… Now all he does is to put all the blame on Alexis and say he doesn’t know how it all happened. You know what it’s like.”
“Yes, Boss, I know what it’s like, but don’t forget one thing: that guy’s a bastard with real pedigree and comes with a guarantee.. . You must have a really twisted mind to think about taking a medallion from a strangled man who is your own son in order to try to save your own skin and then put two coins up his arse for good measure. And why does he reckon he didn’t throw him in the river?”
“He says a motorbike drove by and he took fright. That was when he removed the medallion.”
“Well, the guy’s sick… Hey, Boss, don’t start feeling sorry for him…”
“No, don’t be like that, Mario, everything will be done by the book.”
The Major’s voice now sounded mellow and peaceful, and the Count thought it was better that way: everything should be mellow and peaceful, and he decided he’d start lifting the red ghost of Alexis Arayan from his shoulders.
“Well, good luck to you and him… Boss, how about giving me a week’s holidays?”
“What’s up? Don’t tell me you want to do some writing?”
“No, of course not. That’s history. I’m just exhausted and fed up. What about you?”
The silence floated down the line more than it usually did with Major Rangel.
“I’m fed up, Conde. And disappointed… I think I’m going to hang up the sword. But forget it. Take a week and, if you can, start writing. Learn to help yourself and quit the self-pity… Come back next Monday. If I need you I’ll call you before, OK?”
“OK, Boss, look after yourself. And you know, I’ll get you some real good cigars,” he said, as he hung up.
While he showered, he thought he’d more than enough time to tell the Marquess the last chapter of that sordid story the whole truth about which would never be known. But he owed him that version. He tried to imagine how he’d tell it to the dramatist, and realized that all he was doing was concealing the real anxiety he felt at the prospect of the visit: he’d take his manuscript to the old dramatist. Will he like it? he wondered as he washed, when he got dressed, as he went into the street, and was still wondering when he let the door knocker fall for a third time and waited for the curtains to open on the theatrical world of Alberto Marques.
“You’re a surprising man, Mr Friendly Policeman. So much so that I now think you’re a fake policeman. It’s like another form of transvesting, right? The difference being that you’ve stripped off.. . and everything’s out in the open,” said the Marquess, waving the pages of the story like a fan.
“But… what do you think?” implored the Count, shy at his perceived nudity.
The dramatist smiled but tittered not. That Sunday evening he wore a towelling dressing gown, a degree less decrepit than his silk one, and in order to read he’d opened all the windows in the room and lifted the pages up close to his eyes, and at last the Count managed to construct a precise idea of the set where they’d been meeting recently. It was the image one always forms of an attic or one of those dusty, cobwebby places, ripe for a horror film, which don’t exist in Cuban houses, even less so in those with such lofty ceilings. As the Marquess read, the Count smoked two cigars and concentrated on creating an inventory of what might be useful from that surrealist accumulation of objects that one never usually saw: apart from the two armchairs where they sat, the lieutenant thought that a very grainy wooden table, a bronze leg which must have sustained an Art Nouveau lamp and a few plates that looked healthy, perhaps even bone china, were just salvageable. The rest reeked of exquisite corpses, without the option of resurrection: they must be the final remains of the autophagy the Marquess had surely practised on his own house.
“I’ll tell you what I think later. First tell me something. Have you recently read Camus or Sartre?”
The Count looked for a cigarette.
“No, I’ve hardly had time to read. Why?”
“Are you familiar with The Outsider?” The Count nodded and his host smiled again. “Well, your bus driver really reminds me of Mr Meursault in The Outsider… That metaphorical possibility is beautiful, isn’t it? French existentialism and Cuban buses bonded by the glare of the sun.” And he smiled again and the Count felt like grabbing him by the neck. The bastard’s making fun of me.
“So you think it’s silly.”
“But it doesn’t have a title,” proceeded the Marquess, as if he’d not heard the lament of the Count, who was now shaking his head. “Well, I’ve thought of one, seeing these people are dead before they’ve died physically: ‘Iron in the Soul’. What do you reckon?”
“I’m not sure, I think I like it.”
“Well, if you want, I’ll make you a present of it. After all, it’s Sartre’s…”
“Thank you,” the Count had to respond, as he thought it made no sense to ask for his final opinion on the already devalued quality of that story from his soul.
“It’s funny reading stories like that again… In another era you’d certainly have been accused of adopting aesthetic postures of a bourgeois, anti-Marxist character. Just imagine this reading of the story: there’s no logical or dialectical explanation of your characters’ irrational behaviour or their anecdotes; it’s obvious these creatures cannot explain the chaos in human life, while the narrator’s naturalist detail only reinforces the desolation of the man who received, God knows from where, an illumination in his existence. Such an aesthetic could then have been said (as was often said) to be a simple reflection of the spiritual degeneration of the modern bourgeoisie. Besides, your work offers no solutions to the social situations you pinpoint, just to state what’s most obvious: you communicate a sordid image of man in a society like ours… How do you like that interpretation? Poor existentialism… And what should we do then with those ever so horribly beautiful works by Camus and Sartre and Simone?… And poor Scott Fitzgerald and eschatological Henry Miller and the good characters in Carpentier and the dark world of Onetti? Decapitate the history of culture and of man’s uncertainties?… But you know what surprised me most: it’s your ability to create a fable. You don’t write like a fledgling, friendly policeman, but like a writer, although I’d have preferred a different ending: she should have killed the bus driver… And, tell me, where did you get the idea to write this story? The mystery of creation has always fascinated me.”
“I don’t know, I think because I saw a bus driver with a bus-driver’s face, and recently people have said I’ve got a policeman’s face.”
The Marquess’s smile dissolved into a string of titters which seemed bent on disarming him once and for all, and the Count was on the point of standing up and leaving the house.
“And you believed me, Mr Friendly Policeman? I was only joking. Or it was self-defence, I’m not sure. I wanted to create a distance, you know. Fear and suspicion? The fact is when you’ve been beaten once, you learn to raise your arms before they try to beat you again. Like Pavlov’s dog. But I think I went too far with you, really: I’m not as perverse, ironic, or… or as pansied as I make out. No way. So please forgive me if I showed a lack of respect. I’d like you to forgive all my ironies.”
“So you said you liked my story?” insisted the Count wanting a simple declaration bereft of equivocal verbal whirls.
“But didn’t you hear me? I told you… I’ll go even further: I admire you as a policeman. The cigar thing was a mark of genius, right? I’d never have thought of that dramatic solution as catalyst to the tragedy which had been woven… Because I don’t know if you noticed how it was all like a Greek tragedy, in the best style of Sophocles, full of ambiguity, parallel stories that began twenty years ago and which come together on the same day and characters who aren’t who they say they are, or who hide what they are, or have changed so much nobody now knows who they are, and at an unexpected moment there is tragic recognition. But they all confront a destiny that goes beyond them, that forces, drives them to make dramatic acts: only here Laius kills Oedipus, or Aegisthus anticipates Orestes… Should it be dubbed filicide?… And all is unleashed because of the hubris committed. There are excesses of passion, of ambition for power, of pent-up hatred, and that’s usually severely punished… What is really regrettable in this almost theatrical game is that the gods chose Alexis to sacrifice his destiny morbidly. What that poor boy did has grieved me sorely. At my age I’ve seen too many people die, dozens of friends, all my family, and each close death is an alarm bell warning that mine may be next, and the older I get, the greater my fear of death. But now I’m very pleased you’ve unmasked this gentleman and that he’s been jailed… Because I’ll tell you something else: do you want to know where the lines of this tragedy began to cross? In Paris, that spring of 1969: Faustino Arayan was the embassy functionary who rang Muscles’ place that day to say the Other Boy was at the police station. And he was the one who decided the Other should go back to Cuba, and sent him back wrapped in
