Havana Red (11 page)

“It's difficult for him. It must be the talk of at least the diplomatic service, right? But I can tell you one thing. I reckon he's pleased from one point of view. It's
like when someone dies of cancer: if there's no cure, the sooner it's over, the better.”

“Maybe,” the Count agreed, not knowing exactly what it was that might be.

“Where do we go now?” Manuel Palacios asked, preparing to accelerate.

“I'm not sure . . . Salvador K. looks to be top of the list, right? But it's also true we have nothing definite against him . . . I'm pissed off,” he said, throwing his cigarette into the street.

“Conde, Conde,” Manolo shook his head, as if he couldn't believe it. “Here you are and you still get like that. Don't gripe like that; if we need to invent something to implicate the painter, we will, won't we?”

“Don't suggest such a thing. At least not today.”

“Why not?”

“Because I'm very worried. Did you manage to find out what happened to Maruchi?”

The sergeant reduced speed slightly.

“No, I haven't got anything on that . . . But this morning I didn't tell you something else that happened yesterday. I've got an appointment at three this afternoon with the Internal Investigation people.”

“And what do they want from you?”

Manuel Palacios shook his head, and the Count noticed he was wiping the sweat from his hands on to his trousers.

“I don't know. I really don't.”

The Count looked into the street, more and more potholes, dustbins overflowing with rubbish, houses eroded by salt water and neglect.

“If you don't have problems, nothing to worry about, but watch what you say, OK? You're no idiot, Manolo, so think out your replies carefully . . . But
don't get too worked up, I expect it's something quite trivial.”

“All right, Conde. It's really hot, isn't it?”

The fishermen congregated on the Malecón at that early hour with little hope that fate would place a fine specimen on their hooks and bring justifiable cheer to the family table. When the Count saw those silhouettes over the calm sea, he was filled with envy. He knew life was healthier there, with a piece of string in the water and one's mind thinking only about a possible catch and the dinner of one's dreams, and not about a series of stories of deaths, thefts, frauds, rapes, lesser or greater forms of assault – that could also help save him from boredom – or, the last straw, about the enquiries of the Internal Investigations team bent on throwing light on business the Count hadn't even imagined and that had already cost two of his colleagues their positions at work. Will they find something on me? he wondered, and tried to recall any heinous act in his career. Who knows . . . And what about Maruchi, what the hell had happened to her?

“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 . . .