Havana Red

by Leonardo Padura

  The Count plunged into Seventeenth Street with a bad taste in his mouth – and it wasn’t the rum’s fault – prow pointing seawards and hull battened down so as not to be over-awed by the galling sumptuousness, apparently oblivious to the test of time and other erosions, of those palaces which had one day expressed the pride of a class at the height of its creative splendour and given the street the nickname from time immemorial of Millionaires’ Row. The success of those extremely rich men – who couldn’t get over their shock at being so flush, by merely hitting the three buttons of political, financial or even smuggling bravado – needed visual confirmation so badly that they insisted on giving their fortunes eternal form, and hired all the necessary talents to perpetuate the triumphs they glorified in stone, wrought iron and glass, throwing up the most dazzling mansions in the whole city. Immersed in the afternoon reveries of an aimlessly wandering mariner, he didn’t even ponder how it was possible to live in a forty-roomed house or what one might feel seeing the dawn through the panes of glass that went into that stained-glass window of St George and the dragon or the tropical glade on a gigantic skylight, bearing all the possible fruits of nature and the imagination. What he was thinking, as he walked down the avenue, recycled three decades ago and now occupied by offices, businesses and a few citadels packed with the citizenry, was that when he was exactly sixteen years old and writing his first story, Alberto Marqués had already been condemned to forget glory and plaudits. His pathetic tale went by the title of “Sundays” and was selected to appear in issue zero of La Viboreña, the magazine of the school’s literary workshop. The story told was a simple one, which the Count knew well: the unforgettable experience when he woke every Sunday morning and his mother forced him to go to the local parish church while the rest of his friends enjoyed their only free morning playing baseball at the corner of the house. The Count wanted thus to speak about the repression he’d experienced, or at least the kind he’d suffered in the most remote years of his sentimental education, although while writing he didn’t formulate the theme in exactly those terms. What was frustrating, however, was the repression unleashed on that magazine which never reached issue number one – and thus also on his story. Whenever he remembers it, the Count relives a distant but indelible sense of shame, all his own, which invades him physically. He feels a malevolent torpor, a choking desire to shout out what he didn’t shout the day they gathered them together to shut down the magazine and workshop, accusing them of writing idealist stories, escapist poems, unacceptable criticism, stories hostile to the country’s present needs, now that it has embarked on the construction of a new man and a new society (thus spake their headteacher, the very same guy who one year later would be expelled because of countless frauds committed in his drive to be known as the best headteacher of the best high school in the city, the country, the world, even when his headship was based on fraud: all that mattered was that everyone should think him the best head and recognize him as such, and endow him with all the privileges such recognition might engender . . .). How did his story relate to all they were told? he wondered again, as he floated down the street, the wind in his sails. Yes, when it happened he was sixteen and Alberto Marqués was almost fifty, it was his first story and he thought he’d die, but Alberto Marqués was already used to living among plaudits, praise and congratulations suddenly denied him one black day because he and his works didn’t meet particular parameters that were suddenly considered vital. What must he have felt, that man who looked so diabolical, whose tongue was so barbed, when he found himself separated from what he loved, knew and could do, when he saw himself condemned to suffer a silence for a period that might be perpetual? The Count tried to imagine, as he’d tried on other occasions to imagine dawn rising over those palaces, and couldn’t: he didn’t have the experience, but he remembered his old shame, his elemental rage at the age of sixteen, and thought he should multiply it by a hundred. Thus he might perhaps approach the dimensions of that Frustration trapped in a municipal library. Was he so harmful that he deserved such brutal punishment and a castrating exercise of re-education so that ten years on they could tell him they were strategic errors, misunderstandings by extremists who now had neither name nor office? Could the new ideology, the education of the new masses, the brain of the new man, be infected and even destroyed by enterprises such as those undertaken by Alberto Marqués? Or wasn’t it more damaging to write the kind of opportunist literature cultivated by his ex-comrade Baby Face Miki, who was always ready to prostitute his writing and vomit his frustrations on anyone really talented who wrote, painted or danced? No, there was no comparison, and the world, though it was grey, could never be the way Miki – never again to be called Baby Face – coloured it. Then the Count sensed that the whole business was softening him, that he was getting softer by the day, and also that Alberto Marqués’s queerness was beginning to worry him less and a furtive rebel solidarity was beginning to draw him to the dramatist, and he even began to regret any evidence that might implicate him in the assassination and take him, all his queerness, frustration and dignity, not to mention that ugly face, to a prison where his buttocks would become a flowerpot, and the service plied by buggers, though not surprising, would be free, that was for sure . . . At last he had reached the sea.

  Kick his guts out, hit him hard, gouge his eyes, he’d ordered Manolo after explaining who Salvador K. was and allotting him the first interview with the painter. And when he saw him, the Count’s expectations were replete with prejudice: the guy was just over forty and weighed some two hundred pounds, had two enormous feet – could he be a size nine? – and flexed a weighttrainer’s arms, just right for tightening a silk sash to strangle a man while ensuring he didn’t fight back.

  Seated in the living room to the flat, the policemen rejected his assiduous offers of water, tea and even coffee, keeping to the plan they had agreed. No, not even water.

  Salvador K. seemed nervous and was trying to ingratiate himself.

  “It’s an investigation, I suppose?”

  “No, on the contrary,” said Manuel Palacios, sitting on the edge of his armchair. The Count liked his skeletal friend’s hostile manner. “It’s something much more serious and you know it. Shall we speak here or should we go elsewhere?”

  The painter smiled in trepidation. He’s shitting himself, the Count’s experience told him.

  “But what about . . .?”

  “Then we’ll talk here. What was your relationship with Alexis Arayán?”

  As he didn’t like him, the Count was pleased to see Salvador K.’s last hopes fade and the smile abandon his lips.

  “I know him,” he said, trying to fake a degree of offended dignity, “from the Centre for Cultural Heritage. Why?”

  “Two reasons. First, because Alexis Arayán was murdered yesterday. Second, because we’ve heard you two were very close.”

  The painter tried to stand up, but desisted. It was obvious he had no plan of attack, or perhaps they had really taken him by surprise.

  “Was murdered?”

  “Last night, in the Havana Woods. Strangled.”

  The painter looked into his house, as if fearing some unexpected presence. The Count stood up while Salvador stared and formulated a question, but decided to wait.

  “You really want to talk here?” persisted Manolo.

  “Yes, of course, why not? . . . So he was murdered. But where do I come in?”

  Manuel Palacios smirked.

  “Well, Salvador, this is very delicate, but some people claim your friendship was a touch more than friendship.”

  Then he did get up, very offended, his muscular arms tensed.

  “What are you implying?”

  “What you just heard. Do I need to spell it out? People are saying you and he sustained a homosexual relationship.”

  Still on his feet, the painter tried to look disaster in the face: “I will not allow you . . .”

  “That’s fine, don’t allow us, but go into the street
and shout it out publicly and see what people say.”

  Salvador appeared to contemplate the possibity and reject it. His muscles began to lose momentum and he sank into the lower reaches of his chair.

  “They’re jealous. Gossips, slanderers, envious . . .”

  “Of course, you’re right . . . But the fact is Alexis was killed dressed as a woman,” said Manuel Palacios and, not giving Salvador time, he manoeuvred round a bend in the conversation: “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “Yesterday morning at the Centre. I took some paintings to sell. Was he really dressed as a woman?”

  “What did you talk about? Try to remember.”

  “About the paintings. He wasn’t too keen on them. He was like that, meddling in other people’s business. I expect that’s why someone murdered him.”

  “And what can you tell me about the relationship you had with him?”

  “That’s pure slander. Just try to get someone to come and say to my face that he saw me . . .”

  “That would be more difficult, you’re right. So you deny it?”

  “Of course I do,” he said, and seemed to gain in confidence.

  “What’s your blood group, Salvador?”

  His confidence evaporated again. The Count looked daggers at Sergeant Palacios. He’d never have asked him that question at that point, but the one buzzing round his head. Manuel Palacios was definitely better.

  “I really don’t know,” he said, and he did really seem not to.

  “Don’t worry. We can find out in the Policlinic. Which one do you go to?”

  “On the corner of Seventeenth and J.”

  “And you didn’t see him last night?”

  “I told you I didn’t. But what’s my blood group got to do with it?”

  “And where were you last night between eight and midnight?”

  “Painting in the studio I’ve got on Twenty-First and Eighteenth. Hey, I don’t know anything . . .”

  “Oh . . . And who saw you there?”

  Salvador looked at the floor, as if searching a point of support that continually eluded him. His fear and embarrassment were as prominent as his muscles.

  “I don’t know, who might have seen me? I don’t know, I work alone there, but I arrived at around six and worked until around midnight.”

  “And nobody saw you. What bad luck!”

  “It’s a garage,” he tried to explain. “It’s outside the building and if nobody’s parking nearby . . .”

  “Twenty-First and Eighteenth are very near the Havana Woods, right?”

  The man didn’t reply.

  “Hey, Salvador,” the Count then intervened. He thought it a good time to move the direction of the dialogue on a little . . . “What does the K mean?”

  “Oh, my surname is Kindelán, that’s why I sign K.”

  “Predictable. Something else I’ve been wanting to ask you for some time. I only see reproductions of famous paintings, but no works by you. Don’t you think that strange?”

  The painter smiled, at last. He seemed back on firm ground and breathed loudly.

  “Have you never heard the anecdote about the friends of Picasso who go to his place to eat and don’t see a single work by him? And one of them asks, intrigued: ‘Maestro, why don’t you have any of your work here?’ And Picasso replies: ‘I can’t afford the luxury. Picassos are too expensive . . .’ ”

  The Count faked a smile, to accompany Salvador’s.

  “I get you, I get you, and the other day, did he mention the day of the Transfiguration to you?”

  The painter looked down, making it clear he was making an effort to remember. The Count saw that he was deciding what would be the best reply.

  “I don’t know, it doesn’t ring a bell. But I do remember he had a Bible on his desk yesterday . . . And so what?”

  “Nothing, police curiosity pure and simple . . . By the way, Salvador, why do you think Alexis dressed up as a woman last night?”

  “How should I know . . . I told you, it’s just gossip . . .”

  “Of course, there’s no reason why you should know. Well, that’s enough for today,” the Count added, as if tired, and his sergeant was the man most surprised by this dénouement. The Count sighed exhaustedly as he stood up, and looked the painter in the eye. “But we’ll be back, Salvador, and get this into your head: try to be straight, for I can see you’ve got a few numbers that might win you the jackpot. Good evening.”

  As the painter voiced his final protests, they went into the street and got into their car. Sergeant Manuel Palacios turned the first corner tightly.

  “So the Transfiguration . . . Why did we leave, Conde? Didn’t you see how I’d got him?”

  The Count lit a cigarette and lowered the window.

  “Softly, softly,” he urged his sergeant, and added, “What did you expect, that the man would say yes, he’s a bugger who took advantage of the other guy to sell his work and that last night he killed him because Alexis said his paintings were a load of shit? Don’t fuck around, Manolo, you extracted what there was to extract and he had nothing else . . . Let them check his blood group and investigate him at the Centre and in the studio he’s got on Twenty-First and Eighteenth, and see if anyone saw him last night. Tell Headquarters to give you a couple of guys, better still if they’re Crespo and El Greco, and let me stay at home, for I’ve got a book I have to read. You get an early night, tomorrow we’ll go and see Faustino Arayán and ten other people . . . I’ll tell you this: you’re a much better policeman than I am . . . Pity you’re so skinny and sometimes go squint-eyed.”

  The Count realized that while reading he couldn’t get out of his mind the image of the mask behind which Alexis Arayán hid, the closest he’d ever come to a transvestite. And that he was searching not only for explanations to a mystery, but to something definite: his desire to return to talk to Alberto Marqués. Each paragraph in his book became a weapon for a possible verbal duel with the Marquess, an idea with which to scale his heights and level the dialogue. It gave him a knowledge of the subject that would let him close in on that sordid business which had finally begun to attract him the way he preferred: as a challenge to his apathy and prejudice. Mario Conde the policeman was a bad case of idées fixes and the pursuit, in each case, of his own obsessions. And the story of that dead transvestite (perhaps symbolically transfigured into ephemeral significance) contained all the ingredients to fascinate him and lead him to its resolution. Consequently Alexis Arayán’s fake female face appeared at every moment as a graphic complement to the treatise on metamorphosis and bodily self-creation penned by Muscles, thanks to which various things were becoming clearer to the Count: cross-dressing was more vital and biological than the simple perverted exhibitionism of going into the street dressed as a woman, as he’d always viewed it viscerally as a red-neck macho. Though he’d never been completely convinced, it was true, by the primary attitude of the transvestite who changes his physical appearance in order to enhance his pick-up rate. Pick up who? Heterosexual real men, with hairy chests and stinking armpits, would never knowingly tangle with a transvestite: they’d bed a female, but not that limited vision of woman, whose most desirable entry-point had been blocked off for good by the capricious lottery of nature. A passive homosexual, for his part, preferred one of those real men, because that was why they were homosexual and passive, for heaven’s sake. And an active homosexual, hidden behind his appearance of a real man – crudely put: a bugger, cultured archaic version: bougre — didn’t require that often obscene exaggeration to feel his sodomizing instincts aroused and penetrate per angostam viam.