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 recherche, 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?
The Count moved away from the window and his memories as he felt the jungle call of his entrails galvanized by so much inactivity. The evening was drawing to a close and apart from two dark, evillooking fish, which had absconded to the back of his fridge, he had no other edible products on the home front. He looked at his watch: seven forty-five, and dialled a telephone number.
“It’s me, Jose.”
“Of course it’s you, Condesito.”
“I’m really hungry.”
“Why you’re ringing me so late? You never change… But you’re in luck, because I got into a state looking for stuff here and there, and started late. Let’s see what I can rustle up.”
“Anything will do.”
“Shut up, I’m thinking. I’ve got red beans on the stove and I was choosing the rice… Come round then, I’ve had an idea.”
“It’s paisa mix,” Josefina announced, and her eyes shone with pride and satisfaction the way Archimedes must have looked just before he got out of his bath.
Skinny Carlos and the Count, like two rather dim-witted pupils, were listening to the woman’s explanation. Feigning surprise was part of the ritual: the impossible would become possible, dreams reality, and then their Cuban longing for food would suddenly transgress any frontier of reality measured by quotas, ration-books and irremediable shortages, thanks to a magical trick only Josefina was capable of performing.
“My uncle Marcelo, who you know was once a sailor, fell in love in Cartagena de las Indias and lived in Colombia for several years. But the woman was paisa, as they call people from Medellin, and she taught him to prepare paisa mix, as Marcelo calls, or called it, may he rest in peace, the poor guy, for it’s a typically paisa platter. Then, as I had some red beans on the boil when you called, I started thinking and had this idea: of course, paisa mix, and, right there, when the beans started to soften, I threw in half a pound of minced meat, so the meat cooked in the juice, you follow me? Then I cooked crackling from really big pigs, with some of their meat, ripe plantains, eggs for you two, for at this time of night eggs don’t suit me because of my gall-bladder, a beef steak, with plenty of garlic and onion, and I cooked the rice with extra lard so it separates out right. You can eat the beans separately or put them on the top of the rice. How do you prefer them?”
“Both ways,” they chorused, and the Count sat behind Carlos’s wheelchair. They followed in the footsteps of Carlos’s mother to the dining-room, with the solemnity one adopts when visiting the holiest of holy places. Jose, Conde told the woman while downing spoonfuls of beans and meat, you’ve saved my life.
“Jose,” said Carlos, stretching out a hand to caress his mother’s, “you beat your record. This is out of this world… I’m going to go paisa, I swear I am.”
