“Would you like us to speak elsewhere?” the lieutenant suggested, pained by the despair of this would-be author.
“No, don’t worry, nobody knows you here and the rum’s running out. Do you want a double?”
The Count looked at the bar, where they were serving white Bocoy rum. Irritated, he acted as if he weren’t sure, perhaps wanting to bolster his confidence.
“Yes, I think that’s just what I need.”
“Give me four pesos,” Miki said, holding out a hand.
The Count smiled: of course, you shit-head, he thought, and gave him a ten-peso note.
“A triple for me and a double for you.”
While he waited for Miki, the Count lit a cigarette and tried to listen to the conversation of his nearest neighbours. There were three of them: a young but very greying mulatto, who talked non-stop, a fat bearded half-caste with a hump like a jerry-built camel; and a tall guy, with a bugger’s face which would have astounded Lombroso himself. Oh image of literature! They were enthusiastically slandering another writer whose recent novel had apparently enjoyed a lot of success and who wrote very popular articles in the newspapers, and were calling him a fucking populist. Yes, they said, secreting bile on the bar floor, just imagine, he writes crime novels, interviews crooners and mooners, and writes stories about pimps and the history of rum: I tell you, he’s a fucking populist, and that’s why he wins so many prizes, and they changed topic in order to talk about themselves, writers really preoccupied by aesthetic values and reflections on social contradictions, when Miki returned with two glasses of rum.
“I didn’t tell you… we got the last drops from the bottle. It puts me really on edge. Every day it happens earlier.”
“You like coming here, don’t you, Miki?”
The writer tried his rum, as he extracted a cigarette from the Count’s packet.
“Yes, why not. There’s rum, you can talk a pile of shit and now and then lay some woman who’s gone overboard for poetry. Right now I’m expecting one who’s got more cash than the National Bank. I don’t know where the hell she gets it. So if my poetess turns up, you vanish, right?”
The Count nodded, thinking he’d ask him who his neighbours were and whom they were dissecting now, but was afraid they’d hear him. He’d like to have read the history of rum, he thought, as he downed a gulp of incestuous, ahistorical alcohol, the molecules of which carried too much undistilled water.
“Miki, what do you know about a painter called Salvador K.?”
Miki smiled and took another sip of rum.
“He’s a piece of shit.”
“Fuck, everyone here is shit, opportunist, populist or queer, right?”
“Right first time. What did you expect? Parnassus? That when you came in they’d whisper in your ear, “Sing, my muse, the glory of Pelida Achilles,” or something as stupid? No, no chance, and for your information: that cock is all four things at once. The guy paints garish paintings which sell very well, but it’s the purest shit… You know, I think he lives around here, between N and Seventeenth, his wife’s house. And what’s there between you and this fellow?”
“Nothing, somebody mentioned him the other day. And you say he’s married?”
“No, I said he lives in his wife’s house.”
“I get you. Hey, Miki, as you know the downside on everybody’s life, what can you tell me about Alberto Marques?”
If you were to stand out in the entrance to the Union and shout, “Who is Alberto Marques?” two hundred guys would rush up, kneel on the ground, bow down and chant: He’s God, he’s God, and if you leave them for a while, they’ll organize a homage to him and chorus his praises, you bet your bottom dollar… But if you’d shouted that fifteen years ago, the same two hundred you see now would have rushed up and shouted, fists aloft, veins bursting in the neck like the fat guy’s: he’s the Devil, the class enemy, the apostate, the apostate of the prostate, not a bad metaphor, do you think?… Because that’s how it is, Count: before it was better not to mention him, and now he’s a living monument to ethical and aesthetic resistance, it’s a load of bullshit… Every minute someone’s recounting how he went to his place and talked to him, and you should hear them: you’d think they’d been to Mecca… The motherfuckers. Just imagine, now they say he’s the father of creole postmodernism, that with Grotowski and Artaud he’s one of the three geniuses of twentieth-century theatre, that Virgilio Pinera, Roberto Blanco and Vicente Revuelta owe everything they are to him, and even his queerness is a virtue because it allows him to voice another sensibility. That’s right. Do you understand what’s going on? Well, I do: when betrayal was the name of the game, they betrayed him, and now it’s not dangerous, and it’s even in good taste to weep over those who fell in old ideological skirmishes, you know, they worship him. And what are we left with? A guy who’s really fucked up, with more hate inside him than if he’d been spawned by a Nazi, and now converted into a big cheese, and not because of what he did, but because of what he might have done, because they rubbished him and, when he was offered a second chance the guy refused, for he didn’t want to do more theatre or publish anything, and he retired. A bloody hero is what he is now… And worst of all, the guy had to suffer a ten-year sentence of silence and solitude. Perhaps of the two hundred worshippers he has now, four or five carried on seeing him after he was destroyed, with all that stuff about queers, ideological deviants and idealists and foreignizers and the trip on socialist realism and art as ideological weapon in the political struggle… They took the guy out of circulation and sent him to run some bookshop or other, I’m not sure. Bloody hell: a stack of years without a single line of his published in the paltriest magazine, critics were banned from mentioning him when they wrote about the theatre, he disappeared from anthologies and even from dictionaries of writers. Straight: he no longer existed. He crumpled in the air, whooosh! not because he’d died or left the country, which amounts to the same thing. No. But because he was forced to change his routines. He became famous in the queue for bananas, and the queue for bread, at the Policlinic and milk stand… It’s terrible, right? But almost nobody talks about the kind of queer he was and still is. Do you know the story about the rent-a-blacks? Well, you know, it’s amazing. The gist is he was talking to a black bugger and saying he’d pay him to fuck him, but on one condition: he’d have to take him by surprise, so it would be more exciting. And he told the big black guy to enter his house and rape him one day that week. Then he’d settle down to read, every day at that time, until lo! one day the black came and he started to run around the house and the black chased after him, and he shouted and hid and the black finally grabbed him, took his clothes off and bang! gave it him from behind. You heard of anything more poofy? And the stories about when he went beautiful boy-hunting in the street… and a thousand similar stories. He was a queer and a half! But do you want me to tell you what’s truer than all this, truer than all his queer business, his being annihilated, his betrayal by his old girlies, or the way they worship him now? Do you want me to? Well, the truth is that that queer who shits himself when anyone shouts after him has got balls down to his ankles. He took it like a man and stayed here, because he knew if he’d left the island he’d have died for sure, so he didn’t play anybody’s game: he shut his gob and bolted himself in at home… I wish I’d got half the spunk that queen’s got… Fuck, get on your way, you motherfucker, my poetess is coming round the corner. You know what this crazy woman calls me? Mickey Rourke, hey, that’s neat! I’ll be fucked, not a drop of rum left. This lousy place!
The Count plunged into Seventeenth Street with a bad taste in his mouth – and it wasn’t the rum’s fault – prow pointing seawards and hull battened down so as not to be over-awed by the galling sumptuousness, apparently oblivious to the test of time and other erosions, of those palaces which had one day expressed the pride of a class at the height of its creative splendour and given the street the nickname from time immemorial of Millionaires’ Row. The success of those extremely rich men – who couldn’t get over their shock at being so flush, by merely hitting the three buttons of political, financial or even smuggling bravado – needed visual confirmation so badly that they insisted on giving their fortunes eternal form, and hired all the necessary talents to perpetuate the triumphs they glorified in stone, wrought iron and glass, throwing up the most dazzling mansions in the whole city. Immersed in the afternoon reveries of an aimlessly wandering mariner, he didn’t even ponder how it was possible to live in a forty-roomed house or what one might feel seeing the dawn through the panes of glass that went into that stained-glass window of St George and the dragon or the tropical glade on a gigantic skylight, bearing all the possible fruits of nature and the imagination. What he was thinking, as he walked down the avenue, recycled three decades ago and now occupied by offices, businesses and a few citadels packed with the citizenry, was that when he was exactly sixteen years old and writing his first story, Alberto Marques had already been condemned to forget glory and plaudits. His pathetic tale went by the title of “Sundays” and was selected to appear in issue zero of La Viborena, the magazine of the school’s literary workshop. The story told was a simple one, which the Count knew well: the unforgettable experience when he woke every Sunday morning and his mother forced him to go to the local parish church while the rest of his friends enjoyed their only free morning playing baseball at the corner of the house. The Count wanted thus to speak about the repression he’d experienced, or at least the kind he’d suffered in the most remote years of his sentimental education, although while writing he didn’t formulate the theme in exactly those terms. What was frustrating, however, was the repression unleashed on that magazine which never reached issue number one – and thus also on his story. Whenever he remembers it, the Count relives a distant but indelible sense of shame, all his own, which invades him physically. He feels a malevolent torpor, a choking desire to shout out what he didn’t shout the day they gathered them together to shut down the magazine and workshop, accusing them of writing idealist stories, escapist poems, unacceptable criticism, stories hostile to the country’s present needs, now that it has embarked on the construction of a new man and a new society (thus spake their headteacher, the very same guy who one year later would be expelled because of countless frauds committed in his drive to be known as the best headteacher of the best high school in the city, the country, the world, even when his headship was based on fraud: all that mattered was that everyone should think him the best head and recognize him as such, and endow him with all the privileges such recognition might engender…). How did his story relate to all they were told? he wondered again, as he floated down the street, the wind in his sails. Yes, when it happened he was sixteen and Alberto Marques was almost fifty, it was his first story and he thought he’d die, but Alberto Marques was already used to living among plaudits, praise and congratulations suddenly denied him one black day because he and his works didn’t meet particular parameters that were suddenly considered vital. What must he have felt, that man who looked so diabolical, whose tongue was so barbed, when he found himself separated from what he loved, knew and could do, when he saw himself condemned to suffer a silence for a period that might be perpetual? The Count tried to imagine, as he’d tried on other occasions to imagine dawn rising over those palaces, and couldn’t: he didn’t have the experience, but he remembered his old shame, his elemental rage at the age of sixteen, and thought he should multiply it by a hundred. Thus he might perhaps approach the dimensions of that Frustration trapped in a municipal library. Was he so harmful that he deserved such brutal punishment and a castrating exercise of re-education so that ten years on they could tell him they were strategic errors, misunderstandings by extremists who now had neither name nor office? Could the new ideology, the education of the new masses, the brain of the new man, be infected and even destroyed by enterprises such as those undertaken by Alberto Marques? Or wasn’t it more damaging to write the kind of opportunist literature cultivated by his ex-comrade Baby Face Miki, who was always ready to prostitute his writing and vomit his frustrations on anyone really talented who wrote, painted or danced? No, there was no comparison, and the world, though it was grey, could never be the way Miki – never again to be called Baby Face – coloured it. Then the Count sensed that the whole business was softening him, that he was getting softer by the day, and also that Alberto Marques’s queerness was beginning to worry him less and a furtive rebel solidarity was beginning to draw him to the dramatist, and he even began to regret any evidence that might implicate him in the assassination and take him, all his queerness, frustration and dignity, not to mention that ugly face, to a prison where his buttocks would become a flowerpot, and the service plied by buggers, though not surprising, would be free, that was for sure… At last he had reached the sea.
Kick his guts out, hit him hard, gouge his eyes, he’d ordered Manolo after explaining who Salvador K. was and allotting him the first interview with the painter. And when he saw him, the Count’s expectations were replete with prejudice: the guy was just over forty and weighed some two hundred pounds, had two enormous feet – could he be a size nine? – and flexed a weighttrainer’s arms, just right for tightening a silk sash to strangle a man while ensuring he didn’t fight back.
Seated in the living room to the flat, the policemen rejected his assiduous offers of water, tea and even coffee, keeping to the plan they had agreed. No, not even water.
Salvador K. seemed nervous and was trying to ingratiate himself.
“It’s an investigation, I suppose?”
“No, on the contrary,” said Manuel Palacios, sitting on the edge of his armchair. The Count liked his skeletal friend’s hostile manner. “It’s something much more serious and you know it. Shall we speak here or should we go elsewhere?”
The painter smiled in trepidation. He’s shitting himself, the Count’s experience told him.
“But what about…?”
“Then we’ll talk here. What was your relationship with Alexis Arayan?”
As he didn’t like him, the Count was pleased to see Salvador K.’s last hopes fade and the smile abandon his lips.
“I know him,” he said, trying to fake a degree of offended dignity, “from the Centre for Cultural Heritage. Why?”
“Two reasons. First, because Alexis Arayan was murdered yesterday. Second, because we’ve heard you two were very close.”
The painter tried to stand up, but desisted. It was obvious he had no plan of attack, or perhaps they had really taken him by surprise.
“Was murdered?”
“Last night, in the Havana Woods. Strangled.”
The painter looked into his house, as if fearing some unexpected presence. The Count stood up while Salvador stared and formulated a question, but decided to wait.
“You really want to talk here?” persisted Manolo.
“Yes, of course, why not?… So he was murdered. But where do I come in?”
Manuel Palacios smirked.
“Well, Salvador, this is very delicate, but some people claim your friendship was a touch more than friendship.”
Then he did get up, very offended, his muscular arms tensed.
“What are you implying?”
“What you just heard. Do I need to spell it out? People are saying you and he sustained a homosexual relationship.”
Still on his feet, the painter tried to look disaster in the face: “I will not allow you…”
“That’s fine, don’t allow us, but go into the street and shout it out publicly and see what people say.”
Salvador appeared to contemplate the possibity and reject it. His muscles began to lose momentum and he sank into the lower reaches of his chair.
“They’re jealous. Gossips, slanderers, envious…”