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…”
That last sentence from the Marquess made the policeman feel an urgent need for a dose of nicotine. He touched his packet of cigarettes and observed yet again how clean the place was, and decided to fight off the anxiety of abstinence: he wanted to visit the depths of that open wound Alberto Marques had decided to expose to him. Could it all have happened in the same country where they both lived?
“How did you find out?”
The Marquess smiled and sighed again, exhausted.
“First, from the two who overcame their own fears and stood out against the penultimate vote. Then, within a few months, one after another, the twenty-four who’d stayed till the end… Even ten years after, I heard it all again from one of the people on stage who asked me to forgive him for what he’d done. But I didn’t, because he’d been so vile, I couldn’t… Of course, I’ve just learned that the one who made the closing speech is now the guy most in favour of perestroika and a proponent of the social necessity of glasnost. What do you make of that change of mask?”
The Count looked him in the eye and again felt he was in the theatre, among the accused, full of fear and guilt, and wondered if he’d have voted against the Marquess. And he told himself that now it was very easy to think he wouldn’t have and stand on his dignity. But on that day of all days?
“If you believed in God, you could forgive, couldn’t you?”
“That’s probably why I don’t want to believe, Mr Policeman.”
The Count sensed that he couldn’t resist his need to light up a second more. It annoyed him to do so in a place so clean and tidy, and the last occupant would certainly have been upset, but he couldn’t resist and decided to use his own hand as an ashtray.
“But even you say things changed later, that they invited you to go and work back in the theatre, didn’t you?”
The Marquess tidied the three awkward wisps on his skull. He wasn’t smiling now.
“Yes, it’s true, but the first thing to happen was that several people who’d been expelled from groups decided to mount a legal challenge against what they’d suffered and, so strange and just is justice in my country, they won their case in the High Court Chamber for Constitutional Guarantees and were restored to their groups, paid a wage, but it was a long time before they worked again, because obviously a director must be able to choose freely whom he wants to work with, you must agree? I didn’t pursue that line, I didn’t want a trial, then, later or now. Because it wasn’t a legal problem: it was a judgement of history, and I didn’t accept the pay-off either. I preferred to be a librarian than enjoy a stipend that could buy my right to take decisions. So, when asked to go back, I refused, because they couldn’t force me. Something which couldn’t be mended had been broken. If I went back, it would be for reasons of vanity or revenge, rather than from the need to make statements, which always muddies the waters of art. Ten years are a lot of years and I got used to the silence, almost learned to enjoy it, with people whispering about me, and pointing at me from afar. Besides, nobody could guarantee that what happened in ’71 might not happen again, you know?… I wouldn’t have had the strength to suffer a second sentence after returning to the stage and the limelight.”
Mario Conde thought he’d listened to an otiose declaration. He’d have preferred to preserve the image of pride and courage Miki had created or the one of provocative, amoral petulance that emerged from the bulky reports he’d been given two days earlier on a man who had to be condemned for being a rebel. He even preferred the sense of hostile, sarcastic irony he’d taken from his first meeting with the Alberto Marques now confessing to his real motive: fear.
“And wouldn’t it be better to forget all this?”
The old dramatist smiled and looked up at the ceiling, as if he expected something to fall on him from heaven.
“You know, it’s very easy to say that, because memory loss is one of this country’s psychological qualities. It’s a self-defence mechanism employed by many people… Everybody forgets everything and they always say you can start afresh, this very minute: the past has been exorcized. If memory doesn’t exist, there’s no blame, and if there’s no blame, no need to forgive, you see the logic? And I understand, of course I understand, because this island’s historical mission is always to be starting afresh, to make a new beginning every thirty or forty years, and oblivion is usually the ointment for all the wounds which are still open… And it isn’t that I must forgive or want to blame anyone: no, the fact is I don’t want to forget. I don’t want to. Time passes, people pass on, histories change, and I think too many things, both good and bad, have been forgotten. But my things are mine and no way do I want to forget them. You understand?”
“Yes, I understand,” the Count replied and went into the yard to ditch the cigarette butt and the ash accumulated on his hand. He also wanted to quit that shadowy detour in the conversation and return to his hunch. “Do you know where Alexis put his Bible?”
The Marquess looked at him with a bored shrug, as if the policeman’s persistence seemed sick, if not lunatic.
“No. Did you take a good look at his bookshelves?”
“It’s not there, that’s why I asked.”
“Well, search me if you like,” he suggested, and raised his arms and brought the Count to the edge of the abyss: his dressing gown almost reached knee level while the buttons were struggling to come undone…
“No, no need for that. I think it’s time for me to go. I’ve still got work to do,” the Count responded hurriedly, and, seeing the Marquess still in the position of a prisoner waiting to be frisked, he couldn’t restrain his laughter. “But I’d like to talk to you again.”
“Whenever, my prince,” the Marquess replied, and only then did he lower his arms.
“One last question, and forgive me if I’m being indiscreet… What were your feelings towards Alexis Arayan?”
The Marquess looked towards the empty room.
“Pity. Yes. He was too fragile to live in this cruel world. I also loved him.”
“And why do you think he dressed in Electra Garrigo’s costume?”
The Marquess seemed to ponder a moment, and the Count hoped to hear something that might clear up that whole business at a single stroke.
“Because it was a very pretty dress, and Alexis was queer. Do you need any other reason?”
“But he wasn’t a transvestite…”
The Marquess smiled, as if he’d given up.
“Ay, you’ve understood nothing.”
“That’s my lot recently: I never understand anything.”
“Look, don’t think I’m interfering, because I know who I can interfere with… But as I see the subject interests you so… Why not accompany me to a party tonight where you might see some transvestites and other most fascinating people?…”
High on nostalgia, the Count surveyed the unchanging landscape spread before him from his office window: crests of trees, a church belfry, the top floors of several tower-blocks, and the eternal, challenging promise of the sea, always in the background, always beyond reach, like the damned presence of water everywhere which the Marquess’s poet friend talked about so much. He appreciated the bucolic, solicitous landscape framed by the window, now diffused with the flat, harsh August light, because it allowed him to think and, above all, remember, and wasn’t he just one hell of a rememberer. And he recalled how much he’d wanted to devote himself to literature and be a real writer, in the ever more distant days of school and the first years of his unfinished university degree. He felt that Alberto Marques, possessed by certain Mephistophelian powers, had stirred that occasional ambition, which he used to think he’d definitively left behind but which, at the slightest provocation, returned to obsess him like a recurring virus he’d never really been cured of. Mario Conde felt that that premature pang, which had stung him, perhaps only worked as a wily move on the part of his consciousness to unload in someone else’s port a guilt that was only his: he’d never seriously applied himself, perhaps because the only real truth was that he was unable to write anything (that was both squalid and moving). He’d always thought he’d wanted to write stories about
