Havana Red (20 page)

We went back to our room, and that night, to continue the intellectual and physical intoxication I was experiencing in the middle of that Paris spring, Muscles and I made love for the first and only time, after twenty years of friendship, as his record player poured out languid Strauss waltzes. Everything was possible, everything was permitted, everything was mine, I was thinking the next morning as I lay in bed drinking the Arabica coffee Muscles had percolated, and we heard knocking at the door. I remember recalling how I had forgotten the Other Boy, whom we'd excluded, and I thought it must be him finally returning from his perpetual orgy, but Muscles said the Other had his own key, so he opened the door, and standing there all hieratic and voluminous was an unexpected embassy functionary floating down at us a piece of news from his stoutly arrogant, immaculately diplomatic heights: the Other Boy was behind bars in a Montmartre police station for causing a public uproar, for improper, aggressive behaviour, and the embassy couldn't take on the bail or any legal representation of that personal problem . . .

Once more we had to call Sartre, who luckily was still at home, and he accompanied us to the police station, a horrible place where nobody was like Maigret and which was untouched by a single breath of the spring enveloping the rest of the city: harmony was imprisoned there, if not guillotined. But first Jean-Paul made a couple of calls and, by the time we'd arrived, they handed the Other Boy over to him, all sneers, snot and torn shirt, and it was decided there would be
no court case or bail, for everything was down to a slightly frenetic cat-fight between homosexuals of doubtful national origin: the Other and the Albanian transvestite without papers he'd fallen in love with, as he declared, swore and shouted. But the greater evil was already done: the Other had to go to the embassy that afternoon and they told him he must return to Cuba on the plane leaving the next morning. That night Muscles and I spoke to him endlessly, as he cried disconsolately over his lost love, scared about his future as an official writer that he was about to lose, and he asked us to forgive him, as he painfully anticipated the punishment awaiting him in Havana, where two days later he would appear before the leadership of the National Council for Culture which had financed his trip to Paris, to the very Paris, that very spring when I dreamt everything was possible, that everything was mine, that the theatre was mine.

 

“Do you want to do the talking?”

“Oh, so now you want me to . . . How do you decide, Mario Conde . . .?”

“Do you or don't you?” the Count asked dismissively, and Sergeant Manuel Palacios nodded: he's too much of a policeman to say no, thought the lieutenant, and opened the wrought-iron gate leading to the Arayán mansion. In the garden, a sprinkler threw tenuous curtains of water over a carpet of recently mown turf, which gave off an aroma that always moved the Count: the scent of damp earth and cut grass, a telluric, simple smell, inevitably bringing back the image of his grandfather Rufino el Conde, a well-chewed, agonic cigar between his teeth, sprinkling water over the layer of sawdust in the cockfight arena, as the radio blared
out poetic tirades by peasant poets. The moment he pressed the bell to the house where Alexis Arayán had lived, the Count wanted to be back inside the circular fence which defined the arena, next to Grandad Rufino, on a day when the whole world depended on a rooster's spurs and the skill of the owner in ensuring his bird fought with an advantage. Never play if you're evens, his grandfather had taught him, encapsulating a whole philosophy of life in one sentence.

“Good afternoon,” said María Antonia as she opened the door.

The policemen greeted her and the Count told her he wanted to speak to her and Alexis's parents.

“Why?” asked the woman, who'd switched on her alarm lights.

“About the medallions . . .”

“But the fact is,” she began and sirens followed lights: imminent danger, the Count registered.

“They don't know you found it?”

The black woman nodded.

“But they have to be told . . . That medallion can tell us a lot about Alexis's death.”

She nodded again and beckoned them in.

“Mrs Matilde is the one at home.”

“And comrade Faustino?”

“He's at the Foreign Ministry. On Monday he was to leave for Geneva, but the mistress is still so edgy . . .” she added, and the Count and Manolo saw María Antonia, the woman with wingèd feet, skim the floor as she flew into the house, after pointing them towards the big leather armchairs in the ante-room.

“We'll put the screws on her, Conde.”

“Don't you worry, this black lady knows more than me and you . . .”

Matilde looked a very sick old woman. In the
three days since the Count had informed her of her son's death, the woman seemed to have lived twenty destructive years, devoted daily to tarnishing the veneer of vitality she'd preserved. She greeted them sleepily, and sat in another of the armchairs while María Antonia stood there, as her status as a submissive maid demanded. The Count again felt he was in the middle of a theatrical performance too much like a pre-packaged reality where everyone had their role and seat assigned. The Great Theatre of the World, what nonsense. The Tragedy of Life, yet more nonsensical. Life is a dream?

“Now then, Matilde,” Manolo began, and it was evident he found the conversation difficult, “we've found out something from María Antonia that may be very important for our work, though equally it may be quite irrelevant . . . Do you follow?”

Matilde barely moved her head. Of course she couldn't follow, thought the Count, but he decided to wait. Manuel Palacios had canine instincts and always got back on the trail. Then the sergeant told her about María Antonia's find and added his own conclusion: “If that medallion is yours and Alexis hid it there, well, there's no problem. But if it's your son's, we think it might clear up certain things . . .”

“Which, for example?” asked the woman, apparently awaking from hibernation.

“Well, it's all supposition, but if he put your medallion there, perhaps he was thinking of committing suicide and didn't want it to be lost . . . Although there's another possibility, which is less likely: that someone else put it there . . .”

“When?”

“Perhaps after Alexis's death,” Manolo Palacios answered, and the Count looked at him. I shit on your
mother, the lieutenant then said to himself, surprised by that strange possibility he hadn't envisaged. Might the murderer have hidden the medallion there? No, of course not, the Count tried to tell himself, although he knew it was an option. But why?

“What's all this about, Toña?” Matilde then asked, barely turning towards the black woman. Striking a dramatic pose, María Antonia recounted her discovery, very early this morning, and her call to Alberto Marqués. Matilde turned to look at her, and finally said, “Please bring me the medallion.”

María Antonia glided into the house, while Matilde looked at the two policemen.

“They weren't exactly the same. I differentiated mine from Alexis's. The man on mine had a line etched under his left arm,” she said, and sank back into a silence which extended anxiously in the minutes before María Antonia returned. “Give it me,” Matilde then told her; she peered at the shiny figure trapped in the circle and said: “This is Alexis's.” There wasn't a trace of doubt in her voice.

“Just as well,” sighed Sergeant Manuel Palacios, betrayed by the intensity of his desires, and the Count rushed to harness Matilde's burst of vitality.

“We also want to ask if you are sure this is Alexis's writing.” And he showed her the page from the Bible.

The woman stretched out her hand mechanically to reach her glasses on the corner table, and María Antonia moved to place them in her hand.

“Yes, I think so. You look, María Antonia.”

“It's his,” said the servant, without recourse to spectacles, as confident, the Count supposed, as she would be in the art of identifying the creators of renowned Italian Madonnas . . . The lieutenant noted
the empty ashtray, and this time held back. He spoke, looking at both women.

“Madame, the medallion, this page Alexis tore out and wrote on, and the dress he wore on the night are very peculiar items. Did Alexis ever mention the word suicide in your presence?”

 

You cannot imagine what a mother feels when she discovers her son is homosexual . . . You think everything's been in vain, life's come to a halt, it's a trap, but then one begins to think it isn't, it's a passing phase, everything will return to normal, and the son you dreamt of as married and with children of his own will be a man like any other, and then you begin to look at every man, wanting to swap them for your son, that son you think still has time to become what you wanted him to be. But the illusion was short-lived. Alexis was never going to change, and more than once I even wanted him to die, before seeing him transformed into a homosexual, pointed at, execrated, belittled . . . I know if there's a God in heaven he won't forgive me. That's why I'm telling you now, quite calmly. Moreover, I got used to the inevitable and realized that above all, he was my son. But his father didn't. Faustino would never accept him, and converted his disappointment into contempt for Alexis. Then he preferred to stay longer outside Cuba, and leave him here with María Antonia and my mother. And that was very hard on Alexis: can you imagine what it's like to feel different and scorned at school and at home with your own father rejecting and denying you? One day, after the theatre, Faustino and I were chatting to friends, and Alexis left in the company of a boy like himself, a thirteen-year-old, and
Faustino averted his gaze to show he didn't even want to acknowledge him. It was all too cruel. It was giving Alexis a guilt complex, and worst of all I persisted in wanting to cure him, as if it were possible to cure either that or his preference for men. I took him to several psychiatrists, and I now know that that was a mistake. It made him feel unhappier, more scorned, more different, I don't know, as if he were the leper in the family. It was then he began to go to church and apparently nobody humiliated him there, and he also began to chat to Alberto Marqués, when he was working in the library in Marianao, and his life developed in those directions, far from me, from his family . . . He became a stranger. After he had his last row with his father and Faustino kicked him out of the house, he came barely once a week, to speak to his grandmother and María Antonia, and sometimes he would chat to me, but he never gave me space in his world. My son was no longer my son, do you understand now? And I was very much to blame. I helped him to be an unloved person, and he began to say perhaps it would have been better if he had not been born or had even killed himself: he said that to me one day. Is that what you wanted to know? Well, he did say that . . . And now would you be very surprised if I told you I also wish I were dead? If I told you these two hands created Alexis's death? Tell me, can there be a worse punishment than this?

 

“Well, fuck me, just as well, it looks like rain. Come on, you up there, the one who doesn't want to be the great policeman. Tell me, where are we at now?”

“Well, Conde . . .”

“We now know the medallion is Alexis's and that
opens up two possibilities: he put it there or someone did who must be the murderer. Well, who could have put it there?”

“It wasn't María Antonia, because she wouldn't have rung, or Matilde, because she was the only one who knew the difference between the two.”

“Faustino?”

“No, Conde, for fuck's sake. He's his father. They had their problems, but you're prejudiced against the guy. Hey, give me a cigarette.”

“Then we must assume the murderer is a stranger who entered the house to put the medallion there.”

“Well, that must be it, I guess. The day of the wake and burial the house was left empty.”

“Don't be crazy, Manolo. What would be the point?”

“To put us off track. What about that cigarette?”

“Here you are . . . But the murderer didn't know the medallions were different, or even that there were two of them, right?”

“No, I suspect he didn't. But if it wasn't Alexis who put it there, it must have been an acquaintance of his.”

“And where does that leave your theory that the murderer didn't throw the corpse into the river because nobody would ever connect him with Alexis?”

“Sure, it doesn't square . . . But what if Alexis, who certainly knew they were different, told Salvador, or another of his lovers? . . . Just as well it's raining, perhaps it will cool down . . . Over the last few days several people have visited the house: the gardener, yesterday; the gas fitter, on Thursday; Matilde's doctor, three times after Alexis died; five, seven, eight people from Matilde and Faustino's families before and after the funeral; Alexis's two poofy friends, Jorge Arcos and Abilio Arango, right . . .? Some thirteen people all told.”

“Too many. But a good crew, don't you reckon!”

“Yes, though the doctor had more opportunities than the others, don't you think?”

“Of course, one day he stayed with Matilde until she fell asleep. But why did Salvador K. go into hiding?”

“Yes, he's the jackpot winner so far, don't you think?”

“Conde, the fitter guy was new. Could it have been Salvador?”

“Don't be crazy, Manolo, don't get too far-fetched. Just imagine all the coincidences necessary for Salvador to hear the oven needs fixing, to decide to substitute for the fitter, put the medallion in place, and fix the cooker while he's about it!”