Havana Red (17 page)

“More or less,” he responded, trusting to postmodernity and hoping she wouldn't ask how much more or less.

“I like painting, you know, and I'm really a mad postmodern queen.”

“No kidding,” the Count said and finished his rum.

“God, you're terrible, you really gulp it down . . . Give me your glass. I'll get you a refill.”

The Marquess waved to him from his corner. He was still there, the fish on his pedestal, and seemed happy with life, in the shadow of the blond locks he'd restored to a sparsely populated pate.

“Here you are,” said Polly, and now his glass was full to the brim.

“Thanks. And are you hetero?”

She smiled again. Hers were a sparrow's teeth, tiny and sharp.

“Almost always,” she confessed and the Count gulped. Could she be a transvestite? With that little bun? “The fact is, if a person wants to reach their potential, all their bodily potential, they must try a homosexual relationship at least once. Hasn't the Marquess told you that?”

“No. He knows I follow a macho-Stalinist line.”

“Your choice . . . But you're lacking something very important in life.”

“I've managed so far. Don't you worry. Hey, did you know Alexis?”

She stroked her cameo and sighed: “What they did to him was horrible. The poor boy. He never harmed anybody, did he? . . . Others are more violent and go too far with men, the types who go prospecting in lavatories and such like. But he didn't. I'm a would-be painter, as I told you I think? And I liked talking to him, when he came to see my uncle. He knew heaps about painting, particularly Italian painting . . . And when I talked to him he said his problem was that he really fell in love and couldn't stand changing partners every other day.”

“But they're into lots of changes, aren't they?”

“Yes, not many have very long relationships, which was what he wanted. He was more a woman than a man, a woman in the head, you know what I mean?”

“No, I don't think I do.”

“Well, he'd have liked to live in a house with a man, as if he were his husband, and nobody else's, and just be that man's wife. Do you get me now?”

“More or less. What I don't understand is why he
walked down the street dressed as a woman, as if he'd gone searching for a man.”

“Yes, that's very odd, because he was really quite a prude. And I should tell you the real transvestites are scared stiff now because they say this might be the start of a serial lynching. But that must be them being hysterical.”

“So they're hysterical?”

“Transvestites? Completely. As they want to be women and there's no woman who isn't hysterical. But Alexis wasn't, I don't think he was hysterical, though he was a champion manic depressive . . .”

“Polly,” the Count then took a risk, “you know, I'd like to write about this scene. Tell me a bit about the people here today.”

She smiled again, she could always put on a smile and look ingenuous. “Anyone would think you were police.”

The Count had recourse to all his powers of bluff: “And you're like a postmodern sparrow.”

A gentle titter followed that left Polly's brow resting on the Count's knee. No, of course she's not a transvestite, he tried to persuade himself.

“My God, it's horrible, there's a bit of everything here,” she said, looking the policeman in the eye, as if making a confession.

And the Count discovered that in that room in Old Havana, on first evidence, there were men and women who had made their mark because they were: militants on behalf of free love, of nostalgia trips, or of red, green and yellow parties, ex-dramatists with and without oeuvre, writers with ex-libris but never published, queers of every tendency and leaning: queens – drags on full beam and the perverted sort – luckless little duckies, hunters expert at high-flying prey, buggers on
their own account who give it in the arse at home and go into the countryside if there's horse on offer, inconsolably disconsolate souls and disconsolate souls in search of consolation, A-I cocksuckers with ass-holes sewn up for fear of Aids, and even freshly matriculated apprentices in the Academy of Pedagogy in Homosexuality, the chief tutor being none other than uncle Alquimio, winners of national and international ballet competitions, prophets of the end of time, history and the ration book; nihilists converted to Marxism and Marxists converted to shit, every kind of chip on the shoulder: sexual, political, economic, psychological, social, cultural, sporting and electronic; practising Zen Buddhists, Catholics, witches, voodoists, Islamists, santería animists, a Mormon and two Jews, a pitcher from the Industriales team who pitches and bats with either hand; fans of Pablo Milanés and enemies of Silvio Rodríguez, expert oracles who know who will be the next Nobel Prize for Literature as well as Gorbachev's secret intentions, the last pretty boy adopted as nephew by the Famous Person in the Higher Echelons, or the price of a pound of coffee in Baracoa; seekers after temporary or permanent visas, dreamers,
femmes
and
hommes
, hyper-realists, abstract artists and socialist realists who'd renegued on their aesthetic past; a Latinist; the repatriated and the patriotic; people expelled from everywhere one can be expelled from; a blind man who saw, disillusioned and deceivers, opportunists and philosophers, feminists and optimists, followers of Lezama (frankly the vast majority), disciples of Virgilio, Carpentier, Martí and one adept of Antón Arrufat; Cubans and foreigners; singers of boleros; breeders of fighting dogs, alcoholics, rheumatics, dogmatists and head-cases; smokers and non-smokers; and one macho-Stalinist heterosexual.

“Yours truly . . . And transvestites? Aren't there any transvestites?” he asked, angling his vampire-hunter look at her breasts.

“There by the door to the balcony: that's Victoria, though she prefers to be called Viki and her real name is Víctor Romillo. The prettiest thing, isn't she? And that dark-skinned lass who looks like Annia Linares by day is Esteban and by night Estrella, because she's a bolero singer.”

“Tell me one thing: there are about thirty people here . . . How can they do all the jobs you mentioned?”

Polly smiled, inevitably. “They're just multioccupational and like voluntary work . . . Look over there, the guy next to Wilfredito Insula, he does at least ten of the things I mentioned. God, how horrible, and you're going to write about this?”

“I don't know, I probably will. But I'm really interested in transvestites.”

“Then go to a party at Ofelia Belén Pacheco's place, an old queer who lives around the Virgen del Camino, because there they do transvestite parties, live performances, the lot. That's where Estrella sings boleros and a girl called Zarzamora does a striptease and you'll shit yourself laughing.”

“The Marquess never mentioned it.”

“Of course he didn't: Ofelia Belén Pacheco and the Marquess are sworn enemies, ever since Ofelia bedded one of the Marquess's boyfriends. Although that was in the days when buses were made of wood . . . Well, they have fantastic parties and all the transvestite buddies of Havana go there. Sometimes thirty or more.”

In the spacious living room, under the influence of music of a seemingly Barbra Streisand flavour, several couples of diverse make-up had started dancing and the Count stared at Estrella, dancing boleros and
cutting an incongruous figure with her dance partner, a titchy black barely five feet tall, whom the Count supposed had bigger dimensions that were momentarily hidden. Viki was still standing by the balcony, and the Count was alarmed when he realized that if he hadn't been warned he'd have thought her a woman who was desirable, if not beautiful.

The atmosphere exuded a ghetto freedom, limited but capacious, as the dancers' hands caressed their partners and muffled voices echoed the song. A distasteful chill ran through the policeman when he spotted a couple kissing shamelessly: two men – according to legal, biological codes – some thirty years old, moustachioed with jet black hair, soldering lips to facilitate a flow of tongues and saliva that injected the Count with a squeamish repugnance he tried to quell by gulping down another glass of rum. He knew then that he'd gone too far on that journey to hell and needed different air if he wasn't going to suffocate or die of shock. A policeman who boasted he'd seen every possible barbarity, he now felt pain-stricken by a vibration born from a tight knot of male hormones, unable to resist that most disturbing negation of nature. He looked at Polly and tried to smile, as he turned his green goblet round, as if to demonstrate that the evaporation was damaging the atmosphere.

“Should I put you on the alcoholics' list?”

“Put me down as an aspiring or discerning drinker . . . Hey, the Marquess says Alexis hadn't been here for days.”

“That's right, I hadn't seen him for some time.”

“And when you saw him, did he tell you he was in love with somebody?”

Polly looked up, as if seeking her reply in the visible part of her lank fringe.

“I don't think so. I think he was still with a painter whose name I've forgotten, one who did things with collages.”

“Salvador K.”

“Hey, you're really in the know! You sure you're not police?”

“Really I'm not, love . . . And what did Alexis tell you?”

“Nothing much, that he was really fed up and that if he split with the Salvador guy he wasn't going to hitch up with anyone else. And he went off because he was going to mass at the cathedral.”

The Count thought how Alexis Arayán must have been carrying his Bible, where perhaps the passage on the Transfiguration was already missing.

“Why did you suddenly shut up?” enquired Polly, pressing one of his legs. “Do you want another drink?”

“That's not a bad idea. I'd like to have a drop with you.”

And she smiled, as mischievous as ever.

“Why not have a drink at my place? I live just round the corner.”

“Are you a transvestite?”

“Come and find out.”

“The walk will warm you up,” said the Count, and compared Polly to a St Bernard on a rescue mission in the middle of a snowstorm. Averting his gaze from the kissing moustaches, he looked round for the Marquess. He wasn't in the room, nor was his amphibian friend. Polly's roll-call, he thought, as he stood up, still had a way to go.

 

The Count let himself be undressed without claiming the promised drink and was pleased to see his best friend on duty, despite the evening's bustle and the
worries about sexual fraudulency still torturing him; a whiff of sparrowish behind had woken him up. He took off Polly's baby-doll and wasn't surprised by her small tits, with their ripe nipples, just bursting to be touched and bitten, then he warily checked inside her panties and found no false castrations, but a moist, inverted mine down which half a hand vanished. Awakened abruptly by the discovery of that vein, his travelling companion perked up, stretched, yawned and braced its swollen tissue, before descending, like a bullet winging home, into Polly's mouth, deep like the other cavities he'd already explored.

Polly was a sophisticated lady: unhurried and unfussed, she fellatioed delicately, licking his penis's every cranny, swallowing, then bringing it back into the fresh air only to languish enviously as her sparrow's teeth tightened round his testicles. It was the Count who had to call for a truce, dismayed by the imminent spurt and desirous to deepen his knowledge of her second jousting cleft, and he pushed Polly on her bed, ready to crucify her, just as the girl's hand intervened in her fate.

“Oh, mum, I've always wanted to lay a policeman. Go on, there are some condoms under the pillow,” she said, sucking on the Count's nipples as he hooded his anxious friend, annoyed by the lateness of the party.

He penetrated her as if it wasn't a first visit, noticing how much was required to fill a slit worthy of a white whale's rather than a sparrow's, a surprise Moby Dick, but he was happy at the manoeuvrability permitted by Polly's hundred pounds, portable Polly, easily upped and downed the length and breadth of polyethelene which blocked off a good part of that objective, if invisible reality. The Count was surprised by his own energy, which he could only attribute to his systematic
lack of such binary practices. He inned and outed like a jack-in-the-box, hooked on a nipple, then offered up an ear for a girlish tongue to explore. Saliva ran like the rivers of life, turned them into slippery, naughty sea snakes. He went back in, conscious the curtain was about to fall, when postmodern Polly snuck away from him, half-turned on the bed and presented her sparrow's bun to his eyes, increased in size by its nearness and pert position.

“Give it me in the arse,” she asked, unsmiling.

The Count took one look at his selfless comrade, inelegant but ready for combat, and gripped her buttocks tight to open up the exit door more widely.

“God, how horrible!” she said when he drilled her little hole. Then the Count felt he was the right measure for polyphonic Polly's proportions, and stuck to his task as he heard the girl's anxious lament, which, between push and pull, changed to a smile, a laugh, a guffaw, a cry begging split my arse, split it down the middle, though now there was nothing left to heft and he could only keep up the rubbing which the man tried to do tirelessly. Ay, Polly the prostrate . . .

But everything has an end. The Count was surprised by his own powerful, triumphant macho whoop, as Polly's guffaws faded to a laugh, to a smile before ending on a whimper: “God, how horrible,” only to add, with a judgement the Count assumed he fully deserved: “Ay, darling, what a lovely fucker you are, you are!”