I imagined the set and the costumes, and above all the kind of physical gestures I wanted to impose on the actors, making them up in Greek masks but with very Havanan, white, mulatto and black faces, trying to ensure that the masks showed and didn’t hide them, that they revealed their inner life and didn’t conceal the tragic and burlesque spirituality I wanted to pinpoint as the essence of a Cubanity which had Virgilio Pinera as chief prophet, because he believed that if anything distinguished us from the rest of the world, it was our possession of Creole wisdom, where nothing is really painful or totally pleasant. My approach, I explained, would be an extreme stylization of nineteenth-century Havana comedy and creole vernacular from the Alhambra Theatre, but distilled with a tragic, philosophical will, until only its artistic essence remained, for at the end of the day that has always been the grand theatre of Cuban idiosyncrasy… I added that for a similar reason I had to be sustained by words, and couldn’t, like poor Artaud, try to create a stage language dependent only on signs or dynamic, active gestures, because one of the visible traits of our Cubanity is an irrepressible inclination never to shut our mouths. Like Artaud, certainly, I wanted to show how theatre isn’t a game, but true reality, truer than reality itself, and I had to resolve the problem which restoring that level to the theatre always entails, how to make each performance a kind of happening to provoke confusion and unleash insights, to go beyond a facile, digestive phase of entertainment, as he said… And the facial mask is a vital ingredient in a project wishing to reveal the moral masks many people have worn at some moment of their existence: homosexuals who affect not to be so, the disappointed who smile at the bad weather, wizards with Marxist manuals under their arms, ferocious opportunists dressed as gentle lambs, apathetic ideologues with that most useful party card in their pocket: in a word a very colourful carnival in a country that has often had to renounce its carnivals.. . My intention, pure and simple, was to create a transcendent poetic aura, outside any specific time, but in a precise space, for a tragedy which the author conceived as a family dilemma: to stay or to leave, to respect or disobey, or the old story from Oedipus and Hamlet: to be or not to be… As the evening came to an end I told them how Parisian transvestites had given me the final key to that spectral metamorphosis which magnifies the supreme aspiration of performance, when the actor dies beneath the garments of his character and the masquerade ceases to be a passing, carnivalesque act and turns into another life, all the more real for being more desired, consciously chosen and not assumed as mere conjunctural concealment… Then Sartre, with the eagle eye he always had, became my oracle: “Isn’t what you are suggesting too complex?” he began by asking, telling me to be careful with revelations, for they always suggest diverse readings, a diversity which might be dangerous for me, just like the essential fatalism I wanted to represent through a twentieth-century Cuban Electra: I’d already heard certain insular bureaucrats say that art in Cuba should be different and that difference wasn’t like my Electra Garrigo and her dilemma of being or not being… But it was written that I wasn’t to heed him: my decision was irrevocable, and that’s how Plimpton told it in the interview with me published in the Paris Review.
We went back to our room, and that night, to continue the intellectual and physical intoxication I was experiencing in the middle of that Paris spring, Muscles and I made love for the first and only time, after twenty years of friendship, as his record player poured out languid Strauss waltzes. Everything was possible, everything was permitted, everything was mine, I was thinking the next morning as I lay in bed drinking the Arabica coffee Muscles had percolated, and we heard knocking at the door. I remember recalling how I had forgotten the Other Boy, whom we’d excluded, and I thought it must be him finally returning from his perpetual orgy, but Muscles said the Other had his own key, so he opened the door, and standing there all hieratic and voluminous was an unexpected embassy functionary floating down at us a piece of news from his stoutly arrogant, immaculately diplomatic heights: the Other Boy was behind bars in a Montmartre police station for causing a public uproar, for improper, aggressive behaviour, and the embassy couldn’t take on the bail or any legal representation of that personal problem…
Once more we had to call Sartre, who luckily was still at home, and he accompanied us to the police station, a horrible place where nobody was like Maigret and which was untouched by a single breath of the spring enveloping the rest of the city: harmony was imprisoned there, if not guillotined. But first Jean-Paul made a couple of calls and, by the time we’d arrived, they handed the Other Boy over to him, all sneers, snot and torn shirt, and it was decided there would be no court case or bail, for everything was down to a slightly frenetic cat-fight between homosexuals of doubtful national origin: the Other and the Albanian transvestite without papers he’d fallen in love with, as he declared, swore and shouted. But the greater evil was already done: the Other had to go to the embassy that afternoon and they told him he must return to Cuba on the plane leaving the next morning. That night Muscles and I spoke to him endlessly, as he cried disconsolately over his lost love, scared about his future as an official writer that he was about to lose, and he asked us to forgive him, as he painfully anticipated the punishment awaiting him in Havana, where two days later he would appear before the leadership of the National Council for Culture which had financed his trip to Paris, to the very Paris, that very spring when I dreamt everything was possible, that everything was mine, that the theatre was mine.
“Do you want to do the talking?”
“Oh, so now you want me to… How do you decide, Mario Conde. ..?”
“Do you or don’t you?” the Count asked dismissively, and Sergeant Manuel Palacios nodded: he’s too much of a policeman to say no, thought the lieutenant, and opened the wrought-iron gate leading to the Arayan mansion. In the garden, a sprinkler threw tenuous curtains of water over a carpet of recently mown turf, which gave off an aroma that always moved the Count: the scent of damp earth and cut grass, a telluric, simple smell, inevitably bringing back the image of his grandfather Rufino el Conde, a well-chewed, agonic cigar between his teeth, sprinkling water over the layer of sawdust in the cockfight arena, as the radio blared out poetic tirades by peasant poets. The moment he pressed the bell to the house where Alexis Arayan had lived, the Count wanted to be back inside the circular fence which defined the arena, next to Grandad Rufino, on a day when the whole world depended on a rooster’s spurs and the skill of the owner in ensuring his bird fought with an advantage. Never play if you’re evens, his grandfather had taught him, encapsulating a whole philosophy of life in one sentence.
“Good afternoon,” said Maria Antonia as she opened the door.
The policemen greeted her and the Count told her he wanted to speak to her and Alexis’s parents.
“Why?” asked the woman, who’d switched on her alarm lights.
“About the medallions…”
“But the fact is,” she began and sirens followed lights: imminent danger, the Count registered.
“They don’t know you found it?”
The black woman nodded.
“But they have to be told… That medallion can tell us a lot about Alexis’s death.”
She nodded again and beckoned them in.
“Mrs Matilde is the one at home.”
“And comrade Faustino?”
“He’s at the Foreign Ministry. On Monday he was to leave for Geneva, but the mistress is still so edgy…” she added, and the Count and Manolo saw Maria Antonia, the woman with winged feet, skim the floor as she flew into the house, after pointing them towards the big leather armchairs in the ante-room.
“We’ll put the screws on her, Conde.”
“Don’t you worry, this black lady knows more than me and you.. .”
Matilde looked a very sick old woman. In the three days since the Count had informed her of her son’s death, the woman seemed to have lived twenty destructive years, devoted daily to tarnishing the veneer of vitality she’d preserved. She greeted them sleepily, and sat in another of the armchairs while Maria Antonia stood there, as her status as a submissive maid demanded. The Count again felt he was in the middle of a theatrical performance too much like a pre-packaged reality where everyone had their role and seat assigned. The Great Theatre of the World, what nonsense. The Tragedy of Life, yet more nonsensical. Life is a dream?
“Now then, Matilde,” Manolo began, and it was evident he found the conversation difficult, “we’ve found out something from Maria Antonia that may be very important for our work, though equally it may be quite irrelevant… Do you follow?”
Matilde barely moved her head. Of course she couldn’t follow, thought the Count, but he decided to wait. Manuel Palacios had canine instincts and always got back on the trail. Then the sergeant told her about Maria Antonia’s find and added his own conclusion: “If that medallion is yours and Alexis hid it there, well, there’s no problem. But if it’s your son’s, we think it might clear up certain things.. .”
“Which, for example?” asked the woman, apparently awaking from hibernation.
