Havana Red

by Leonardo Padura

  “What shit, right.” And he added, “Turn down there, I want to revisit the Havana Woods.”

  Without patrol cars, ambulances pretending to be in a rush, the obscene line of bystanders, the photographers, forensics and police summoned by death, that forest of fantasies, in the middle of the city, by the dirty river, radiated a harmony which the Count’s every pore tried to inhale, in an urgent, greedy act of appropriation. He felt that violence and that place now seemed so alien that even his own presence in the area was an incongruous irritant, and, as usual, he meditated on death’s insalubrious ability to change everything. The grass so green, the indefatigable sound of the river, the generous shade from the trees, had been but a few hours earlier the scenario framing a macabre murder, the pre- and post-histories of which the policeman was now trying to grasp, with his unprofessionally manic tendency to feel he too was an accomplice. That was why he now stood there, in that anonymous space – nobody would ever erect a pretentious funeral monument to the first Cuban transvestite killed in sexual combat – where Alexis Arayán’s life had ended and Mario Conde’s eschatological labours had begun. Death was thus transformed into a social event, ceased to be a drastic biological fact which no exact, medical, natural or supernatural science could revoke: its only importance now lay in the crime and possible punishment for the transgressor of a law, already established by the Bible and Talmud, and the Count knew his mission in the world would conclude with the Pyrrhic victory of a conviction that was predictable and necessary, but could not restore what was gone for ever.

  “What you thinking about?” Manuel Palacios pulled up a blade of grass and put it in his mouth.

  “About woods and wild animals,” the lieutenant replied as he headed towards the river. “That transvestite didn’t get dressed to go on parade or hunt, Manolo. He was seeking something more difficult to find. Peace of mind, perhaps. Or revenge, how do I know . . . What was he seeking here, looking the complete transvestite, if he wasn’t one, and right on the evening of the day of the Transfiguration? It gets stranger by the minute . . .”

  “I don’t see why you have to over-complicate things all the time. Why do you always want to imagine what nobody else can? . . . Something strange is happening to you, Conde. I’ll tell you one thing: I sometimes think you’re not interested in being a policeman any more.”

  “Manolo, you are a genius.”

  The policemen followed the path down to the bed of a river, a slow, decidedly sickly serpent. The Count got close to the edge and lamented the advanced stage of agony he contemplated there: patches of oil, acidic foam, dead animals, countless bits of detritus flowing in the slow waters of the Almendares, the city’s only real river. And then he had a premonition: “Of course, hell, didn’t Alexis own a Bible?”

  “Oh, you’re back already, Mr Police Lieutenant Mario Conde. Tell me right away, because I bet you know who did it. I sometimes see these series where the police get their man straight away, you know? The police are so good at . . .”

  The Count ignored the barbed wit and went into a living room as dark and cool as on the previous day, and sat back in his armchair while Alberto Marqués sat in his. He felt they both moved with the premeditation of actors conscious of their movements on stage.

  “Would you like a cup of tea? I can give it to you ice cold, ice cubes included. . . .”

  “Yes, I think I could do with that,” the Count nodded, and the Marquess disappeared down a corridor at the back of the peculiar stage set arranged in that dark room. Now, as he watched him walk, the policeman noticed that the dramatist had the unlikely springy step of a young lad tiptoeing at an impressive rate, like a rabbit or crane in a hurry. He doesn’t seem that old, thought the Count, but his mind wandered off to the interview awaiting Sergeant Palacios that afternoon. What the hell were they after? A slight but disconcerting feeling of fear lodged in his stomach. Experience screamed at him that an incisive investigation would light on annoying evidence, delicate truths, improbable but definitive clues, and that was why he’d begun to wonder what the hell they were after, while he’d opted to return to the Marquess’s house, driven by a need to find out more: he must log Alexis’s belongings, search for pointers. Meanwhile, Manolo had to carry on research at the Centre for Cultural Heritage on the transvestite and his pathetic friend Salvador K., and look for the Bible the painter had mentioned. But what the hell are they after? he wondered again as the Marquess tiptoed back like a young crane, a cup in each hand. He gave one to the Count and returned to his armchair.

  “Should I open the window?”

  “If it’s no bother . . .”

  The dramatist put his cup on the floor and opened the window behind him. All the very high windows in the room had grills, and the Count was curious to discover how the rented lovers Miki had mentioned went about taking the house by assault. As the Marquess sat back in his chair, the Count understood how it had all been prepared afresh: the sun, perfectly arranged, only allowed him sight of the man’s silhouette. He was expecting me, he thought.

  “Well, don’t prolong the torture . . . Are you on to something?” And he blinked insistently.

  “Very little, in fact . . . But this case has its curious features. Alexis was strangled but didn’t put up a fight.”

  “For God’s sake,” the old dramatist exclaimed softly, touching his neck as if to beat off a strangler’s approaching hands.

  “And after he was dead, the assassin stuck two coins up his anus.”

  “Ay, ay, ay,” repeated the dramatist, closing his legs as if to avoid possible monetary penetration.

  “Have you ever heard of anything like it?”

  “No, never . . . It’s like something out of a mafia film.”

  “Yes, you could say that . . . The other thing I did was to read a bit of the book you lent me and I learned several things about transvestites.”

  “Of interest, I hope?”

  “Yes, but a touch too conceptual. Is it really true transvestites go in for all this philosophy of mimetics and erasure?”

  In spite of the intense background glare, the Count thought he saw the Marquess smile.

  No other city in the world – not even Havana – can offer the miraculous harmonies of Paris. In Paris evening and night fuse in a tentative symphony, dawn seems a necessary consequence, shy yet inevitable, and if the spirit of man can penetrate by osmosis the sensibility in the breeze, stones, smells and colours of Paris, life in the city can be a gift from the gods: and that’s how I felt, that spring.

  Washed and perfumed, we got into the taxi and my hands sweated profusely on the drive, as my eyes twice saw the illuminated shape of the Eiffel Tower, the edifice of the Opéra, the cheerfully lit Café de la Paix, until we turned down narrow, cobble-stoned side streets – cobbles that had become famous the previous year, when love, intelligence and ideology spawned revolutionary copulations behind barricades made from the very same cobbles – the sinuous streets of the Quartier Latin, and we stopped in front of a neon-lit joint advertising LES FEMMES, a gateway to a dive we anxiously desired. Muscles paid and said something to the taxi-driver – a Moroccan, who handed him a small envelope – while the Other Boy and I contemplated the shabbiness of the place; then the padded door creaked noisily open to give us our first vision of the cabaret: a blue glow.

  Muscles came over to us and for the first time that spring on my last visit to Paris I saw his round peasant face, still slightly uncouth, beam with happiness. A few days earlier, when I’d arrived in Paris, he’d told me about the end of his relationship with Julien, the young anthropologist he’d lived with over the last two years on a permanent honeymoon – as Muscles reported it, a man at other times so exquisite in his poetic images – and who’d humiliated him by leaving him for a woman: no more, no less than a Russian dancer – and corps de ballet, not even a soloist – who’d defected from the Bolshoi. As ideology had interfered in matters of love, I commented and queried: “Did the dancer carry the plague in her armpits
and have a shotputter’s face like most of our Soviet sisters?” Women, what filth, we chorused, and Muscles could only laugh . . . But now, near that blue, yellow-lettered cabaret, Muscles seemed to rediscover his desire to live.

  “Come on,” he said, and took us by the arm (my left, the Other Boy’s right), and dragged us into the blue glow . . . Light shone from the floor and drew volutes of smoke, over-sweet even for Virginian cigarettes, which mixed its hypnotic emanations with the waft of acrid sweat and the heavy perfume of Arab essences that are sold wholesale in Paris’s apocryphal Persian markets. Their ears, in the meantime, were hit by the wild rhythms unleashed by the voice of Miriam Makeba (a Third World invasion), projected from a cubbyhole built in the wall. I felt strangely afraid to find myself at the vortex of that attack on all the senses, but Muscles and the Other seemed to have entered familiar territory where they moved completely naturally. Then I started to see fake Valkyries performing their ancient function as pourers of beer. They seemed to float on the blue, like phosphorescent, newly hatched chrysalises, parading the starched organdy and anorexic pleated skirts they modelled as the last word in retro chic. Each Valkyrie carried a tray of glasses in one hand and yellow (yellow?) flowers in the other. I was looking at those hands, too large even for a Valkyrie, even for such a genuinely Scandinavian item, when one exemplar brushed her tunic’s abrasive edge against me and I felt I’d been touched by a prehistoric insect.

  I was bewildered and grateful that Muscles pushed me towards a table, where the Other Boy was already seated, drinking an amber liquid I soon discovered wasn’t beer. How did he manage it, that innate ability of his always to get there first? Then the disc jockey switched from Makeba to Doris Day and I discovered that, like any good cabaret, Les Femmes had a stage where seven perfect – if not more than perfect – versions of Doris Day had settled – they must have settled – singing along to the recording to the delight of an enraptured audience, where I began to see men and women whose affiliations I doubted: too many opulent, peroxide blondes in best Marilyn Monroe style, dark-skinned beauties from post-war Italian cinema, black women with large, acromegalic hands and metallic robo-comic lips which regaled their colleagues around the table with kisses as intense and syncopated as Doris Day’s ballad.

  I was still nonplussed when Muscles invited me to go to the bathroom and waved the envelope the taxi-driver gave him. He knew I wouldn’t go, and so didn’t insist, but the Other Boy did go . . . It isn’t that I was a puritan. On the contrary, I must have been pretty daring in my life, I’ve tried everything, but my instinctive lucidity has always proved more useful, and that day, it was certainly having a party out there, expectant, wanting to digest everything my eyes could take in. And thanks to that lucidity I realized I’d come upon a giant happening, all transmutation and masks, that was less famous but more real and intense than a Venetian carnival. The idea of the chrysalis and the feeling that a huge insect had brushed against me held the key to what I was living and seeing: a party for insects. I remember thinking, among those transvestites, the movement’s cutting-edge pioneers, that man can create, paint, invent or re-create colours and forms he finds around himself and impose them on material, what is beyond his body, but is unable or powerless when it comes to modifying his own organism. Only a transvestite can transform it radically and, like a butterfly, paint himself, make his body the subject for his master work, convert his sexual emanations into colour, through the bewildering arabesques and incandescent hues of physical adornment. It is a vital plastic surgery of the self, though those infinitely repeated replicas – seven Doris Days, four Marilyn Monroes, three Anna Magnanis in twenty square yards – could not avoid, at best, a coldly nostalgic perfection. What was most disturbing was to understand that this was the apotheosis self-conscious theatre people have dreamed about from the days of Pericles: the mask become character, the character carved out of an actor’s physique and soul, life as visceral performance of the dreamt . . . It was like an epiphany which had been waiting, crouched in that dirty corner of Paris, and in a few minutes I’d planned and staged the solution I’d been looking for my version of Electra Garrigó . . . What I could never imagine was that my genial idea would be the beginning of my last act as a theatre director. The end as a beginning without means . . .

  Then, when I went to tell Muscles about my illumination, I found he and the Other Boy had disappeared with one of those perverted insects. A delightful touch came the day after when they accused me of vanishing on the arm of a Sara Montiel. Anyway, I told Muscles what I’d felt there, and the ungrateful creature didn’t give me any credit for it in his book on transvestites, and I still think I could put between quotation marks whole paragraphs I dictated on the occasion . . . And certainly, as I didn’t have enough money, I had to walk home, but I’d never have gone with a Sarita Montiel, because the fact is, I never could stand la Saritísima.

  “This is by Salvador K., isn’t it?”

  “Yes, that’s his signature, SK. Such bad taste . . . Looks like a kind of medicine, don’t you think?”

  “Or beer.”

  The Marquess had taken him into Alexis Arayán’s bedroom, which turned out to be the old servants’ quarters. It had its own small, separate bathroom, and you could reach the room without entering the main house. Everything appeared meticulously ordered, as if its owner had arranged it with particular care before departing two days ago: shelves tidy, pictures dusted, clothing clean and hanging up in the small wardrobe, two pairs of underpants dry on the bathroom window, ashtrays without cigarette ends. The Count concentrated on the books, letting an envious finger run across various sizes and textures of spine where several appealing titles caught his eye.

  “Did Alexis smoke?”

  “No, he loathed tobacco. Particularly cigars.”

  “What do you make of this drawing by Salvador K.?”

  The drawing, framed and behind glass, represented a kind of woman’s head beneath a parasol. The angles were sharp, the colours aggressive.

  “He’s employing an ancient technique of wetting paper and making human figures like that. It’s like an etching on paper, or kind of collage, although he boasted that he’d discovered the warm water technique. And that drawing is a piece of shit, to put it Cubanly, as Muscles would say. The expressionists and cubists did this kind of portrait sixty years ago, when it really meant something, but now . . .”

  “And are you sure they had a relationship?”

  Now the Count could see the Marquess was smiling.

  “The walls of this room are paper-thin. If you like, go out, and I’ll whimper, and you tell me . . .”

  “That won’t be necessary . . .” The Count tried to frighten off the image of what the Marquess was suggesting. “Alexis kept this all very clean . . .”

  “He was scrupulous, as I was saying. And even worse, he tried to convert me, but always failed. Besides, María Antonia used to come here once a week, a woman who works as a maid in his parents’ house, and she helped him wash and clean, and sometimes prepared us meals for several days at a time. Do you know what? She’d steal tasty morsels from Alexis’s house and bring them here: some Spanish chorizo, smoked salmon, a couple of lobster claws, the things one can only imagine or find in the dollar-stores, you get me?”

  “What else can you tell me about María Antonia? She’s a woman with a certain . . .”

  The Marquess’s fingers tried in vain to comb the remnants of his hair.

  “You must forgive me, but yesterday I lied . . . It was María Antonia who called to tell me about Alexis. Please forgive me? She also warned me you’d be paying a visit.”

  The Count preferred to skip over any kind of reproach.

  “What did Alexis tell you about María Antonia and his family?”

  The Marquess sat on the edge of the perfectly made bed and smoothed the folds of his Chinese dressing gown over his legs.

  “Ever since his grandmother died, he’d been thinking of leaving. Alexis really loved her a
lot, because she and María Antonia brought him up . . . And what I’m about to tell you may seem incredible, but it’s a hundred per cent true: you know Alexis was a specialist in Italian Pre-Renaissance art? Well, María Antonia knows as much as he did. That’s right. Alexis studied with her, lent her his books, and taught her what he was learning. If you are interested, talk to her some time about Italian Madonnas and especially Giotto, and expect a weighty dissertation . . . The person Alexis really couldn’t stand was his father, for a thousand reasons, but I think in particular because once, when he was some seven years old, he almost drowned on the beach, and someone else rescued him from the sea, because his father was drunk. And Alexis never forgave him and even said his father had left him to drown . . . I don’t know which damn Greek gave a name to that complex . . . Besides, his father hated him because he was, well, queer. Whenever he could, he made it clear he hated him . . . Just imagine, it was the worst disgrace imaginable for such a respectable man . . . But God must have shamed him as a punishment. You know what I mean: men who have sons who are going to turn out like them, strong, fond of skirt, tyrannical, and suddenly he turns out homosexual. But Alexis suffered a lot, suffered every way possible, and if they hadn’t killed him, I’d have said he’d committed suicide.”

  “Did Alexis talk to you about suicide?”

  The Marquess stood up and pointed at one of the bookshelves.

  “Look for yourself: Mishima, Zweig, Hemingway, my poor friend Calvert Casey, Pavese . . . He was fascinated by suicides and those who committed suicide, a morbid fascination, to be sure. He kept saying everything in his life was a mistake: his sex, his intellect, his family, the times he lived in, and he would say that if one was conscious of such mistakes, suicide might be the solution: that way perhaps he would have a second opportunity. I think this mysticism was one of the things that turned him into a Catholic.”