“And who might he be?” continued Manuel Palacios, perching his sparse buttocks on the edge of the chair.
The black woman looked back at the staircase and the Count felt that anonymous sensation for which a girlfriend of his, for want of a better word, had invented the term liporis: embarrassment at somebody making a spectacle of themselves. That woman, in the year 1989, still harboured the atavistic instinct of deference: she was a servant and, what was worse, thought like a servant, wrapped perhaps in the invisible but tightly clinging veils of genetics moulded by numerous enslaved, repressed generations. Physical discomfort then replaced liporis, and the Count felt the desire to flee that world of glitter and veneer.
The black woman looked back at Sergeant Palacios and said: “I think he’s a friend of Alexis… A friend he lived with. Poor Alexis, oh God…”
When he found that the almost impossible address really existed, the Count shut the notebook where he’d transcribed various data from the stout file on Alberto Marques Basterrechea and tucked it into his back pocket. He contemplated the miraculously cheerful bougainvillea in the garden under that anti-social two p.m. sun. Magenta, purple, yellow, like enchanted butterflies, their flowers entangled the small clump of leaves, thorns and branches which seemed capable of surviving any local or universal cataclysm. The sylvan shadow in the garden, dominated by the arrogant plumes of several palms, lent a dark patina to the house rising up a few yards behind, exhibiting its number 7, on calle Milagros, between Delicias and Buenaventura. Could that number and the names of the three streets – Miracles, Delights and Good Fortune – be an invention of Alberto Marques in order to locate his house in a corner of Earthly Paradise, in perfect arcadian bliss? Yes, it had to be one of the devil’s infinite stratagems, since, according to the information the Count had recorded in his notebook, extracted from the aged but ever healthy file he’d been handed with a broad grin by the security specialist who dealt with the Ministry of Culture, anything was possible if it involved that very particular, diabolical Alberto Marques: a hugely experienced, predatory homosexual, politically apathetic and ideologically deviant, a provocative, conflictive individual, lover of the foreign, hermetic, obscurantist, potential consumer of marijuana and other substances, protector of derailed queers, a man of dubious philosophical affiliations, steeped in class-based, petty-bourgeois prejudice, all annotated and classified with the precious help of a Muscovite manual of social-realist techniques and procedures… That impressive curriculum vitae was the result of reports written, collated and precised by diverse police informers, successive presidents of the Committee for the Defence of the Revolution, cadres of the long-gone National Council for Culture and the present Ministry of Culture, the political attache’s office in the Cuban Embassy in Paris and even by a Franciscan Father who’d been his confessor in a prehistoric era and a pair of perverse lovers who’d been interrogated for strictly criminal reasons. What the hell have I got myself into? Trying futilely to cleanse his mind of prejudices – the fact is I love prejudice and can’t stand pansies – the Count crossed the garden and walked up the four steps to the front door in order to press the bell that stuck out like a nipple under the number 7. He stroked it twice and repeated the operation, for no sound of a bell reached him, and when he was about to touch it again, hesitating over whether to try the knocker, he felt assailed by the darkness beyond the slowly opening door, which surrounded the pale face of Alberto Marques, dramatist and theatre director.
“What’s the charge this time?” asked the man, his deep voice heavy with irony. The Count tried to suppress his surprise at the door, which apparently opened by itself, at the remarkable pallor of his host’s face and the question he fired at him, and opted to smile.
“I’m looking for Alberto Marques.”
“Yours truly, Mr Policeman,” the man replied, opening the door a few inches more, with a distinctly theatrical touch, so that the Count had the forbidden pleasure of seeing him full length: colourless rather than pale, thin to the point of emaciation, his head barely adorned by a drooping, lank lock. He was covered from neck to ankles by a Chinese dressing gown that might have belonged to the Han dynasty: yes, thought the policeman, no less than two thousand years of anguish must have passed through that silk, its colours as faded as the man’s face, worn and rough as if it were no longer silk, prominently marked by testimonies to many a battle, by what could be coffee, banana, iodine or even blood stains, endowing what masqueraded as the attire of historic emperors with a dismal, out-of-sorts leitmotif… The Count forced a smile, remembered the awful reports stuck to his buttock, and dared ask: “How do you know I’m police? Were you expecting us?”
Alberto Marques blinked several times and tried to organize his dank strands of hair.
“You don’t have to be a Sherlock Holmes… In this heat, at this time of day, with that face and in this house, who is going to pay a visit if not the police? Besides, I’ve heard what happened to poor Alexis…”
The Count concurred. It was the second time recently he’d been told he had a policeman’s face and he was on the verge of believing it was true. If there were bus drivers who looked like bus drivers, doctors like doctors and tailors like tailors, it can’t be difficult to have a policeman’s mug after ten years in the job.
“Can I come in?”
“Can I not let you come in?… Enter,” he added finally, opening the door into the pitch black.
It wasn’t hot inside, although all the windows were shut and he couldn’t hear the hum of any refreshing fan. In the cool half-dark, the Count imagined a distant high ceiling and glimpsed several pieces of furniture as dark as the ambience, scattered without rhyme or reason across a spacious room divided in two by a pair of columns that were possibly Doric in their upper reaches. At the back, some five yards away, the wall receded towards an equally sombre corridor. Without closing the door, Alberto Marques went over to one of the room’s walls and opened a french window that spread the obscene light of August on the room’s chequered floor, to create an aggressive, decidedly unreal luminosity: as if from a spotlight turned on a stage. Then the Count got it: he’d been dropped into the middle of the set for The Price, a work by Arthur Miller that thirty years earlier Alberto Marques had staged with a success that still resonated (that was also on his file) and which he himself had seen some ten years ago in a version staged by one of the dramatist’s more orthodox disciples. He’d stepped into the production – too many stages! – like one of the characters and… of course, that was it. But could it possibly be?
“Sit down, please, Mr Policeman,” said Alberto Marques, reluctantly pointing to a mahogany armchair darkened by fossilized sweat and grime, and only then did he close the door.
The Count used those seconds to get a better look: between the floor and the dressing gown he saw two rickety, starved ankles, as translucent as the face, extended by two unshod ostrich feet that ended in funny fat toes, splayed out, their nails like jagged hooks. The fingers of the hands were, on the contrary, slender and spatula’d like a practising pianist’s. And the smell. His sense of smell ravaged by twenty years of vigorous smoking, the Count tried to distinguish the odours of damp, fumes from reheated oil and a whiff he recognized but found difficult to pin down, as he observed the man in his Chinese silk dressing gown settling down in another armchair, parting his legs and carefully positioning his skeletal hands on the wooden arms, as if he wanted to embrace them entirely, to possess them, as in a final gesture he folded his oh-so-delicate fingers over the front edges of the wood.
“Well, I’m all ears.”
“What do you know about what happened to Alexis Arayan?”
“Poor… That they killed him in the Havana Woods.”
“And how did you find out?”
“I got a call this morning. A friend got wind.”
“Which friend?”
“One who lives round there and saw all the bother. He enquired, found out and phoned me.”
“But who is he?”
Alberto Marques sighed ostentatiously, blinked a bit more, but kept his hands on the arms of the chair.
“Dionisio Carmona is his name, if you must know. Are you happy now?” And tried to make it evident he found the revelation troubling.
The Count thought of asking permission, but decided not to. If Alberto Marques could be ironic, he, Conde, could be rude. How dare that pansy try it on with him, a policeman? He lit his cigarette and puffed the smoke in the direction of his interlocutor.
“You may drop your ash on the floor, Mr Policeman.”
“Lieutenant Mario Conde.”
“You may drop your ash on the floor, Mr Policeman Lieutenant Mario Conde,” the man said, and the Count demurred. You’ll get it from me, you wanking pansy, he thought.
“And what else do you know?”
Alberto Marques shrugged his shoulders, as he shut his eyes and released another sonorous sigh.
“Well… that he was strung up. Ah, my God, the poor dearie.”
Perhaps the man was really upset, thought the Count, before going on the offensive.
“No, technically, he was strangled. His neck was pressed tight till the oxygen was cut off. With a red silk sash. And you know he was dressed like a woman, all in red, with a shawl and the whole works?”
Alberto Marques had let go of the chair arms and his right hand rubbed his face from cheek to chin. Touche, concluded the Count.
“Dressed like a woman? In a red dress? One as long as an old bathrobe?”
“Yes,” replied the Count, “what can you tell me about that? Because I already know it was this house he left yesterday.”
“Yes, he left here at about seven, but I swear I saw him just before and he wasn’t dressed like Electra Garrigo.”
The feast in Paris is never over, and everyone who has lived there retains distinct memories… And it’s so true, though Hemingway said it first, and he was the century’s most egocentric, narcissistic writer. My memories of Paris are a nostalgia in blue I’ve not managed to throw off in twenty years. Because when I arrived in Paris, in April 1969, a painfully beautiful spring had just begun and it made you want to do something to be happier, if happiness exists, to be more intelligent and all-encompassing, or be freer, if freedom exists, or could ever exist. And I remember feeling the magic of an affectionate, almost velvety sun bathing the Champs-Elysees, the grand Napoleonic palaces, the frivolous cafes, and I better understood what had happened the year before. I still feel the afternoon light on the rose-window of Notre-Dame’s facade like a caress on my skin, and hear the dark, historic sound of the Seine by the Cite, and that black organ-grinder in front of the Louvre making his little African monkey dance to the tune of a Viennese waltz. I also remember the Rolling Stones concert when they tried to out-rebel the Beatles, and they were only two hundred yards away from me, under a cold sky of a Paris spring, among shrieking, liberated French blondes, daughters who’d aborted and mothers newly born of the revolution that might have been and was not, although after that month of May the world would never be the same again, because the revolution had been made: the revolution in customs and morality, the twentieth-century’s permanent revolution that Lev Davidovich Bronstein, alias Leon Trotsky, never imagined. I remember each day, each minute, each conversation with Jean-Paul Sartre and the inevitable Simone de Beauvoir, dinners with George Plimpton while he interviewed me for the Paris Review, researching the life, sensitive madness and papers of Antonin Artaud for an edition under contract of The Theatre and Its Double, the nostalgia I acquired upon the death of a Camus whom I never met yet always knew so well, the re-encounter, guided by the eyes and footsteps of Nestor Almendros, with the real sets of so much French cinema, and the pursuit, on the arm of my friend Cortazar, of the archaeological sites of pre-war jazz, cherished in bars like miraculous grottoes… I remember it all because it would be my last trip to Paris, if not my last tango, and memory anticipated history and sage memory knowingly manufactured its own self-defence and tucked away each happy moment of my last trip to Paris as if it knew it would be my last.
That’s why I also remember that day of multiple coincidences charged with encouraging magnetic attractions, when Muscles, the Other Boy and I floated over to Montparnasse on the last sigh of the afternoon, in search of a Greek restaurant that just had to be called the Odyssey, and was renowned for its mountain goat. We were enjoying our leisure and freedom, advanced arm in arm, an invincible army, when Muscles saw him, or rather her, to be more exact. She was a tall, engagingly elegant woman, as prepossessing as the owner of Edith Piaf’s voice, if Edith hadn’t been a mere alcoholic sparrow: a woman who towered alarmingly, projected her breasts pugnaciously and sported a metallic flower of a mouth. I felt her pride tingle my skin: she was dressed in red, strident and so serene, and I found her image bore the tragic dignity which I’d recurrently seen in Electra: she was a revelation, or premonition, dressed in red.
“She’s a transvestite,” Muscles piped up.
And I (and the Other Boy as well, whose name I must not and do not want to recall, for it would be politically and ideologically gauche to reveal his old friendship with Muscles and myself, in that phantasmagoric Paris where everything was possible, even walking the streets with him) felt like a pillar of salt: petrified and speechless.
“My God, how can it be?” asked the Other, even allowing himself a mention of God in Paris, that distant bastion of liberty, when in his Havana conversations he would publicly defend historical, dialectical materialist ideology and his conviction that religion was the opium, marijuana, if not the Marlboro of the people…
“She’s perfection,” I said, for I already knew about pushy Parisian transvestites who went into the street to mingle and exhibit themselves, but I’d never imagined such a spectacle: that woman could have bowled any man over because she was more perfect than any woman, I’d almost go as far as to say she was Woman incarnate, and in fact I did.
“No, a transves tite doesn’t imitate women,” Muscles commented, as if dictating a lecture, with that know-all voice and way with words of his. He always used long, spiralling baroque sentences, as if caricaturing our poor paradisiacal Fat Lezama. As far as he was concerned, a la limite there is no woman, because he knows (and his greatest tragedy is this knowledge he can never cast off) that he, that’s to say, she, is an appearance, her fetishistic realm and power concealing an irredeemable defect created by an otherwise wise nature …
And he explained to us that the transves tite ’s cosmetic erection (Muscles always gave it the emphasis transves tite), the resplendent aggression of her metallic eyelids trembling like the wings of voracious insects, her voice displaced as if it belonged to someone else, a constant voice-over, the imitation mouth drawn over her hidden mouth, and her own sex, ever more castrated, ever more present, is entirely appearance, a perfect theatrical masquerade, he said, and looked at me, as if he must look at me, as if he had no choice.
It was when he uttered the word appearance that I understood everything, that my discovery rushed like iron filings to his magnet and I swung round in alarm to look for the transvestite. But she’d already disappeared into Paris’s magical penumbra, like a fleeting sparkler… An appearance. A masquerade. That had always been the very essence of performance, ever since ritual dances were transformed into theatre, when awareness of artistic creation was born: the transvestite as artist enacting herself… But she was no longer there, and I beheld the Other Boy, in an epiphany, refusing to budge, smitten by that possibility of what he’d always longed to be – or do – and never dared…
From the Greek restaurant, through a glazed window, the Moulin Rouge glowed scarlet. The Other, who had been sent to Paris by the National Council for Culture because he’d just published a successful bad book programmed to fit the Latin Americanist third-world fashion of the time – always hunting for opportunities – had caught the blood-red glow full in the face and it made him seem more aroused, while Muscles, who had galloped off on his hobby-horse, was writing a few paragraphs for a future essay at the top of his voice.
“King” – he sometimes addressed me thus, promoting me up the noble hierarchy – “the human transves tite is an imaginary apparition where three mimetic possibilities converge” – and he paused to drink a glass of rough Balkan wine, served in beautiful imitations of ancient Greek amphoras. “First, cross-dressing properly speaking, stamped on that unfettered impulse towards metamorphosis, in that transformation which is not restricted to the imitation of a real, precise model, but rushes to pursue an infinite reality (and from the start of the ‘game’ is accepted as such). It is an unreality which becomes more and more elusive, beyond reach (becoming more and more womanly, till the boundary is transgressed and womanness is transcended)…