I was bewildered and grateful that Muscles pushed me towards a table, where the Other Boy was already seated, drinking an amber liquid I soon discovered wasn’t beer. How did he manage it, that innate ability of his always to get there first? Then the disc jockey switched from Makeba to Doris Day and I discovered that, like any good cabaret, Les Femmes had a stage where seven perfect – if not more than perfect – versions of Doris Day had settled – they must have settled – singing along to the recording to the delight of an enraptured audience, where I began to see men and women whose affiliations I doubted: too many opulent, peroxide blondes in best Marilyn Monroe style, dark-skinned beauties from post-war Italian cinema, black women with large, acromegalic hands and metallic robo-comic lips which regaled their colleagues around the table with kisses as intense and syncopated as Doris Day’s ballad.
I was still nonplussed when Muscles invited me to go to the bathroom and waved the envelope the taxi-driver gave him. He knew I wouldn’t go, and so didn’t insist, but the Other Boy did go… It isn’t that I was a puritan. On the contrary, I must have been pretty daring in my life, I’ve tried everything, but my instinctive lucidity has always proved more useful, and that day, it was certainly having a party out there, expectant, wanting to digest everything my eyes could take in. And thanks to that lucidity I realized I’d come upon a giant happening, all transmutation and masks, that was less famous but more real and intense than a Venetian carnival. The idea of the chrysalis and the feeling that a huge insect had brushed against me held the key to what I was living and seeing: a party for insects. I remember thinking, among those transvestites, the movement’s cutting-edge pioneers, that man can create, paint, invent or re-create colours and forms he finds around himself and impose them on material, what is beyond his body, but is unable or powerless when it comes to modifying his own organism. Only a transvestite can transform it radically and, like a butterfly, paint himself, make his body the subject for his master work, convert his sexual emanations into colour, through the bewildering arabesques and incandescent hues of physical adornment. It is a vital plastic surgery of the self, though those infinitely repeated replicas – seven Doris Days, four Marilyn Monroes, three Anna Magnanis in twenty square yards – could not avoid, at best, a coldly nostalgic perfection. What was most disturbing was to understand that this was the apotheosis self-conscious theatre people have dreamed about from the days of Pericles: the mask become character, the character carved out of an actor’s physique and soul, life as visceral performance of the dreamt… It was like an epiphany which had been waiting, crouched in that dirty corner of Paris, and in a few minutes I’d planned and staged the solution I’d been looking for my version of Electra Garrigo… What I could never imagine was that my genial idea would be the beginning of my last act as a theatre director. The end as a beginning without means…
Then, when I went to tell Muscles about my illumination, I found he and the Other Boy had disappeared with one of those perverted insects. A delightful touch came the day after when they accused me of vanishing on the arm of a Sara Montiel. Anyway, I told Muscles what I’d felt there, and the ungrateful creature didn’t give me any credit for it in his book on transvestites, and I still think I could put between quotation marks whole paragraphs I dictated on the occasion. .. And certainly, as I didn’t have enough money, I had to walk home, but I’d never have gone with a Sarita Montiel, because the fact is, I never could stand la Saritisima.
“This is by Salvador K., isn’t it?”
“Yes, that’s his signature, SK. Such bad taste… Looks like a kind of medicine, don’t you think?”
“Or beer.”
The Marquess had taken him into Alexis Arayan’s bedroom, which turned out to be the old servants’ quarters. It had its own small, separate bathroom, and you could reach the room without entering the main house. Everything appeared meticulously ordered, as if its owner had arranged it with particular care before departing two days ago: shelves tidy, pictures dusted, clothing clean and hanging up in the small wardrobe, two pairs of underpants dry on the bathroom window, ashtrays without cigarette ends. The Count concentrated on the books, letting an envious finger run across various sizes and textures of spine where several appealing titles caught his eye.
“Did Alexis smoke?”
“No, he loathed tobacco. Particularly cigars.”
“What do you make of this drawing by Salvador K.?”
The drawing, framed and behind glass, represented a kind of woman’s head beneath a parasol. The angles were sharp, the colours aggressive.
“He’s employing an ancient technique of wetting paper and making human figures like that. It’s like an etching on paper, or kind of collage, although he boasted that he’d discovered the warm water technique. And that drawing is a piece of shit, to put it Cubanly, as Muscles would say. The expressionists and cubists did this kind of portrait sixty years ago, when it really meant something, but now.. .”
“And are you sure they had a relationship?”
Now the Count could see the Marquess was smiling.
“The walls of this room are paper-thin. If you like, go out, and I’ll whimper, and you tell me…”
“That won’t be necessary…” The Count tried to frighten off the image of what the Marquess was suggesting. “Alexis kept this all very clean…”
“He was scrupulous, as I was saying. And even worse, he tried to convert me, but always failed. Besides, Maria Antonia used to come here once a week, a woman who works as a maid in his parents’ house, and she helped him wash and clean, and sometimes prepared us meals for several days at a time. Do you know what? She’d steal tasty morsels from Alexis’s house and bring them here: some Spanish chorizo, smoked salmon, a couple of lobster claws, the things one can only imagine or find in the dollar-stores, you get me?”
“What else can you tell me about Maria Antonia? She’s a woman with a certain…”
The Marquess’s fingers tried in vain to comb the remnants of his hair.
“You must forgive me, but yesterday I lied… It was Maria Antonia who called to tell me about Alexis. Please forgive me? She also warned me you’d be paying a visit.”
The Count preferred to skip over any kind of reproach.
“What did Alexis tell you about Maria Antonia and his family?”
The Marquess sat on the edge of the perfectly made bed and smoothed the folds of his Chinese dressing gown over his legs.
“Ever since his grandmother died, he’d been thinking of leaving. Alexis really loved her a lot, because she and Maria Antonia brought him up… And what I’m about to tell you may seem incredible, but it’s a hundred per cent true: you know Alexis was a specialist in Italian Pre-Renaissance art? Well, Maria Antonia knows as much as he did. That’s right. Alexis studied with her, lent her his books, and taught her what he was learning. If you are interested, talk to her some time about Italian Madonnas and especially Giotto, and expect a weighty dissertation… The person Alexis really couldn’t stand was his father, for a thousand reasons, but I think in particular because once, when he was some seven years old, he almost drowned on the beach, and someone else rescued him from the sea, because his father was drunk. And Alexis never forgave him and even said his father had left him to drown… I don’t know which damn Greek gave a name to that complex… Besides, his father hated him because he was, well, queer. Whenever he could, he made it clear he hated him… Just imagine, it was the worst disgrace imaginable for such a respectable man… But God must have shamed him as a punishment. You know what I mean: men who have sons who are going to turn out like them, strong, fond of skirt, tyrannical, and suddenly he turns out homosexual. But Alexis suffered a lot, suffered every way possible, and if they hadn’t killed him, I’d have said he’d committed suicide.”