making a confession.
And the Count discovered that in that room in Old Havana, on first evidence, there were men and women who had made their mark because they were: militants on behalf of free love, of nostalgia trips, or of red, green and yellow parties, ex-dramatists with and without oeuvre, writers with ex-libris but never published, queers of every tendency and leaning: queens – drags on full beam and the perverted sort – luckless little duckies, hunters expert at high-flying prey, buggers on their own account who give it in the arse at home and go into the countryside if there’s horse on offer, inconsolably disconsolate souls and disconsolate souls in search of consolation, A-I cocksuckers with ass-holes sewn up for fear of Aids, and even freshly matriculated apprentices in the Academy of Pedagogy in Homosexuality, the chief tutor being none other than uncle Alquimio, winners of national and international ballet competitions, prophets of the end of time, history and the ration book; nihilists converted to Marxism and Marxists converted to shit, every kind of chip on the shoulder: sexual, political, economic, psychological, social, cultural, sporting and electronic; practising Zen Buddhists, Catholics, witches, voodoists, Islamists, santeria animists, a Mormon and two Jews, a pitcher from the Industriales team who pitches and bats with either hand; fans of Pablo Milanes and enemies of Silvio Rodriguez, expert oracles who know who will be the next Nobel Prize for Literature as well as Gorbachev’s secret intentions, the last pretty boy adopted as nephew by the Famous Person in the Higher Echelons, or the price of a pound of coffee in Baracoa; seekers after temporary or permanent visas, dreamers, femmes and hommes, hyper-realists, abstract artists and socialist realists who’d renegued on their aesthetic past; a Latinist; the repatriated and the patriotic; people expelled from everywhere one can be expelled from; a blind man who saw, disillusioned and deceivers, opportunists and philosophers, feminists and optimists, followers of Lezama (frankly the vast majority), disciples of Virgilio, Carpentier, Marti and one adept of Anton Arrufat; Cubans and foreigners; singers of boleros; breeders of fighting dogs, alcoholics, rheumatics, dogmatists and head-cases; smokers and non-smokers; and one macho-Stalinist heterosexual.
“Yours truly… And transvestites? Aren’t there any transvestites?” he asked, angling his vampire-hunter look at her breasts.
“There by the door to the balcony: that’s Victoria, though she prefers to be called Viki and her real name is Victor Romillo. The prettiest thing, isn’t she? And that dark-skinned lass who looks like Annia Linares by day is Esteban and by night Estrella, because she’s a bolero singer.”
“Tell me one thing: there are about thirty people here… How can they do all the jobs you mentioned?”
Polly smiled, inevitably. “They’re just multioccupational and like voluntary work… Look over there, the guy next to Wilfredito Insula, he does at least ten of the things I mentioned. God, how horrible, and you’re going to write about this?”
“I don’t know, I probably will. But I’m really interested in transvestites.”
“Then go to a party at Ofelia Belen Pacheco’s place, an old queer who lives around the Virgen del Camino, because there they do transvestite parties, live performances, the lot. That’s where Estrella sings boleros and a girl called Zarzamora does a striptease and you’ll shit yourself laughing.”
“The Marquess never mentioned it.”
“Of course he didn’t: Ofelia Belen Pacheco and the Marquess are sworn enemies, ever since Ofelia bedded one of the Marquess’s boyfriends. Although that was in the days when buses were made of wood
… Well, they have fantastic parties and all the transvestite buddies of Havana go there. Sometimes thirty or more.”
In the spacious living room, under the influence of music of a seemingly Barbra Streisand flavour, several couples of diverse make-up had started dancing and the Count stared at Estrella, dancing boleros and cutting an incongruous figure with her dance partner, a titchy black barely five feet tall, whom the Count supposed had bigger dimensions that were momentarily hidden. Viki was still standing by the balcony, and the Count was alarmed when he realized that if he hadn’t been warned he’d have thought her a woman who was desirable, if not beautiful.
The atmosphere exuded a ghetto freedom, limited but capacious, as the dancers’ hands caressed their partners and muffled voices echoed the song. A distasteful chill ran through the policeman when he spotted a couple kissing shamelessly: two men – according to legal, biological codes – some thirty years old, moustachioed with jet black hair, soldering lips to facilitate a flow of tongues and saliva that injected the Count with a squeamish repugnance he tried to quell by gulping down another glass of rum. He knew then that he’d gone too far on that journey to hell and needed different air if he wasn’t going to suffocate or die of shock. A policeman who boasted he’d seen every possible barbarity, he now felt pain-stricken by a vibration born from a tight knot of male hormones, unable to resist that most disturbing negation of nature. He looked at Polly and tried to smile, as he turned his green goblet round, as if to demonstrate that the evaporation was damaging the atmosphere.
“Should I put you on the alcoholics’ list?”
“Put me down as an aspiring or discerning drinker… Hey, the Marquess says Alexis hadn’t been here for days.”
“That’s right, I hadn’t seen him for some time.”
“And when you saw him, did he tell you he was in love with somebody?”
Polly looked up, as if seeking her reply in the visible part of her lank fringe.
“I don’t think so. I think he was still with a painter whose name I’ve forgotten, one who did things with collages.”
“Salvador K.”
“Hey, you’re really in the know! You sure you’re not police?”
“Really I’m not, love… And what did Alexis tell you?”
“Nothing much, that he was really fed up and that if he split with the Salvador guy he wasn’t going to hitch up with anyone else. And he went off because he was going to mass at the cathedral.”
The Count thought how Alexis Arayan must have been carrying his Bible, where perhaps the passage on the Transfiguration was already missing.
“Why did you suddenly shut up?” enquired Polly, pressing one of his legs. “Do you want another drink?”
“That’s not a bad idea. I’d like to have a drop with you.”
And she smiled, as mischievous as ever.
“Why not have a drink at my place? I live just round the corner.”
“Are you a transvestite?”
“Come and find out.”
“The walk will warm you up,” said the Count, and compared Polly to a St Bernard on a rescue mission in the middle of a snowstorm. Averting his gaze from the kissing moustaches, he looked round for the Marquess. He wasn’t in the room, nor was his amphibian friend. Polly’s roll-call, he thought, as he stood up, still had a way to go.
The Count let himself be undressed without claiming the promised drink and was pleased to see his best friend on duty, despite the evening’s bustle and the worries about sexual fraudulency still torturing him; a whiff of sparrowish behind had woken him up. He took off Polly’s baby-doll and wasn’t surprised by her small tits, with their ripe nipples, just bursting to be touched and bitten, then he warily checked inside her panties and found no false castrations, but a moist, inverted mine down which half a hand vanished. Awakened abruptly by the discovery of that vein, his travelling companion perked up, stretched, yawned and braced its swollen tissue, before descending, like a bullet winging home, into Polly’s mouth, deep like the other cavities he’d already explored.
Polly was a sophisticated lady: unhurried and unfussed, she fellatioed delicately, licking his penis’s every cranny, swallowing, then bringing it back into the fresh air only to languish enviously as her sparrow’s teeth tightened round his testicles. It was the Count who had to call for a truce, dismayed by the imminent spurt and desirous to deepen his knowledge of her second jousting cleft, and he pushed Polly on her bed, ready to crucify her, just as the girl’s hand intervened in her fate.
“Oh, mum, I’ve always wanted to lay a policeman. Go on, there are some condoms under the pillow,” she said, sucking on the Count’s nipples as he hooded his anxious friend, annoyed by the lateness of the party.
He penetrated her as if it wasn’t a first visit, noticing how much was required to fill a slit worthy of a white whale’s rather than a sparrow’s, a surprise Moby Dick, but he was happy at the manoeuvrability permitted by Polly’s hundred pounds, portable Polly, easily upped and downed the length and breadth of polyethelene which blocked off a good part of that objective, if invisible reality. The Count was surprised by his own energy, which he could only attribute to his systematic lack of such binary practices. He inned and outed like a jack-in-the-box, hooked on a
