Havana Red (21 page)

“Conde, you've seen greater coincidences . . . Anyway, if he's scarpered, it's because he's got dirt on his hands.”

“Sure enough. And we've got the page of the Bible Alexis annotated and hid in the Piñera book . . . ‘God the Father, why do you force him to suffer so much?' . . . What does that mean?”

“I haven't a clue.”

“Don't be crazy, Manolo, it's easy: Alexis is suffering and feels solidarity with a fellow sufferer, right?”

“Yes, very touching, but just tell me one thing: why did he put the page in that book?”

“Because he'd already decided to dress up in Electra's gear . . . He wanted to set up his own tragedy . . . That sounds queer enough, doesn't it?”

“If you who know about these things say so . . . And what about the coins? Have you forgotten them?”

“Of course not, but I've not got the slightest fucking clue about them. What say you, Mr Genius?”

“I told you: they were paying him something back.”

“But what was it all about . . . Fuck, was it blackmail?”

“How the hell do I know? While you're at it, what do you reckon about María Antonia?”

“Toña, black and swift . . . I don't know what to think: that black woman knows much more than she gives away. Why do you think she called the Marquess and set up this complication over the medallion?”

“So we'd find out.”

“OK. Then it's because she knows something . . .”

“Shall we bring her in?”

“Don't be crazy, Manolo, your idea is to solve everything by putting the screws on people. If it were that easy, she'd have called us. I think it's going to rain all afternoon, don't you?”

“Yes, look at the sky over your place . . . Well, what are we going to do till Salvador appears and tells us he left home because he couldn't stand his wife any more?”

“What are we going to do? Well think on it, what else can we do? Think like the couple of thinkers we are . . . Now drop me off at home, sharpish!”

 

He wanted to believe the rain cleaning his windowpanes also cleaned his mind and helped him think. That's why he was thinking, with the blurred, slippery image from his dream at the forefront of his mind, trying to get mentally exercised so he could pull away the mask behind which the truth was hiding. It was always truth. Irksome truth always hidden or transfigured: sometimes behind words, at others behind attitudes and sometimes even behind an entire life simulated and redesigned merely to hide or transfigure the truth. But he now knew it was there and he only needed an idea, a light like a spotlight able to illuminate his mind and get at the fucking truth. Truth
is, he told himself, as he thought more and more, I'd like to see Polly Sparrow-bun again, God, how horrible, he remembered, and though he felt a desire to masturbate he rigorously denied himself that individualist, self-sufficient solution, now that little butt was real and tangible, not tonight, but on Sunday, she'd agreed, because on Saturday I'm going to the ballet, you know, and if it cleared up he'd take the opportunity to go to Eligio Riego's poetry reading, and could perhaps talk to the reader, and he also thought it was a long, long time since he'd seen Skinny and that he must tell him about his first-rate encounter with the mad item who'd extracted all the semen stored in his body, as she said: “God, how horrible!” as if it were all a big mistake. What would Dulcita be like after living so long in Miami? Perhaps she'd put on weight and look like a housewife, or wear those shiny clothes all Miami people wore, or perhaps she wouldn't, and she'd still have those beautiful legs whose distant reaches he'd tried to observe – he knew she had the tightest of butts, Skinny had told him – when his friend wasn't looking. If she was still pretty, perfect and nice, was it right she should see poor Carlos like that? If only everything could be like it was then and Skinny were thin again! If God existed, where the hell had he been the day Skinny was wounded, why Skinny? . . . Who was it? Salvador? The doctor? Faustino? The kitchen fitter? Or perhaps one of the other ten people in the house that day? And why do I never think the Marquess might be implicated? A debt collector hired by the dramatist? Don't get fanciful, Conde, he told himself. I could almost see him, for fuck's sake, but he was all right there, after eating two fried fish and a piece of bread and downing more coffee, not thinking how if he didn't buy some more he wouldn't have any left on
Monday, because everything improved with the cool brought on by rain that didn't look as if it would stop. What would Fatman Contreras be thinking as he watched the rain? Poor Fatman, if I could consult him, he'd surely say he could help. That bastard was a good policeman. Now without Fatman and old Captain Jorrín, whose death the Count still lamented, a policeman's job would be more difficult. Who could he consult when he had doubts? And where had they hidden Maruchi? What can have happened afterwards between the Marquess and the Other Boy with the unmentionable name, deported to Havana for being such a queer? He needed the Marquess to tell him the end of that adventure in which each chapter became more personal and less transvestite. Would he tell me who the Other Boy was and if he'd really peeped the day he peed in his house? What he really needed to know, he thought as he watched the water running down the panes of glass, drank a drop more coffee, lit another cigarette and looked at his watch concluding he had plenty of time to go and ingest a few of Eligio Riego's poems that night, what he really needed to know was the end of the story of Alexis Arayán, so masked and dead in the dirty grass of the Havana Woods, pursuing a death he didn't dare prosecute with his own hands, faking divine retribution, crossing his own Calvary without fame or heaven, a sacrifice made to measure for his sinful homosexuality, wrapped tragically in the clothing of a Havanan Electra. What a good fucker you are, darling . . .! Was it true? Nobody had ever said that before, at least not like that. And how much truth was there in what the Marquess said? In this world only Skinny told the truth, and even he didn't always tell his friend the truth. Would Faustino Arayán tell the truth? And black María Antonia? And
could it be true that he, Mario Conde, was befriending pansied, theatrical Alberto Marqués? The truth might be the bus driver with a bus-driver's face he'd seen that morning, hitting the steering wheel with his ring, deciding whether or not to open the door to that girl begging, leaping up and down in front of the bus. What might happen later between those two people who were strangers and perhaps would never have met if the red light hadn't stopped the bus at that exact moment? Was it a chance coincidence? The rain was still falling, streaming softly down the panes like ideas through the Count's mind, as he looked at his hands and thought, after so much thinking, that the only truth was there and in the river sweeping everything along.

He got up and took the typewriter case out from under his bed. He opened it and looked at the ribbon, half covered in rot and good intentions, and went in search of paper. He felt he'd seen a transvestite and that the light of revelation had reached his mind, alarmed by so much thinking. He put the first sheet in the carriage and wrote: “While he waited, José Antonio Morales's eyes followed the extravagant flight of that pigeon.” He needed a title, but would look for it later, he reckoned, because his fingertips felt the immediacy of a revelation. He sank his fingers into the keyboard and went on: “He observed how the bird gained height . . .”

 

It was a perfectly performed act of magic: the rain stopped, the wind swept the clouds towards other precipices and the blazing sun of seven in the evening returned to close the curtain of day. But the smell of rain seemed to have filtered into the city's skin for the night, removing petrol fumes, ammonia from dry
urine, ambiguous smells from packed-out pizzerias and even the perfume from the woman walking in front of the Count, perhaps to the very same destination. If only.

Euphoria overflowing because of the eight typed sheets he carried in the back pocket of his trousers, the Count forgot his rush to reach the poetry reading and concentrated, while crossing the Capitolio's ravaged gardens, on completing an exhaustive visual survey. He tried to keep up with the prodigious pace of a no less prodigious woman who enjoyed the confluence of all the benefits of cross-breeding: her long blond hair, swooning it was so lank, fell on the mountable buttocks of a black houri, an arse of strictly African proportions, finely flexed rotundities descending two compact thighs to wild animal ankles. Her face – an even greater shock for the Count – didn't betray her allconquering rearguard: ripe papaya lips dominated by elusively spare, definitively devious Asiatic eyes which, by the theatre where his pursuit and optical frisking ended, looked at the Count in a moment of oriental arrogance and ditched him without right of appeal. The right bitch knows she's hot and is flaunting it. She's so hot I could kill her, the Count told himself, pleased to quote himself, as he climbed the imposing stairs where at other times all the city's money, wrapped in silk gowns, linen suits, fox and ermine, went up and down from the nation's most exclusive drawing rooms, unthinkable in that torrid town where, nevertheless, it was possible to think anything.

He found the lecture theatre on the second floor and peered in; the poetry reading was apparently over and the poet, from behind an exhaustingly huge table, where his papers, spectacles and half glass of water lay, communed with the faithful who'd responded to his
lyrical summons. Eligio Riego was in his seventies and his tepid, lethargic voice had a modulated rhythm that belonged to poetry rather than old age or exhaustion.

From the margins the Count furtively observed him in inquisitive, emotional mode: he knew that many people thought the gentle man with the dusty absentminded
guayabera
was one of the most important poets the island had ever given birth to, and that, in his movement through poetry and time, he had bequeathed a unique view of the strange, awkward country they inhabited. The poetic grandeur, invisible to many, hidden behind a physique nobody would ever have pursued admiringly through the streets of Havana, had, however, an essential, permanent value because of the enviable range of its power, made only from the magic substance of words.

Now, as he sucked on his blackened pipe, like an anxious smoker with emphysema, Eligio Riego's small eyes ranged over his audience, and he allowed himself a smile, before continuing: “We Catholics are too serious when it comes to the divine. We lack the vital, primitive happiness of the Greeks, Yorubas or Hindus who dialogue with their Gods and sit them at their table. I've always thought it wrong, for example, to ignore the humour that exists in the Holy Scriptures, to scorn the holy smile that God gave and communicated to us, and forget how Jesus's first great miracle was to convert wine into water . . . A very clear sign from on high.”

“And what about devils, Eligio?” asked a know-all in the front row.

“Look, young man, the existence of devils attests to the existence of God, and vice versa. They need each other as Good needs Evil to exist. And that's why evil is also everywhere: in hell, on earth, inside and outside.
Moreover, if we follow the tradition of the Talmud, the angels appeared on the second day of creation. Hence Lucifer, the most beautiful of all these angels, has existed from that early date, do you see? Then the fall of Lucifer and his dissident band took place, and so I've heard, the devil has been characterized ever since by the fact that every third time he blinks, he blinks upwards, he cannot walk backwards or blow his nose; he never sleeps and is impatient, ambitious and never creates a shadow; his favourite food is flies, but he eats other things, which are always highly spiced, though he has an aversion to salt . . . But what most interests me about devils is their real artistic prowess: they say the malign one is an excellent musician and prefers stringed instruments. I always remember as an example how Juan Horozco y Covarrubias in his
Treatise on True and False Prophecy
, published in Segovia in 1588, states that he possesses proof of the devil's artistic vocation. In his book the father recounts how he saw Lucifer, after the latter had taken on the body of a rather thick village girl, compose some beautiful profane verse and, as they say now, put them to music, so they could be sung to the accompaniment of a lute which, with a woman's hands and arms, he played ‘like the most expert in the world'. Now, young man, I'm more interested in demons on earth than in hell, like Max Beerbohm, the English novelist who wrote
Zuleika Dobson
, that fascinating story of the planet's most beautiful woman, who caused a love-sickness able to provoke the suicide en masse of all Oxford students in love with her devilish charms and, as one gleans from the novel's final pages, also loved by those in Cambridge, where she was bound. It is one of the most diabolical stories I've read . . .” Eligio was emphatic, with his eyes receding when the Count opted to guarantee peace
and quiet for his conversation with the poet and went out to reserve a table at the Louvre Café. Do you have any vintage rum? Yes, and Gold Medal. No, two vintage rums, without ice. No, not now, I'll be back, keep the table, he warned the waiter, and went out to find Eligio Riego who, pipe in hand, was chatting at the exit from the lecture theatre to a young woman apparently melting under the heat from his words. Could he be the devil himself? I've no option but to interrupt, old friend, the Count told himself, and accosted him thus: “Forgive me, maestro . . . I'm your friend Rangel's friend.”

 

“Young man, it's a fabulous story about the tranvestite murdered wearing Electra Garrigó's costume. Almost half demoniacal, you know? Like nearly everything involving Alberto Marqués, who's more shocking than Max Beerbohm . . . Look, young man, he and I have known each other and been friends from the forties, when we used to meet to prepare the issues of the magazine, often in Fat Lezama's house, and I've always thought it was lucky this fellow was there to turn everything into a joke and puncture the atmosphere of poetic solemnity imposed by Lezama. We held poetry to be something entirely serious, transcendent, telluric, as they say now, and for him it was always a way to show off his cleverness, brilliance and talent. Because Alberto is one of the most intelligent men I've known, although I've always criticized the fact that he could sacrifice everything for a good joke, for the erotic chase, as he calls it, or one of his diabolically evil deeds, naturally. His break with Lezama and the whole magazine group in the fifties was one of his most shockingly evil deeds, but then I also understood him:
he needed to be himself and shine alone. He was always like that, a loose cannon searching restlessly, and that was why I lamented the excesses committed against him, when they isolated him completely, just because they wanted to punish his irreverence and artistic rebelliousness. It was intensely sad, young man, and the ten years they delayed before trying to right this wrong was too long for him. But what was most extraordinary about Alberto's dramatic character flourished in those difficult years: he displayed a dignity that was frankly enviable, and stopped writing and thinking about the theatre, which was all the more surprising in someone like him who lived for the world's stages . . . Did I say he is an exhibitionist? . . . Careful with him. Alberto's a born actor, one of the best actors I've ever seen, and he likes to invent his own comedies and tragedies. He exaggerates what he is or explains what he isn't, so you really don't know what goes . . . He says it is a form of self-defence. Perhaps this character of his is the reason why our friendship improves at a distance: we prefer to respect rather than engage with each other. I think he may understand me. No, my situation was different: I've always been a Catholic, though I'm not a mystic like your transvestite and in no way sanctimonious: as you can see, I drink large quantities of rum, smoke my pipes, and have never been able to deny myself the sometimes desperate contemplation of a girl coming into flower, because I'm convinced there's no beauty on earth to surpass the heat which comes from youth. In a word, we are children of time and dust, and no poetry can spare us that. Other things perhaps, but the time allotted to each of us, no chance. That's why I think life should be enjoyed on one's own terms, provided the enjoyment doesn't prejudice one's
neighbour, do you see? But there was a phase when it was thought that the vision of the world and life propounded by Catholic writers was inappropriate, that our fidelity was blemished by irrevocable spiritual fidelities and consequently we couldn't be trusted, apart from being retrograde and philosophically idealist, you know? So we were discreetly sidelined. Nothing like what happened to Alberto and other people. The fact was, social commitment was confused with individual mind-sets and then extremists put us on the list of targets to be dealt with: we were ideologically impure and, for some, pernicious if not reactionary, when the preponderance of matter seemed clearly demonstrated, as they say out there. Someone with a Muscovite mentality thought uniformity was possible in this hot, heterodox country where nothing's ever been pure, and then they unleashed a wave of hysteria against literature which left several corpses abandoned on the roadside and several walking wounded covered in scars . . . But I left the stage voluntarily: I couldn't renounce something I'd always believed in (a lovely trait, as Alberto would say) or mistake the circumstantial for the essential. In any case I'd have betrayed myself if I'd let myself be defeated by what was transitory or, worse, if I'd pretended to change, as many people did . . . That's why I trusted to silence but didn't stop writing. The Marquess is different, as you'll know if you've had a couple of conversations with him: his extreme sacrifice has the ingredients, many would say, of theatrical tragedy. But, I repeat, don't be put off by what he says, try to see the truth in what he has done: he resisted all the insults, but stayed here, although only, as he says, to see the final fate of those who harassed him . . . The fact is he calls for the right to revenge, though he'd be incapable of transforming
it into physical acts or public outrages. Look, young man, I'd also advise you, if at all possible, not to be misled by the many unpleasant incidents and stories you've heard about any of us: writers and artists aren't as diabolical as is sometimes thought or alleged. Did they never tell you about the wrong-doings and hassles that occur among bank employees or workers in innocent canning factories or dozy members of a diplomatic mission? Don't such things happen among you policemen? What I mean is that we don't have an exclusive on back-biting, opportunism and ambition. Like everywhere, Good and Evil blend in each and every one of us. Young man: what more can I say, except to thank you for this vintage rum nobody could classify as diabolical which has warmed our conversation in a place that is so delightful? . . . Perhaps, as a result of some professional defect, you got the wrong person, and expected to hear a different opinion from me, but I profess two unchanging fidelities in my life: friendship and poetry. As long as I live I'll write poetry, whether it's published or not, whether it wins a poetry festival or not, whether they give me recognition for it or not. And friendship is a voluntary commitment one enters into, and if one does, it has to be respected: although we don't agree on many things, Alberto Marqués is my friend and when someone, you or anyone else, asks about him, the first thing I say is that he is my friend, and I think that says it all. Don't you agree, young man?”