Havana Red (26 page)

“No, of course not. That's history. I'm just exhausted and fed up. What about you?”

The silence floated down the line more than it usually did with Major Rangel.

“I'm fed up, Conde. And disappointed . . . I think I'm going to hang up the sword. But forget it. Take a week and, if you can, start writing. Learn to help yourself and quit the self-pity . . . Come back next Monday. If I need you I'll call you before, OK?”

“OK, Boss, look after yourself. And you know, I'll get you some real good cigars,” he said, as he hung up.

While he showered, he thought he'd more than enough time to tell the Marquess the last chapter of that sordid story the whole truth about which would never be known. But he owed him that version. He tried to imagine how he'd tell it to the dramatist, and realized that all he was doing was concealing the real anxiety he felt at the prospect of the visit: he'd take his manuscript to the old dramatist. Will he like it? he wondered as he washed, when he got dressed, as he went into the street, and was still wondering when he let the door knocker fall for a third time and waited for the curtains to open on the theatrical world of Alberto Marqués.

 

“You're a surprising man, Mr Friendly Policeman. So much so that I now think you're a fake policeman. It's like another form of transvesting, right? The difference being that you've stripped off . . . and everything's out in the open,” said the Marquess, waving the pages of the story like a fan.

“But . . . what do you think?” implored the Count, shy at his perceived nudity.

The dramatist smiled but tittered not. That Sunday evening he wore a towelling dressing gown, a degree less decrepit than his silk one, and in order to read he'd opened all the windows in the room and lifted the pages up close to his eyes, and at last the Count managed to construct a precise idea of the set where they'd been meeting recently. It was the image one always forms of an attic or one of those dusty, cobwebby places, ripe for a horror film, which don't exist in Cuban houses, even less so in those with such lofty ceilings. As the Marquess read, the Count smoked two cigars and concentrated on creating an inventory of what might be useful from that surrealist accumulation of objects that one never usually saw: apart from the two armchairs where they sat, the lieutenant thought that a very grainy wooden table, a bronze leg which must have sustained an Art Nouveau lamp and a few plates that looked healthy, perhaps even bone china, were just salvageable. The rest reeked of exquisite corpses, without the option of resurrection: they must be the final remains of the autophagy the Marquess had surely practised on his own house.

“I'll tell you what I think later. First tell me something. Have you recently read Camus or Sartre?”

The Count looked for a cigarette.

“No, I've hardly had time to read. Why?”

“Are you familiar with
The Outsider
?” The Count nodded and his host smiled again. “Well, your bus driver really reminds me of Mr Meursault in
The Outsider
. . . That metaphorical possibility is beautiful, isn't it? French existentialism and Cuban buses bonded by the glare of the sun.” And he smiled again
and the Count felt like grabbing him by the neck. The bastard's making fun of me.

“So you think it's silly.”

“But it doesn't have a title,” proceeded the Marquess, as if he'd not heard the lament of the Count, who was now shaking his head. “Well, I've thought of one, seeing these people are dead before they've died physically: ‘Iron in the Soul'. What do you reckon?”

“I'm not sure, I think I like it.”

“Well, if you want, I'll make you a present of it. After all, it's Sartre's . . .”

“Thank you,” the Count had to respond, as he thought it made no sense to ask for his final opinion on the already devalued quality of that story from his soul.

“It's funny reading stories like that again . . . In another era you'd certainly have been accused of adopting aesthetic postures of a bourgeois, anti-Marxist character. Just imagine this reading of the story: there's no logical or dialectical explanation of your characters' irrational behaviour or their anecdotes; it's obvious these creatures cannot explain the chaos in human life, while the narrator's naturalist detail only reinforces the desolation of the man who received, God knows from where, an illumination in his existence. Such an aesthetic could then have been said (as was often said) to be a simple reflection of the spiritual degeneration of the modern bourgeoisie. Besides, your work offers no solutions to the social situations you pinpoint, just to state what's most obvious: you communicate a sordid image of man in a society like ours . . . How do you like that interpretation? Poor existentialism . . . And what should we do then with those ever so horribly beautiful works by Camus and Sartre and Simone? . . . And poor Scott
Fitzgerald and eschatological Henry Miller and the good characters in Carpentier and the dark world of Onetti? Decapitate the history of culture and of man's uncertainties? . . . But you know what surprised me most: it's your ability to create a fable. You don't write like a fledgling, friendly policeman, but like a writer, although I'd have preferred a different ending: she should have killed the bus driver . . . And, tell me, where did you get the idea to write this story? The mystery of creation has always fascinated me.”

“I don't know, I think because I saw a bus driver with a bus-driver's face, and recently people have said I've got a policeman's face.”

The Marquess's smile dissolved into a string of titters which seemed bent on disarming him once and for all, and the Count was on the point of standing up and leaving the house.

“And you believed me, Mr Friendly Policeman? I was only joking. Or it was self-defence, I'm not sure. I wanted to create a distance, you know. Fear and suspicion? The fact is when you've been beaten once, you learn to raise your arms before they try to beat you again. Like Pavlov's dog. But I think I went too far with you, really: I'm not as perverse, ironic, or . . . or as pansied as I make out. No way. So please forgive me if I showed a lack of respect. I'd like you to forgive all my ironies.”

“So you said you liked my story?” insisted the Count wanting a simple declaration bereft of equivocal verbal whirls.

“But didn't you hear me? I told you . . . I'll go even further: I admire you as a policeman. The cigar thing was a mark of genius, right? I'd never have thought of that dramatic solution as catalyst to the tragedy which had been woven . . . Because I don't know if you noticed how it was all like a Greek tragedy, in the best
style of Sophocles, full of ambiguity, parallel stories that began twenty years ago and which come together on the same day and characters who aren't who they say they are, or who hide what they are, or have changed so much nobody now knows who they are, and at an unexpected moment there is tragic recognition. But they all confront a destiny that goes beyond them, that forces, drives them to make dramatic acts: only here Laius kills Oedipus, or Aegisthus anticipates Orestes . . . Should it be dubbed filicide? . . . And all is unleashed because of the
hubris
committed. There are excesses of passion, of ambition for power, of pent-up hatred, and that's usually severely punished . . . What is really regrettable in this almost theatrical game is that the gods chose Alexis to sacrifice his destiny morbidly. What that poor boy did has grieved me sorely. At my age I've seen too many people die, dozens of friends, all my family, and each close death is an alarm bell warning that mine may be next, and the older I get, the greater my fear of death. But now I'm very pleased you've unmasked this gentleman and that he's been jailed . . . Because I'll tell you something else: do you want to know where the lines of this tragedy began to cross? In Paris, that spring of 1969: Faustino Arayán was the embassy functionary who rang Muscles' place that day to say the Other Boy was at the police station. And he was the one who decided the Other should go back to Cuba, and sent him back wrapped in papers where he'd wiped all the shit he could find, about the Other and about me, naturally. And, obviously, Alexis was also fully aware . . .”

 

The feast was finally over and I left Paris in the rain. Because springtime in Paris is so fragile: winter's
deathbed rattle can launch an attack with an impunity that is simply an awful revenge. The bad weather started without warning and the windows we left open during the day to the season's pleasant noises and smells had suddenly to be shut, so we could see through the glass how the icy rain abused the virgin shoots on the trees in the nearby square. Two days before, I'd finished my research in the Artaud papers and also my course of master classes at the Théâtre des Nations, where I'd expounded for the first time in public my new idea for a production of
Electra Garrigó
based on what I called a transvestite aesthetic. It was a success, in fact, my last great public success . . . From Sartre to Grotowski, by way of Truffaut, Néstor Almendros, Julio Cortázar and Simone Signoret, I was praised publicly and privately and was invited there and then to present the work the following season, with performances in six French cities. I was at the height of my dreams when it began to rain in Paris, as if it had never rained before, and I decided to return to the sure but merciless sun of Havana, in a feverish haste to get on with my work. Muscles accompanied me to Orly, and we could never have imagined that that embrace and kiss on my neck would be last carnal contact I'd have with him. We'd never see each other again.

As soon as I arrived I started work. I let the other directors get on with the year's repertory and shut myself up in my house with Virgilio's text, and began to elaborate my idea for the production. By December I had the first libretto ready, with all the sketches for the sets and costumes, the staging of scenes and acts, and a tentative cast in which actors from various groups participated, because I had to engage the best from Cuban theatre. But the sugar harvest had begun
and the entire country was cutting and grinding sugar cane: even actors and theatre technicians, and I had to wait till July to have the chance to work with the actors I wanted. I wrote to Paris and explained the reasons behind the delay and they very kindly postponed the tour to the
annus horribilis
of 1971, and then I used the time to prepare the best ever Spanish edition of
The Theatre and Its Double
...

Finally, on 6 September I gathered in the theatre all those who were going to work on the project and made a first reading of the script, and explained the requirements for the stage, lighting, costumes and acting. The applause at the end, a standing ovation, convinced me beyond doubt I'd reached the gates of heaven: I only had to knock and Saint Peter would welcome me with open arms . . . And we started work. Although everything turned very difficult (the material for the costumes, the making of the thirty-two masks, the immaculate costume for the Centaur-Pedagogue, the scenery design), we gradually got the necessary and in January moved on from plain rehearsals to dress rehearsals on stage. What the actors had to do was really complicated and I demanded nothing short of perfection. They had to handle the masks as if they were their own faces and that meant special training, lots and lots of practice, and we spent long hours watching films of Japanese theatre. I then began to invite very specific people to see the rehearsals and they all left on cloud nine. Only Virgilio said something which, in my euphoria, I failed to register: Marqués, this is better than what I wrote, more intense, more provocative, and you've quite thrown me arse over tit, that is, my arse is all over the place . . . But, my friend, it's too turbulent and cruel and I'm afraid it'll upset . . . In fact, the air was already murky,
but I failed to see the danger signals coming from every direction. I've always had a problem believing weather forecasts. I let passion take over and shut ears and eyes to anything that's not my single goal . . . And so we finally set the première in Havana for April and the start of the tour in France for May. And then began the last act in the affair which ended with the performance the four bureaucrats put on behind the dissecting table on the set . . . One day I got a call to say there were problems with the Paris trip. They'd received reports about the fairly serious moral problems during my last stay in France, and they even knew I'd lodged at Muscles' place, that I had an ambiguous attitude to the revolutionary process and suspiciously cordial relationships with certain pseudo-revolutionary and revisionist French intellectual circles . . . That I'd met up with Néstor Almendros and other people who held critical attitudes, including even loyal Julio Cortázar, and it was then they started to tell me things which only two people knew, Muscles and the Other Boy. I was told the Paris embassy was fully informed about all the goings-on, and I discovered they'd lumped together lies and truth in surprising fashion: the events were real and only the Other could have told them that way, because his vulgar stamp was obvious on all they recounted, but their conclusions would have made you piss yourself with laughter if it hadn't been so serious. There they could say anything they liked about my character, my work, my morality, my attitude, my ideology and even the way I breathed . . . But I still didn't give up . . . I wrote to Muscles to ask him to use his influence in Paris to activate the invitations and send them the most official way possible, and I kept the April première date in Cuba. Then the master stroke: in one week my production said goodbye to Orestes,
the Pedagogue, Clytemnestra Pla and even Electra Garrigó . . . I thought I'd die, but I still didn't give up and I started to look for other actors, to the very day they summoned us all to the theatre and it was decided, in my absence, to expel me from the group by twenty-four votes for and two abstentions.