revelation: “The man who killed him is white, blood group AB, and between forty and sixty. Possibly righthanded. In other words, we’ve already a million and a half suspects…”
The Count declined to laugh at the joke and Sergeant Manuel Palacios finished his story: the murder had been by strangling, and the murderer had pulled the sash tight while facing the transvestite, and yet there was only the smallest speck of someone else’s skin on Alexis’s nails. The man’s footprints indicated he weighed some one hundred and eighty to two hundred pounds, that his shoe size was number nine, that he walked normally and probably wore blue jeans, for they’d found a multi-coloured thread that had snagged on a shrub. The possible fellatio was ruled out, for there was no trace of semen in the dead man’s mouth. There was not a single fingerprint and the silk sash provided no useful information. Nothing of special interest was found at the location of the crime: the usual rubbish you come across in such places: a bottle, a used condom, a rusty key, cigar butts with and without their labels – Rey del Mundo, Montecristo, Coronas – and a plastic comb missing six teeth, not to mention a wisdom tooth…
“Then it’s obvious there was no struggle,” the Count commented as Manolo wound up his inventory. “And as for the coins…”
“It’s a real bastard, isn’t it? But I reckon the strangest thing is that he didn’t throw him in the river. You can imagine if he’d appeared in the sea we wouldn’t have known where he was from, or the fish might have eaten him and, if we’d found him, we wouldn’t have identified him. Should we go to Headquarters?”
“No, no,” said the Count, who paused to glance selfpityingly towards the house of Tamara, the most constant of his lost loves, a woman whose skin always smelled of strong eau-de-cologne, whom he’d dreamed about for the last two thousand years of his life. “Better carry on to Vedado, a friend just came to mind and I want to talk to him.”
“But what the hell you doing here, you motherfucker?” And almost reluctantly he scoured the other tables, scenting possible reactions to the Count’s arrival. “Look, if this lot realize you’re a policeman and you start whispering to me, I’ll get a bucket of shit chucked over me…”
“You’re the whisperer,” said the Count at the top of his voice, as he grabbed the glass of rum from the table and despatched it in one gulp.
Baby Face Miki didn’t dare stop him or take another look around; the Count smiled. He’d known him for almost twenty years and he’d not changed: a load of bollocks. When they were at school, Miki’d become a famous flirt and used to say he’d set the definitive record for girlfriends in one year – naturally, kissing always included – thanks to his immaculate features and clean complexion, on which the years had wrought a vicious toll: with more wrinkles than to be expected at thirty-eight, traces of late pimples and poorly distributed body fat, Miki – never again to be called Baby Face – tried to hide behind a luxuriant beard that contrasted with the scant hair over his forehead, equally mortal remains of what had once been arrogant blond locks. The passage from adolescence to adulthood had been, for Miki de Jeva, a devastating mutation. Nevertheless, despite everything and against all odds, Miki had turned out to be the only accepted writer from among his school friends keen on writing: a wretched novel and two books of particularly opportune stories had granted him that undeserved standing. He knew – as did the Count – that his literary fruits were sentenced irrevocably to deepest oblivion, after their premeditated moment, much vaunted by certain critics and publishers for his writing about peasants and the need for cooperatives when every newspaper spoke of peasants and the need for cooperatives, and about anti-patriotic scum and emigrated filth, when such epithets echoed down the country’s streets in the summer of 1980… Nevertheless, his Writers’ Union card said just that, writer, and every afternoon Miki took refuge in the Union bar to drink a few rums which, thought the Count, didn’t strictly belong to him.
“Would you like us to speak elsewhere?” the lieutenant suggested, pained by the despair of this would-be author.
“No, don’t worry, nobody knows you here and the rum’s running out. Do you want a double?”
The Count looked at the bar, where they were serving white Bocoy rum. Irritated, he acted as if he weren’t sure, perhaps wanting to bolster his confidence.
“Yes, I think that’s just what I need.”
“Give me four pesos,” Miki said, holding out a hand.
The Count smiled: of course, you shit-head, he thought, and gave him a ten-peso note.
“A triple for me and a double for you.”
While he waited for Miki, the Count lit a cigarette and tried to listen to the conversation of his nearest neighbours. There were three of them: a young but very greying mulatto, who talked non-stop, a fat bearded half- caste with a hump like a jerry-built camel; and a tall guy, with a bugger’s face which would have astounded Lombroso himself. Oh image of literature! They were enthusiastically slandering another writer whose recent novel had apparently enjoyed a lot of success and who wrote very popular articles in the newspapers, and were calling him a fucking populist. Yes, they said, secreting bile on the bar floor, just imagine, he writes crime novels, interviews crooners and mooners, and writes stories about pimps and the history of rum: I tell you, he’s a fucking populist, and that’s why he wins so many prizes, and they changed topic in order to talk about themselves, writers really preoccupied by aesthetic values and reflections on social contradictions, when Miki returned with two glasses of rum.
“I didn’t tell you… we got the last drops from the bottle. It puts me really on edge. Every day it happens earlier.”
“You like coming here, don’t you, Miki?”
The writer tried his rum, as he extracted a cigarette from the Count’s packet.
“Yes, why not. There’s rum, you can talk a pile of shit and now and then lay some woman who’s gone overboard for poetry. Right now I’m expecting one who’s got more cash than the National Bank. I don’t know where the hell she gets it. So if my poetess turns up, you vanish, right?”
The Count nodded, thinking he’d ask him who his neighbours were and whom they were dissecting now, but was afraid they’d hear him. He’d like to have read the history of rum, he thought, as he downed a gulp of incestuous, ahistorical alcohol, the molecules of which carried too much undistilled water.
“Miki, what do you know about a painter called Salvador K.?”
Miki smiled and took another sip of rum.
“He’s a piece of shit.”
“Fuck, everyone here is shit, opportunist, populist or queer, right?”
“Right first time. What did you expect? Parnassus? That when you came in they’d whisper in your ear, “Sing, my muse, the glory of Pelida Achilles,” or something as stupid? No, no chance, and for your information: that cock is all four things at once. The guy paints garish paintings which sell very well, but it’s the purest shit… You know, I think he lives around here, between N and Seventeenth, his wife’s house. And what’s there between you and this fellow?”
“Nothing, somebody mentioned him the other day. And you say he’s married?”
“No, I said he lives in his wife’s house.”
“I get you. Hey, Miki, as you know the downside on everybody’s life, what can you tell me about Alberto Marques?”
If you were to stand out in the entrance to the Union and shout, “Who is Alberto Marques?” two hundred guys would rush up, kneel on the ground, bow down and chant: He’s God, he’s God, and if you leave them for a while, they’ll organize a homage to him and chorus his praises, you bet your bottom dollar… But if you’d shouted that fifteen years ago, the same two hundred you see now would have rushed up and shouted, fists aloft, veins bursting in the neck like the fat guy’s: he’s the Devil, the class enemy, the apostate, the apostate of the prostate, not a bad metaphor, do you think?… Because that’s how it is, Count: before it was better not to mention him, and now he’s a living monument to ethical and aesthetic resistance, it’s a load of bullshit… Every minute someone’s recounting how he went to his place and talked to him, and you should hear them: you’d think they’d been to Mecca… The motherfuckers. Just imagine, now they say he’s the father of creole postmodernism, that with Grotowski and Artaud he’s one of the three geniuses of twentieth-century theatre, that Virgilio Pinera, Roberto Blanco and Vicente Revuelta owe everything they are to him, and even his queerness is a virtue because it allows him to voice another sensibility. That’s right. Do you understand what’s going on? Well, I do: when betrayal was the name of the game, they betrayed him, and now it’s not dangerous, and it’s even in good taste to weep over those
