Leonardo Padura - Havana Red

“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.