Havana Red

by Leonardo Padura

  The Count looked towards the river and reflected how fortunate it was that people were still thieving, murdering, assaulting, embezzling in the city, ever more enthusiastically, for it was his personal salvation. Terrible, but true: that death by strangling the forensic doctor was now trying to explain to Detective Lieutenant Mario Conde and his aide, Sergeant Manuel Palacios, had enabled him to fight off the void and feel that his brain was working again, and that it had more to its existence than headaches from repeated hangovers.

  “What do you reckon, Conde? Yes, it’s a man. Dressed and face-painted like a woman. Now we’ve got murdered transvestites, we’re almost part of the developed world. At this rate we’ll soon be making rockets and going to the moon . . .”

  “Cut the crap and continue,” said the Count, throwing his cigarette butt in the direction of the river. Sometimes he liked to speak like that and this forensic, for a reason as elusive as it was inevitable, always made him react curtly. Perhaps it was just his easy familiarity with death.

  “I’ll go on, but I’m not talking crap . . .” the forensic retorted and, as he listened, the Count tried to imagine the scene.

  He saw Alexis Arayán, a woman without all the gifts of nature, tarted up in red, wearing a long, antiquated dress, her shoulders draped in a shawl that was also red, her waist emphasized by a silk sash, walking out with someone in the starry night of the Havana Woods. The Count reckoned a breeze was blowing, and the night must have been more appealing and welcoming than in the rest of the city. The footprints preserved from Alexis’s sandals signalled the journey from road to woods. The other footprints belonged to her companion, a corpulent man, who must have leered at Arayán’s face in eager anticipation: her finely drawn eyebrows, eyelids with pale purple highlights, mascara’d eyelashes and a mouth as gorgeously red as that strange dress which belonged to a vague, doubtless, distant past. Perhaps there were kisses, teasing gropes, caresses from Alexis Arayán Rodríguez’s delicate fingers and varnished nails. Then they stopped by the battered trunk of a hundred-year-old blossoming flamboyant tree, and a tragedy of equivocal love was unleashed.

  “You know something?” Conde interrupted the forensic’s narrative and looked over towards the covered corpse. “Yesterday was the sixth of August, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, and so what?” the forensic now interjected.

  “So you lot can see the benefits of going to catechism . . . August sixth is the Catholic celebration of the Transfiguration. According to the Bible, on that day Jesus was transformed before three of his disciples on Mount Tabor, and, from a cloud of light, God called on the apostles to listen to him for ever. Isn’t it too much of a coincidence that this transvestite was murdered on August sixth?”

  Sergeant Palacios folded his arms over his undernourished pigeon chest (he was only palatial by name) and looked at the Count. The lieutenant enjoyed that glance where a timid, squint-eyed hesitancy lurked: he knew he’d surprised his skeletal subordinate, and his subordinate liked him surprising him like that.

  “And how the fuck do you remember that, Conde? As far as I know you’ve not been inside a church for thirty years or more.”

  “Less, Manolo, less. The truth is I always liked that story: in catechism classes I always imagined God in his cloud, illuminating everything, like a spotlight . . .”

  “Hey there, Conde, and what if Alexis disguised himself day in day out?” asked the forensic, smiling triumphantly at his question and prompting the Count to think of other reasons for his aversion.

  “Then end of mystery,” the Count admitted. “But it would be a pity, wouldn’t it? The transfiguration of Alexis Arayán . . . sounded good. Well, on with your story.”

  He saw them halt under the flamboyant tree. A glimmering moonbeam sweetly pierced the foliage, lending a silvery hue to the big man and fake woman, a couple on whom the breeze rained down a shower of red petals. Perhaps they kissed, perchance they caressed, and Alexis kneeled, like a penitent, surely intending to satisfy his companion’s urgent need with his nearest available orifice: the grass patches on his knees betrayed such genuflection. Then he plunged into the finale of the tragedy: at some moment the red silk sash went from Alexis’s waist to his neck and the big man mercilessly terminated the breathing of the woman who wasn’t, until her heavily made-up eyes bulged out of their sockets and every sphincter opened its floodgates, dislocation by strangulation.

  “And this is what I can’t square, Conde. The big guy killed him from in front, judging by the footprints, right? But it appears the transvestite didn’t struggle, didn’t scratch, didn’t try to wriggle . . .”

  “So there was no fight?”

  “If there was, it was a battle of words. The dead man’s nails don’t carry any traces of anything, although I’ll provide a conclusive report later . . . But now comes the second mystery: the murderer began dragging the corpse that way, look at the grass, do you see? As if to throw him in the river . . . But barely moved him two yards. Why didn’t he throw him in the river if that was what first came to mind?”

  The Count observed the grass where the forensic was pointing and the canvas which now covered Alexis Arayán’s body and hid the patch of red cloth that had so alarmed the early morning jogger, who’d departed his daily route only to discover a corpse already crawling with ants which had rushed to the magnificent banquet.

  “But the strangest of all is yet to come: after killing the transvestite, the big man pulled her knickers down and inspected her anus with his fingers . . . I know because he wiped himself clean on the gown afterwards. What do you make of that, lads? Well, that’s as far as I can take my little tale. When they do the autopsy and finish the other tests in the laboratory, perhaps we’ll have more to go on. Now I’ll be off, downtown, as there’s been another little murder in Old Havana . . .”

  “Good luck to you, Flower of the Dead,” replied the Count, turning his back on him.

  He looked at the dirty river in the waters of which he’d once swum. In other waters, in fact, he thought, like Heraclitus: not as dirty, at least not up by La Chorrera bridge, where he and his friends used to catch biajacas, if not Chinese carp, when someone decided those red, exotic fish could grow and multiply in the island’s rivers and reservoirs.

  “All right, Manolo, try your hand at the questions Flower of the Dead left us. Why should anyone let himself be strangled and not fight back? Why didn’t the murderer throw him into the water? And why the hell did he decide to inspect his anus?”

  Sergeant Manuel Palacios folded two very rickety arms over an emaciated chest. In every case he was assigned to with the Count it was always the same: he had to be the first to get it wrong.

  “I don’t know, Conde,” he said finally.

  The Count looked at him, surprised by his wariness.

  “But how come you don’t know, you always know.”

  “But I don’t today . . . Hey, Conde, what the hell’s got into you today? You’re evil, man . . .”

  The Count returned his gaze, as he lit up. Manuel Palacios was right. What had got into him?

  “No idea, Manolo, but it’s something bad. Can you imagine, I cheered up when they said I was on a homicide case and could leave Headquarters! I’m fucked, my friend, now I get high when people are murdered. And this forensic gets at me bad, and big time.”

  Manuel Palacios nodded. He knew the Count too well to take those confessions of sinning seriously, and decided to be charitable for once.

  “Well, how about a respectable married man with children, who suddenly picks up a woman, though he’s not a flirt, and she’s tall and beautiful, and he’s so delighted with his catch he brings her to the Woods, they kiss, caress, the woman kneels down to suck him off, as the forensic said, and it’s then the fellow discovers she’s not a woman but quite the contrary. Or how about the big ’un also being quite the contrary, I mean as fruity as the dead guy, and he’s taken revenge on Arayán because of some quarrel from queer street? Or how about if the big ’un’s
a pervert who likes going with transvestites so he can kill them afterwards, because he hates transvestites, as he’s a transvestite himself, but frustrated by his size and girth? That’s my best take ever, don’t you reckon?”

  The Count coughed, cigarette between his lips.

  “You get more intelligent by the day, you really do . . . This is fishy, Manolo. Nobody lets himself be strangled without scratching back. And you tell me, what can you hide in your rectum? Drugs? A jewel? And how come the other fellow knew he had to search there of all places? . . . Well, because they obviously knew each other, right? But if the murderer decided against dumping him in the river it was because he was sure no one would connect him with this place or that transvestite. And what about the red dress, which must be from somewhere special? And why’s such an elegant transvestite carrying his identity card? Don’t you think it incongruous? I’ll tell you something for nothing, Manolo. I don’t like this case one little bit. It seems too mysterious, and in this country it’s too hot and there are too many fuck-ups for us to handle mysteries as well. Besides, I’ve never liked pansies, just so you know. I’m prejudiced in that department . . .”

  “You don’t say,” acknowledged the Sergeant.

  “Piss off, Manolo.”

  The worst side of the dead is that they leave their living behind, thought the Count after the woman confirmed: “Yes, he’s my son, what’s happened now?” And as she seemed so strong and self-confident he told her without any soft-soaping: “The fact is he was murdered last night,” and then the woman started to crumple, her body visibly shrinking on that nice leather sofa, and an inconclusive scream escaped from the hands she screwed up over her face . . .

  The identity card Alexis Arayán was carrying indicated that the address was his permanent residence: a big two-storey house on Seventh Avenue in Miramar, with a well-trimmed garden, walls painted a bright white, panes of glass miraculously intact in a city of broken windows, and two cars in the drive. A Mercedes and a Toyota, pointed out Manuel Palacios, who knew all there is to know about cars and makes . . . It was the image of prosperity, as it should be, for according to his ID Alexis was the son of Faustino, the Faustino Arayán, Cuba’s latest representative at UNICEF, a diplomat always away on long trips, a personage from the higher echelons, and of Matilde Rodríguez, that woman who was perhaps a well-preserved sixtysomething, with hair a delicate shade of brown and well-kept hands, who suddenly seemed much older than sixty and to have lost the petulant confidence with which she’d welcomed the policemen.

  When she cried out a black woman silently emerged from somewhere in the mansion. She walked noiselessly, as if her feet didn’t touch the ground. The Count noticed the bloodshot look in her bulging, shiny eyes. She didn’t greet the policemen, but sat down next to Matilde and started whispering words of consolation accompanied by almost maternal gestures. Then she got up, went out the way she’d come, and returned with a glass of water and the tiniest pink pill, which she handed to Matilde. The Count’s training enabled him to pick up a fleeting tremble in the black woman’s hands as they neared the out-of-control hands of Alexis’s mother. Still not acknowledging the Count or Manolo, the black woman said: “Her nerves have been very bad of late,” and she helped Matilde stand up and led her towards the stairs.

  The Count looked at Manuel Palacios and lit a cigarette. Manolo shrugged his shoulders as if to say: “Bloody hell,” and they waited. The Count, meanwhile, decided to use a blue and white ashtray inscribed GRANADA. Everything seemed clean and perfect in that house where suddenly tragedy had unexpectedly intruded. The black woman came down ten minutes later and sat down opposite them. Finally she looked at them, her eyes still red and shiny, as if she were running a temperature.

  “Her nerves have been very bad of late,” she repeated, as if it were a set phrase or the best her vocabulary could muster.

  “And comrade Faustino Arayán?”

  “He’s at the Foreign Ministry, he left early,” she said, joining her hands together and pressing them between her legs, as if praying to an image nailed to the floor.

  “You work here?” interjected Manolo.

  “Yes.”

  “Been here long?”

  “Over thirty years.”

  “Do you know if Alexis went out from here yesterday?”

  “No.”

  “Didn’t he live here?”

  “No.”

  “But this was his home, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes what: was it or wasn’t it, did he go out or don’t you know?”

  “Yes, it was his home, but he didn’t live here and so he didn’t leave here. For months . . . Poor Alexis.”

  “So where did he live then?”

  The black woman looked towards the staircase that led to the bedrooms. She hesitated. Should she ask permission? Now she did seem nervous, as she lowered her bloodshot gaze and bit her lips.

  “In somebody else’s house . . . Alberto Marqués’s.”

  “And who might he be?” continued Manuel Palacios, perching his sparse buttocks on the edge of the chair.

  The black woman looked back at the staircase and the Count felt that anonymous sensation for which a girlfriend of his, for want of a better word, had invented the term liporis: embarrassment at somebody making a spectacle of themselves. That woman, in the year 1989, still harboured the atavistic instinct of deference: she was a servant and, what was worse, thought like a servant, wrapped perhaps in the invisible but tightly clinging veils of genetics moulded by numerous enslaved, repressed generations. Physical discomfort then replaced liporis, and the Count felt the desire to flee that world of glitter and veneer.

  The black woman looked back at Sergeant Palacios and said: “I think he’s a friend of Alexis . . . A friend he lived with. Poor Alexis, oh God . . .”

  When he found that the almost impossible address really existed, the Count shut the notebook where he’d transcribed various data from the stout file on Alberto Marqués Basterrechea and tucked it into his back pocket. He contemplated the miraculously cheerful bougainvillea in the garden under that anti-social two p.m. sun. Magenta, purple, yellow, like enchanted butterflies, their flowers entangled the small clump of leaves, thorns and branches which seemed capable of surviving any local or universal cataclysm. The sylvan shadow in the garden, dominated by the arrogant plumes of several palms, lent a dark patina to the house rising up a few yards behind, exhibiting its number 7, on calle Milagros, between Delicias and Buenaventura. Could that number and the names of the three streets – Miracles, Delights and Good Fortune – be an invention of Alberto Marqués in order to locate his house in a corner of Earthly Paradise, in perfect arcadian bliss? Yes, it had to be one of the devil’s infinite stratagems, since, according to the information the Count had recorded in his notebook, extracted from the aged but ever healthy file he’d been handed with a broad grin by the security specialist who dealt with the Ministry of Culture, anything was possible if it involved that very particular, diabolical Alberto Marqués: a hugely experienced, predatory homosexual, politically apathetic and ideologically deviant, a provocative, conflictive individual, lover of the foreign, hermetic, obscurantist, potential consumer of marijuana and other substances, protector of derailed queers, a man of dubious philosophical affiliations, steeped in class-based, petty-bourgeois prejudice, all annotated and classified with the precious help of a Muscovite manual of social-realist techniques and procedures . . . That impressive curriculum vitae was the result of reports written, collated and précised by diverse police informers, successive presidents of the Committee for the Defence of the Revolution, cadres of the long-gone National Council for Culture and the present Ministry of Culture, the political attaché’s office in the Cuban Embassy in Paris and even by a Franciscan Father who’d been his confessor in a prehistoric era and a pair of perverse lovers who’d been interrogated for strictly criminal reasons. What the hell have I got myself into? Trying futilely to cleanse his mind of prejudices
– the fact is I love prejudice and can’t stand pansies – the Count crossed the garden and walked up the four steps to the front door in order to press the bell that stuck out like a nipple under the number 7. He stroked it twice and repeated the operation, for no sound of a bell reached him, and when he was about to touch it again, hesitating over whether to try the knocker, he felt assailed by the darkness beyond the slowly opening door, which surrounded the pale face of Alberto Marqués, dramatist and theatre director.

  “What’s the charge this time?” asked the man, his deep voice heavy with irony. The Count tried to suppress his surprise at the door, which apparently opened by itself, at the remarkable pallor of his host’s face and the question he fired at him, and opted to smile.

  “I’m looking for Alberto Marqués.”

  “Yours truly, Mr Policeman,” the man replied, opening the door a few inches more, with a distinctly theatrical touch, so that the Count had the forbidden pleasure of seeing him full length: colourless rather than pale, thin to the point of emaciation, his head barely adorned by a drooping, lank lock. He was covered from neck to ankles by a Chinese dressing gown that might have belonged to the Han dynasty: yes, thought the policeman, no less than two thousand years of anguish must have passed through that silk, its colours as faded as the man’s face, worn and rough as if it were no longer silk, prominently marked by testimonies to many a battle, by what could be coffee, banana, iodine or even blood stains, endowing what masqueraded as the attire of historic emperors with a dismal, out-of-sorts leitmotif . . . The Count forced a smile, remembered the awful reports stuck to his buttock, and dared ask: “How do you know I’m police? Were you expecting us?”