Havana Red

by Leonardo Padura

  “I want to talk to you about the Transfiguration. Something has happened which reminded me of that passage, but I failed Bible History.”

  The priest, who’d recovered his rocking speed, contemplated his cigarette before speaking.

  “I knew you wanted to get something out of me . . . Do you know why I used the passage on the Transfiguration that day?”

  His eyes tired of following the pendulum marked by the priest’s face, the Count looked towards the painting which represented the arrival at Mount Calvary.

  “You really want me to guess?”

  “I’m sorry, I’m becoming old and stupid, and ask stupid questions . . . I did so because I felt very sick, and in that passage, when God appears before the apostles, Jesus understands the human soul more than ever and tells his disciples: ‘Arise, be not afraid’ . . . And not everyone can understand the dimensions fear can have. And that day, you understand, I went in great fear of death.”

  “And after six days, Jesus taketh Peter, James and John his brother and bringeth them up into a high mountain apart. And was transfigured before them: and his face did shine as the sun and his raiment was white as the light. And, behold, there appeared unto them Moses and Elias talking with him. Then answered Peter and said unto Jesus: Lord, it is good for us to be here: if thou wilt, let us make here three tabernacles, one for thee, one for Moses and another for Elias. While he yet spake, a bright cloud overshadowed them: and behold a voice out of the cloud which said, This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased: hear ye him. And when the disciples heard it, they fell on their face, and were sore afraid. And Jesus came and touched them, and said: Arise, be not afraid. And when they had lifted up their eyes, they saw no man, save Jesus only.

  “And as they came down from the mountain, Jesus charged them, saying, Tell the vision to no man, until the Son of man be risen again from the dead.

  “This is chapter seventeen according to St Matthew. Mark and Luke also relate the Transfiguration, and, listen to this interesting detail, Mark saw it thus: ‘And his raiment became shining, exceeding white as snow; so as no fuller on earth can white them.’

  “Conde, you know, the scholars say that this happened on Mount Tabor, some forty miles from Caesarea. It’s a strange mountain, because it stands a thousand feet above the plain of Esdrelon, and reigns in solitude, as if it had sprung from the ground or fallen from heaven. On the mountain meseta the Byzantines raised a basilica with two chapels that the Crusaders rebuilt several centuries later and entrusted to the Benedictines. After the Crusades, the Muslims transformed it into a fortress in the year 1212. The latest news I have is that the present basilica was consecrated in 1924 and has a central façade flanked by two towers.

  “But what is important in all this is that it was on Mount Tabor that Jesus’s divine character was publicly revealed for the first time, that he was recognized by his father and introduced as the Messiah. Hence the disciples saw the appearance of Jesus, who must have been really dirty after such a long journey over the sea and desert, profoundly transformed: his clothes, skin and hair shone, but in reality everything was the result of an inner brilliance necessary to receive the revelation from his father. It is then the greatness of Jesus is made manifest: being who he is, introduced as a divine being, he doesn’t lose his humanity and understands the fear of his followers, who have witnessed something that transcends them infinitely. And do you know why? Because I think Jesus predicted his own fear when he talks to them about how his work will be carried through: his glory will be in a resurrection, but first he must endure the suffering and sacrifice which await him on the cross, that was the necessary test for this greater miracle to take place. Beautiful and heartrending, don’t you think? And if He was afraid and understood what fear is, why should we deny ourselves such a human sentiment? Perhaps the most human of all, Conde.”

  Quite the contrary, thought the Count, already set on forgetting biblical transfigurations too remote from sordid, earthly transvesting, as he took another look at Faustino Arayán’s house and compared it to the dark, damp cavern inhabited by Alberto Marqués, whence the transvestite Alexis had emerged on his last night-time excursion. An unbridgeable, impossible abyss existed between those two vital spaces, of established strata, self-interest, merits forgotten and recognized, favours lost and opportunities grasped or not, which distinguished them and set them apart, like light and shadow, poverty and opulence, sorrow and happiness. Nevertheless, in life and death, Alexis Arayán had fused the extremes of his origins and destiny, and created an unlikely link.

  From the moment his car turned into Seventh Avenue in Miramar, under the still benevolent sun of that August morning, the Count felt he was entering another world, its face more pleasant and better washed than that of the other city – the same city – they’d just crossed. And now, in front of Faustino Arayán’s house, he brought his idea full circle: quite the contrary, when he thought how the original owners of that preening mansion with its windowpanes still intact had no doubt also tried to delineate a drastic difference between two worlds, the best of which – naturally for them – they had intended to magnify by building that house: oh, those good old bourgeois pretensions to permanence . . . At this moment, perhaps in Miami, Union City or wherever the hell they were, thirty years on, they must still miss the precise beauty of that construction where they’d invested fistfuls of dreams and money, thinking it was eternal. But people usually get it wrong, the Count told himself, penetrating the maze of his mind as it raced on and thinking that, if he’d lived in a house like that, he’d like to have owned at least three dogs running around the garden. And who’d pick up the shit? he wondered, lifting a foot in his imagination to avoid doggy deposits, and decided to do without his pack of hounds and devote his time – and this was beyond debate – to cherishing the library he’d have on the second floor, overlooking the garden.

  On his journey the Count had also gleaned from the lips of Sergeant Palacios two choice items of disturbing news: Salvador K.’s blood, like the murderer’s, was AB, and nobody in the vicinity of the studio on Twenty-First and Eighteenth had seen him on the night of the crime, although they’d seen him go in more than once with Alexis Arayán. According to the Count’s calculations, those two tickets meant he was sure to win the raffle he’d bought into.

  Manuel Palacios rang the bell and the maid opened the door.

  “Come in,” she said, without saying good-day, and pointed them to the armchairs in the sitting room. “I’ll tell Faustino right away.” And she disappeared on ghostly tiptoe.

  The Count and Manolo looked at each other, laughed and prepared to wait. Ten minutes later, Faustino Arayán appeared.

  He was wearing a guayabera that was so white and elegant the Count wouldn’t have dared to wear it for a minute: it was resplendent rather than white, with tenuous tucks, a shiny thread and the maker’s name discreetly but visibly embroidered on the top right-hand pocket. The grey pin-stripe trousers displayed the precise crease of an expert iron, while his dark patent leather moccasins seemed light and comfortable.

  “Good-day,” he said, holding out a hand; a strong, solid, pink hand, like its owner, whose only sign of being in his sixties was an almost totally bald pate which distinguished the equally shiny roundness, noted the Count, of his enormous head.

  “I’m really sorry to trouble you today, compañero Arayán. We know you had a bad day yesterday, but . . .”

  “Not to worry, not to worry . . .”

  “Lieutenant Mario Conde,” he introduced himself, and pointing to his colleague, he said, “and Sergeant Manuel Palacios.”

  “I told you, Lieutenant, not to worry. You’re doing your job, and I have to do mine today, because life goes on . . .”

  “Thanks,” said the Count and observed the ashtray from Granada, as clean as ever, as if it had never been used.

  “Just a moment, I’ll get us a drop of coffee, if you’d like one?” asked Faustino Arayán, and without waiting for a rep
ly, he whispered: “María Antonia.”

  The black woman appeared like a flash, with a tray of three cups of coffee, as if she’d been waiting for the gun from behind a starting line. The damn bitch floats, the Count was convinced, and he was the first to be served. When she’d passed the cups around, she left the tray on the table and flitted back into the inner recesses of the house.

  “May I smoke?”

  “Yes, of course. Would you like a cigar? I have some excellent Montecristos.”

  The Count thought about it: no, he shouldn’t, but he dared. “What the hell,” he told himself.

  “I’d be glad to accept one, to smoke later.”

  “Yes, of course,” answered his host, and from the lower drawer of the table in the centre of the room he offered the Count a cedar-wood box where a dozen Montecristos lay in perfect formation, finely scented and pale-hued.

  “Thanks,” the Count reiterated, and put the cigar in his shirt pocket.

  “Well, Lieutenant, what can I do for you?”

  Only then did the Count become aware that he had nothing to say or had forgotten what he’d intended to say: he’d been dazzled by so much glitter and couldn’t clearly see the route he should follow. He had returned simply to comply with police routines in that perfectly ordered house, with its gleaming guayaberas and bald pates, black maids with wings on their ankles and ashtrays from Granada without a speck of dust, which seemed quite unrelated to the eschatological story of a queer who’d been strangled with two coins up his backside, after exhibiting himself through the city streets in a theatrical garment which would end up stained by major and minor effluvia – as Alberto Marqués might have said.

  “How’s your wife?” he asked, looking for a way to broach the matter.

  Faustino nodded repeatedly.

  “In very bad shape. Yesterday, when we got back from the funeral, Dr Pérez Flores, well, I’ll tell you his name because everybody knows who Jorge is, prescribed sedatives and tension-reducers. She’s asleep now. The poor woman can’t accept it. But I knew one day that boy would give us a big upset, and now look what’s happened.” He paused, and the Count decided not to interrupt. “Who knows what business he’d been mixed up in? From adolescence Alexis has been a constant headache. Not only because of his . . . problem, but because of his character. Sometimes, I’ve even thought he hated both me and his mother, and he was particularly despotic with her. He always blamed us for the fact that we spent so much time outside Cuba and that he had to stay here with María Antonia and my mother-in-law. He refused to understand that my work forced me down that path. He couldn’t come with us, where would he have studied? Six months in London, three in Brussels, a year in New York, then back to Cuba . . . Can you imagine? I’d have preferred to give him a more stable life, for us to have brought him up here, and I can tell you I’d have kept him like that, under my thumb, but my work has always assigned me very important duties and my wife and I always made sure he had all he needed: the house, his grandmother, and María Antonia, who loved him as if she were his real mother, school, the home comforts he wanted . . . everything. If this seems like a punishment . . . I’ll confess something, so you see where I’m coming from: my son and I never got on. I think I was really to blame, I never made concessions to him, though to begin with I did speak to him and try to help. Now I think mine was the worst approach possible. And look what has happened, how it’s all turned out. I feel guilty, I don’t deny that, but he also behaved very badly towards me and his mother, right from adolescence. And afterwards, when he befriended that scoundrel, the Alberto Marqués guy, it was impossible to see eye to eye. That man brainwashed him, injected his head with poison, changed him for ever in every way: it isn’t that he started to write or waste paper trying to be a painter. No, it was worse than that. It was his moral, even political behaviour, and I couldn’t allow that, no way, now do you understand me? No one, not Alexis nor anybody, was going to defile the status I’d won from so many years of struggle, work and sacrifice, so I dictated my rules of the game very clearly: if he wanted to live under this roof and enjoy all the comforts that gradually one had been able to accrue, one couldn’t think certain ideas about this country, or be criticizing it all the time or eat shit in church or associate with an envy-ridden guy like Alberto Marqués . . . It had to be all or nothing, and that’s what I told him one day, because he was no longer a child, and he got furious, I wish you could have seen him, and heard the things he said, that I was a dogmatist, an extremist and a troglodyte and a good few things besides . . . And that was when he said he was leaving home. I know he always came back to see his mother and María Antonia, after his grandmother died, and if I arrived, he left, and I was almost pleased, because I didn’t want any more arguments with him. These conflicts upset me a lot, you know? . . . I regret that now, perhaps I could have done more for Alexis, forced him to keep going to the doctor, been more strict with him, whatever, but he never gave me that option,” he said, and bent down to the cigar-box. He took one, but rejected it immediately, as if suddenly the possibility of lighting one of those beautiful Montecristos seemed inappropriate.

  “Faustino, do you or your wife have any idea about what might have happened the other night?”

  The owner of the house looked at his hands as if he’d find a truth there, and looked the Count in the eye.

  “What can I say, Lieutenant? It was all the result of a wrong choice . . . Alexis chose his path and look where it led. What I can say, it’s like a punishment . . . The very thought of it fills me with shame. Disguised as a woman . . . Can I tell you something?” The Count nodded, like an eager pupil. “Neither his mother nor I deserved to suffer this. All I hope is that time passes so we see if we can wake up from this nightmare. Of course you do understand me . . .”

  “Of course,” the Count affirmed and looked at his own hands, searching, perhaps, for another possible truth.

  “It’s really shaming,” Faustino repeated, and the Count looked him in the eye for the first time in the whole conversation: he found two damp eyes, where he thought he spotted real grief, and tears which perhaps his sense of manliness prevented him from shedding. Although it was difficult, given he was such a powerful, self-confident man, the policeman was surprised to find he could feel pity for him.

  “Faustino, you may know nothing about this. Because of your relationship with Alexis, I mean . . . But perhaps your wife, I don’t know . . . Please ask her if she heard Alexis mention at all the day of the Transfiguration. I’m following this line of thought, though I can’t tell you why. It’s an idea I can’t get out of my head . . .”

  Mario Conde began to feel a degree of relief when the car took to the tunnel under the river and ran along the Malecón, towards the city centre. The sea had a pacifying effect, and absorbed him in a state of allconsuming fascination. And that morning the sea was an invitation to quiet and calm: tranquil and blue, like the breeze blowing in through the windows.

  “What do you reckon, Manolo?” he finally asked the sergeant, and lit a cigarette.

  Sergeant Manuel Palacios drove down the right lane and reduced speed slightly.

  “It’s difficult for him. It must be the talk of at least the diplomatic service, right? But I can tell you one thing. I reckon he’s pleased from one point of view. It’s like when someone dies of cancer: if there’s no cure, the sooner it’s over, the better.”

  “Maybe,” the Count agreed, not knowing exactly what it was that might be.

  “Where do we go now?” Manuel Palacios asked, preparing to accelerate.

  “I’m not sure . . . Salvador K. looks to be top of the list, right? But it’s also true we have nothing definite against him . . . I’m pissed off,” he said, throwing his cigarette into the street.

  “Conde, Conde,” Manolo shook his head, as if he couldn’t believe it. “Here you are and you still get like that. Don’t gripe like that; if we need to invent something to implicate the painter, we will, won’t we?”

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p; “Don’t suggest such a thing. At least not today.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m very worried. Did you manage to find out what happened to Maruchi?”

  The sergeant reduced speed slightly.

  “No, I haven’t got anything on that . . . But this morning I didn’t tell you something else that happened yesterday. I’ve got an appointment at three this afternoon with the Internal Investigation people.”

  “And what do they want from you?”

  Manuel Palacios shook his head, and the Count noticed he was wiping the sweat from his hands on to his trousers.

  “I don’t know. I really don’t.”

  The Count looked into the street, more and more potholes, dustbins overflowing with rubbish, houses eroded by salt water and neglect.

  “If you don’t have problems, nothing to worry about, but watch what you say, OK? You’re no idiot, Manolo, so think out your replies carefully . . . But don’t get too worked up, I expect it’s something quite trivial.”

  “All right, Conde. It’s really hot, isn’t it?”

  The fishermen congregated on the Malecón at that early hour with little hope that fate would place a fine specimen on their hooks and bring justifiable cheer to the family table. When the Count saw those silhouettes over the calm sea, he was filled with envy. He knew life was healthier there, with a piece of string in the water and one’s mind thinking only about a possible catch and the dinner of one’s dreams, and not about a series of stories of deaths, thefts, frauds, rapes, lesser or greater forms of assault – that could also help save him from boredom – or, the last straw, about the enquiries of the Internal Investigations team bent on throwing light on business the Count hadn’t even imagined and that had already cost two of his colleagues their positions at work. Will they find something on me? he wondered, and tried to recall any heinous act in his career. Who knows . . . And what about Maruchi, what the hell had happened to her?