“All right, Conde. It’s really hot, isn’t it?”
The fishermen congregated on the Malecon at that early hour with little hope that fate would place a fine specimen on their hooks and bring justifiable cheer to the family table. When the Count saw those silhouettes over the calm sea, he was filled with envy. He knew life was healthier there, with a piece of string in the water and one’s mind thinking only about a possible catch and the dinner of one’s dreams, and not about a series of stories of deaths, thefts, frauds, rapes, lesser or greater forms of assault – that could also help save him from boredom – or, the last straw, about the enquiries of the Internal Investigations team bent on throwing light on business the Count hadn’t even imagined and that had already cost two of his colleagues their positions at work. Will they find something on me? he wondered, and tried to recall any heinous act in his career. Who knows
… And what about Maruchi, what the hell had happened to her?
“What shit, right.” And he added, “Turn down there, I want to revisit the Havana Woods.”
Without patrol cars, ambulances pretending to be in a rush, the obscene line of bystanders, the photographers, forensics and police summoned by death, that forest of fantasies, in the middle of the city, by the dirty river, radiated a harmony which the Count’s every pore tried to inhale, in an urgent, greedy act of appropriation. He felt that violence and that place now seemed so alien that even his own presence in the area was an incongruous irritant, and, as usual, he meditated on death’s insalubrious ability to change everything. The grass so green, the indefatigable sound of the river, the generous shade from the trees, had been but a few hours earlier the scenario framing a macabre murder, the pre- and post-histories of which the policeman was now trying to grasp, with his unprofessionally manic tendency to feel he too was an accomplice. That was why he now stood there, in that anonymous space – nobody would ever erect a pretentious funeral monument to the first Cuban transvestite killed in sexual combat – where Alexis Arayan’s life had ended and Mario Conde’s eschatological labours had begun. Death was thus transformed into a social event, ceased to be a drastic biological fact which no exact, medical, natural or supernatural science could revoke: its only importance now lay in the crime and possible punishment for the transgressor of a law, already established by the Bible and Talmud, and the Count knew his mission in the world would conclude with the Pyrrhic victory of a conviction that was predictable and necessary, but could not restore what was gone for ever.
“What you thinking about?” Manuel Palacios pulled up a blade of grass and put it in his mouth.
“About woods and wild animals,” the lieutenant replied as he headed towards the river. “That transvestite didn’t get dressed to go on parade or hunt, Manolo. He was seeking something more difficult to find. Peace of mind, perhaps. Or revenge, how do I know… What was he seeking here, looking the complete transvestite, if he wasn’t one, and right on the evening of the day of the Transfiguration? It gets stranger by the minute…”
“I don’t see why you have to over-complicate things all the time. Why do you always want to imagine what nobody else can?… Something strange is happening to you, Conde. I’ll tell you one thing: I sometimes think you’re not interested in being a policeman any more.”
“Manolo, you are a genius.”
The policemen followed the path down to the bed of a river, a slow, decidedly sickly serpent. The Count got close to the edge and lamented the advanced stage of agony he contemplated there: patches of oil, acidic foam, dead animals, countless bits of detritus flowing in the slow waters of the Almendares, the city’s only real river. And then he had a premonition: “Of course, hell, didn’t Alexis own a Bible?”
“Oh, you’re back already, Mr Police Lieutenant Mario Conde. Tell me right away, because I bet you know who did it. I sometimes see these series where the police get their man straight away, you know? The police are so good at…”
The Count ignored the barbed wit and went into a living room as dark and cool as on the previous day, and sat back in his armchair while Alberto Marques sat in his. He felt they both moved with the premeditation of actors conscious of their movements on stage.
“Would you like a cup of tea? I can give it to you ice cold, ice cubes included…”
“Yes, I think I could do with that,” the Count nodded, and the Marquess disappeared down a corridor at the back of the peculiar stage set arranged in that dark room. Now, as he watched him walk, the policeman noticed that the dramatist had the unlikely springy step of a young lad tiptoeing at an impressive rate, like a rabbit or crane in a hurry. He doesn’t seem that old, thought the Count, but his mind wandered off to the interview awaiting Sergeant Palacios that afternoon. What the hell were they after? A slight but disconcerting feeling of fear lodged in his stomach. Experience screamed at him that an incisive investigation would light on annoying evidence, delicate truths, improbable but definitive clues, and that was why he’d begun to wonder what the hell they were after, while he’d opted to return to the Marquess’s house, driven by a need to find out more: he must log Alexis’s belongings, search for pointers. Meanwhile, Manolo had to carry on research at the Centre for Cultural Heritage on the transvestite and his pathetic friend Salvador K., and look for the Bible the painter had mentioned. But what the hell are they after? he wondered again as the Marquess tiptoed back like a young crane, a cup in each hand. He gave one to the Count and returned to his armchair.
“Should I open the window?”
“If it’s no bother…”
The dramatist put his cup on the floor and opened the window behind him. All the very high windows in the room had grills, and the Count was curious to discover how the rented lovers Miki had mentioned went about taking the house by assault. As the Marquess sat back in his chair, the Count understood how it had all been prepared afresh: the sun, perfectly arranged, only allowed him sight of the man’s silhouette. He was expecting me, he thought.
“Well, don’t prolong the torture… Are you on to something?” And he blinked insistently.
“Very little, in fact… But this case has its curious features. Alexis was strangled but didn’t put up a fight.”
“For God’s sake,” the old dramatist exclaimed softly, touching his neck as if to beat off a strangler’s approaching hands.
“And after he was dead, the assassin stuck two coins up his anus.”
“Ay, ay, ay,” repeated the dramatist, closing his legs as if to avoid possible monetary penetration.
“Have you ever heard of anything like it?”
“No, never… It’s like something out of a mafia film.”
“Yes, you could say that… The other thing I did was to read a bit of the book you lent me and I learned several things about transvestites.”
“Of interest, I hope?”
“Yes, but a touch too conceptual. Is it really true transvestites go in for all this philosophy of mimetics and erasure?”
In spite of the intense background glare, the Count thought he saw the Marquess smile.
No other city in the world – not even Havana – can offer the miraculous harmonies of Paris. In Paris evening and night fuse in a tentative symphony, dawn seems a necessary consequence, shy yet inevitable, and if the spirit of man can penetrate by osmosis the sensibility in the breeze, stones, smells and colours of Paris, life in the city can be a gift from the gods: and that’s how I felt, that spring.
Washed and perfumed, we got into the taxi and my hands sweated profusely on the drive, as my eyes twice saw the illuminated shape of the Eiffel Tower, the edifice of the Opera, the cheerfully lit Cafe de la Paix, until we turned down narrow, cobble-stoned side streets – cobbles that had become famous the previous year, when love, intelligence and ideology spawned revolutionary copulations behind barricades made from the very same cobbles – the sinuous streets of the Quartier Latin, and we stopped in front of a neon-lit joint advertising LES FEMMES, a gateway to a dive we anxiously desired. Muscles paid and said something to the taxi-driver – a Moroccan, who handed him a small envelope – while the Other Boy and I contemplated the shabbiness of the place; then the padded door creaked noisily open to give us our first vision of the cabaret: a blue glow.
Muscles came over to us and for the first time that spring on my last visit to Paris I saw his round peasant face, still slightly uncouth, beam with happiness. A few days earlier, when I’d arrived in Paris, he’d told me about the end of his relationship with Julien, the young anthropologist he’d lived with over the last two years on a permanent honeymoon – as Muscles reported it, a man at other times so exquisite in his poetic images – and who’d
