Havana Red hq-1

by Leonardo Padura

  “Now then, Matilde,” Manolo began, and it was evident he found the conversation difficult, “we’ve found out something from Maria Antonia that may be very important for our work, though equally it may be quite irrelevant… Do you follow?”

  Matilde barely moved her head. Of course she couldn’t follow, thought the Count, but he decided to wait. Manuel Palacios had canine instincts and always got back on the trail. Then the sergeant told her about Maria Antonia’s find and added his own conclusion: “If that medallion is yours and Alexis hid it there, well, there’s no problem. But if it’s your son’s, we think it might clear up certain things.. .”

  “Which, for example?” asked the woman, apparently awaking from hibernation.

  “Well, it’s all supposition, but if he put your medallion there, perhaps he was thinking of committing suicide and didn’t want it to be lost… Although there’s another possibility, which is less likely: that someone else put it there…”

  “When?”

  “Perhaps after Alexis’s death,” Manolo Palacios answered, and the Count looked at him. I shit on your mother, the lieutenant then said to himself, surprised by that strange possibility he hadn’t envisaged. Might the murderer have hidden the medallion there? No, of course not, the Count tried to tell himself, although he knew it was an option. But why?

  “What’s all this about, Tona?” Matilde then asked, barely turning towards the black woman. Striking a dramatic pose, Maria Antonia recounted her discovery, very early this morning, and her call to Alberto Marques. Matilde turned to look at her, and finally said, “Please bring me the medallion.”

  Maria Antonia glided into the house, while Matilde looked at the two policemen.

  “They weren’t exactly the same. I differentiated mine from Alexis’s. The man on mine had a line etched under his left arm,” she said, and sank back into a silence which extended anxiously in the minutes before Maria Antonia returned. “Give it me,” Matilde then told her; she peered at the shiny figure trapped in the circle and said: “This is Alexis’s.” There wasn’t a trace of doubt in her voice.

  “Just as well,” sighed Sergeant Manuel Palacios, betrayed by the intensity of his desires, and the Count rushed to harness Matilde’s burst of vitality.

  “We also want to ask if you are sure this is Alexis’s writing.” And he showed her the page from the Bible.

  The woman stretched out her hand mechanically to reach her glasses on the corner table, and Maria Antonia moved to place them in her hand.

  “Yes, I think so. You look, Maria Antonia.”

  “It’s his,” said the servant, without recourse to spectacles, as confident, the Count supposed, as she would be in the art of identifying the creators of renowned Italian Madonnas… The lieutenant noted the empty ashtray, and this time held back. He spoke, looking at both women.

  “Madame, the medallion, this page Alexis tore out and wrote on, and the dress he wore on the night are very peculiar items. Did Alexis ever mention the word suicide in your presence?”

  You cannot imagine what a mother feels when she discovers her son is homosexual… You think everything’s been in vain, life’s come to a halt, it’s a trap, but then one begins to think it isn’t, it’s a passing phase, everything will return to normal, and the son you dreamt of as married and with children of his own will be a man like any other, and then you begin to look at every man, wanting to swap them for your son, that son you think still has time to become what you wanted him to be. But the illusion was short-lived. Alexis was never going to change, and more than once I even wanted him to die, before seeing him transformed into a homosexual, pointed at, execrated, belittled… I know if there’s a God in heaven he won’t forgive me. That’s why I’m telling you now, quite calmly. Moreover, I got used to the inevitable and realized that above all, he was my son. But his father didn’t. Faustino would never accept him, and converted his disappointment into contempt for Alexis. Then he preferred to stay longer outside Cuba, and leave him here with Maria Antonia and my mother. And that was very hard on Alexis: can you imagine what it’s like to feel different and scorned at school and at home with your own father rejecting and denying you? One day, after the theatre, Faustino and I were chatting to friends, and Alexis left in the company of a boy like himself, a thirteen-year-old, and Faustino averted his gaze to show he didn’t even want to acknowledge him. It was all too cruel. It was giving Alexis a guilt complex, and worst of all I persisted in wanting to cure him, as if it were possible to cure either that or his preference for men. I took him to several psychiatrists, and I now know that that was a mistake. It made him feel unhappier, more scorned, more different, I don’t know, as if he were the leper in the family. It was then he began to go to church and apparently nobody humiliated him there, and he also began to chat to Alberto Marques, when he was working in the library in Marianao, and his life developed in those directions, far from me, from his family… He became a stranger. After he had his last row with his father and Faustino kicked him out of the house, he came barely once a week, to speak to his grandmother and Maria Antonia, and sometimes he would chat to me, but he never gave me space in his world. My son was no longer my son, do you understand now? And I was very much to blame. I helped him to be an unloved person, and he began to say perhaps it would have been better if he had not been born or had even killed himself: he said that to me one day. Is that what you wanted to know? Well, he did say that… And now would you be very surprised if I told you I also wish I were dead? If I told you these two hands created Alexis’s death? Tell me, can there be a worse punishment than this?

  “Well, fuck me, just as well, it looks like rain. Come on, you up there, the one who doesn’t want to be the great policeman. Tell me, where are we at now?”

  “Well, Conde…”

  “We now know the medallion is Alexis’s and that opens up two possibilities: he put it there or someone did who must be the murderer. Well, who could have put it there?”

  “It wasn’t Maria Antonia, because she wouldn’t have rung, or Matilde, because she was the only one who knew the difference between the two.”

  “Faustino?”

  “No, Conde, for fuck’s sake. He’s his father. They had their problems, but you’re prejudiced against the guy. Hey, give me a cigarette.”

  “Then we must assume the murderer is a stranger who entered the house to put the medallion there.”

  “Well, that must be it, I guess. The day of the wake and burial the house was left empty.”

  “Don’t be crazy, Manolo. What would be the point?”

  “To put us off track. What about that cigarette?”

  “Here you are… But the murderer didn’t know the medallions were different, or even that there were two of them, right?”

  “No, I suspect he didn’t. But if it wasn’t Alexis who put it there, it must have been an acquaintance of his.”

  “And where does that leave your theory that the murderer didn’t throw the corpse into the river because nobody would ever connect him with Alexis?”

  “Sure, it doesn’t square… But what if Alexis, who certainly knew they were different, told Salvador, or another of his lovers?.. . Just as well it’s raining, perhaps it will cool down… Over the last few days several people have visited the house: the gardener, yesterday; the gas fitter, on Thursday; Matilde’s doctor, three times after Alexis died; five, seven, eight people from Matilde and Faustino’s families before and after the funeral; Alexis’s two poofy friends, Jorge Arcos and Abilio Arango, right…? Some thirteen people all told.”

  “Too many. But a good crew, don’t you reckon!”

  “Yes, though the doctor had more opportunities than the others, don’t you think?”

  “Of course, one day he stayed with Matilde until she fell asleep. But why did Salvador K. go into hiding?”

  “Yes, he’s the jackpot winner so far, don’t you think?”

  “Conde, the fitter guy was new. Could it have been Salvador?”

 
“Don’t be crazy, Manolo, don’t get too far-fetched. Just imagine all the coincidences necessary for Salvador to hear the oven needs fixing, to decide to substitute for the fitter, put the medallion in place, and fix the cooker while he’s about it!”

  “Conde, you’ve seen greater coincidences… Anyway, if he’s scarpered, it’s because he’s got dirt on his hands.”

  “Sure enough. And we’ve got the page of the Bible Alexis annotated and hid in the Pinera book… ‘God the Father, why do you force him to suffer so much?’… What does that mean?”

  “I haven’t a clue.”

  “Don’t be crazy, Manolo, it’s easy: Alexis is suffering and feels solidarity with a fellow sufferer, right?”

  “Yes, very touching, but just tell me one thing: why did he put the page in that book?”

  “Because he’d already decided to dress up in Electra’s gear… He wanted to set up his own tragedy… That sounds queer enough, doesn’t it?”

  “If you who know about these things say so… And what about the coins? Have you forgotten them?”

  “Of course not, but I’ve not got the slightest fucking clue about them. What say you, Mr Genius?”

  “I told you: they were paying him something back.”

  “But what was it all about… Fuck, was it blackmail?”

  “How the hell do I know? While you’re at it, what do you reckon about Maria Antonia?”

  “Tona, black and swift… I don’t know what to think: that black woman knows much more than she gives away. Why do you think she called the Marquess and set up this complication over the medallion?”

  “So we’d find out.”

  “OK. Then it’s because she knows something…”

  “Shall we bring her in?”

  “Don’t be crazy, Manolo, your idea is to solve everything by putting the screws on people. If it were that easy, she’d have called us. I think it’s going to rain all afternoon, don’t you?”

  “Yes, look at the sky over your place… Well, what are we going to do till Salvador appears and tells us he left home because he couldn’t stand his wife any more?”

  “What are we going to do? Well think on it, what else can we do? Think like the couple of thinkers we are… Now drop me off at home, sharpish!”

  He wanted to believe the rain cleaning his windowpanes also cleaned his mind and helped him think. That’s why he was thinking, with the blurred, slippery image from his dream at the forefront of his mind, trying to get mentally exercised so he could pull away the mask behind which the truth was hiding. It was always truth. Irksome truth always hidden or transfigured: sometimes behind words, at others behind attitudes and sometimes even behind an entire life simulated and redesigned merely to hide or transfigure the truth. But he now knew it was there and he only needed an idea, a light like a spotlight able to illuminate his mind and get at the fucking truth. Truth is, he told himself, as he thought more and more, I’d like to see Polly Sparrow-bun again, God, how horrible, he remembered, and though he felt a desire to masturbate he rigorously denied himself that individualist, self-sufficient solution, now that little butt was real and tangible, not tonight, but on Sunday, she’d agreed, because on Saturday I’m going to the ballet, you know, and if it cleared up he’d take the opportunity to go to Eligio Riego’s poetry reading, and could perhaps talk to the reader, and he also thought it was a long, long time since he’d seen Skinny and that he must tell him about his first-rate encounter with the mad item who’d extracted all the semen stored in his body, as she said: “God, how horrible!” as if it were all a big mistake. What would Dulcita be like after living so long in Miami? Perhaps she’d put on weight and look like a housewife, or wear those shiny clothes all Miami people wore, or perhaps she wouldn’t, and she’d still have those beautiful legs whose distant reaches he’d tried to observe – he knew she had the tightest of butts, Skinny had told him – when his friend wasn’t looking. If she was still pretty, perfect and nice, was it right she should see poor Carlos like that? If only everything could be like it was then and Skinny were thin again! If God existed, where the hell had he been the day Skinny was wounded, why Skinny?… Who was it? Salvador? The doctor? Faustino? The kitchen fitter? Or perhaps one of the other ten people in the house that day? And why do I never think the Marquess might be implicated? A debt collector hired by the dramatist? Don’t get fanciful, Conde, he told himself. I could almost see him, for fuck’s sake, but he was all right there, after eating two fried fish and a piece of bread and downing more coffee, not thinking how if he didn’t buy some more he wouldn’t have any left on Monday, because everything improved with the cool brought on by rain that didn’t look as if it would stop. What would Fatman Contreras be thinking as he watched the rain? Poor Fatman, if I could consult him, he’d surely say he could help. That bastard was a good policeman. Now without Fatman and old Captain Jorrin, whose death the Count still lamented, a policeman’s job would be more difficult. Who could he consult when he had doubts? And where had they hidden Maruchi? What can have happened afterwards between the Marquess and the Other Boy with the unmentionable name, deported to Havana for being such a queer? He needed the Marquess to tell him the end of that adventure in which each chapter became more personal and less transvestite. Would he tell me who the Other Boy was and if he’d really peeped the day he peed in his house? What he really needed to know, he thought as he watched the water running down the panes of glass, drank a drop more coffee, lit another cigarette and looked at his watch concluding he had plenty of time to go and ingest a few of Eligio Riego’s poems that night, what he really needed to know was the end of the story of Alexis Arayan, so masked and dead in the dirty grass of the Havana Woods, pursuing a death he didn’t dare prosecute with his own hands, faking divine retribution, crossing his own Calvary without fame or heaven, a sacrifice made to measure for his sinful homosexuality, wrapped tragically in the clothing of a Havanan Electra. What a good fucker you are, darling…! Was it true? Nobody had ever said that before, at least not like that. And how much truth was there in what the Marquess said? In this world only Skinny told the truth, and even he didn’t always tell his friend the truth. Would Faustino Arayan tell the truth? And black Maria Antonia? And could it be true that he, Mario Conde, was befriending pansied, theatrical Alberto Marques? The truth might be the bus driver with a bus-driver’s face he’d seen that morning, hitting the steering wheel with his ring, deciding whether or not to open the door to that girl begging, leaping up and down in front of the bus. What might happen later between those two people who were strangers and perhaps would never have met if the red light hadn’t stopped the bus at that exact moment? Was it a chance coincidence? The rain was still falling, streaming softly down the panes like ideas through the Count’s mind, as he looked at his hands and thought, after so much thinking, that the only truth was there and in the river sweeping everything along.

  He got up and took the typewriter case out from under his bed. He opened it and looked at the ribbon, half covered in rot and good intentions, and went in search of paper. He felt he’d seen a transvestite and that the light of revelation had reached his mind, alarmed by so much thinking. He put the first sheet in the carriage and wrote: “While he waited, Jose Antonio Morales’s eyes followed the extravagant flight of that pigeon.” He needed a title, but would look for it later, he reckoned, because his fingertips felt the immediacy of a revelation. He sank his fingers into the keyboard and went on: “He observed how the bird gained height…”

  It was a perfectly performed act of magic: the rain stopped, the wind swept the clouds towards other precipices and the blazing sun of seven in the evening returned to close the curtain of day. But the smell of rain seemed to have filtered into the city’s skin for the night, removing petrol fumes, ammonia from dry urine, ambiguous smells from packed-out pizzerias and even the perfume from the woman walking in front of the Count, perhaps to the very same destination. If only.

  Euphoria overflowing because of the eight typed sheet
s he carried in the back pocket of his trousers, the Count forgot his rush to reach the poetry reading and concentrated, while crossing the Capitolio’s ravaged gardens, on completing an exhaustive visual survey. He tried to keep up with the prodigious pace of a no less prodigious woman who enjoyed the confluence of all the benefits of cross-breeding: her long blond hair, swooning it was so lank, fell on the mountable buttocks of a black houri, an arse of strictly African proportions, finely flexed rotundities descending two compact thighs to wild animal ankles. Her face – an even greater shock for the Count – didn’t betray her allconquering rearguard: ripe papaya lips dominated by elusively spare, definitively devious Asiatic eyes which, by the theatre where his pursuit and optical frisking ended, looked at the Count in a moment of oriental arrogance and ditched him without right of appeal. The right bitch knows she’s hot and is flaunting it. She’s so hot I could kill her, the Count told himself, pleased to quote himself, as he climbed the imposing stairs where at other times all the city’s money, wrapped in silk gowns, linen suits, fox and ermine, went up and down from the nation’s most exclusive drawing rooms, unthinkable in that torrid town where, nevertheless, it was possible to think anything.

  He found the lecture theatre on the second floor and peered in; the poetry reading was apparently over and the poet, from behind an exhaustingly huge table, where his papers, spectacles and half glass of water lay, communed with the faithful who’d responded to his lyrical summons. Eligio Riego was in his seventies and his tepid, lethargic voice had a modulated rhythm that belonged to poetry rather than old age or exhaustion.

  From the margins the Count furtively observed him in inquisitive, emotional mode: he knew that many people thought the gentle man with the dusty absentminded guayabera was one of the most important poets the island had ever given birth to, and that, in his movement through poetry and time, he had bequeathed a unique view of the strange, awkward country they inhabited. The poetic grandeur, invisible to many, hidden behind a physique nobody would ever have pursued admiringly through the streets of Havana, had, however, an essential, permanent value because of the enviable range of its power, made only from the magic substance of words.