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 welclass="underline" 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.