The bougainvilleas were as lush and petulant as ever in the sun, which seemed enraged that it was almost high noon and ready to kill off any living cell that fell under its red-hot ferrule, except for the defiant bougainvilleas. The Count observed them enviously as he dropped the door-knocker he’d preferred today to the nipple-shaped bell you never heard.
“Well, well, what an efficient policeman you are!” the Marquess commented, opening the door. “Just ring and he comes running.”
“Hello,” the Count mumbled as he scoured the half-dark for the armchair assigned to him in that stage-set. When he thought how he was there because of the strange death of Alexis Arayan, he felt ill at ease and at a loss, and told himself it was true the case no longer interested him: his only motivation was a morbid curiosity to get further into the world of Alberto Marques, as shadowy and shocking as last night’s party.
“Did you have a good time last night?”
“Yes, really,” the Count replied, knowing what was coming next.
“I waited for you till two o’clock at Alquimio’s, but my sickly body couldn’t resist any longer. It’s been a long, long time since I went on a late-night spree like that.”
“Sorry if you waited for me. Why did you ring me so early? To scold me?”
The Marquess straightened his dressing gown between his legs before responding: “God spare me giving such a potentate a scolding. ..”
“We are razor-sharp today. Why are you always like that?”
“Oh, I’m so sorry, Mr Count… Are you upset with me? I called because something happened that might be of interest to you,” and he lowered his voice, to speak confidentially. “This morning Maria Antonia called again.”
“And what’s happened now?”
“It’s odd, very odd. She asked me if Alexis had left a medallion here which he used to wear. It’s a small gold medallion, with a circle around the engraved face of Leonardo the universal man. Was he wearing it round his neck when you found him?”
The Count rewound his tape of memories of the transvestite murdered in the Havana Woods: examined again the dramatic red dress, the silk scarf round his neck, the breastless bosom, and saw no medallion.
“No, I don’t think he was.”
“Well, I didn’t manage to find it here either. Alexis’s mother bought two identical medallions several years ago in the museum in Vinci, the village where Leonardo was born. One for her and the other for Alexis. Hers went missing soon after and was never found. And now one has appeared in a trinket-box Alexis had at home. Maria Antonia says she’d never seen it there, and doesn’t know if it’s the one Matilde lost or Alexis’s.”
“But Alexis still used to wear his?”
“Yes, he always wore it. What do you think? That Alexis stole it from his mother and kept it there, or that he left his there for some reason?”
The Count couldn’t resist a smile as he pondered the riddle set by the Marquess.
“I really didn’t think you liked playing the detective so much. They accuse me of hogging the case but I think you’re the one on the hog.”
“Oh, don’t say that. I’d be incapable of taking anything away from you, Mr Friendly Policeman.”
The Count smiled again and lit a cigarette. The Marquess was helping him come to terms with the world.
“Is there no tea on offer today? I think I could do with a cup.. .”
“Delighted to oblige, Mr Friendly Policeman. And I’ll add lots of ice cubes,” said the Marquess, as he pattered off to the back of the stage, his red Chinese silk dressing gown caressing the sharp edges of his feet.
God, how horrible, the Count remembered, seeing the grotesque figure who’d suddenly transformed into his Dr Watson, tea in hand, smiling contentedly.
“You know one thing, Marquess? If Alexis put his own medallion in his jewel box, it’s as if he were pointing to suicide. Don’t you think? As if he were organizing everything before he left. But he didn’t commit suicide. Perhaps they didn’t give him time.”
“Or perhaps he provoked his own death… That’s my considered view… Look what I found on my bookshelves.”
And he handed the Count a page from a Bible: the page cut from the Gospel according to St Matthew, pages 989 and 990, which began with chapter 17: “And after six days Jesus taketh Peter, James and John his brother, and bringeth them up into a high mountain apart. And was transfigured before them.” And, written in a margin, in tiny but precise writing, the words: “God the Father, why do you force him to suffer so much?”
“Where was this?”
“Elemental, Lieutenant Conde, it was where it had to be: inside the Complete Plays of Virgilio Pinera I have on my shelves. Look,” and he touched his temples: “Pure deduction.”
“Yes, it had to be there… Alexis didn’t dress as a transvestite because he liked to. He was either mad, or a mystic as you say, determined to represent an act of transfiguration with which he was aiming to…”
“Was aiming to be crucified, Mr Friendly Policeman.”
The Count looked at the page from the Bible again, read the whole chapter and felt that the truth of Alexis Arayan’s death lay there, but had just eluded him, like the face glimpsed in that dream.
“Yes, you may be right. But why do it like that?”
“It’s clear enough to me: because he was afraid of killing himself
… Remember, Alexis was a Catholic, and Catholicism condemns suicide, but his religion also condemned homosexuality. Thanks to him I learned about the passage in Leviticus which says: ‘Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.’ It isn’t easy for a believer to live knowing his God called to Moses and pronounced so savagely, you know? But it’s only a part of the Tragedy of Life, as one old friend of mine says, who definitely isn’t at all homosexual. It’s a long time since anyone posed it so Judaically, as it were, but over many centuries that sin known as contra natura has condemned the lives of homosexuals, as has the idea that it’s a sickness… Mortal sin, social aberration, sickness of body and mind: it’s not easy to be a queer anywhere in the world, my friendly Mr Policeman, I can tell you. But let me proceed: I’ve been informed by people expert in the matter that of the ten million Cubans living in our Socialist Republic, between five and six per cent of us are homosexual. Naturally, including our lesbian comrades. Do your sums, do your sums: if there are five million men, and three per cent are homosexual, that gives you one hundred and fifty thousand, or almost a fifth of a million compatriots. Enough to make an army… What more can I say? I’m not convinced by this figure, because lots and lots of people are unable to admit to being homosexual, logically enough, because of what I said previously and because of the long national history of homophobia that we’ve endured between the four walls of this island ever since the Spaniards arrived and deemed dirty and barbaric what our sodomite Indians did while bathing in our peaceful rivers sucking cigars and flinging a yucca… Your experience of recent history can add other conflicts to the drama, my friendly policeman: don’t forget how right here in the 60s there was something called the UMAP, the famous Military Units to Aid Production, where homosexuals were confined, along with other harmful beings, so they would turn into men by cutting sugar cane and picking coffee and then, after 1971, a statute was decreed, also right here, to be enforced by policemen like you, magistrates and judges, which prohibited ‘ostensible homosexuality and other socially reprehensible behaviour’… And you’re so ingenuous you wonder why a homosexual still thinks of committing suicide?”
In Paris, in the springtime, you don’t usually think of suicide. At least I don’t. I felt so free and intelligent I couldn’t imagine all that freedom, intellect and revelation in one spring would later lead me to suffer so much and witness my last dramatic act… Muscles was saying I was a stranger, he’d never seen me so optimistic and happy, as we drove by taxi to Sartre’s and Simone’s house, where they’d invited me to have supper that night along with those I’d invite formally to come to Cuba to the premiere of my new version of Electra Garrigo. That night, however, destiny had decreed I’d make a decision which might be the possible starting point for everything else. I told Muscles it was perhaps better not to bring the Other Boy, for I reckoned he might get up to his tricks, which included getting drunk and vomiting on the carpet and wanting to kiss Jean-Paul because he’d refused the Nobel… And Muscles said he agreed, the Other was all right for transvestites and public places, but not so right for Simone’s house… It was a delightful, even candle-lit supper: we drank Bordeaux, ate platefuls of French and Italian cheeses, and of meat in mushroom sauce, now intoxicating every taste-bud in my mouth and memory, unable to evoke any another taste of that kind. And Dutch ice cream for dessert… All night we talked about my project, I discussed how
