Havana Red

by Leonardo Padura

  “I don’t know, I think because I saw a bus driver with a bus-driver’s face, and recently people have said I’ve got a policeman’s face.”

  The Marquess’s smile dissolved into a string of titters which seemed bent on disarming him once and for all, and the Count was on the point of standing up and leaving the house.

  “And you believed me, Mr Friendly Policeman? I was only joking. Or it was self-defence, I’m not sure. I wanted to create a distance, you know. Fear and suspicion? The fact is when you’ve been beaten once, you learn to raise your arms before they try to beat you again. Like Pavlov’s dog. But I think I went too far with you, really: I’m not as perverse, ironic, or . . . or as pansied as I make out. No way. So please forgive me if I showed a lack of respect. I’d like you to forgive all my ironies.”

  “So you said you liked my story?” insisted the Count wanting a simple declaration bereft of equivocal verbal whirls.

  “But didn’t you hear me? I told you . . . I’ll go even further: I admire you as a policeman. The cigar thing was a mark of genius, right? I’d never have thought of that dramatic solution as catalyst to the tragedy which had been woven . . . Because I don’t know if you noticed how it was all like a Greek tragedy, in the best style of Sophocles, full of ambiguity, parallel stories that began twenty years ago and which come together on the same day and characters who aren’t who they say they are, or who hide what they are, or have changed so much nobody now knows who they are, and at an unexpected moment there is tragic recognition. But they all confront a destiny that goes beyond them, that forces, drives them to make dramatic acts: only here Laius kills Oedipus, or Aegisthus anticipates Orestes . . . Should it be dubbed filicide? . . . And all is unleashed because of the hubris committed. There are excesses of passion, of ambition for power, of pent-up hatred, and that’s usually severely punished . . . What is really regrettable in this almost theatrical game is that the gods chose Alexis to sacrifice his destiny morbidly. What that poor boy did has grieved me sorely. At my age I’ve seen too many people die, dozens of friends, all my family, and each close death is an alarm bell warning that mine may be next, and the older I get, the greater my fear of death. But now I’m very pleased you’ve unmasked this gentleman and that he’s been jailed . . . Because I’ll tell you something else: do you want to know where the lines of this tragedy began to cross? In Paris, that spring of 1969: Faustino Arayán was the embassy functionary who rang Muscles’ place that day to say the Other Boy was at the police station. And he was the one who decided the Other should go back to Cuba, and sent him back wrapped in papers where he’d wiped all the shit he could find, about the Other and about me, naturally. And, obviously, Alexis was also fully aware . . .”

  The feast was finally over and I left Paris in the rain. Because springtime in Paris is so fragile: winter’s deathbed rattle can launch an attack with an impunity that is simply an awful revenge. The bad weather started without warning and the windows we left open during the day to the season’s pleasant noises and smells had suddenly to be shut, so we could see through the glass how the icy rain abused the virgin shoots on the trees in the nearby square. Two days before, I’d finished my research in the Artaud papers and also my course of master classes at the Théâtre des Nations, where I’d expounded for the first time in public my new idea for a production of Electra Garrigó based on what I called a transvestite aesthetic. It was a success, in fact, my last great public success . . . From Sartre to Grotowski, by way of Truffaut, Néstor Almendros, Julio Cortázar and Simone Signoret, I was praised publicly and privately and was invited there and then to present the work the following season, with performances in six French cities. I was at the height of my dreams when it began to rain in Paris, as if it had never rained before, and I decided to return to the sure but merciless sun of Havana, in a feverish haste to get on with my work. Muscles accompanied me to Orly, and we could never have imagined that that embrace and kiss on my neck would be last carnal contact I’d have with him. We’d never see each other again.

  As soon as I arrived I started work. I let the other directors get on with the year’s repertory and shut myself up in my house with Virgilio’s text, and began to elaborate my idea for the production. By December I had the first libretto ready, with all the sketches for the sets and costumes, the staging of scenes and acts, and a tentative cast in which actors from various groups participated, because I had to engage the best from Cuban theatre. But the sugar harvest had begun and the entire country was cutting and grinding sugar cane: even actors and theatre technicians, and I had to wait till July to have the chance to work with the actors I wanted. I wrote to Paris and explained the reasons behind the delay and they very kindly postponed the tour to the annus horribilis of 1971, and then I used the time to prepare the best ever Spanish edition of The Theatre and Its Double ...

  Finally, on 6 September I gathered in the theatre all those who were going to work on the project and made a first reading of the script, and explained the requirements for the stage, lighting, costumes and acting. The applause at the end, a standing ovation, convinced me beyond doubt I’d reached the gates of heaven: I only had to knock and Saint Peter would welcome me with open arms . . . And we started work. Although everything turned very difficult (the material for the costumes, the making of the thirty-two masks, the immaculate costume for the Centaur-Pedagogue, the scenery design), we gradually got the necessary and in January moved on from plain rehearsals to dress rehearsals on stage. What the actors had to do was really complicated and I demanded nothing short of perfection. They had to handle the masks as if they were their own faces and that meant special training, lots and lots of practice, and we spent long hours watching films of Japanese theatre. I then began to invite very specific people to see the rehearsals and they all left on cloud nine. Only Virgilio said something which, in my euphoria, I failed to register: Marqués, this is better than what I wrote, more intense, more provocative, and you’ve quite thrown me arse over tit, that is, my arse is all over the place . . . But, my friend, it’s too turbulent and cruel and I’m afraid it’ll upset . . . In fact, the air was already murky, but I failed to see the danger signals coming from every direction. I’ve always had a problem believing weather forecasts. I let passion take over and shut ears and eyes to anything that’s not my single goal . . . And so we finally set the première in Havana for April and the start of the tour in France for May. And then began the last act in the affair which ended with the performance the four bureaucrats put on behind the dissecting table on the set . . . One day I got a call to say there were problems with the Paris trip. They’d received reports about the fairly serious moral problems during my last stay in France, and they even knew I’d lodged at Muscles’ place, that I had an ambiguous attitude to the revolutionary process and suspiciously cordial relationships with certain pseudo-revolutionary and revisionist French intellectual circles . . . That I’d met up with Néstor Almendros and other people who held critical attitudes, including even loyal Julio Cortázar, and it was then they started to tell me things which only two people knew, Muscles and the Other Boy. I was told the Paris embassy was fully informed about all the goings-on, and I discovered they’d lumped together lies and truth in surprising fashion: the events were real and only the Other could have told them that way, because his vulgar stamp was obvious on all they recounted, but their conclusions would have made you piss yourself with laughter if it hadn’t been so serious. There they could say anything they liked about my character, my work, my morality, my attitude, my ideology and even the way I breathed . . . But I still didn’t give up . . . I wrote to Muscles to ask him to use his influence in Paris to activate the invitations and send them the most official way possible, and I kept the April première date in Cuba. Then the master stroke: in one week my production said goodbye to Orestes, the Pedagogue, Clytemnestra Pla and even Electra Garrigó . . . I thought I’d die, but I still didn’t give up and I started to look for other actors, to the very day they summone
d us all to the theatre and it was decided, in my absence, to expel me from the group by twenty-four votes for and two abstentions.

  Two months later the Other Boy published an article on Cuban theatre which didn’t mention my name or work, as if I’d never existed or it were impossible I might ever exist again . . . I then understood there was nothing doing, or that I could do nothing but retreat into my shell, like a persecuted snail. And I let the curtain fall. I gave in and took every punishment: first, factory work, then library work, forgot theatre and publishing, trips and interviews, was transformed into a nobody. And I assumed my role as a live ghost, performed with mask and all for so long, that what you see as a white mask is now my very own face.

  “Really?” the Marquess said and added, “Come with me,” and the Count followed him through the livingroom, across the bedroom and down the passage to the room which reeked of damp, ancient dust and old papers. The dramatist switched on the light and the policeman found himself surrounded by books, from the floor to the highest point of the ceiling, books the number and quality of which was incalculable, in dissimilar bindings and volumes, in various sizes and colours: books.

  “Take a good look, what can you see?”

  “Well, books.”

  “Yes, books, but as a writer you must know when you are seeing something more. Look, that one there is the edition of Paradise Lost which I stole with illustrations by Gustave Doré. Now I’ll ask you something: who would know the name of Milton’s neighbour, a very wealthy man, much feared in his time, and one who perhaps one day accused him of some barbarity or other? You don’t know? Of course: nobody knows or should know, but everyone remembers who the poet was. And was Dante a Guelph or a Ghibeline? You don’t know that either, do you, but you do know he wrote The Divine Comedy and that his reputation is greater than that of any politician of his time. For that is what is invincible . . . And now I’ll tell you why I brought you here!”

  And he walked over to one of the shelves and took down a red folder tied with ribbons which one day had been white and now lay under several layers of dust.

  “I’ll tell you this, Friendly Policeman, because I think I owe it to you, as I owe you an apology for my excesses with you . . . Herein are eight plays written in my silent years, and the other folder you can see contains a 300-page essay on the re-creation of Greek myths in Western theatre in the twentieth century. What do you reckon?”

  The Count gestured: shook his head.

  “And why is all this hidden away? Why don’t you try to publish it?”

  “Because of what I said before: my character must endure silence till the end. But that’s the character: the actor did what he had to do, and that’s why I keep writing, because, one day, as with Milton, they’ll remember the writer and nobody will even recall the sad functionary who repressed him. They wouldn’t allow me to publish or direct, but no one could prevent me writing and thinking. These two folders are my best revenge, do you understand me now?”

  “I think so,” replied the Count, and caressed the typed pages of his story and realized right then that he didn’t know where he should take it. Perhaps it was only a story for three readers: himself, Skinny Carlos and Alberto Marqués, and yet that was enough for him. No, he didn’t feel a need to expose himself further, or have pretensions to literature: just do it, for the Marquess was right: those pages contained what was invincible.

  “I also want to apologize, Alberto. At times I must have been too rough with you.”

  “Oh, my honey chil’! You’re an angel! You don’t know what it is to be rough with me. Look, if I tell you . . . Better not, forget it.”

  The Count smiled, remembering the stories he’d heard about the Marquess’s erotic adventures, in that very house. Well, whatever they say, he is a pansy, that’s no lie, but I like the man, he concluded.

  “Come on, let’s sit down,” the Marquess suggested and they went back to the sitting room, as the Count lit a cigarette.

  “I must admit I’m the one who’s now arse over tit,” the policeman said as he returned to his seat and position on that stage set. “But all these confessions have reinforced an idea I’ve been harbouring for two or three days: you know something you’ve not told me and which could help explain Alexis’s death. Will you tell me now or must I interrogate you?”

  “Ah, so you think there’s more to it . . . I get the full bloodhound treatment now, do I? So you want to know more?” the Marquess persisted and, not waiting for a reply, he raised one of his arms so his dressing gown sleeve created a space where, like a spectacular magician, he could put in a hand and pluck something out to show the Count. “You want me to tell you what Alexis said to Faustino to cause him to react that way? But I shouldn’t tell you, because when Alexis told me, and he did tell me, he made me swear on the Bible that, whatever happened, I wouldn’t tell anybody. And I never have . . . That’s why I’ve gone silent, right?”

  The Count smiled.

  “So now you believe in sacred oaths? Even though the secrecy may save Alexis’s murderer or attenuate his guilt?”

  The Marquess wiped a hand over his sparsely populated head and smiled devilishly.

  “True, if I don’t believe in anything and that gentleman is . . . But I should tell you I also kept silent because I didn’t think the man capable of doing what he did . . . For what Alexis said to him was that he’d found out about the fraud his father committed in 1959, when he falsified documents and got himself a couple of false witnesses to swear he’d fought clandestinely against Batista . . . That was how Faustino climbed on the chariot of the Revolution, with a past to guarantee he could be considered a trustworthy man who deserved his reward . . . Can you imagine what would happen if this got out? Well, you know: his feast would be at an end.”

  The Count tried to smile but couldn’t. Another of this bastard’s tall stories, he thought.

  “That’s why he paid him with two coins . . . And how did Alexis find out about this business? Who could have told him?”

  “María Antonia told him . . .”

  “And why did she tell him?”

  “I don’t know, perhaps she thought Alexis should have that card in his hand, you know?”

  The Count finally smiled.

  “So it was María Antonia. The things María Antonia knew; and I thought . . .”

  “Yes, you’re naive, my policeman friend. But it’s better that way: better naive than cynical. That’s why I’ll make one more confession to you: many of the accusations made against me are true: I am self-sufficient, proud, an experimentalist and ever since my twelfth birthday when I saw I was in love with my sister’s boyfriend, I’ve known the only antidote was to frolic wherever with men, which I’ve been doing ever since. Because I’m that way, yesterday, today and tomorrow as the saying goes . . .”

  The Count never thought he’d listen to something like that and find it appealing and wouldn’t want to get up and kick such an exultant little poof. But anyway he did decide it was time to beat a timely retreat and try to tie up the last loose ends to his case.

  “Did Arayán write that report?”

  “Who did, if he didn’t? He was always a sly, insidious cunt on the make.”

  “And what’s the latest on Muscles?”

  “This is all awful, isn’t it? I discovered he’s very ill, really ill. They say he’s got a few months . . . My poor friend. He suffered a lot from what they did to me. Perhaps even more than I did.”

  “Right,” the Count responded, standing up. “I’ve got to go. But I must ask you two last questions . . .”

  “It never changes: always two last questions.”

  “Who is the Other Boy?”

  “Haven’t you guessed? Ah, you’re not such a good policeman after all. I gave you all the clues. So find out for yourself and don’t get into deep water. And what’s the other one?”

  “The day I went for a pee in your bathroom, did you take a peek?”

  The Marquess rehearsed that gesture o
f amazement the Count was already familiar with: his mouth formed a huge silent O and he put his right hand on his chest, as if about to swear an oath.

  “Me? Do you think I’d do that kind of thing, Mr Friendly Policeman?”

  “Yes.”

  Then he laughed, but tittered not.

  “Well, your mind has an evil bent . . .”

  “If you say so.”

  “Of course I do . . . Hey, I’d like to ask you a little favour: keep my secret. I’ve become fond of you and when I get fond of someone, I love to go confessional. But only three people know what’s in those folders and you’re one of them.”