Havana Red (8 page)

 

Kick his guts out, hit him hard, gouge his eyes, he'd ordered Manolo after explaining who Salvador K. was and allotting him the first interview with the painter. And when he saw him, the Count's expectations were replete with prejudice: the guy was just over forty and weighed some two hundred pounds, had two enormous feet – could he be a size nine? – and flexed a weighttrainer's arms, just right for tightening a silk sash to strangle a man while ensuring he didn't fight back.

Seated in the living room to the flat, the policemen rejected his assiduous offers of water, tea and even coffee, keeping to the plan they had agreed. No, not even water.

Salvador K. seemed nervous and was trying to ingratiate himself.

“It's an investigation, I suppose?”

“No, on the contrary,” said Manuel Palacios, sitting on the edge of his armchair. The Count liked his skeletal friend's hostile manner. “It's something much more serious and you know it. Shall we speak here or should we go elsewhere?”

The painter smiled in trepidation. He's shitting himself, the Count's experience told him.

“But what about . . .?”

“Then we'll talk here. What was your relationship with Alexis Arayán?”

As he didn't like him, the Count was pleased to see
Salvador K.'s last hopes fade and the smile abandon his lips.

“I know him,” he said, trying to fake a degree of offended dignity, “from the Centre for Cultural Heritage. Why?”

“Two reasons. First, because Alexis Arayán was murdered yesterday. Second, because we've heard you two were very close.”

The painter tried to stand up, but desisted. It was obvious he had no plan of attack, or perhaps they had really taken him by surprise.

“Was murdered?”

“Last night, in the Havana Woods. Strangled.”

The painter looked into his house, as if fearing some unexpected presence. The Count stood up while Salvador stared and formulated a question, but decided to wait.

“You really want to talk here?” persisted Manolo.

“Yes, of course, why not? . . . So he was murdered. But where do I come in?”

Manuel Palacios smirked.

“Well, Salvador, this is very delicate, but some people claim your friendship was a touch more than friendship.”

Then he did get up, very offended, his muscular arms tensed.

“What are you implying?”

“What you just heard. Do I need to spell it out? People are saying you and he sustained a homosexual relationship.”

Still on his feet, the painter tried to look disaster in the face: “I will not allow you . . .”

“That's fine, don't allow us, but go into the street and shout it out publicly and see what people say.”

Salvador appeared to contemplate the possibity and
reject it. His muscles began to lose momentum and he sank into the lower reaches of his chair.

“They're jealous. Gossips, slanderers, envious . . .”

“Of course, you're right . . . But the fact is Alexis was killed dressed as a woman,” said Manuel Palacios and, not giving Salvador time, he manoeuvred round a bend in the conversation: “When was the last time you saw him?”

“Yesterday morning at the Centre. I took some paintings to sell. Was he really dressed as a woman?”

“What did you talk about? Try to remember.”

“About the paintings. He wasn't too keen on them. He was like that, meddling in other people's business. I expect that's why someone murdered him.”

“And what can you tell me about the relationship you had with him?”

“That's pure slander. Just try to get someone to come and say to my face that he saw me . . .”

“That would be more difficult, you're right. So you deny it?”

“Of course I do,” he said, and seemed to gain in confidence.

“What's your blood group, Salvador?”

His confidence evaporated again. The Count looked daggers at Sergeant Palacios. He'd never have asked him that question at that point, but the one buzzing round his head. Manuel Palacios was definitely better.

“I really don't know,” he said, and he did really seem not to.

“Don't worry. We can find out in the Policlinic. Which one do you go to?”

“On the corner of Seventeenth and J.”

“And you didn't see him last night?”

“I told you I didn't. But what's my blood group got to do with it?”

“And where were you last night between eight and midnight?”

“Painting in the studio I've got on Twenty-First and Eighteenth. Hey, I don't know anything . . .”

“Oh . . . And who saw you there?”

Salvador looked at the floor, as if searching a point of support that continually eluded him. His fear and embarrassment were as prominent as his muscles.

“I don't know, who might have seen me? I don't know, I work alone there, but I arrived at around six and worked until around midnight.”

“And nobody saw you. What bad luck!”

“It's a garage,” he tried to explain. “It's outside the building and if nobody's parking nearby . . .”

“Twenty-First and Eighteenth are very near the Havana Woods, right?”

The man didn't reply.

“Hey, Salvador,” the Count then intervened. He thought it a good time to move the direction of the dialogue on a little . . . “What does the K mean?”

“Oh, my surname is Kindelán, that's why I sign K.”

“Predictable. Something else I've been wanting to ask you for some time. I only see reproductions of famous paintings, but no works by you. Don't you think that strange?”

The painter smiled, at last. He seemed back on firm ground and breathed loudly.

“Have you never heard the anecdote about the friends of Picasso who go to his place to eat and don't see a single work by him? And one of them asks, intrigued: ‘Maestro, why don't you have any of your work here?' And Picasso replies: ‘I can't afford the luxury. Picassos are too expensive . . .' ”

The Count faked a smile, to accompany Salvador's.

“I get you, I get you, and the other day, did he mention the day of the Transfiguration to you?”

The painter looked down, making it clear he was making an effort to remember. The Count saw that he was deciding what would be the best reply.

“I don't know, it doesn't ring a bell. But I do remember he had a Bible on his desk yesterday . . . And so what?”

“Nothing, police curiosity pure and simple . . . By the way, Salvador, why do you think Alexis dressed up as a woman last night?”

“How should I know . . . I told you, it's just gossip . . .”

“Of course, there's no reason why you should know. Well, that's enough for today,” the Count added, as if tired, and his sergeant was the man most surprised by this dénouement. The Count sighed exhaustedly as he stood up, and looked the painter in the eye. “But we'll be back, Salvador, and get this into your head: try to be straight, for I can see you've got a few numbers that might win you the jackpot. Good evening.”

As the painter voiced his final protests, they went into the street and got into their car. Sergeant Manuel Palacios turned the first corner tightly.

“So the Transfiguration . . . Why did we leave, Conde? Didn't you see how I'd got him?”

The Count lit a cigarette and lowered the window.

“Softly, softly,” he urged his sergeant, and added, “What did you expect, that the man would say yes, he's a bugger who took advantage of the other guy to sell his work and that last night he killed him because Alexis said his paintings were a load of shit? Don't fuck around, Manolo, you extracted what there was to extract and he had nothing else . . . Let them check his blood group and investigate him at the Centre and in the studio he's got on Twenty-First and Eighteenth,
and see if anyone saw him last night. Tell Headquarters to give you a couple of guys, better still if they're Crespo and El Greco, and let me stay at home, for I've got a book I have to read. You get an early night, tomorrow we'll go and see Faustino Arayán and ten other people . . . I'll tell you this: you're a much better policeman than I am . . . Pity you're so skinny and sometimes go squint-eyed.”

 

The Count realized that while reading he couldn't get out of his mind the image of the mask behind which Alexis Arayán hid, the closest he'd ever come to a transvestite. And that he was searching not only for explanations to a mystery, but to something definite: his desire to return to talk to Alberto Marqués. Each paragraph in his book became a weapon for a possible verbal duel with the Marquess, an idea with which to scale his heights and level the dialogue. It gave him a knowledge of the subject that would let him close in on that sordid business which had finally begun to attract him the way he preferred: as a challenge to his apathy and prejudice. Mario Conde the policeman was a bad case of
idées fixes
and the pursuit, in each case, of his own obsessions. And the story of that dead transvestite (perhaps symbolically transfigured into ephemeral significance) contained all the ingredients to fascinate him and lead him to its resolution. Consequently Alexis Arayán's fake female face appeared at every moment as a graphic complement to the treatise on metamorphosis and bodily self-creation penned by Muscles, thanks to which various things were becoming clearer to the Count: cross-dressing was more vital and biological than the simple perverted exhibitionism of going into the street dressed as a woman, as he'd
always viewed it viscerally as a red-neck macho. Though he'd never been completely convinced, it was true, by the primary attitude of the transvestite who changes his physical appearance in order to enhance his pick-up rate. Pick up who? Heterosexual real men, with hairy chests and stinking armpits, would never knowingly tangle with a transvestite: they'd bed a female, but not that limited vision of woman, whose most desirable entry-point had been blocked off for good by the capricious lottery of nature. A passive homosexual, for his part, preferred one of those real men, because that was why they were homosexual and passive, for heaven's sake. And an active homosexual, hidden behind his appearance of a real man – crudely put: a bugger, cultured archaic version:
bougre
— didn't require that often obscene exaggeration to feel his sodomizing instincts aroused and penetrate
per angostam viam
.

The book attempted a philosophical explanation of that contradiction: the problem, as the Count thought he saw it, wasn't being, but appearance; wasn't the act, but the performance; it wasn't even an end, but the means as its own end: the mask for the pleasure of the mask itself, concealment as supreme truth. That's why he thought it logical to identify human cross-dressing and animal camouflage, not for the purposes of hunting or self-defence, but to fulfil one of the dreams eternally pursued by man: disappearance. Because it wasn't likely, all in all, that the only meaning of such morphological transformation was capture of male prey, as with certain insects which vary their looks in order to simulate the aspect of attractive flowers loved by others who then fall bewildered into the lethal trap; nor was the disguise about deception, as with certain insects whose aggressive physique scares off possible
assailants. It was, on the contrary, the will to be masked and mistaken, to negate the negation and join the common tribe of women, which perhaps guided a transformism that could so often prove to be grotesque.

But if erasure were the ultimate goal of cross-dressing, the practical results of the exercise had its equivalents in the animal world which one could compare – through a series of case-studies – with the sad destinies of those transvestites who were always found out despite all their efforts: the inevitable Adam's apple, hands that had grown by natural design, a narrow pelvis, alien to any sign of maternity . . . The book quoted a study, carried out over forty-seven years, which demonstrated how birds' stomachs contained as many camouflaged as non-camouflaged victims, according to the statistics recorded in the region. Was disguise then futile, vulnerable and without guarantees of safety? And Muscles concluded, quoting someone who must have known more than he did, that transvestites confirm only that “a law of pure disguise exists in the living world, a practice which consists in passing oneself off as somebody else, and that's clearly documented, beyond debate, and cannot be reduced to a biological necessity derived from rivalry between the species or natural selection”. So then, what the hell was the big deal? All that simply to conclude that it was a simple game of appearances. No, that clearly could not be the case. But could it be entirely chance for a Catholic transvestite who moreover wasn't a transvestite to transform himself on the day the liturgical calendar set as the date of the Transfiguration? It couldn't be so, it must be a coincidence, it's too
recherché
, thought the Count as he shut the book and looked through the window from which he could see the old English castle,
all white stone and red tiles brought from Chicago, which had risen up opposite the quarries, on the neighbourhood's most prominent hill.

He'd suddenly remembered poor Luisito the Indian, the only self-confessed little queer of his generation, there in his neighbourhood. He remembered how Luisito was treated as a kind of plague-carrier by the boys playing baseball, marbles and leapfrog among whom the Count grew up. Nobody liked him, nobody accepted him, and, more than once, several of them threw stones at Luisito until his mother, Domitila the mulatta, came out, broom in hand, to rescue him, cursing the mothers, the fathers and the whole lineage of his aggressors. Theirs were cruel attitudes and successive nicknames – Luisita, the first and longestlasting; Luisito the Duck; Rubber Bum (because of his abundant buttocks, already predestined for certain uses and abuses); and Cinnamon Flower, because of his Indian skin-colour – constant insults and a historical marginalization culturally decreed for all time: it's his fault if he's such a pansy, they said, as did the other mothers, who taught their children not to walk with that different, inverted, perverted boy, infected with the most abominable illness one could imagine. Nevertheless, the Count discovered that some of the stone-throwers who cursed him in public on certain propitious nights climbed the second rung of their sexual initiation via Luisito's promiscuous arse; after experimenting with she-goats and sows, they tried Luisito's dark hole, in the darkest tunnels of the quarry. And as none of them would ever admit to ancillary kisses and caresses to raise the temperature (you know, that's really poofish, they'd argue when talking about these incidents), for all who made it, the relationship with Luisito was forwarded as proof of virility
reached at penis point . . . Luisito was; they weren't: as if homosexuality were only defined by the acceptance of the flesh of others in female fashion. Later, when they started to have girlfriends and stopped playing baseball and leapfrogging on the street corners in the neighbourhood, they forgot Luisito and Luisito forgot them: then the boy began to cruise La Rampa and El Prado, in the company of other youthful inverts like himself, in flocks which sidled slowly and tetchily, like La Florida Park ducks, in search of welcoming lakes in which to splash, until in 1980, thanks to his undeniable homosexual condition, and hence as an anti-social, expendable dreg, he was allowed peacefully to board a launch in the port of Mariel and leave for the United States. The last news the Count had received of Luisito the Indian were two photographs which circulated in the neighbourhood, describing a before and an after, like Charles Atlas: in one he was sitting on a shiny sofa – both Luisito and the pearl pink sofa were most pansyish, Luisito with his high-lighted eyebrows and bouffant hair; in the other, on the same sofa, sat a rather fat, uglyish mulatta, who was none other than Louise Indira, a woman surgically transformed, the only recognized queer of his generation, there in the neighbourhood. And the Count wondered if Luisito the Indian had ever had any philosophical or psychonatural principles first to sustain his homosexuality, and second to carry through his irreversible transfiguration. Or could it simply be that from childhood he'd felt an irrepressible desire to dress up in lace and play with dolls, which would later lead to an obsession for slotting things in his backside?