Havana Red

by Leonardo Padura

  “Did he go to church?”

  “Yes, a lot.”

  “What about yourself?” asked the Count, led on by his spirit of curiosity.

  “Me?” smiled the Marquess, blinking. “Can you imagine me praying on a hassock? . . . No, you must be kidding. I’m too perverse to get on with those gentlemen . . . Though I prefer them to you lot . . .”

  The Count observed the Marquess’s duly perverse smile, and decided to cultivate it, because in some way the invitation was there. He checked his parachute and launched himself into the Sea of Sarcasm.

  “Do you hate the police?”

  The Marquess’s laugh was genuine and unexpected. His parchment body suddenly seemed a smooth kite ready to fly out of the nearest window, launched by the guffaws now convulsing it.

  “No, in no way. You guys aren’t the worst. Look, police do police work, they interrogate and imprison people, and even do it well, if the truth be told. It’s a cruel, repressive vocation, for which certain aptitudes are necessary, do forgive me. Like, for example, being ready to beat someone else into submission, or destroy their personality through fear and threats . . . But they are socially and sadly necessary.”

  “So who then?”

  “The real bastards are the others: the self-appointed police, volunteer commissars, improvised persecutors, unpaid informers, amateur judges, all those who think they own the life, destiny and even the moral, cultural and historical purity of a country . . . They were the people who tried to finish off people like me, or poor Virgilio, and they succeeded, you know. Remember how in the last ten years of his life Virgilio never saw a single book of his published, nor a play performed, nor a study on his work published in any of those six magical provinces which suddenly became fourteen with a special municipality. And I was transformed into a ghost guilty because of my talent, my work, my tastes and my words. I was one huge malign tumour that had to be extirpated for the social, economic and political good of this beautiful, pre-eminent island. You see what I mean? And as it was so easy to parameterize me: whenever they measured me, whatever the angle, the result always came out the same: he’s no use, no use, no use . . .”

  The Count recalled yet again the meeting in his headteacher’s office at school, when they were informed that La Viboreña was an inappropriate, inopportune and unacceptable magazine and they had to recant ideologically and literary-wise.

  “How did you find all that out?” he decided to ask, with a degree of historicist sadism, opening himself up to a flurry of darts poisoned with ironic resentment.

  “I’ve worked at it and for a few years even enjoyed telling the story. And now it barely hurts, you know? But before . . . And why are you so interested in all this?”

  “Curiosity pure and simple,” suggested the Count, unable to admit his real reasons. “I’d like to hear your version, right?”

  “Well, I’ll tell you. They’d already suspended the works we were performing that had been advertised while I was rehearsing Electra Garrigó, when they called us to a meeting in the theatre one day. Everybody went, except me. I wasn’t prepared to go and listen to what I knew I’d have to listen to. But afterwards they told me how they got the people together in the entrance hall and called them in, one at a time, like at the dentist’s. You know what it’s like waiting for three or four hours in a dentist’s waiting room, hearing the drill and the cries of the people going in? Inside they’d put a table on the stage, where there was still part of the set for Yerma, with its mournful atmosphere, draped in black . . . There were four of them, a kind of inquisitional tribunal, and they’d put one of those enormous tape recorders on the table and told people how they’d sinned and asked them if they were ready to change their attitudes in the future, if they’d agree to engage in a process of rehabilitation, to work in places where they’d be sent. And almost everyone admitted to sinning, even added sins their accusers hadn’t mentioned, and bowed to the need for that purifying purge to cleanse their past and spirit of pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-critical tendencies . . . And I understood them, I really did, because many thought it was right such accusations were made and even felt guilty for not doing the things that they were told they ought to have done, and became the most vicious critics . . . of themselves. They called a kind of mass meeting afterwards: the protagonists were still behind the table on the stage with the people in the stalls. All the lights were on . . . You ever been to a theatre with the lights on? Have you seen how it loses all its magic and the whole world of artifice seems fake and meaningless? Then they talked about me, as the main person responsible for the theatre’s aesthetic policy. The first accusation made was that I was a homosexual who flaunted his condition, and they added that in their view homosexuality had a clearly anti-social, pathological character and that the accords negotiated to reject such manifestations of milksop softness or its propagation in a society like ours should be even more draconian. They were in a position to prevent ‘artistic quality’ (people insisted the guy talking opened and closed the quotation marks, as he smiled) being used as an excuse to circulate certain ideas and fashions which were corrupting our selfless youth. (It has to be said that the guy doing all the talking was a mediocrity who’d tried to make it as an actor but was never more than a poseur, and his reputation was down to the fact his was tiny and he was nicknamed Titch.) Nor would well-known homosexuals like me be allowed to influence the training of our youth, and for that reason they would assess (he said ‘carefully’, this time the quotation marks are mine) the involvement of homosexuals in cultural bodies, and relocate all those banned from having contact with the young, and they wouldn’t be allowed to leave the country in delegations representing Cuban art, because we were not and never could be true representatives of Cuban art.”

  The Marquess sighed, as if releasing a great wave of exhaustion, and Mario Conde felt he was awaking from a long dream: through the dramatist’s words he’d entered a theatre of cruelty and heard the words of the protagonists wrapped in dense, real tragedy where destinies and lives were decided with a chilling sang-froid.

  “I never imagined it being like that. I thought — ”

  “Don’t think anything yet,” the Marquess snapped, his verbal hostility taking the policeman by surprise. “You wanted to hear the story? Well, let me go on, for the best is yet to come . . . Yes, because the aesthetic judgement came next: they said my work and productions attempted to transform elitism, extravagance, homosexuality and other social aberrations into a single aesthetic subject, for I had deviated from the path of purest aspirations through that philosophy of cruelty, the absurd and total theatre, and they wouldn’t allow me my ‘haughty arrogance’ (his quotation marks again, because it was a very useful textual quote) in apportioning myself the role of exclusive critic of Cuban history and society, at the same time as I abandoned the stage of real struggles and used the peoples of Latin America as themes for creations that turned them into the ones preferred by bourgeois theatres and imperialist publishing houses . . . I really don’t know what it all meant, but that’s what he said word for word, and he also said my person, my example and work were, as everybody acknowledged, incompatible with the new reality . . . And finally they took a vote. They asked everyone to raise their hands if they agreed that artists should join the struggle by criticizing harshly the horrors of the past and thus contribute with their work to the eradication of the traces of the old society still surviving into the period of the construction of socialism. The vote was unanimous. There was a vote against manifestations of elitism, namby-pambyism, hyper-criticism, escapism and petty-bourgeois remnants in art, which was also carried unanimously. They voted on everything you could possibly vote on, almost always with complete unanimity, until it came to the vote on whether I should stay in the theatre group, the same group I had founded, named and devoted my whole life to, and of the twenty-six present, twenty-four raised their hands, called for my expulsion, and two, only two, couldn’t stomach any more and left the theatre. T
hen they voted on whether those two should stay in, and they were expelled by twenty-four in favour with none against . . . Followed by the final speech read out by the man chairing the session, who hadn’t said a word till then. As you can imagine, he barely said anything new: he repeated that it was a vital struggle against the past, against imperialism and the lackeys of the bourgeoisie, for a better future in a society where it was no longer dog eat dog. To sum up: a bad finale to the show and a historical performance that afternoon in 1971, which was even greeted by applause and cries of joy . . . And they let the curtain fall on my neck . . .”

  That last sentence from the Marquess made the policeman feel an urgent need for a dose of nicotine. He touched his packet of cigarettes and observed yet again how clean the place was, and decided to fight off the anxiety of abstinence: he wanted to visit the depths of that open wound Alberto Marqués had decided to expose to him. Could it all have happened in the same country where they both lived?

  “How did you find out?”

  The Marquess smiled and sighed again, exhausted.

  “First, from the two who overcame their own fears and stood out against the penultimate vote. Then, within a few months, one after another, the twenty-four who’d stayed till the end . . . Even ten years after, I heard it all again from one of the people on stage who asked me to forgive him for what he’d done. But I didn’t, because he’d been so vile, I couldn’t . . . Of course, I’ve just learned that the one who made the closing speech is now the guy most in favour of perestroika and a proponent of the social necessity of glasnost. What do you make of that change of mask?”

  The Count looked him in the eye and again felt he was in the theatre, among the accused, full of fear and guilt, and wondered if he’d have voted against the Marquess. And he told himself that now it was very easy to think he wouldn’t have and stand on his dignity. But on that day of all days?

  “If you believed in God, you could forgive, couldn’t you?”

  “That’s probably why I don’t want to believe, Mr Policeman.”

  The Count sensed that he couldn’t resist his need to light up a second more. It annoyed him to do so in a place so clean and tidy, and the last occupant would certainly have been upset, but he couldn’t resist and decided to use his own hand as an ashtray.

  “But even you say things changed later, that they invited you to go and work back in the theatre, didn’t you?”

  The Marquess tidied the three awkward wisps on his skull. He wasn’t smiling now.

  “Yes, it’s true, but the first thing to happen was that several people who’d been expelled from groups decided to mount a legal challenge against what they’d suffered and, so strange and just is justice in my country, they won their case in the High Court Chamber for Constitutional Guarantees and were restored to their groups, paid a wage, but it was a long time before they worked again, because obviously a director must be able to choose freely whom he wants to work with, you must agree? I didn’t pursue that line, I didn’t want a trial, then, later or now. Because it wasn’t a legal problem: it was a judgement of history, and I didn’t accept the pay-off either. I preferred to be a librarian than enjoy a stipend that could buy my right to take decisions. So, when asked to go back, I refused, because they couldn’t force me. Something which couldn’t be mended had been broken. If I went back, it would be for reasons of vanity or revenge, rather than from the need to make statements, which always muddies the waters of art. Ten years are a lot of years and I got used to the silence, almost learned to enjoy it, with people whispering about me, and pointing at me from afar. Besides, nobody could guarantee that what happened in ’71 might not happen again, you know? . . . I wouldn’t have had the strength to suffer a second sentence after returning to the stage and the limelight.”

  Mario Conde thought he’d listened to an otiose declaration. He’d have preferred to preserve the image of pride and courage Miki had created or the one of provocative, amoral petulance that emerged from the bulky reports he’d been given two days earlier on a man who had to be condemned for being a rebel. He even preferred the sense of hostile, sarcastic irony he’d taken from his first meeting with the Alberto Marqués now confessing to his real motive: fear.

  “And wouldn’t it be better to forget all this?”

  The old dramatist smiled and looked up at the ceiling, as if he expected something to fall on him from heaven.

  “You know, it’s very easy to say that, because memory loss is one of this country’s psychological qualities. It’s a self-defence mechanism employed by many people . . . Everybody forgets everything and they always say you can start afresh, this very minute: the past has been exorcized. If memory doesn’t exist, there’s no blame, and if there’s no blame, no need to forgive, you see the logic? And I understand, of course I understand, because this island’s historical mission is always to be starting afresh, to make a new beginning every thirty or forty years, and oblivion is usually the ointment for all the wounds which are still open . . . And it isn’t that I must forgive or want to blame anyone: no, the fact is I don’t want to forget. I don’t want to. Time passes, people pass on, histories change, and I think too many things, both good and bad, have been forgotten. But my things are mine and no way do I want to forget them. You understand?”

  “Yes, I understand,” the Count replied and went into the yard to ditch the cigarette butt and the ash accumulated on his hand. He also wanted to quit that shadowy detour in the conversation and return to his hunch. “Do you know where Alexis put his Bible?”

  The Marquess looked at him with a bored shrug, as if the policeman’s persistence seemed sick, if not lunatic.

  “No. Did you take a good look at his bookshelves?”

  “It’s not there, that’s why I asked.”

  “Well, search me if you like,” he suggested, and raised his arms and brought the Count to the edge of the abyss: his dressing gown almost reached knee level while the buttons were struggling to come undone . . .

  “No, no need for that. I think it’s time for me to go. I’ve still got work to do,” the Count responded hurriedly, and, seeing the Marquess still in the position of a prisoner waiting to be frisked, he couldn’t restrain his laughter. “But I’d like to talk to you again.”

  “Whenever, my prince,” the Marquess replied, and only then did he lower his arms.

  “One last question, and forgive me if I’m being indiscreet . . . What were your feelings towards Alexis Arayán?”

  The Marquess looked towards the empty room.

  “Pity. Yes. He was too fragile to live in this cruel world. I also loved him.”

  “And why do you think he dressed in Electra Garrigó’s costume?”

  The Marquess seemed to ponder a moment, and the Count hoped to hear something that might clear up that whole business at a single stroke.

  “Because it was a very pretty dress, and Alexis was queer. Do you need any other reason?”

  “But he wasn’t a transvestite . . .”

  The Marquess smiled, as if he’d given up.

  “Ay, you’ve understood nothing.”

  “That’s my lot recently: I never understand anything.”

  “Look, don’t think I’m interfering, because I know who I can interfere with . . . But as I see the subject interests you so . . . Why not accompany me to a party tonight where you might see some transvestites and other most fascinating people? . . .”

  High on nostalgia, the Count surveyed the unchanging landscape spread before him from his office window: crests of trees, a church belfry, the top floors of several tower-blocks, and the eternal, challenging promise of the sea, always in the background, always beyond reach, like the damned presence of water everywhere which the Marquess’s poet friend talked about so much. He appreciated the bucolic, solicitous landscape framed by the window, now diffused with the flat, harsh August light, because it allowed him to think and, above all, remember, and wasn’t he just one hell of a rememberer. And he recalled how much he’d
wanted to devote himself to literature and be a real writer, in the ever more distant days of school and the first years of his unfinished university degree. He felt that Alberto Marqués, possessed by certain Mephistophelian powers, had stirred that occasional ambition, which he used to think he’d definitively left behind but which, at the slightest provocation, returned to obsess him like a recurring virus he’d never really been cured of. Mario Conde felt that that premature pang, which had stung him, perhaps only worked as a wily move on the part of his consciousness to unload in someone else’s port a guilt that was only his: he’d never seriously applied himself, perhaps because the only real truth was that he was unable to write anything (that was both squalid and moving). He’d always thought he’d wanted to write stories about ordinary people, without grand passions or terrific adventures, small lives that pass through the world without leaving a single trace on the earth’s face but who carry on their backs the fantastic burden of living from day to day. When he thought of his literary preferences, and read Salinger, Hemingway’s stories, a few nineteenth-century novels, and books by Sartre and Camus, he still thought yes, it was possible, it might be possible. Was it an exhibitionist urge? he wondered, when he didn’t know whether he should regret an impulse to sincerity that had made him confess to the dramatist his eternally deferred artistic instincts, so inappropriate in someone professionally dedicated to repression and not creation, to sordid truths, not sublime fantasies . . . Smiles and sniggers, the only response he got from the Marquess, who’d carried on sniffing the non-existent scent from a bougainvillea, now riled him like a poor joke. Nevertheless, the stories that man kept teasing him with went beyond the limits of any prejudice, and he could no longer see him simply as that shitty queer he’d gone to meet barely twenty-four hours earlier. I’ll be fucked, he told himself, as he heard the door opening to allow the awaited figure of Sergeant Manuel Palacios to become a tangible reality.