Havana Red

by Leonardo Padura

  The book attempted a philosophical explanation of that contradiction: the problem, as the Count thought he saw it, wasn’t being, but appearance; wasn’t the act, but the performance; it wasn’t even an end, but the means as its own end: the mask for the pleasure of the mask itself, concealment as supreme truth. That’s why he thought it logical to identify human cross-dressing and animal camouflage, not for the purposes of hunting or self-defence, but to fulfil one of the dreams eternally pursued by man: disappearance. Because it wasn’t likely, all in all, that the only meaning of such morphological transformation was capture of male prey, as with certain insects which vary their looks in order to simulate the aspect of attractive flowers loved by others who then fall bewildered into the lethal trap; nor was the disguise about deception, as with certain insects whose aggressive physique scares off possible assailants. It was, on the contrary, the will to be masked and mistaken, to negate the negation and join the common tribe of women, which perhaps guided a transformism that could so often prove to be grotesque.

  But if erasure were the ultimate goal of cross-dressing, the practical results of the exercise had its equivalents in the animal world which one could compare – through a series of case-studies – with the sad destinies of those transvestites who were always found out despite all their efforts: the inevitable Adam’s apple, hands that had grown by natural design, a narrow pelvis, alien to any sign of maternity . . . The book quoted a study, carried out over forty-seven years, which demonstrated how birds’ stomachs contained as many camouflaged as non-camouflaged victims, according to the statistics recorded in the region. Was disguise then futile, vulnerable and without guarantees of safety? And Muscles concluded, quoting someone who must have known more than he did, that transvestites confirm only that “a law of pure disguise exists in the living world, a practice which consists in passing oneself off as somebody else, and that’s clearly documented, beyond debate, and cannot be reduced to a biological necessity derived from rivalry between the species or natural selection”. So then, what the hell was the big deal? All that simply to conclude that it was a simple game of appearances. No, that clearly could not be the case. But could it be entirely chance for a Catholic transvestite who moreover wasn’t a transvestite to transform himself on the day the liturgical calendar set as the date of the Transfiguration? It couldn’t be so, it must be a coincidence, it’s too recherché, thought the Count as he shut the book and looked through the window from which he could see the old English castle, all white stone and red tiles brought from Chicago, which had risen up opposite the quarries, on the neighbourhood’s most prominent hill.

  He’d suddenly remembered poor Luisito the Indian, the only self-confessed little queer of his generation, there in his neighbourhood. He remembered how Luisito was treated as a kind of plague-carrier by the boys playing baseball, marbles and leapfrog among whom the Count grew up. Nobody liked him, nobody accepted him, and, more than once, several of them threw stones at Luisito until his mother, Domitila the mulatta, came out, broom in hand, to rescue him, cursing the mothers, the fathers and the whole lineage of his aggressors. Theirs were cruel attitudes and successive nicknames – Luisita, the first and longestlasting; Luisito the Duck; Rubber Bum (because of his abundant buttocks, already predestined for certain uses and abuses); and Cinnamon Flower, because of his Indian skin-colour – constant insults and a historical marginalization culturally decreed for all time: it’s his fault if he’s such a pansy, they said, as did the other mothers, who taught their children not to walk with that different, inverted, perverted boy, infected with the most abominable illness one could imagine. Nevertheless, the Count discovered that some of the stone-throwers who cursed him in public on certain propitious nights climbed the second rung of their sexual initiation via Luisito’s promiscuous arse; after experimenting with she-goats and sows, they tried Luisito’s dark hole, in the darkest tunnels of the quarry. And as none of them would ever admit to ancillary kisses and caresses to raise the temperature (you know, that’s really poofish, they’d argue when talking about these incidents), for all who made it, the relationship with Luisito was forwarded as proof of virility reached at penis point . . . Luisito was; they weren’t: as if homosexuality were only defined by the acceptance of the flesh of others in female fashion. Later, when they started to have girlfriends and stopped playing baseball and leapfrogging on the street corners in the neighbourhood, they forgot Luisito and Luisito forgot them: then the boy began to cruise La Rampa and El Prado, in the company of other youthful inverts like himself, in flocks which sidled slowly and tetchily, like La Florida Park ducks, in search of welcoming lakes in which to splash, until in 1980, thanks to his undeniable homosexual condition, and hence as an anti-social, expendable dreg, he was allowed peacefully to board a launch in the port of Mariel and leave for the United States. The last news the Count had received of Luisito the Indian were two photographs which circulated in the neighbourhood, describing a before and an after, like Charles Atlas: in one he was sitting on a shiny sofa – both Luisito and the pearl pink sofa were most pansyish, Luisito with his high-lighted eyebrows and bouffant hair; in the other, on the same sofa, sat a rather fat, uglyish mulatta, who was none other than Louise Indira, a woman surgically transformed, the only recognized queer of his generation, there in the neighbourhood. And the Count wondered if Luisito the Indian had ever had any philosophical or psychonatural principles first to sustain his homosexuality, and second to carry through his irreversible transfiguration. Or could it simply be that from childhood he’d felt an irrepressible desire to dress up in lace and play with dolls, which would later lead to an obsession for slotting things in his backside?

  The Count moved away from the window and his memories as he felt the jungle call of his entrails galvanized by so much inactivity. The evening was drawing to a close and apart from two dark, evillooking fish, which had absconded to the back of his fridge, he had no other edible products on the home front. He looked at his watch: seven forty-five, and dialled a telephone number.

  “It’s me, Jose.”

  “Of course it’s you, Condesito.”

  “I’m really hungry.”

  “Why you’re ringing me so late? You never change . . . But you’re in luck, because I got into a state looking for stuff here and there, and started late. Let’s see what I can rustle up.”

  “Anything will do.”

  “Shut up, I’m thinking. I’ve got red beans on the stove and I was choosing the rice . . . Come round then, I’ve had an idea.”

  “It’s paisa mix,” Josefina announced, and her eyes shone with pride and satisfaction the way Archimedes must have looked just before he got out of his bath.

  Skinny Carlos and the Count, like two rather dim-witted pupils, were listening to the woman’s explanation. Feigning surprise was part of the ritual: the impossible would become possible, dreams reality, and then their Cuban longing for food would suddenly transgress any frontier of reality measured by quotas, ration-books and irremediable shortages, thanks to a magical trick only Josefina was capable of performing.

  “My uncle Marcelo, who you know was once a sailor, fell in love in Cartagena de las Indias and lived in Colombia for several years. But the woman was paisa, as they call people from Medellín, and she taught him to prepare paisa mix, as Marcelo calls, or called it, may he rest in peace, the poor guy, for it’s a typically paisa platter. Then, as I had some red beans on the boil when you called, I started thinking and had this idea: of course, paisa mix, and, right there, when the beans started to soften, I threw in half a pound of minced meat, so the meat cooked in the juice, you follow me? Then I cooked crackling from really big pigs, with some of their meat, ripe plantains, eggs for you two, for at this time of night eggs don’t suit me because of my gall-bladder, a beef steak, with plenty of garlic and onion, and I cooked the rice with extra lard so it separates out right. You can eat the beans separately or put them on the top of the rice. How do you prefer them?”

  “Both
ways,” they chorused, and the Count sat behind Carlos’s wheelchair. They followed in the footsteps of Carlos’s mother to the dining-room, with the solemnity one adopts when visiting the holiest of holy places. Jose, Conde told the woman while downing spoonfuls of beans and meat, you’ve saved my life.

  “Jose,” said Carlos, stretching out a hand to caress his mother’s, “you beat your record. This is out of this world . . . I’m going to go paisa, I swear I am.”

  As they ate, the Count must have related the temporary lifting of his punishment and the new case he was working on. It was another of the policeman’s necessary rituals to tell Skinny and Josefina his stories, unfolding a plot in daily chapters, till the grand finale came.

  “But that’s all very nasty, Condesito.”

  “So the guy, I mean the gal, didn’t kick out, lash out or anything? Hey, you know I can’t really believe that.”

  “And that painter, with a wife and all. These things never happened in my day . . . What I don’t understand one bit is why you had to mix poor Jesus Christ up in all this.”

  The Count smiled and licked his fingers, streaming in grease from the crackling. He wiped himself with a handkerchief and lit a cigarette, after swigging some of his second beer.

  “Hey, Skinny,” he finally spoke, “you still got that copy of La Viboreña?”

  “Of course.”

  “You’ve got to lend it to me.”

  “Fine, but read it here.”

  “Don’t arse around, let me take it.”

  “Not even if I’d gone crazy. You were the one who threw it away and I kept it.”

  “I swear on your mother I’ll look after it,” the Count promised, smiling and making a sign of the cross with his fingers, and Josefina smiled as well, because the visible happiness of her son, an invalid for ten years, and of the other tormented, ever ravenous man who was also like her son, constituted the only scraps of happiness left in this world where bladders went on strike and you saw so much squalor. Happiness seemed a thing of the past, the time when her son and the Count shut themselves in of an afternoon to study and listen to music, and she was sure one day the house would be full of grandchildren and Carlos would hang his engineering diploma on the wall and the Count would present her with his first book and all would be sweetness and light, as life ought to be. But the knowledge she’d got it wrong didn’t stop her smiling when she said: “I’ll make some coffee,” and departed.

  “Hey, Conde, Andrés called me this afternoon. He asked after you.”

  “And what’s he up to?”

  “He’s say’s he’s got problems in the hospital, but he’ll come by tomorrow to talk.”

  “Then tell him from me to buy a bottle and drop in to see us one of these nights, OK?”

  The policeman had just downed his second beer and was peering into the darkness beyond the window. His stomach, body and mind were sighing in relief and he felt his muscles and brain distend, lose electricity, that he was on the verge of one of those moments of confidences and emotion he would share with Skinny Carlos, right there in his house. All the shields, armour and even masks he walked the world with – like any hunted insect – would tumble to the floor, and a necessary, much longed-for spiritual levity would replace the fears, wariness and lies he employed daily, as frequently as his blue jeans that daily clamoured for an emergency wash. And then he said: “I can’t get the story of the Transfiguration out of my head . . . Do you know, I still remember when I heard it for the first time? What’s more, Skinny, I think I’m getting the writing bug.”

  “Fuck!” exclaimed Carlos, hitting the table with one of his heavyweight’s fists. “What’s happened? You fallen in love again?”

  “If only!”

  “If only!” repeated the other, who then looked incredulously at his bottle of beer: how the fuck had it emptied? And the Count waited calmly for the inevitable suggestion to come. “Hey, you bastard, go and buy a bottle of rum. This calls for a celebration.”

  “Twenty-eight years ago,” the Count calculated.

  He said it out loud so it seemed more credible, used his fingers to reckon up yet again the obscenely inflated figure, which represented so many, many years, and he began to accept it must be so when he felt the anxiety stirred by what had gone forever to be in denial. Then time changed into an irritating, identifiable feeling, like a pain spreading from his stomach and starting to oppress his chest; his mother was next to him, a tiny white headscarf on her jet-black hair and that linen – linen? – dress that crackled because of the macerated yucca juices in which she’d soaked it before subjecting it to trial by iron, and he fingered the bluish, gentle spume of prickly starch and the final severity of the now ironed cloth, as he felt it minutes before they went into church, and his mother gave her son that hug he would never forget. You’re going to be a saint, she told him, you are my handsome boy, she told him, and the white purity of the material wrapped round them that Sunday morning passed through his pores and reached his soul: I am pure, he thought, as he walked towards the front row of pews to listen to the mass Father Mendoza would intone and receive at last that memorable wafer with an ancient flavour that should change his life: when it fell on his tongue, he would join a privileged clan: those with a right to salvation, he thought, and he looked at her again, and she smiled back at him, so beautiful in her headscarf and white dress, twenty-eight years ago.

  Father Mendoza jumped from the altar of memory to the real door where the Count had knocked twice. Although their spiritual relationship had never been renewed after that distant Sunday of purity he’d never revisited, the priest and the dissident had always maintained an affable relationship, in which the cleric insisted on calling the Count a mystic without faith and the latter on dubbing Father Mendoza a cunning old devil, capable of doing anything to win – or bring back – a believer to the fold. Nevertheless in subsequent years their dialogues had always taken place in the middle of the street, the result of casual encounters, for the Count had never gone back inside the local church or the adjoining house where the priest lived and where he’d received the necessary instruction in catechism in order to accede to communion with the holy and eternal.

  “My Lord, can this be a miracle?” exclaimed Father Mendoza when his eyes, still bloodshot from sleep and clouded by the passage of time, allowed him mentally to locate the image of his morning visitor.

  “Miracles are a thing of the past, Father. How are you?”

  The priest smiled as he led him into his sitting room.

  “Miracles still happen. And I’m a real ruin, or are you blind to boot?”

  “As I can see, but you’re not that bad. We’re both growing old at a similar pace.”

  “But I’ve got a forty-year lead. How can I help? Have you finally come to confess your multiple sins?”

  The Count sat on the wood and straw sofa, for he hadn’t forgotten how the high-backed rocking-chair was the only earthly property the priest defended like a vehement, haggling merchant. As usual, Father Mendoza settled down in his armchair and began swaying furiously.

  “Don’t keep on, Father: that decision was for ever.”

  “This is your greatest sin, Condesito: pride. And the other, I know for certain, is that you are afraid of yourself... Do you realize that one day you’ll fall . . .”

  “Don’t be so sure, Father. Do you know when I was last here?”

  “Twenty-eight years ago,” replied the priest, as if he didn’t have to think twice, and the Count suspected he’d thrown out a figure and only by chance hit on the right number.

  “Exactly twenty-eight years, but don’t play at cheap miracles.”

  The priest smiled again.

  “Don’t worry, it’s not because of you that I remember . . . My father died on the day of your communion. I found out ten minutes before saying mass. It was the worst mass of my life, or the best, I don’t know. And it was also the last time I doubted the goodness of God.”

  “And why did you talk to
us about the Transfiguration that day?”

  The priest almost shut his eyes, as if needing to look within himself.

  “So I’m not the only one who remembers that day, am I?”

  “No,” the Count admitted.

  “Wait, would you like a coffee? I can tell you I don’t offer everybody coffee. Just imagine, twenty people come and see me every day, and I’ve still not worked the miracle of multiplying the little envelopes of coffee they give me in my ration book . . .”

  Father Mendoza leapt from his chair as if propelled by the rocking and the Count’s heart felt the vitality the old parish priest exuded. He looked round the sitting room, at the wooden walls with scenes of the stations of the cross – all the fallen women were present – and the resplendent statue of Archangel Raphael, an exact replica of the one in the church, under which – twenty-eight years ago – the children taking part in the catechism had sat and listened to the lessons from Miss Merced and Father Mendoza. Just the fucking job, he thought when the priest returned with a cup of coffee, which his stomach, ravaged by alcohol and lack of sleep, was piously grateful for.

  “Do you still smoke?” he asked the Count, who nodded. “Well, give me one. That’s one pleasure I’ll allow myself today.”

  The Count took two cigarettes out of the packet and then lit the priest’s and his. They both exhaled at the same time and were enveloped by the same cloud of smoke.