Havana Red

by Leonardo Padura

  “Why did you take so long, man?”

  Sergeant Palacios flopped down in his chair and the Count was afraid it would come apart. Who the hell ever accepted him in the force? It must have been the same lunatic who recruited me.

  “Let me get my breath. The lift’s broken down again.”

  The Count glanced back at his landscape with sea, and bid farewell, until they next met.

  “Well, what happened?”

  “Nothing, Conde, I had to wait for Alexis’s boss. And I think I was right to because the waters are muddying.”

  Sergeant Palacios took a deep breath before he spoke.

  “Alexis was no longer with Salvador K. His boss at the Centre, one Alejandro Fleites, who also looks like one great queer, says Alexis and Salvador had cooled off recently and that he twice saw Alexis with a mulatto who works at the Film Institute, a guy called Rigofredo López. You can imagine the kind of hulk . . . And he says someone told him, you know what they’re like, that Rigofredo and Salvador K. had a row in Alexis’s office. Fleites’s conclusion: jealousy. Then I went to the Film Institute and discovered Rigofredo’s been in Venezuela for the last ten days . . . What do you make of this can of worms?”

  The Count sat back in his chair and only then asked:

  “So what did he tell you about Alexis?”

  “Little that’s new . . . That he was a hard worker, that he got on with painters very well, that he was very cultured and that he couldn’t imagine him dressed in red in the Havana Woods. Also that he was very shy and screwed up . . .”

  “What about the Bible?”

  “The Bible? Hell, yes, the Bible . . .” He paused for a long time as if his thoughts were elsewhere and then said, “Here it is,” and searched in the briefcase he’d put on the floor.

  “Give it me, give it me,” demanded the Count, looking for the Gospels on the contents page.

  St Matthew started on page 971 and, according to Father Mendoza, the Transfiguration episode was in chapter 17. He skimmed the tops of the pages till he reached chapter 16 and then 19, in a fatal leap which caught him by surprise like a cry for help. He then looked among the pages and discovered what was missing: the sheet with pages 989 and 990, where chapters 17 and 18 of Matthew ought to be.

  “I knew it, for fuck’s sake, Alexis was thinking about the Transfiguration . . . Look at this, the page where it happens isn’t there. Let me see if it’s missing in the others.”

  The Count slowly embarked on his quest for the verses in Mark and Luke, discovering that both had all their pages, and he found the story of the Transfiguration in Mark, chapter 9: “And his raiment became shining, exceeding white as snow; so as no fuller on earth can white them.” And also in Luke 9: “And as he prayed, the fashion of his countenance was altered, and his raiment was white and glistering.”

  “Where was the Bible, Manolo?”

  “In Alexis’s desk. In the unlocked bottom drawer.”

  “And people knew it was there?”

  “Well, his boss says he didn’t know . . . You didn’t tell me . . .”

  “Not to worry. The problem is someone tore out the missing page. And look at this: he did it very carefully, you don’t notice the tear, do you? It was probably Alexis himself . . . Can you imagine what this means?”

  “That there was something written there.”

  “Something that annoyed or endangered someone, and that someone tore the page out. Or, if not, it meant something special for this boy and that’s why he decided to take it out himself. And if that was the case, it clarifies a lot for us, Manolo: the bastard was mad and transfigured himself in order to enter his own Calvary. I’ll bet my buttocks on it.”

  “Hey, I’d bet something else if I were you. I think certain influences aren’t good for you . . . But remember Salvador knew the Bible was there.”

  “You think it was him?”

  “I don’t know, but I’d bring him in and tighten his ‘K’ into a ‘Q’ .”

  “I’m not so sure, Manolo . . . If it was him, why would he mention the Bible? No, I don’t think Salvador is so stupid as to appear guilty of something so serious and be that guilty person into the bargain. What do you reckon? . . . Now I’ve got to talk to the Boss. Wait here.”

  “I’m always waiting for you, Count.”

  The lieutenant ignored the irony and went out into the passage. He climbed two flights of stairs, to the top floor. Walked along another corridor and entered the anteroom to Major Rangel’s office. Behind Maruchi’s desk – she always had a flower in a small vase that was no longer there, perhaps she took it with her – there was the lieutenant who’d surprised him the day before. The Count saluted her and asked to see the Major.

  “He told me to make sure nobody bothered him,” the lieutenant warned.

  “Tell him it’s urgent,” the Count retorted. “Do me a favour . . .”

  She hummed sonorously – how this guy likes to hassle, she must have been thinking – but she pressed the intercom button and told the Major that Lieutenant Conde was there and said it was urgent. “Tell him to come in,” said the Boss’s voice on the intercom.

  The Count opened the door and saw him, cigar in his mouth. It was the same kind of smoke as the previous day’s wretched Holguín specimen.

  “What’s up, Mario?” asked the Boss, and his voice was slow and opaque.

  “I’ve brought you this, that’s why it was urgent.” And he took out of his pocket the long, resplendent Montecristo with which Faustino Arayán had regaled him.

  “Where did you get this from, my boy?”

  “I promised you one, didn’t I?”

  “Fuck, this is a fine piece of work,” he said, and almost without looking threw his Holguín weed out of the window and started to smell the Montecristo. “It’s a little on the dry side, isn’t it?”

  “You can sort that . . .”

  “And what else do you want? I know you too well . . .”

  The Count sat down and lit one of his cigarettes.

  “They’ve called Manolo in. What’s his problem?”

  The Major didn’t reply. He sniffed his new cigar again and carefully put it away in a drawer.

  “For after lunch . . .”

  “Are you going to tell me?” persisted the Count.

  “They want him because of you,” replied the Boss as he stood up.

  “Because of me?”

  “Yes, it’s logical enough. You’re officially suspended and that’s why you are of interest to Internal Investigations — ”

  “I’ll fuck the — ”

  “Hey,” Rangel bellowed, switching his tired voice to a gruff, authoritarian tone that culminated in the fingertip he flourished at the lieutenant. “You don’t need to worry . . . If you do, say, comment or think anything about this and I find out, I’ll get your balls sliced off, get that? This is red-hot and I don’t want any more problems. They’re going to question Manolo about you, and what will he say? Nothing . . . That you had a set-to with Fabricio because you can’t stand each other and there’s nothing else to go on . . . Nothing!”

  The Count put out his cigarette and suddenly wanted to be well out of there. It was already complicated enough looking for rapists, thieves, swindlers and murderers of mystical transvestites without becoming the subject of suspicion oneself.

  “Talk to Manolo and tell him what’s at stake. But talk to him away from here. OK? If anyone finds out I told you this, I’ll be the one who’ll get it in the balls. OK?”

  The Count didn’t reply.

  “OK, Conde?” the Major persisted.

  “OK, Boss . . . I’m off . . .” And he stood up.

  “Just a minute. How’s the case going?”

  The Count shrugged his shoulders. Suddenly he wasn’t overly interested in his case.

  “So so . . . I’ve got a dead man who occasionally had visions of God, and a suspect who’s too suspicious, but no proof against him.”

  “So what next?”

  “
I’ll carry on searching.”

  “What the fuck,” said the Boss as he opened the drawer and took out the Montecristo. He broke off the end with his teeth in the traditional manner and briefly chewed on it. He spat the end in the basket and then, when he went to put the lighter-flame next to the end of his cigar, something stopped him and he shook his head. “It’s too good to light now. This at least deserves a cup of real coffee.” And he put it back in the drawer. “There’s one more thing I’ve got to tell you, Conde. Someone phoned me and asked me for discretion in everything around this case. He told me something I didn’t know: the dead man was old Arayán’s son and you know what that means. They want everything to stay a problem unconnected to the family so links can’t be made between them and that mess of tranvestites and queers their son was mixed up with. So now you know: first I said trasvestites because that’s what came to me, and don’t hassle the family much and try to resolve this quickly, without creating too much of a stir, get it?”

  “Yes, Siree, as they say,” the Count riposted and left the office, without saying goodbye to the Major. Now he wanted to abandon everything even more. And he thought: what a load of shit. They don’t even have a decent cup of coffee to go with a decent cigar.

  “What do you reckon?”

  The Count smiled, looking at the faded, parched pages of what had aspired to be the school literary review, and thought how all that might as well belong to another life, one too distant to be the one he was still living: his story on the back of the title page with the print of the Jesus del Monte church, and the pompous title of La Viboreña, which hid so many expectations and longings severed by the brutal chop from the hatchet of intolerance and incomprehension.

  “Naive and without depth. I remembered it as being more squalid and more moving,” he said, and reclined back on Carlos’s bed. “Far too many ‘thats’ and far too few commas . . .”

  “And why did you want to read it?”

  The Count poured more rum into his glass and moved the bottle towards Skinny’s glass.

  “I didn’t know if I wanted to remember what the story said or what they said to me about the story.”

  Carlos downed some rum and grimaced far too dramatically for the owner of a throat burnt by the slow fire of a sustained daily habit.

  “Who remembers any of that now, Conde . . .”

  “I do,” he rasped and took a long, possibly excessive gulp.

  “Hey, hold on, man . . . What the fuck’s up with you today? You were perfectly fine yesterday, and today . . .”

  The Count looked at his friend: an ever more amorphous mass in his wheelchair. He closed his eyes, like the character in his story and thought, like him: if only it weren’t true. He would have liked Skinny still to be skinny, and not that fat type keeling over, like a sinking boat, taking with it in the wreck Mario Conde’s last chance of happiness. He wanted to play on the street corner again, for all his old friends to be there and nobody to exclude him from a place which so much belonged to him. At the same time he wanted to forget everything, for good.

  “Won’t you tell me what’s wrong?” Carlos insisted, moving his chair to the edge of the bed where his friend had flopped down.

  “I’m fucked, Skinny. They don’t even want me as a policeman any more . . . Today they’re going to talk to Manolo about me. They’ll probably retire me. What do you reckon? Retired at thirty-five . . .”

  “Are you serious?”

  “As serious as Desiderio’s arse.”

  Skinny laughed. The bastard couldn’t help it.

  “You’re done for, man.”

  “That’s what they say. Pour me some more rum. I’m running shit-scared.”

  “Why, you idiot? Are there real problems?”

  “I don’t know, but I can’t stop being scared . . . More rum.”

  “You’ve got to forget all this, man . . . Conde, you’re well fucked, but you’re a good man. I know you’ve done no wrong, so quit being scared, right?”

  “All right,” the other agreed, not overly convinced.

  “Did I tell you Andrés came to see me this morning?”

  “Yesterday you told me he was going to come. What did that lunatic want?”

  Carlos poured himself out more rum, downed a murderous gulp and pulled his wheelchair over until he was in front of his friend.

  “Dulcita’s coming,” he said.

  “Dulcita?” Conde was taken aback. “Dulcita?”

  Dulcita had left for the United States more than ten years ago, and the Count remembered how often he and Skinny had spoken about the departure of the girl who’d been Carlos’s girlfriend for two years at school. Intelligent Dulcita, perfect Dulcita, the great laugh, who’d then left, leaving them to wonder why, oh why did it have to be her. And now she was coming back: “How come?”

  “She’s coming to see her grandmother, who is apparently dying. Andrés knows because they talked to him in order to get the medical certificate the Red Cross requires to negotiate the travel permit.”

  “Fantastic, right?” the Count went on, getting over his shock.

  Skinny finished his rum and put his hands on the Count’s knees, which felt the moist, red-hot heat of those voluminous extremities.

  “More than fantastic, it’s brilliant. Do you know what Dulcita’s sister said to Andrés? That if we weren’t angry and it wouldn’t hurt, she’d like to see us. But above all she wanted to see me.”

  The Count started to smile, moved by an inevitable feeling of happiness that immediately languished and killed the stillborn smile.

  “You tell me, Conde, do you think it right for Dulcita to see me like this?” He used his obese hands to indicate his body overflowing the wheelchair.

  Mario Conde stood up, went over to the window and spat venomously. It wasn’t right, he thought, remembering that photo featuring Pancho, Tamara, Dulcita, Skinny and himself, coming down the stairs at school the day they’d put in for their university courses. Skinny, who was very thin in those days and walked on two legs, was in the centre, arms open wide and head to one side, as if awaiting crucifixion: Carlos and Dulcita had been a beautiful, lovely couple, eager for sex, life, happiness and love . . . No, it wasn’t right, he kept thinking, but he said:

  “Hey, if she comes to see you and you want to see her, let her: you are you and always will be, and the person who loved you must still love you, or should go to hell.”

  “Don’t talk shit, Conde, things aren’t like that.”

  “Aren’t they? Well, they are as far as I’m concerned, because you’re my brother and it has to be like that . . . But if you don’t want to see her, well, don’t, and forget it.”

  “That’s the fucking point, Conde, I do want to see her. But whatever way, it’s not exactly going to be a party for her to see me like this. Get me?”

  The Count lit a cigarette and went back to the bed. He pulled the wheelchair even nearer, and Carlos’s face was only an inch or two from his.

  “Skinny: don’t be such a pansy,” he said. “Don’t give up, for Christ’s sake, because if you do, we’re all fucked. Do it for yourself, for me and old Josefina; don’t let anything fuck you up: a bullet, the past, the war, or this damned wheelchair,” he declared breathlessly, and, against his usual custom of thinking everything through, he took Carlos’s face between his hands and kissed him on a cheek. “Don’t give up, brother.”

  “But what the fuck is this!”

  Of course. It just had to be the hottest summer he’d ever experienced, he concluded while undressing before getting in the shower. For several days now the Count had been pinching memory and flesh to try to remember other August temperatures like this cruel year’s, but the wall-scorching sun, the haze from the ceiling, the moisture wrapping round him in bed and the deep depression, able to sap his will and his muscles, told him it was impossible to recall a similar muggy heat. Or did the heat come from his body rather than the infernal atmosphere possessing the island? He looked at his watch: yes, it w
as still early for Sergeant Palacios to call him and he still didn’t know whether he’d dare call the Marquess.

  When he got out of the bath, streaming water, the towel round his shoulders like a defeated boxer, the Count decided to finish drying himself on the ecstatic gusts from the fan. He flopped on to his hot bed and for a moment enjoyed the minimal privilege of solitude, felt the draught massage his drooping testicles and hit his anus particularly deliciously. He closed his legs slightly. Then, to help the draught, and impelled by a straightforward burst of onanism, he started lifting up his wet penis, sliding his fingers to the head that had been surgically uncapped, only to let it drop in a free fall that gradually became an upward tilt transmitting a warm, erect hardness to his fingers. He hesitated for a moment over whether to masturbate or not: and decided he had no reason not to try. No woman was out there waiting for that spare ejaculation, and as he stroked himself, even the heat in the air seemed to have abated. But his decision hit fresh doubts: whose turn was it? Still grasping his member but reducing the rubbing rhythm, the Count opened his much-fingered book of erotic memories and began to flick through the pages of women he’d loved by remote control when seeking to protect himself against the successive departures, deceits and disappearances they’d inflicted on him: on the last page – he always began at the back when he read an issue of the magazine Bohemia — he found Karina, naked, sucking a dazzling saxophone whose intense music caressed her nipples as it moved between her open legs, but he let her go, humiliated her with mental indifference, a form of revenge on a woman too painfully close to be called upon, and the fact is he could still feel her scent of ripened fruit, between a mango and velvety plums, which mingled with the deep, animal dampness from her desire-swollen sex: “No, not you.”

  He likewise abandoned Haydée, trying not to remember shared alcoholic belches, miserable wretched bouts of drinking, rums poured on mouths, breasts and a doubly moist pubis, and that was why he fled, he tried not even to brush against her – though he failed to resist that painful temptation – because she’d been his best lover, so hard-working in bed the Count’s productivity couldn’t keep up with her and she’d replaced him with an Olympic-class fornicator (whose anus was she now kissing with her drilling, eschatological, reptilian tongue?); but he did pass without major upset on the memory of Maritza, his first wife, too distant and faded to be of use even for a summery masturbation, that pink scent from her virgin skin hardly perceptible now, always washed to face sex, at once clean and apprehensive; he breathed, more nostalgic than horny, the essential feminine fragance that nurse gave off, a nymphomaniac on the thin side, whose name he’d now forgotten but whom he always remembered because she’d initiated him in the pleasure of the other’s hand which strokes, rubs, allowing one to discover the value of another’s skin, giving the act of masturbation an unexpected dimension, only because it comes from other hands, from another skin; and, when her turn came, he almost stayed with Tamara, felt her on his fingertips, on the wrinkled sac of his testicles, as he revisited her rumbadancer’s butt and black nipples, the dark depths of her curly patches of down, and breathed in the strong aromas from her male colognes – Canoe is my favourite, she’d confess, allergic to other subtle, feminine perfumes – and then his hand stopped on the album – and on a glans gorged and ready to spit – to reach a final conclusion: none of them . . . He stretched a hand out from the position he found himself in, slipped it under his bed and extracted the Penthouse that Peyi had lent Skinny and Skinny had lent him and went on an immediate search for that shameless blonde – lots of hair upstairs, next to none down – who in the same position as he – in bed, legs open to the breeze or other possibilities – made her professional nakedness stand out against red, photographer-ready sheets: if there was a breeze in the photo – and there had to be – it must smell of moist, ploughed earth, and the woman must surely have exuded the same fertile, primary fragance. Better you than one concocted from deceit and memories, he told the blonde, as he leaned forward and continued to rub until he could no longer see the woman and felt his life being drained by those white drops spilling without rhyme or reason on the dusty tiles of his room, which now emanated, like a disturbing perfume born of his painful solitude, the sweetness of ejaculation . . .