Havana Red

by Leonardo Padura

  When he went into the corridor he saw the Marquess in the sitting room, seated in his armchair. He walked over to him and sat down again.

  “How lovely to urinate when you feel like it, don’t you agree?” commented the dramatist, and the Count was certain he’d been observed. Fuck your mother, he said to himself, this is too much, but he tried to get back on to the offensive.

  “And what has all this Paris story got to do with Alexis Arayán?”

  The Marquess smiled, then tittered.

  “Forgive me,” he said. “Well, it has to do with the dress they found him in and the fact he wasn’t a transvestite. Rather he wasn’t what you’d call practising, although he sometimes played at it. He donned disguises and created various personae. As much feminine as masculine, though he’d never have been capable of going on stage, you understand? He was too shy and cerebral for that and very inhibited, do you see? . . . But he always liked that dress, the one I designed on that night in Paris for my version of Electra Garrigó to be premièred in the Théâtre des Nations in Paris in 1971. And although Alexis was homosexual, as you must have gathered, I never imagined he’d have the daring necessary to be a transvestite and, as far as I know, he never did go into the street dressed as a woman.”

  “So why did he do so yesterday?”

  “I don’t know, you should find out . . . That is what you’re paid for, aren’t you?”

  “Apparently,” replied the Count. “By the way, was Alexis Catholic?”

  “Yes, of course. And half mystic.”

  “And did he ever mention the day of the Transfiguration?”

  “Of the transfiguration? What transfiguration?”

  “Christ’s . . . the one celebrated yesterday, on August sixth.”

  “No, he didn’t mention that . . . You know, he left yesterday without saying goodbye, but I wasn’t too worried, because he was like that: half neurotic, and sometimes very introverted. I heard him go out into the passage, and that’s why I know it was around seven. . . . Besides, for your information: Alexis and I were just friends. He had problems at home, his parents were threatening to kick him out every day, so he asked me to let him live here. But that was all there was to it, right? Every sheep has her mate and I’m too old to wolf it . . .”

  The Count lit up another cigarette and again wondered: what the fuck have I got into? This world was too remote and exotic for him and he felt totally bewildered, with a thousand questions the answers to which he had no access to. For example: did that old queer like queers or men? And is a man who goes with queers also queer? Can two queers be friends, even live together without having it off with each other? But he said: “Of course, I understand . . . And how did you and Alexis get to know each other? When did it happen?”

  The Marquess smiled again and patted his dressinggown lapels.

  “You really don’t know? . . . You know, eighteen years ago, the year of Our Lord 1971, I was parameterized, and, naturally, didn’t possess the parameters they were after. Can you imagine – parameterizing an artist as if he were a pedigree dog? It would be almost comic if it weren’t tragic. And, on the other hand, it’s such an ugly word . . . To parameterize. Well, that whole business of parameterizing artists began and they expelled me from the theatre group and association of theatrical artistes, and after finding out I couldn’t work in a factory, as I should have done if I wanted to purify myself by contact with the working class, though nobody ever asked me if I wanted to be pure or the working class whether it was ready to accept such a detox challenge, they put me to work in a tiny library in Marianao, cataloguing books. I’ll confess something to you for which I hope you won’t put me inside, lieutenant sir: it was a mistake. You can’t put an artist too near fine books he doesn’t own, because he’ll steal them . . . Though he doesn’t have the soul of a thief, he’ll steal them . . . Just imagine: that library had an edition of Paradise Lost illustrated by Doré. You know the one I mean? Well, I can show you, if you like . . .”

  “That won’t be necessary,” interjected the Count.

  “Well, I was working there and Alexis went to study in the library, as it was near the school where he was enrolled. And the fact is he knew who I was and obviously admired me. The poor kid, he didn’t dare speak to me, because he’d heard so many things about me . . . but you’ll be familiar with all that, I guess? Until one day he dared, and confessed he’d read two of my works and that he’d been present at a rehearsal of Electra Garrigó, and it had been the deepest emotional experience of his life . . . The poor child adored me, and no artist can resist the adoration of a young apprentice. So, we became friends.”

  “Just one last question for now,” said the Count, looking at his watch. That last story seemed the most extraordinary of all he’d heard and read, and he tried to imagine what a man so acclaimed and loved by the critics could have felt in the anonymous silence of a municipal library, where his expectations were reduced to the theft of the odd desirable book. No, it wasn’t so easy. “Did Alexis have problems with anyone?”

  Alberto Marqués didn’t smile or blink this time. He merely shifted the very long fingers which he’d draped over the end of the chair arm.

  “I’m not sure if he had what people call problems. He was a sensitive soul, to put it one way. He craved peace and affection and at home they treated him like a leper, were ashamed of him, and that turned him into someone obsessed, who saw ghosts on every street corner. Besides, he knew he’d never become an artist, which had been his lifelong dream, but he courageously recognized his lack of talent, something not everyone’s capable of doing, right?”

  The Count thought: right. And wondered: could that be a dart aimed at me? No, no way, he doesn’t know me and I am really talented. A real fucking talent.

  “The people at the Centre for Cultural Heritage loved him, especially the artists, because he always defended them against the filthy sniffing bureaucrats leeching on talent. And I think he really enjoyed a fairly stable relationship with a painter, one Salvador K., whom I don’t know personally. Will that do for now? Do you want to go to the bathroom again?” And now he did manage a smile.

  The Count stood up: he’d met an awesome verbal adversary, he thought, and stretched out a hand to receive the emaciated, poorly articulated bones of the famous Alberto Marqués. It was a frog’s hand.

  “I don’t want to go to the bathroom, but I’m not done. Besides, you owe me the end of the transvestite story.”

  “True, my prince,” said the Marquess, unable to restrain himself, and added: “Forgive me, but I’ve got a real thing about titles of nobility, you know? Well whenever you fancy, Sir Policeman Count, but wait a minute: to force you to come back I’m going to lend you the book Muscles wrote on transvestites. It’s dedicated to me, you know? . . . You’ll see what madness human beings are capable of.” And he smiled, rising up to a string of uncontrollable grunts and blinks.

  The Count looked at the book’s front cover: a butterfly was emerging from a chrysalis with a grotesquely divided human face: a woman’s eyes and a man’s mouth, female hair and male chin. It was entitled The Face and the Mask; and was quite uncryptically dedicated to “The last active member of the Cuban nobility”. He felt an urge to return home and start reading this book, which might perhaps supply a few keys to what had happened or, at least, teach him something about the dark world of homosexuality. In his mystic dissertation the Marquess had mentioned three possible attitudes among the changelings: metamorphosis as a way to overcome the model, camouflage as a form of disappearance, and disguise as a means of intimidation. Which could have pushed Alexis Arayán into dressing up like Electra Garrigó the very night of the day of the Transfiguration? He was coming round to liking that story, but if he wanted to understand anything he had to know a little more. At least one thing was definite: Alberto Marqués couldn’t be the physical murderer of Alexis Arayán. It would have taken those arms two hours to strangle the youth, while he held his nose between two fingers. But he was
also sure Alberto Marqués was deeply implicated in that death dressed in red.

  When he saw Manuel Palacios leaning on the car’s bumper, in the shade of the first flamboyant trees in Santa Catalina, the Count realized how much he was sweating. He’d barely walked four blocks and the sweat was already drenching his shirt, but, bewildered by the rush of information, his brain hadn’t yet processed the feeling of heat he now found in that moisture. It was almost 4 p.m. and the temperature had leapt several degrees.

  “What happened?” asked the sergeant, as the Count mopped himself with his handkerchief.

  “A very peculiar fellow who’s fucked up my whole day. He’s queerer than a Sunday afternoon,” he said smiling, because the metaphor wasn’t his: it bore the copyright of his old acquaintance Baby Face Miki. “And you know I can’t stand queers . . . Well, this guy’s different . . . The bastard got me thinking . . . And what did you find out?”

  As the car drove up Santa Catalina en route to Headquarters, Manuel Palacios recounted the first surprising result from the autopsy: “According to your friend Flower of the Dead, they didn’t take anything from the guy’s arse, Conde: on the contrary, they inserted . . . Two one-peso coins. What do you reckon? Have you ever heard anything like it?”

  The Count shook his head. But the sergeant didn’t give him time to process his shock at the unexpected revelation: “The man who killed him is white, blood group AB, and between forty and sixty. Possibly righthanded. In other words, we’ve already a million and a half suspects . . .”

  The Count declined to laugh at the joke and Sergeant Manuel Palacios finished his story: the murder had been by strangling, and the murderer had pulled the sash tight while facing the transvestite, and yet there was only the smallest speck of someone else’s skin on Alexis’s nails. The man’s footprints indicated he weighed some one hundred and eighty to two hundred pounds, that his shoe size was number nine, that he walked normally and probably wore blue jeans, for they’d found a multi-coloured thread that had snagged on a shrub. The possible fellatio was ruled out, for there was no trace of semen in the dead man’s mouth. There was not a single fingerprint and the silk sash provided no useful information. Nothing of special interest was found at the location of the crime: the usual rubbish you come across in such places: a bottle, a used condom, a rusty key, cigar butts with and without their labels – Rey del Mundo, Montecristo, Coronas – and a plastic comb missing six teeth, not to mention a wisdom tooth . . .

  “Then it’s obvious there was no struggle,” the Count commented as Manolo wound up his inventory. “And as for the coins . . .”

  “It’s a real bastard, isn’t it? But I reckon the strangest thing is that he didn’t throw him in the river. You can imagine if he’d appeared in the sea we wouldn’t have known where he was from, or the fish might have eaten him and, if we’d found him, we wouldn’t have identified him. Should we go to Headquarters?”

  “No, no,” said the Count, who paused to glance selfpityingly towards the house of Tamara, the most constant of his lost loves, a woman whose skin always smelled of strong eau-de-cologne, whom he’d dreamed about for the last two thousand years of his life. “Better carry on to Vedado, a friend just came to mind and I want to talk to him.”

  “But what the hell you doing here, you motherfucker?” And almost reluctantly he scoured the other tables, scenting possible reactions to the Count’s arrival. “Look, if this lot realize you’re a policeman and you start whispering to me, I’ll get a bucket of shit chucked over me . . .”

  “You’re the whisperer,” said the Count at the top of his voice, as he grabbed the glass of rum from the table and despatched it in one gulp.

  Baby Face Miki didn’t dare stop him or take another look around; the Count smiled. He’d known him for almost twenty years and he’d not changed: a load of bollocks. When they were at school, Miki’d become a famous flirt and used to say he’d set the definitive record for girlfriends in one year – naturally, kissing always included – thanks to his immaculate features and clean complexion, on which the years had wrought a vicious toll: with more wrinkles than to be expected at thirty-eight, traces of late pimples and poorly distributed body fat, Miki – never again to be called Baby Face – tried to hide behind a luxuriant beard that contrasted with the scant hair over his forehead, equally mortal remains of what had once been arrogant blond locks. The passage from adolescence to adulthood had been, for Miki de Jeva, a devastating mutation. Nevertheless, despite everything and against all odds, Miki had turned out to be the only accepted writer from among his school friends keen on writing: a wretched novel and two books of particularly opportune stories had granted him that undeserved standing. He knew – as did the Count – that his literary fruits were sentenced irrevocably to deepest oblivion, after their premeditated moment, much vaunted by certain critics and publishers for his writing about peasants and the need for cooperatives when every newspaper spoke of peasants and the need for cooperatives, and about anti-patriotic scum and emigrated filth, when such epithets echoed down the country’s streets in the summer of 1980 . . . Nevertheless, his Writers’ Union card said just that, writer, and every afternoon Miki took refuge in the Union bar to drink a few rums which, thought the Count, didn’t strictly belong to him.

  “Would you like us to speak elsewhere?” the lieutenant suggested, pained by the despair of this would-be author.

  “No, don’t worry, nobody knows you here and the rum’s running out. Do you want a double?”

  The Count looked at the bar, where they were serving white Bocoy rum. Irritated, he acted as if he weren’t sure, perhaps wanting to bolster his confidence.

  “Yes, I think that’s just what I need.”

  “Give me four pesos,” Miki said, holding out a hand.

  The Count smiled: of course, you shit-head, he thought, and gave him a ten-peso note.

  “A triple for me and a double for you.”

  While he waited for Miki, the Count lit a cigarette and tried to listen to the conversation of his nearest neighbours. There were three of them: a young but very greying mulatto, who talked non-stop, a fat bearded half-caste with a hump like a jerry-built camel; and a tall guy, with a bugger’s face which would have astounded Lombroso himself. Oh image of literature! They were enthusiastically slandering another writer whose recent novel had apparently enjoyed a lot of success and who wrote very popular articles in the newspapers, and were calling him a fucking populist. Yes, they said, secreting bile on the bar floor, just imagine, he writes crime novels, interviews crooners and mooners, and writes stories about pimps and the history of rum: I tell you, he’s a fucking populist, and that’s why he wins so many prizes, and they changed topic in order to talk about themselves, writers really preoccupied by aesthetic values and reflections on social contradictions, when Miki returned with two glasses of rum.

  “I didn’t tell you . . . we got the last drops from the bottle. It puts me really on edge. Every day it happens earlier.”

  “You like coming here, don’t you, Miki?”

  The writer tried his rum, as he extracted a cigarette from the Count’s packet.

  “Yes, why not. There’s rum, you can talk a pile of shit and now and then lay some woman who’s gone overboard for poetry. Right now I’m expecting one who’s got more cash than the National Bank. I don’t know where the hell she gets it. So if my poetess turns up, you vanish, right?”

  The Count nodded, thinking he’d ask him who his neighbours were and whom they were dissecting now, but was afraid they’d hear him. He’d like to have read the history of rum, he thought, as he downed a gulp of incestuous, ahistorical alcohol, the molecules of which carried too much undistilled water.

  “Miki, what do you know about a painter called Salvador K.?”

  Miki smiled and took another sip of rum.

  “He’s a piece of shit.”

  “Fuck, everyone here is shit, opportunist, populist or queer, right?”

  “Right first time. What did you
expect? Parnassus? That when you came in they’d whisper in your ear, “Sing, my muse, the glory of Pelida Achilles,” or something as stupid? No, no chance, and for your information: that cock is all four things at once. The guy paints garish paintings which sell very well, but it’s the purest shit . . . You know, I think he lives around here, between N and Seventeenth, his wife’s house. And what’s there between you and this fellow?”

  “Nothing, somebody mentioned him the other day. And you say he’s married?”

  “No, I said he lives in his wife’s house.”

  “I get you. Hey, Miki, as you know the downside on everybody’s life, what can you tell me about Alberto Marqués?”

  If you were to stand out in the entrance to the Union and shout, “Who is Alberto Marqués?” two hundred guys would rush up, kneel on the ground, bow down and chant: He’s God, he’s God, and if you leave them for a while, they’ll organize a homage to him and chorus his praises, you bet your bottom dollar . . . But if you’d shouted that fifteen years ago, the same two hundred you see now would have rushed up and shouted, fists aloft, veins bursting in the neck like the fat guy’s: he’s the Devil, the class enemy, the apostate, the apostate of the prostate, not a bad metaphor, do you think? . . . Because that’s how it is, Count: before it was better not to mention him, and now he’s a living monument to ethical and aesthetic resistance, it’s a load of bullshit . . . Every minute someone’s recounting how he went to his place and talked to him, and you should hear them: you’d think they’d been to Mecca . . . The motherfuckers. Just imagine, now they say he’s the father of creole postmodernism, that with Grotowski and Artaud he’s one of the three geniuses of twentieth-century theatre, that Virgilio Piñera, Roberto Blanco and Vicente Revuelta owe everything they are to him, and even his queerness is a virtue because it allows him to voice another sensibility. That’s right. Do you understand what’s going on? Well, I do: when betrayal was the name of the game, they betrayed him, and now it’s not dangerous, and it’s even in good taste to weep over those who fell in old ideological skirmishes, you know, they worship him. And what are we left with? A guy who’s really fucked up, with more hate inside him than if he’d been spawned by a Nazi, and now converted into a big cheese, and not because of what he did, but because of what he might have done, because they rubbished him and, when he was offered a second chance the guy refused, for he didn’t want to do more theatre or publish anything, and he retired. A bloody hero is what he is now . . . And worst of all, the guy had to suffer a ten-year sentence of silence and solitude. Perhaps of the two hundred worshippers he has now, four or five carried on seeing him after he was destroyed, with all that stuff about queers, ideological deviants and idealists and foreignizers and the trip on socialist realism and art as ideological weapon in the political struggle . . . They took the guy out of circulation and sent him to run some bookshop or other, I’m not sure. Bloody hell: a stack of years without a single line of his published in the paltriest magazine, critics were banned from mentioning him when they wrote about the theatre, he disappeared from anthologies and even from dictionaries of writers. Straight: he no longer existed. He crumpled in the air, whooosh! not because he’d died or left the country, which amounts to the same thing. No. But because he was forced to change his routines. He became famous in the queue for bananas, and the queue for bread, at the Policlinic and milk stand . . . It’s terrible, right? But almost nobody talks about the kind of queer he was and still is. Do you know the story about the rent-a-blacks? Well, you know, it’s amazing. The gist is he was talking to a black bugger and saying he’d pay him to fuck him, but on one condition: he’d have to take him by surprise, so it would be more exciting. And he told the big black guy to enter his house and rape him one day that week. Then he’d settle down to read, every day at that time, until lo! one day the black came and he started to run around the house and the black chased after him, and he shouted and hid and the black finally grabbed him, took his clothes off and bang! gave it him from behind. You heard of anything more poofy? And the stories about when he went beautiful boy-hunting in the street . . . and a thousand similar stories. He was a queer and a half! But do you want me to tell you what’s truer than all this, truer than all his queer business, his being annihilated, his betrayal by his old girlies, or the way they worship him now? Do you want me to? Well, the truth is that that queer who shits himself when anyone shouts after him has got balls down to his ankles. He took it like a man and stayed here, because he knew if he’d left the island he’d have died for sure, so he didn’t play anybody’s game: he shut his gob and bolted himself in at home . . . I wish I’d got half the spunk that queen’s got . . . Fuck, get on your way, you motherfucker, my poetess is coming round the corner. You know what this crazy woman calls me? Mickey Rourke, hey, that’s neat! I’ll be fucked, not a drop of rum left. This lousy place!