Havana Red

by Leonardo Padura

  Alberto Marqués blinked several times and tried to organize his dank strands of hair.

  “You don’t have to be a Sherlock Holmes . . . In this heat, at this time of day, with that face and in this house, who is going to pay a visit if not the police? Besides, I’ve heard what happened to poor Alexis . . .”

  The Count concurred. It was the second time recently he’d been told he had a policeman’s face and he was on the verge of believing it was true. If there were bus drivers who looked like bus drivers, doctors like doctors and tailors like tailors, it can’t be difficult to have a policeman’s mug after ten years in the job.

  “Can I come in?”

  “Can I not let you come in? . . . Enter,” he added finally, opening the door into the pitch black.

  It wasn’t hot inside, although all the windows were shut and he couldn’t hear the hum of any refreshing fan. In the cool half-dark, the Count imagined a distant high ceiling and glimpsed several pieces of furniture as dark as the ambience, scattered without rhyme or reason across a spacious room divided in two by a pair of columns that were possibly Doric in their upper reaches. At the back, some five yards away, the wall receded towards an equally sombre corridor. Without closing the door, Alberto Marqués went over to one of the room’s walls and opened a french window that spread the obscene light of August on the room’s chequered floor, to create an aggressive, decidedly unreal luminosity: as if from a spotlight turned on a stage. Then the Count got it: he’d been dropped into the middle of the set for The Price, a work by Arthur Miller that thirty years earlier Alberto Marqués had staged with a success that still resonated (that was also on his file) and which he himself had seen some ten years ago in a version staged by one of the dramatist’s more orthodox disciples. He’d stepped into the production – too many stages! – like one of the characters and . . . of course, that was it. But could it possibly be?

  “Sit down, please, Mr Policeman,” said Alberto Marqués, reluctantly pointing to a mahogany armchair darkened by fossilized sweat and grime, and only then did he close the door.

  The Count used those seconds to get a better look: between the floor and the dressing gown he saw two rickety, starved ankles, as translucent as the face, extended by two unshod ostrich feet that ended in funny fat toes, splayed out, their nails like jagged hooks. The fingers of the hands were, on the contrary, slender and spatula’d like a practising pianist’s. And the smell. His sense of smell ravaged by twenty years of vigorous smoking, the Count tried to distinguish the odours of damp, fumes from reheated oil and a whiff he recognized but found difficult to pin down, as he observed the man in his Chinese silk dressing gown settling down in another armchair, parting his legs and carefully positioning his skeletal hands on the wooden arms, as if he wanted to embrace them entirely, to possess them, as in a final gesture he folded his oh-so-delicate fingers over the front edges of the wood.

  “Well, I’m all ears.”

  “What do you know about what happened to Alexis Arayán?”

  “Poor . . . That they killed him in the Havana Woods.”

  “And how did you find out?”

  “I got a call this morning. A friend got wind.”

  “Which friend?”

  “One who lives round there and saw all the bother. He enquired, found out and phoned me.”

  “But who is he?”

  Alberto Marqués sighed ostentatiously, blinked a bit more, but kept his hands on the arms of the chair.

  “Dionisio Carmona is his name, if you must know. Are you happy now?” And tried to make it evident he found the revelation troubling.

  The Count thought of asking permission, but decided not to. If Alberto Marqués could be ironic, he, Conde, could be rude. How dare that pansy try it on with him, a policeman? He lit his cigarette and puffed the smoke in the direction of his interlocutor.

  “You may drop your ash on the floor, Mr Policeman.”

  “Lieutenant Mario Conde.”

  “You may drop your ash on the floor, Mr Policeman Lieutenant Mario Conde,” the man said, and the Count demurred. You’ll get it from me, you wanking pansy, he thought.

  “And what else do you know?”

  Alberto Marqués shrugged his shoulders, as he shut his eyes and released another sonorous sigh.

  “Well . . . that he was strung up. Ah, my God, the poor dearie.”

  Perhaps the man was really upset, thought the Count, before going on the offensive.

  “No, technically, he was strangled. His neck was pressed tight till the oxygen was cut off. With a red silk sash. And you know he was dressed like a woman, all in red, with a shawl and the whole works?”

  Alberto Marqués had let go of the chair arms and his right hand rubbed his face from cheek to chin. Touché, concluded the Count.

  “Dressed like a woman? In a red dress? One as long as an old bathrobe?”

  “Yes,” replied the Count, “what can you tell me about that? Because I already know it was this house he left yesterday.”

  “Yes, he left here at about seven, but I swear I saw him just before and he wasn’t dressed like Electra Garrigó.”

  The feast in Paris is never over, and everyone who has lived there retains distinct memories . . . And it’s so true, though Hemingway said it first, and he was the century’s most egocentric, narcissistic writer. My memories of Paris are a nostalgia in blue I’ve not managed to throw off in twenty years. Because when I arrived in Paris, in April 1969, a painfully beautiful spring had just begun and it made you want to do something to be happier, if happiness exists, to be more intelligent and all-encompassing, or be freer, if freedom exists, or could ever exist. And I remember feeling the magic of an affectionate, almost velvety sun bathing the Champs-Elysées, the grand Napoleonic palaces, the frivolous cafés, and I better understood what had happened the year before. I still feel the afternoon light on the rose-window of Notre-Dame’s façade like a caress on my skin, and hear the dark, historic sound of the Seine by the Cité, and that black organ-grinder in front of the Louvre making his little African monkey dance to the tune of a Viennese waltz. I also remember the Rolling Stones concert when they tried to out-rebel the Beatles, and they were only two hundred yards away from me, under a cold sky of a Paris spring, among shrieking, liberated French blondes, daughters who’d aborted and mothers newly born of the revolution that might have been and was not, although after that month of May the world would never be the same again, because the revolution had been made: the revolution in customs and morality, the twentieth-century’s permanent revolution that Lev Davidovich Bronstein, alias Leon Trotsky, never imagined. I remember each day, each minute, each conversation with Jean-Paul Sartre and the inevitable Simone de Beauvoir, dinners with George Plimpton while he interviewed me for the Paris Review, researching the life, sensitive madness and papers of Antonin Artaud for an edition under contract of The Theatre and Its Double, the nostalgia I acquired upon the death of a Camus whom I never met yet always knew so well, the re-encounter, guided by the eyes and footsteps of Néstor Almendros, with the real sets of so much French cinema, and the pursuit, on the arm of my friend Cortázar, of the archaeological sites of pre-war jazz, cherished in bars like miraculous grottoes . . . I remember it all because it would be my last trip to Paris, if not my last tango, and memory anticipated history and sage memory knowingly manufactured its own self-defence and tucked away each happy moment of my last trip to Paris as if it knew it would be my last.

  That’s why I also remember that day of multiple coincidences charged with encouraging magnetic attractions, when Muscles, the Other Boy and I floated over to Montparnasse on the last sigh of the afternoon, in search of a Greek restaurant that just had to be called the Odyssey, and was renowned for its mountain goat. We were enjoying our leisure and freedom, advanced arm in arm, an invincible army, when Muscles saw him, or rather her, to be more exact. She was a tall, engagingly elegant woman, as prepossessing as the owner of Edith Piaf’s voice, if Edith hadn’t been a mere alcoholic sp
arrow: a woman who towered alarmingly, projected her breasts pugnaciously and sported a metallic flower of a mouth. I felt her pride tingle my skin: she was dressed in red, strident and so serene, and I found her image bore the tragic dignity which I’d recurrently seen in Electra: she was a revelation, or premonition, dressed in red.

  “She’s a transvestite,” Muscles piped up.

  And I (and the Other Boy as well, whose name I must not and do not want to recall, for it would be politically and ideologically gauche to reveal his old friendship with Muscles and myself, in that phantasmagoric Paris where everything was possible, even walking the streets with him) felt like a pillar of salt: petrified and speechless.

  “My God, how can it be?” asked the Other, even allowing himself a mention of God in Paris, that distant bastion of liberty, when in his Havana conversations he would publicly defend historical, dialectical materialist ideology and his conviction that religion was the opium, marijuana, if not the Marlboro of the people . . .

  “She’s perfection,” I said, for I already knew about pushy Parisian transvestites who went into the street to mingle and exhibit themselves, but I’d never imagined such a spectacle: that woman could have bowled any man over because she was more perfect than any woman, I’d almost go as far as to say she was Woman incarnate, and in fact I did.

  “No, a transvestite doesn’t imitate women,” Muscles commented, as if dictating a lecture, with that know-all voice and way with words of his. He always used long, spiralling baroque sentences, as if caricaturing our poor paradisiacal Fat Lezama. As far as he was concerned, à la limite there is no woman, because he knows (and his greatest tragedy is this knowledge he can never cast off) that he, that’s to say, she, is an appearance, her fetishistic realm and power concealing an irredeemable defect created by an otherwise wise nature . . .

  And he explained to us that the transvestite’s cosmetic erection (Muscles always gave it the emphasis transvestite), the resplendent aggression of her metallic eyelids trembling like the wings of voracious insects, her voice displaced as if it belonged to someone else, a constant voice-over, the imitation mouth drawn over her hidden mouth, and her own sex, ever more castrated, ever more present, is entirely appearance, a perfect theatrical masquerade, he said, and looked at me, as if he must look at me, as if he had no choice.

  It was when he uttered the word appearance that I understood everything, that my discovery rushed like iron filings to his magnet and I swung round in alarm to look for the transvestite. But she’d already disappeared into Paris’s magical penumbra, like a fleeting sparkler . . . An appearance. A masquerade. That had always been the very essence of performance, ever since ritual dances were transformed into theatre, when awareness of artistic creation was born: the transvestite as artist enacting herself . . . But she was no longer there, and I beheld the Other Boy, in an epiphany, refusing to budge, smitten by that possibility of what he’d always longed to be – or do – and never dared . . .

  From the Greek restaurant, through a glazed window, the Moulin Rouge glowed scarlet. The Other, who had been sent to Paris by the National Council for Culture because he’d just published a successful bad book programmed to fit the Latin Americanist third-world fashion of the time – always hunting for opportunities – had caught the blood-red glow full in the face and it made him seem more aroused, while Muscles, who had galloped off on his hobby-horse, was writing a few paragraphs for a future essay at the top of his voice.

  “King” — he sometimes addressed me thus, promoting me up the noble hierarchy – “the human transvestite is an imaginary apparition where three mimetic possibilities converge” — and he paused to drink a glass of rough Balkan wine, served in beautiful imitations of ancient Greek amphoras. “First, cross-dressing properly speaking, stamped on that unfettered impulse towards metamorphosis, in that transformation which is not restricted to the imitation of a real, precise model, but rushes to pursue an infinite reality (and from the start of the ‘game’ is accepted as such). It is an unreality which becomes more and more elusive, beyond reach (becoming more and more womanly, till the boundary is transgressed and womanness is transcended) . . .

  “Secondly, camouflage, for nothing guarantees that the cosmetic (or surgical) conversion of man into woman doesn’t have, as its hidden final goal, a kind of disappearance, of invisibility, of effacement and erasure of the macho himself from the aggressive tribe, from the brutal macho horde. And finally,” Muscles continued, “comes intimidation, for the frequent disarray or excessive make-up, the visibility of the artifice, the variegated mask, paralyse or terrify, as happens with certain animals who use their appearance to defend themselves or hunt, or to compensate for natural defects or virtues they don’t have: courage or cunning, right?”

  The Other – always so vulgar, “camouflaged” behind a culture he didn’t possess, sonorously sucking the goat cutlets he was devouring – Muscles was paying – looked out of the window, as if he were searching for something.

  “But, at the end of the day,” he asked, “are they queens or aren’t they?”

  The truth is I never discovered why Muscles insisted on bringing him with us on our sentimental, culinary tours of Paris. Because the Other Boy – as everybody knows – only wants queens, and the more publiclavatory and over-the-top the better. And if Muscles needed someone to cross swords with, there were thousands in Paris, and he had five-star choices, so beautiful and sweet . . .

  “Cubanly speaking I would say, ‘Yes, they are queens,’ ” Muscles finally declared, a man who also had his off-the-rails longing for queens. “Like you,” and he smiled, pointing at the Other, “but more daring, you know? And while we’re about it, do you want to go tomorrow, Saturday, to a cabaret where some transvestites will perform?”

  I was so struck by the invitation that I furiously downed the contents of one of those amphoras, something I’d never done and will never do again as long as I live. But everything was possible in Paris: even drinking without getting drunk . . . We walked home through the city, and it was that night, in Muscles’ studio, that I began to etch some lines on cardboard, and by dawn I’d designed the red dress my Electra Garrigó would wear in that luminous, tragically aborted performance which showed Virgilio Piñera his work was more inspired than he could ever warrant.

  The Count thought: this pansy and a half is getting on my wick, just as he realized he couldn’t repress his desire to urinate. This story of Parisian transvestites the Marquess (as his coteries entitled him) had narrated, searching for the red dress of his dear little friend who’d been murdered, was too much like a fable rehearsed and staged to snare the unwary, catch them in a spider’s web and swallow them, perhaps intellectually, maybe physically when, for example, they said they needed to urinate. He crossed his legs and it got worse: the pressure grew on a bladder overwhelmed by liquids he’d ingested to mitigate the heat and he realized he had two options in this emergency: to withdraw or to ask the dramatist if he could use his lavatory. The first solution was as hopeless as the second, for he didn’t want to establish any kind of relationship with that character, but nor could he abandon him now, when he presented himself as the best way into the more scabrous mysteries in the double life of Alexis Arayán. The Marquess, fallen on hard times, was his main witness, perhaps even the murderer of the masked man, although, he thought, while he felt he was about to urinate and reviewed yet again his host’s physical disposition, how could such premature baby arms have strangled anyone? But the Count had always thought urinating in a stranger’s house was the first step to a revealing intimacy: seeing what’s in a bathroom is like seeing into people’s souls: dirty pants, an unflushed toilet or perfumed bath gel are usually as revealing as a confession to a priest.

  “I need to go to the bathroom,” he said, without first instructing his brain.

  He supposed the Marquess would smile and he did, and he glanced down at the Count in a way that made him feel his privates had been weighed, measured and fondled.
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br />   “Just through there, third door on the left. Oh, and to flush you must hold the handle down till the water swills out all your emanations, get me?”

  “Thanks,” replied the Count, standing up and accepting that his bladder had let him down badly. He made for the dark passage and walked through two rooms: as he was in the Marquess’s line of vision, he hardly looked to one side or the other, but he saw one was a bedroom and the second a study, with books piled high to a remote ceiling. Then he discovered the origin of the odour he hadn’t been able to identify initially: it was the oppressive, alluring scent of old, damp, dusty paper that came from that equally dark precinct, where was to be found what must be Alberto Marqués’s library, surely inhabited by authors and works banned by certain codes and exotic publishing wonders, unimaginable to the ordinary reader, that the Count tried to conjure up using residues of intellect not preoccupied by doubt as to whether or not he’d reach the lavatory in time.

  He opened the door and looked at the bathroom: unlike the rest of the house, it seemed clean and organized, but he didn’t stop to scrutinize. He stood in front of the bowl, brought his desperate penis into the light of day and began urinating, feeling the whole world was relieved by the jet hitting the glaze. And it ran on and on as he looked towards the door and thought he saw a shadow through the panes of murky glass which had been badly patched up. Could he be looking at him? The Count put his hand over his penis and stopped urinating as he peered at the door. This is all I needed, he thought, as he shook himself, and welcomed the incontrollable shiver that accompanied the end of micturition. He rapidly popped his diminished extremity into his trousers and flushed the toilet, following the instructions given. Goodbye, effluvia.