Havana Red hq-1 Read online

  “But what’s your problem, Manolo?”

  “Everything, Conde. You’re chucking all the cases down the pan, you seem ashamed to be a policeman, you do as you please… and you just might be getting it wrong.”

  The Count lit his cigarette before he spoke.

  “Don’t be a shit-head, Manolo, you’re way off… It’s just that I…” and he stopped before completing a self-justification that would ring untrue. Perhaps the sergeant was right and he was relegating him, even excluding him from certain areas of the case, but there was no going back: the dialogue was between the Marquess and himself, and the sergeant’s presence might sever his delicate exchanges with the dramatist. It’s like a chamber piece for two actors, he thought, and said: “You’re right in everything you say and I do apologize, but stick right here.”

  The bougainvilleas were as lush and petulant as ever in the sun, which seemed enraged that it was almost high noon and ready to kill off any living cell that fell under its red-hot ferrule, except for the defiant bougainvilleas. The Count observed them enviously as he dropped the door-knocker he’d preferred today to the nipple-shaped bell you never heard.

  “Well, well, what an efficient policeman you are!” the Marquess commented, opening the door. “Just ring and he comes running.”

  “Hello,” the Count mumbled as he scoured the half-dark for the armchair assigned to him in that stage-set. When he thought how he was there because of the strange death of Alexis Arayan, he felt ill at ease and at a loss, and told himself it was true the case no longer interested him: his only motivation was a morbid curiosity to get further into the world of Alberto Marques, as shadowy and shocking as last night’s party.

  “Did you have a good time last night?”

  “Yes, really,” the Count replied, knowing what was coming next.

  “I waited for you till two o’clock at Alquimio’s, but my sickly body couldn’t resist any longer. It’s been a long, long time since I went on a late-night spree like that.”

  “Sorry if you waited for me. Why did you ring me so early? To scold me?”

  The Marquess straightened his dressing gown between his legs before responding: “God spare me giving such a potentate a scolding. ..”

  “We are razor-sharp today. Why are you always like that?”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry, Mr Count… Are you upset with me? I called because something happened that might be of interest to you,” and he lowered his voice, to speak confidentially. “This morning Maria Antonia called again.”

  “And what’s happened now?”

  “It’s odd, very odd. She asked me if Alexis had left a medallion here which he used to wear. It’s a small gold medallion, with a circle around the engraved face of Leonardo the universal man. Was he wearing it round his neck when you found him?”

  The Count rewound his tape of memories of the transvestite murdered in the Havana Woods: examined again the dramatic red dress, the silk scarf round his neck, the breastless bosom, and saw no medallion.

  “No, I don’t think he was.”

  “Well, I didn’t manage to find it here either. Alexis’s mother bought two identical medallions several years ago in the museum in Vinci, the village where Leonardo was born. One for her and the other for Alexis. Hers went missing soon after and was never found. And now one has appeared in a trinket-box Alexis had at home. Maria Antonia says she’d never seen it there, and doesn’t know if it’s the one Matilde lost or Alexis’s.”

  “But Alexis still used to wear his?”

  “Yes, he always wore it. What do you think? That Alexis stole it from his mother and kept it there, or that he left his there for some reason?”

  The Count couldn’t resist a smile as he pondered the riddle set by the Marquess.

  “I really didn’t think you liked playing the detective so much. They accuse me of hogging the case but I think you’re the one on the hog.”

  “Oh, don’t say that. I’d be incapable of taking anything away from you, Mr Friendly Policeman.”

  The Count smiled again and lit a cigarette. The Marquess was helping him come to terms with the world.

  “Is there no tea on offer today? I think I could do with a cup.. .”

  “Delighted to oblige, Mr Friendly Policeman. And I’ll add lots of ice cubes,” said the Marquess, as he pattered off to the back of the stage, his red Chinese silk dressing gown caressing the sharp edges of his feet.

  God, how horrible, the Count remembered, seeing the grotesque figure who’d suddenly transformed into his Dr Watson, tea in hand, smiling contentedly.

  “You know one thing, Marquess? If Alexis put his own medallion in his jewel box, it’s as if he were pointing to suicide. Don’t you think? As if he were organizing everything before he left. But he didn’t commit suicide. Perhaps they didn’t give him time.”

  “Or perhaps he provoked his own death… That’s my considered view… Look what I found on my bookshelves.”

  And he handed the Count a page from a Bible: the page cut from the Gospel according to St Matthew, pages 989 and 990, which began with chapter 17: “And after six days Jesus taketh Peter, James and John his brother, and bringeth them up into a high mountain apart. And was transfigured before them.” And, written in a margin, in tiny but precise writing, the words: “God the Father, why do you force him to suffer so much?”

  “Where was this?”

  “Elemental, Lieutenant Conde, it was where it had to be: inside the Complete Plays of Virgilio Pinera I have on my shelves. Look,” and he touched his temples: “Pure deduction.”

  “Yes, it had to be there… Alexis didn’t dress as a transvestite because he liked to. He was either mad, or a mystic as you say, determined to represent an act of transfiguration with which he was aiming to…”

  “Was aiming to be crucified, Mr Friendly Policeman.”

  The Count looked at the page from the Bible again, read the whole chapter and felt that the truth of Alexis Arayan’s death lay there, but had just eluded him, like the face glimpsed in that dream.

  “Yes, you may be right. But why do it like that?”

  “It’s clear enough to me: because he was afraid of killing himself

  … Remember, Alexis was a Catholic, and Catholicism condemns suicide, but his religion also condemned homosexuality. Thanks to him I learned about the passage in Leviticus which says: ‘Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.’ It isn’t easy for a believer to live knowing his God called to Moses and pronounced so savagely, you know? But it’s only a part of the Tragedy of Life, as one old friend of mine says, who definitely isn’t at all homosexual. It’s a long time since anyone posed it so Judaically, as it were, but over many centuries that sin known as contra natura has condemned the lives of homosexuals, as has the idea that it’s a sickness… Mortal sin, social aberration, sickness of body and mind: it’s not easy to be a queer anywhere in the world, my friendly Mr Policeman, I can tell you. But let me proceed: I’ve been informed by people expert in the matter that of the ten million Cubans living in our Socialist Republic, between five and six per cent of us are homosexual. Naturally, including our lesbian comrades. Do your sums, do your sums: if there are five million men, and three per cent are homosexual, that gives you one hundred and fifty thousand, or almost a fifth of a million compatriots. Enough to make an army… What more can I say? I’m not convinced by this figure, because lots and lots of people are unable to admit to being homosexual, logically enough, because of what I said previously and because of the long national history of homophobia that we’ve endured between the four walls of this island ever since the Spaniards arrived and deemed dirty and barbaric what our sodomite Indians did while bathing in our peaceful rivers sucking cigars and flinging a yucca… Your experience of recent history can add other conflicts to the drama, my friendly policeman: don’t forget how right here in the 60s there was something called the UMAP, the famous Military Units to A
id Production, where homosexuals were confined, along with other harmful beings, so they would turn into men by cutting sugar cane and picking coffee and then, after 1971, a statute was decreed, also right here, to be enforced by policemen like you, magistrates and judges, which prohibited ‘ostensible homosexuality and other socially reprehensible behaviour’… And you’re so ingenuous you wonder why a homosexual still thinks of committing suicide?”

  In Paris, in the springtime, you don’t usually think of suicide. At least I don’t. I felt so free and intelligent I couldn’t imagine all that freedom, intellect and revelation in one spring would later lead me to suffer so much and witness my last dramatic act… Muscles was saying I was a stranger, he’d never seen me so optimistic and happy, as we drove by taxi to Sartre’s and Simone’s house, where they’d invited me to have supper that night along with those I’d invite formally to come to Cuba to the premiere of my new version of Electra Garrigo. That night, however, destiny had decreed I’d make a decision which might be the possible starting point for everything else. I told Muscles it was perhaps better not to bring the Other Boy, for I reckoned he might get up to his tricks, which included getting drunk and vomiting on the carpet and wanting to kiss Jean-Paul because he’d refused the Nobel… And Muscles said he agreed, the Other was all right for transvestites and public places, but not so right for Simone’s house… It was a delightful, even candle-lit supper: we drank Bordeaux, ate platefuls of French and Italian cheeses, and of meat in mushroom sauce, now intoxicating every taste-bud in my mouth and memory, unable to evoke any another taste of that kind. And Dutch ice cream for dessert… All night we talked about my project, I discussed how I imagined the set and the costumes, and above all the kind of physical gestures I wanted to impose on the actors, making them up in Greek masks but with very Havanan, white, mulatto and black faces, trying to ensure that the masks showed and didn’t hide them, that they revealed their inner life and didn’t conceal the tragic and burlesque spirituality I wanted to pinpoint as the essence of a Cubanity which had Virgilio Pinera as chief prophet, because he believed that if anything distinguished us from the rest of the world, it was our possession of Creole wisdom, where nothing is really painful or totally pleasant. My approach, I explained, would be an extreme stylization of nineteenth-century Havana comedy and creole vernacular from the Alhambra Theatre, but distilled with a tragic, philosophical will, until only its artistic essence remained, for at the end of the day that has always been the grand theatre of Cuban idiosyncrasy… I added that for a similar reason I had to be sustained by words, and couldn’t, like poor Artaud, try to create a stage language dependent only on signs or dynamic, active gestures, because one of the visible traits of our Cubanity is an irrepressible inclination never to shut our mouths. Like Artaud, certainly, I wanted to show how theatre isn’t a game, but true reality, truer than reality itself, and I had to resolve the problem which restoring that level to the theatre always entails, how to make each performance a kind of happening to provoke confusion and unleash insights, to go beyond a facile, digestive phase of entertainment, as he said… And the facial mask is a vital ingredient in a project wishing to reveal the moral masks many people have worn at some moment of their existence: homosexuals who affect not to be so, the disappointed who smile at the bad weather, wizards with Marxist manuals under their arms, ferocious opportunists dressed as gentle lambs, apathetic ideologues with that most useful party card in their pocket: in a word a very colourful carnival in a country that has often had to renounce its carnivals.. . My intention, pure and simple, was to create a transcendent poetic aura, outside any specific time, but in a precise space, for a tragedy which the author conceived as a family dilemma: to stay or to leave, to respect or disobey, or the old story from Oedipus and Hamlet: to be or not to be… As the evening came to an end I told them how Parisian transvestites had given me the final key to that spectral metamorphosis which magnifies the supreme aspiration of performance, when the actor dies beneath the garments of his character and the masquerade ceases to be a passing, carnivalesque act and turns into another life, all the more real for being more desired, consciously chosen and not assumed as mere conjunctural concealment… Then Sartre, with the eagle eye he always had, became my oracle: “Isn’t what you are suggesting too complex?” he began by asking, telling me to be careful with revelations, for they always suggest diverse readings, a diversity which might be dangerous for me, just like the essential fatalism I wanted to represent through a twentieth-century Cuban Electra: I’d already heard certain insular bureaucrats say that art in Cuba should be different and that difference wasn’t like my Electra Garrigo and her dilemma of being or not being… But it was written that I wasn’t to heed him: my decision was irrevocable, and that’s how Plimpton told it in the interview with me published in the Paris Review.

  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 Arayan 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 Arayan 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 Maria 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 Maria Antonia, the woman with winged 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 Maria 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?