Leonardo Padura - Havana Red

“Thanks, Maria Antonia,” said the Count when the black woman opened her bag and gave him the cigar. He looked at it lingeringly, as if spellbound by the pale, polished beauty of an excellent cigar grown in Vueltabajo, and smiled as he handed it to Manuel Palacios. “Come in, please,” and he opened the door to his cubicle. Maria Antonia’s feet didn’t seem as light as usual; she had rather the wary tread of a hunted animal, and the Count imagined the doubts raining down on the woman’s consciousness, as she turned round to see if the door was closed. He felt pity for her again as he pointed her to a chair, talked to her about the heat in the street, the tranquil view he enjoyed from his cubicle window and how that was why he preferred it to the big offices that faced the other wing of the building, and finally asked her if she was married.

“No, single,” she replied; wearing a flowery Sunday dress, her bag on her knees, her hair gathered beneath an imitation silk scarf and lips painted blood-red, she seemed like an escapee from a scene in The Color Purple, thought the Count.

“And how long have you known the Arayan family?”

“From ’56, when I started to work for them. Matilde and Faustino had just married and at the time lived in Santos Suarez with Matilde’s mother, who was widowed. After the Revolution I decided to leave the house, I wanted to make a life for myself, quite away from them, and intended looking for another job, but the child was born and I developed an affection for him and kept postponing and postponing my departure, until four days ago, when this happened… Now I think I will leave, though I don’t know where I’ll go. As I’ve always lived with them, I don’t have a home, or a right to a pension… I’d have to go and live with my brother and that’s a real hell, with his wife, three children and who knows how many grandchildren.”

“Did you get on well with the Arayans?”

“Yes, Fabiola, Matilde’s mum, behaved very well towards me, and I loved the kid as if he were my own. For many years we three lived alone in the house, especially here in Miramar, when they began to give Faustino work outside Cuba. The boy spent more time with me and his grandmother than with his parents, and we went out a lot, to the cinema, the theatre, museums, because Fabiola had been a university teacher and was very cultured. Faustino says it’s our fault the way he turned out, well, you know how, but I swear I brought him up like my own child. The fact he was such a loving, helpless child, and that Faustino put so much pressure on him, threatened him a lot, even hit him more than once, I think it was Alexis’s way of taking his revenge on him. They had a very difficult relationship, for a father and son. They didn’t speak to each other for several years…”

“What do you think of Faustino?”

Maria Antonia looked for a pocket handkerchief in her bag and wiped the sweat from her top lip. The air in the cubicle was perfumed by a wave of that handkerchief, which made the Count feel even sorrier for her: the woman had assumed a perfectly aristocratic manner that seemed out of kilter with her submissive attitude in the Arayan household. How many of her real aspirations and aptitudes had she hidden for years, as she deferred her own life to be close to the child of another she’d adopted as her own?

“I don’t think it’s my place…” was her response, finally.

“Tell me something,” the lieutenant continued. “Nothing will go beyond these walls.”

“Well, what is there to tell? He’s somebody in high favour with the government, you know, that’s why he travels so much, has been an ambassador and the like. He’s always behaved well towards me, although never like Fabiola or Matilde, you understand. And I never forgave him for the way he acted towards his son. The poor boy got to be afraid of his father. That’s why he left home. I was very, very happy, and we decided if he ever got his own house, I’d go and live with him.”

As he saw the tears running down Maria Antonia’s black cheeks, the Count thought the end of this soap would more than consume his Sunday quota of pity. He reproached himself for mistaking, in a flash judgement, the face of love for the mask of submission and tried to imagine the woman’s stellar solitude, her life lived at the wrong time and place, whose only reason to live was the strangled transvestite she’d reared and cared for like her own son. The Count stood up and let her cry: he supposed her pain to be as deep as her boundless solitude. Then he heard her asking him to forgive her, just as he looked at his watch and calculated that Manuel Palacios must be about to arrive, and he wanted to see a victory “V” on the sergeant’s hand more than ever. For the sake of Maria Antonia, hapless Alexis, even the Marquess and himself and his blessed prejudices. He wanted it so badly that his cubicle door swung to let in the skeletal form of Manuel Palacios, right hand signalling a “V”.

“Maria Antonia,” he said, and returned to his seat opposite the woman, now putting her small handkerchief back in her small bag. “For some days I’ve been under the impression you wanted to tell us something which perhaps had to do with Alexis’s death. Or did I get it wrong?”

The woman looked him in the eye.

“I don’t know why you imagine that.”

“Rather than imagine it, I’m sure, particularly after yesterday when you phoned Alberto Marques and told him you’d found the medallion in Alexis’s trinket-box. I don’t know why, but I’m also convinced you knew it was Alexis’s and that you called the Marquess so he’d call us. Or have I got it all wrong?”

“Well, I wasn’t sure…”

“Let me help you, for you’re the only one who can help us now, if you know something, which I think you… Listen carefully: next to Alexis’s corpse they found a piece of Montecristo cigar which, according to the laboratory, belongs very probably to the box Faustino Arayan has in his lounge… That and Alexis’s medallion placed in his trinket-box don’t prove anything, but they might mean a lot. Do you understand?”

At each of the Count’s words the woman’s head sank a little lower, as if the world had deposited the burden of truth on her neck and all she wanted to contemplate, as she suffered her punishment, was the bag her two gnarled hands were fingering nervously. The Count waited, feeling his hopes fading, defeated by fear, until he saw the burden disappear and Maria Antonia’s face look up, and meet his beseeching gaze. The woman’s eyes now gleamed, though she didn’t look about to cry.

“There were two threads of red silk on the trousers he wore that night. He put them in the washing machine, but I took them out because it was a blue dye that might have stained other clothes. I was surprised because the turn-ups were muddied and that’s why I inspected them closely… Let him fucking rot,” she said, and the Count was surprised by the power in her voice, the evil glint in her eye and the way her hands twitched murderously, oh, Maria Antonia, so fleet of foot. “The son of a whore,” she said, pronouncing every syllable, and she burst into an aristocratic, disconsolate flood of tears.

“I’ve brought you a present, but it’s not to smoke,” the Count warned, placing on Major Rangel’s desk the tray with three transparent envelopes where the massacred cigars were visible.

“What the fuck’s that?”

“It’s the second piece of evidence in the case against Faustino Arayan for murdering his son, Alexis Arayan.”

Major Rangel slapped the palm of his hand down on his desk.

“What the hell do you mean?”

“Don’t play deaf… The great Faustino killed his son in the Havana Woods. Get it now?”

But before Major Rangel really got it, the Count had to relate the results of his conversations with Maria Antonia Galarraga, the fact that Faustino was AB blood group, the story about the medallion with a line etched under the arm and the two threads of red silk on mud-stained trousers which belonged to that same Faustino Arayan.