Havana Red (12 page)

Then, when I went to tell Muscles about my illumination, I found he and the Other Boy had disappeared with one of those perverted insects. A delightful touch came the day after when they accused me of vanishing on the arm of a Sara Montiel. Anyway, I told Muscles what I'd felt there, and the ungrateful creature didn't give me any credit for it in his book on transvestites, and I still think I could put between quotation marks whole paragraphs I dictated on the occasion . . . And certainly, as I didn't have enough money, I had to walk home, but I'd never have gone with a Sarita Montiel, because the fact is, I never could stand
la Saritísima
.

 

“This is by Salvador K., isn't it?”

“Yes, that's his signature, SK. Such bad taste . . . Looks like a kind of medicine, don't you think?”

“Or beer.”

The Marquess had taken him into Alexis Arayán's bedroom, which turned out to be the old servants' quarters. It had its own small, separate bathroom, and you could reach the room without entering the main house. Everything appeared meticulously ordered, as if its owner had arranged it with particular care before departing two days ago: shelves tidy, pictures dusted, clothing clean and hanging up in the small wardrobe, two pairs of underpants dry on the bathroom window, ashtrays without cigarette ends. The Count concentrated on the books, letting an envious finger run
across various sizes and textures of spine where several appealing titles caught his eye.

“Did Alexis smoke?”

“No, he loathed tobacco. Particularly cigars.”

“What do you make of this drawing by Salvador K.?”

The drawing, framed and behind glass, represented a kind of woman's head beneath a parasol. The angles were sharp, the colours aggressive.

“He's employing an ancient technique of wetting paper and making human figures like that. It's like an etching on paper, or kind of collage, although he boasted that he'd discovered the warm water technique. And that drawing is a piece of shit, to put it Cubanly, as Muscles would say. The expressionists and cubists did this kind of portrait sixty years ago, when it really meant something, but now . . .”

“And are you sure they had a relationship?”

Now the Count could see the Marquess was smiling.

“The walls of this room are paper-thin. If you like, go out, and I'll whimper, and you tell me . . .”

“That won't be necessary . . .” The Count tried to frighten off the image of what the Marquess was suggesting. “Alexis kept this all very clean . . .”

“He was scrupulous, as I was saying. And even worse, he tried to convert me, but always failed. Besides, María Antonia used to come here once a week, a woman who works as a maid in his parents' house, and she helped him wash and clean, and sometimes prepared us meals for several days at a time. Do you know what? She'd steal tasty morsels from Alexis's house and bring them here: some Spanish chorizo, smoked salmon, a couple of lobster claws, the things one can only imagine or find in the dollar-stores, you get me?”

“What else can you tell me about María Antonia? She's a woman with a certain . . .”

The Marquess's fingers tried in vain to comb the remnants of his hair.

“You must forgive me, but yesterday I lied . . . It was María Antonia who called to tell me about Alexis. Please forgive me? She also warned me you'd be paying a visit.”

The Count preferred to skip over any kind of reproach.

“What did Alexis tell you about María Antonia and his family?”

The Marquess sat on the edge of the perfectly made bed and smoothed the folds of his Chinese dressing gown over his legs.

“Ever since his grandmother died, he'd been thinking of leaving. Alexis really loved her a lot, because she and María Antonia brought him up . . . And what I'm about to tell you may seem incredible, but it's a hundred per cent true: you know Alexis was a specialist in Italian Pre-Renaissance art? Well, María Antonia knows as much as he did. That's right. Alexis studied with her, lent her his books, and taught her what he was learning. If you are interested, talk to her some time about Italian Madonnas and especially Giotto, and expect a weighty dissertation . . . The person Alexis really couldn't stand was his father, for a thousand reasons, but I think in particular because once, when he was some seven years old, he almost drowned on the beach, and someone else rescued him from the sea, because his father was drunk. And Alexis never forgave him and even said his father had left him to drown . . . I don't know which damn Greek gave a name to that complex . . . Besides, his father hated him because he was, well, queer. Whenever he could, he made it clear he hated him . . . Just imagine, it was the worst disgrace imaginable for such a respectable man
. . . But God must have shamed him as a punishment. You know what I mean: men who have sons who are going to turn out like them, strong, fond of skirt, tyrannical, and suddenly he turns out homosexual. But Alexis suffered a lot, suffered every way possible, and if they hadn't killed him, I'd have said he'd committed suicide.”

“Did Alexis talk to you about suicide?”

The Marquess stood up and pointed at one of the bookshelves.

“Look for yourself: Mishima, Zweig, Hemingway, my poor friend Calvert Casey, Pavese . . . He was fascinated by suicides and those who committed suicide, a morbid fascination, to be sure. He kept saying everything in his life was a mistake: his sex, his intellect, his family, the times he lived in, and he would say that if one was conscious of such mistakes, suicide might be the solution: that way perhaps he would have a second opportunity. I think this mysticism was one of the things that turned him into a Catholic.”

“Did he go to church?”

“Yes, a lot.”

“What about yourself?” asked the Count, led on by his spirit of curiosity.

“Me?” smiled the Marquess, blinking. “Can you imagine me praying on a hassock? . . . No, you must be kidding. I'm too perverse to get on with those gentlemen . . . Though I prefer them to you lot . . .”

The Count observed the Marquess's duly perverse smile, and decided to cultivate it, because in some way the invitation was there. He checked his parachute and launched himself into the Sea of Sarcasm.

“Do you hate the police?”

The Marquess's laugh was genuine and unexpected. His parchment body suddenly seemed a smooth kite
ready to fly out of the nearest window, launched by the guffaws now convulsing it.

“No, in no way. You guys aren't the worst. Look, police do police work, they interrogate and imprison people, and even do it well, if the truth be told. It's a cruel, repressive vocation, for which certain aptitudes are necessary, do forgive me. Like, for example, being ready to beat someone else into submission, or destroy their personality through fear and threats . . . But they are socially and sadly necessary.”

“So who then?”

“The real bastards are the others: the self-appointed police, volunteer commissars, improvised persecutors, unpaid informers, amateur judges, all those who think they own the life, destiny and even the moral, cultural and historical purity of a country . . . They were the people who tried to finish off people like me, or poor Virgilio, and they succeeded, you know. Remember how in the last ten years of his life Virgilio never saw a single book of his published, nor a play performed, nor a study on his work published in any of those six magical provinces which suddenly became fourteen with a special municipality. And I was transformed into a ghost guilty because of my talent, my work, my tastes and my words. I was one huge malign tumour that had to be extirpated for the social, economic and political good of this beautiful, pre-eminent island. You see what I mean? And as it was so easy to parameterize me: whenever they measured me, whatever the angle, the result always came out the same: he's no use, no use, no use . . .”

The Count recalled yet again the meeting in his headteacher's office at school, when they were informed that
La Viboreña
was an inappropriate, inopportune and unacceptable magazine and they had to recant ideologically and literary-wise.

“How did you find all that out?” he decided to ask, with a degree of historicist sadism, opening himself up to a flurry of darts poisoned with ironic resentment.

“I've worked at it and for a few years even enjoyed telling the story. And now it barely hurts, you know? But before . . . And why are you so interested in all this?”

“Curiosity pure and simple,” suggested the Count, unable to admit his real reasons. “I'd like to hear your version, right?”

“Well, I'll tell you. They'd already suspended the works we were performing that had been advertised while I was rehearsing
Electra Garrigó
, when they called us to a meeting in the theatre one day. Everybody went, except me. I wasn't prepared to go and listen to what I knew I'd have to listen to. But afterwards they told me how they got the people together in the entrance hall and called them in, one at a time, like at the dentist's. You know what it's like waiting for three or four hours in a dentist's waiting room, hearing the drill and the cries of the people going in? Inside they'd put a table on the stage, where there was still part of the set for
Yerma
, with its mournful atmosphere, draped in black . . . There were four of them, a kind of inquisitional tribunal, and they'd put one of those enormous tape recorders on the table and told people how they'd sinned and asked them if they were ready to change their attitudes in the future, if they'd agree to engage in a process of rehabilitation, to work in places where they'd be sent. And almost everyone admitted to sinning, even added sins their accusers hadn't mentioned, and bowed to the need for that purifying purge to cleanse their past and spirit of pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-critical tendencies . . . And I understood them, I really did, because many
thought it was right such accusations were made and even felt guilty for not doing the things that they were told they ought to have done, and became the most vicious critics . . . of themselves. They called a kind of mass meeting afterwards: the protagonists were still behind the table on the stage with the people in the stalls. All the lights were on . . . You ever been to a theatre with the lights on? Have you seen how it loses all its magic and the whole world of artifice seems fake and meaningless? Then they talked about me, as the main person responsible for the theatre's aesthetic policy. The first accusation made was that I was a homosexual who flaunted his condition, and they added that in their view homosexuality had a clearly anti-social, pathological character and that the accords negotiated to reject such manifestations of milksop softness or its propagation in a society like ours should be even more draconian. They were in a position to prevent ‘artistic quality' (people insisted the guy talking opened and closed the quotation marks, as he smiled) being used as an excuse to circulate certain ideas and fashions which were corrupting our selfless youth. (It has to be said that the guy doing all the talking was a mediocrity who'd tried to make it as an actor but was never more than a poseur, and his reputation was down to the fact his was tiny and he was nicknamed Titch.) Nor would well-known homosexuals like me be allowed to influence the training of our youth, and for that reason they would assess (he said ‘carefully', this time the quotation marks are mine) the involvement of homosexuals in cultural bodies, and relocate all those banned from having contact with the young, and they wouldn't be allowed to leave the country in delegations representing Cuban art, because we were
not and never could be true representatives of Cuban art.”

The Marquess sighed, as if releasing a great wave of exhaustion, and Mario Conde felt he was awaking from a long dream: through the dramatist's words he'd entered a theatre of cruelty and heard the words of the protagonists wrapped in dense, real tragedy where destinies and lives were decided with a chilling sang-froid.

“I never imagined it being like that. I thought — ”

“Don't think anything yet,” the Marquess snapped, his verbal hostility taking the policeman by surprise. “You wanted to hear the story? Well, let me go on, for the best is yet to come . . . Yes, because the aesthetic judgement came next: they said my work and productions attempted to transform elitism, extravagance, homosexuality and other social aberrations into a single aesthetic subject, for I had deviated from the path of purest aspirations through that philosophy of cruelty, the absurd and total theatre, and they wouldn't allow me my ‘haughty arrogance' (his quotation marks again, because it was a very useful textual quote) in apportioning myself the role of exclusive critic of Cuban history and society, at the same time as I abandoned the stage of real struggles and used the peoples of Latin America as themes for creations that turned them into the ones preferred by bourgeois theatres and imperialist publishing houses . . . I really don't know what it all meant, but that's what he said word for word, and he also said my person, my example and work were, as everybody acknowledged, incompatible with the new reality . . . And finally they took a vote. They asked everyone to raise their hands if they agreed that artists should join the struggle by criticizing harshly the horrors of the past and thus contribute
with their work to the eradication of the traces of the old society still surviving into the period of the construction of socialism. The vote was unanimous. There was a vote against manifestations of elitism, namby-pambyism, hyper-criticism, escapism and petty-bourgeois remnants in art, which was also carried unanimously. They voted on everything you could possibly vote on, almost always with complete unanimity, until it came to the vote on whether I should stay in the theatre group, the same group I had founded, named and devoted my whole life to, and of the twenty-six present, twenty-four raised their hands, called for my expulsion, and two, only two, couldn't stomach any more and left the theatre. Then they voted on whether those two should stay in, and they were expelled by twenty-four in favour with none against . . . Followed by the final speech read out by the man chairing the session, who hadn't said a word till then. As you can imagine, he barely said anything new: he repeated that it was a vital struggle against the past, against imperialism and the lackeys of the bourgeoisie, for a better future in a society where it was no longer dog eat dog. To sum up: a bad finale to the show and a historical performance that afternoon in 1971, which was even greeted by applause and cries of joy . . . And they let the curtain fall on my neck . . .”