drank, he looked through the window at the perspectives for his most immediate future and for the first time in several months they seemed vaguely promising. He smoked quietly and, when he was about to take a shower, the telephone rang.

  “It’s me, Mario.”

  “Yes, Major, what’s the matter?”

  “The man’s here, he’s confessed already.”

  “And how did he perform?”

  “Well, he says it must have been a moment of madness, that he never planned to do it, and puts all the blame on Alexis. He says he left the Hotel Riviera, where he had an appointment with an Italian deputy who is a personal friend, and bumped into a woman at the side of his car. He says he didn’t recognize her to begin with, but looked at her because there was something odd about her, then realized it was Alexis.” Major Rangel’s intentionally monotone voice continued the story while Conde’s mind, already racing on ahead, visualized one scene after another, to the tragic denouement: the character of the tall man, who’d been faceless till that morning, now wore the face of a Faustino Arayan shocked to see his son, dressed as a woman, waiting for him by the exit from a hotel.

  “What are you doing here in that woman’s clothing?”

  “Nothing. I was waiting for you to take me home. Tona told me you’d be here. Can you drive me or does it make you very embarrassed to see me like this?”

  Alexis doesn’t get a reply, but his father gets into his car and opens the far side door. Annoyed, Faustino lights one of the Montecristos he’s carrying in a pocket and the inside of the car is flooded with smoke that disappears as soon as the car sets off.

  “And what will you do at home in that dress? Have you gone mad? Doesn’t it upset you walking the streets like that? Where’ve you been dressed up like that?”

  “I got dressed in the hotel bathroom and I’m not upset at all.. . Today I felt my life would change. I saw a light, which gave me an order: do what you must do and go to see your father.”

  “You are mad.”

  “I couldn’t be more lucid.”

  “Tell me what you want for God’s sake and don’t fuck around any more.”

  “Let’s go into the Woods, where we can speak more calmly.”

  Once again Faustino thought his son had gone mad, that he was provoking him and that perhaps it was better to resolve everything before they reached home. He turns left and the car goes down to the Havana Woods, where at that time of night a breeze contrasts with the heat in the rest of the city.

  “Let’s go towards the river. I want to see the river.”

  “Fine, fine. Well, what was it you wanted to tell me?”

  And Alexis told him he hated him, had only contempt for him, that he was an opportunist and hypocrite, and suddenly launched an attack on his face. Faustino dropped his cigar and pushed Alexis, who fell to his knees on the grass, but only to spring back up and attack him, and Faustino, not realizing what he was doing, went into action with the swathe of silk he’d taken from the waist of that equivocal, enraged woman who in turn was putting him in a rage, attacking him, making him mad, and by the time he realized what he was doing, Alexis had collapsed, his lungs without oxygen… What do you reckon?”

  “Sounds pretty good, but you missed out half the story. Alexis said something else, which is what drove him mad: he threatened to do or reveal something, whatever… And I think that’s why he paid him with two coins.”

  “You’re inventing now, Conde.”

  “I’m inventing nothing, Boss. Alexis had already called him an opportunist, a hypocrite and hateful person a thousand times. They must find out what Alexis knew that might be very dangerous for his father… Alexis told him because he knew he’d react like that. Let them dig out the whole story and they’ll see some horrible things crawl out, or my name’s not Mario Conde. But they’ve got to put the screws on, Boss, like with any criminal.”

  “I can imagine…”

  “And what about the coins?”

  “He says he was very scared and suddenly thought of that to put people off track, so they’d think it was a homosexual scrap.”

  “What a bastard! And what does he say about the medallion?”

  “He says he thought maybe nobody would identify Alexis, and that’s why he took it. But he forgot he might be carrying his identity card.”

  “Yes, I didn’t think that a woman carrying his identity card was very elegant eithe
r. So we’re both agreed on that. I’m sorry for my part.”

  “He says he put the medallion in the trinket-box that same evening

  … Now all he does is to put all the blame on Alexis and say he doesn’t know how it all happened. You know what it’s like.”

  “Yes, Boss, I know what it’s like, but don’t forget one thing: that guy’s a bastard with real pedigree and comes with a guarantee.. . You must have a really twisted mind to think about taking a medallion from a strangled man who is your own son in order to try to save your own skin and then put two coins up his arse for good measure. And why does he reckon he didn’t throw him in the river?”

  “He says a motorbike drove by and he took fright. That was when he removed the medallion.”

  “Well, the guy’s sick… Hey, Boss, don’t start feeling sorry for him…”

  “No, don’t be like that, Mario, everything will be done by the book.”

  The Major’s voice now sounded mellow and peaceful, and the Count thought it was better that way: everything should be mellow and peaceful, and he decided he’d start lifting the red ghost of Alexis Arayan from his shoulders.

  “Well, good luck to you and him… Boss, how about giving me a week’s holidays?”

  “What’s up? Don’t tell me you want to do some writing?”

  “No, of course not. That’s history. I’m just exhausted and fed up. What about you?”

  The silence floated down the line more than it usually did with Major Rangel.

  “I’m fed up, Conde. And disappointed… I think I’m going to hang up the sword. But forget it. Take a week and, if you can, start writing. Learn to help yourself and quit the self-pity… Come back next Monday. If I need you I’ll call you before, OK?”

  “OK, Boss, look after yourself. And you know, I’ll get you some real good cigars,” he said, as he hung up.

  While he showered, he thought he’d more than enough time to tell the Marquess the last chapter of that sordid story the whole truth about which would never be known. But he owed him that version. He tried to imagine how he’d tell it to the dramatist, and realized that all he was doing was concealing the real anxiety he felt at the prospect of the visit: he’d take his manuscript to the old dramatist. Will he like it? he wondered as he washed, when he got dressed, as he went into the street, and was still wondering when he let the door knocker fall for a third time and waited for the curtains to open on the theatrical world of Alberto Marques.

  “You’re a surprising man, Mr Friendly Policeman. So much so that I now think you’re a fake policeman. It’s like another form of transvesting, right? The difference being that you’ve stripped off.. . and everything’s out in the open,” said the Marquess, waving the pages of the story like a fan.

  “But… what do you think?” implored the Count, shy at his perceived nudity.

  The dramatist smiled but tittered not. That Sunday evening he wore a towelling dressing gown, a degree less decrepit than his silk one, and in order to read he’d opened all the windows in the room and lifted the pages up close to his eyes, and at last the Count managed to construct a precise idea of the set where they’d been meeting recently. It was the image one always forms of an attic or one of those dusty, cobwebby places, ripe for a horror film, which don’t exist in Cuban houses, even less so in those with such lofty ceilings. As the Marquess read, the Count smoked two cigars and concentrated on creating an inventory of what might be useful from that surrealist accumulation of objects that one never usually saw: apart from the two armchairs where they sat, the lieutenant thought that a very grainy wooden table, a bronze leg which must have sustained an Art Nouveau lamp and a few plates that looked healthy, perhaps even bone china, were just salvageable. The rest reeked of exquisite corpses, without the option of resurrection: they must be the final remains of the autophagy the Marquess had surely practised on his own house.

  “I’ll tell you what I think later. First tell me something. Have you recently read Camus or Sartre?”

  The Count looked for a cigarette.

  “No, I’ve hardly had time to read. Why?”

  “Are you familiar with The Outsider?” The Count nodded and his host smiled again. “Well, your bus driver really reminds me of Mr Meursault in The Outsider… That metaphorical possibility is beautiful, isn’t it? French existentialism and Cuban buses bonded by the glare of the sun.” And he smiled again and the Count felt like grabbing him by the neck. The bastard’s making fun of me.

  “So you think it’s silly.”

  “But it doesn’t have a title,” proceeded the Marquess, as if he’d not heard the lament of the Count, who was now shaking his head. “Well, I’ve thought of one, seeing these people are dead before they’ve died physically: ‘Iron in the Soul’. What do you reckon?”

  “I’m not sure, I think I like it.”

  “Well, if you want, I’ll make you a present of it. After all, it’s Sartre’s…”

  “Thank you,” the Count had to respond, as he thought it made no sense to ask for his final opinion on the already devalued quality of that story from his soul.

  “It’s funny reading stories like that again… In another era you’d certainly have been accused of adopting aesthetic postures of a bourgeois, anti-Marxist character. Just imagine this reading of the story: there’s no logical or dialectical explanation of your characters’ irrational behaviour or their anecdotes; it’s obvious these creatures cannot explain the chaos in human life, while the narrator’s naturalist detail only reinforces the desolation of the man who received, God knows from where, an illumination in his existence. Such an aesthetic could then have been said (as was often said) to be a simple reflection of the spiritual degeneration of the modern bourgeoisie. Besides, your work offers no solutions to the social situations you pinpoint, just to state what’s most obvious: you communicate a sordid image of man in a society like ours… How do you like that interpretation? Poor existentialism… And what should we do then with those ever so horribly beautiful works by Camus and Sartre and Simone?… And poor Scott Fitzgerald and eschatological Henry Miller and the good characters in Carpentier and the dark world of Onetti? Decapitate the history of culture and of man’s uncertainties?… But you know what surprised me most: it’s your ability to create a fable. You don’t write like a fledgling, friendly policeman, but like a writer, although I’d have preferred a different ending: she should have killed the bus driver… And, tell me, where did you get the idea to write this story? The mystery of creation has always fascinated me.”

  “I don’t know, I think because I saw a bus driver with a bus-driver’s face, and recently people have said I’ve got a policeman’s face.”

  The Marquess’s smile dissolved into a string of titters which seemed bent on disarming him once and for all, and the Count was on the point of standing up and leaving the house.

  “And you believed me, Mr Friendly Policeman? I was only joking. Or it was self-defence, I’m not sure. I wanted to create a distance, you know. Fear and suspicion? The fact is when you’ve been beaten once, you learn to raise your arms before they try to beat you again. Like Pavlov’s dog. But I think I went too far with you, really: I’m not as perverse, ironic, or… or as pansied as I make out. No way. So please forgive me if I showed a lack of respect. I’d like you to forgive all my ironies.”

  “So you said you liked my story?” insisted the Count wanting a simple declaration bereft of equivocal verbal whirls.

  “But didn’t you hear me? I told you… I’ll go even further: I admire you as a policeman. The cigar thing was a mark of genius, right? I’d never have thought of that dramatic solution as catalyst to the tragedy which had been woven… Because I don’t know if you noticed how it was all like a Greek tragedy, in the best style of Sophocles, full of ambiguity, parallel stories that began twenty years ago and which come together on the same day and characters who aren’t who they say they are, or who hide what they are, or have changed so much nobody now knows who they are, and at an unexp
ected moment there is tragic recognition. But they all confront a destiny that goes beyond them, that forces, drives them to make dramatic acts: only here Laius kills Oedipus, or Aegisthus anticipates Orestes… Should it be dubbed filicide?… And all is unleashed because of the hubris committed. There are excesses of passion, of ambition for power, of pent-up hatred, and that’s usually severely punished… What is really regrettable in this almost theatrical game is that the gods chose Alexis to sacrifice his destiny morbidly. What that poor boy did has grieved me sorely. At my age I’ve seen too many people die, dozens of friends, all my family, and each close death is an alarm bell warning that mine may be next, and the older I get, the greater my fear of death. But now I’m very pleased you’ve unmasked this gentleman and that he’s been jailed… Because I’ll tell you something else: do you want to know where the lines of this tragedy began to cross? In Paris, that spring of 1969: Faustino Arayan was the embassy functionary who rang Muscles’ place that day to say the Other Boy was at the police station. And he was the one who decided the Other should go back to Cuba, and sent him back wrapped in papers where he’d wiped all the shit he could find, about the Other and about me, naturally. And, obviously, Alexis was also fully aware…”

  The feast was finally over and I left Paris in the rain. Because springtime in Paris is so fragile: winter’s deathbed rattle can launch an attack with an impunity that is simply an awful revenge. The bad weather started without warning and the windows we left open during the day to the season’s pleasant noises and smells had suddenly to be shut, so we could see through the glass how the icy rain abused the virgin shoots on the trees in the nearby square. Two days before, I’d finished my research in the Artaud papers and also my course of master classes at the Theatre des Nations, where I’d expounded for the first time in public my new idea for a production of Electra Garrigo based on what I called a transvestite aesthetic. It was a success, in fact, my last great public success… From Sartre to Grotowski, by way of Truffaut, Nestor Almendros, Julio Cortazar and Simone Signoret, I was praised publicly and privately and was invited there and then to present the work the following season, with performances in six French cities. I was at the height of my dreams when it began to rain in Paris, as if it had never rained before, and I decided to return to the sure but merciless sun of Havana, in a feverish haste to get on with my work. Muscles accompanied me to Orly, and we could never have imagined that that embrace and kiss on my neck would be last carnal contact I’d have with him. We’d never see each other again.