“Did Alexis talk to you about suicide?”
The Marquess stood up and pointed at one of the bookshelves.
“Look for yourself: Mishima, Zweig, Hemingway, my poor friend Calvert Casey, Pavese… He was fascinated by suicides and those who committed suicide, a morbid fascination, to be sure. He kept saying everything in his life was a mistake: his sex, his intellect, his family, the times he lived in, and he would say that if one was conscious of such mistakes, suicide might be the solution: that way perhaps he would have a second opportunity. I think this mysticism was one of the things that turned him into a Catholic.”
“Did he go to church?”
“Yes, a lot.”
“What about yourself?” asked the Count, led on by his spirit of curiosity.
“Me?” smiled the Marquess, blinking. “Can you imagine me praying on a hassock?… No, you must be kidding. I’m too perverse to get on with those gentlemen… Though I prefer them to you lot…”
The Count observed the Marquess’s duly perverse smile, and decided to cultivate it, because in some way the invitation was there. He checked his parachute and launched himself into the Sea of Sarcasm.
“Do you hate the police?”
The Marquess’s laugh was genuine and unexpected. His parchment body suddenly seemed a smooth kite ready to fly out of the nearest window, launched by the guffaws now convulsing it.
“No, in no way. You guys aren’t the worst. Look, police do police work, they interrogate and imprison people, and even do it well, if the truth be told. It’s a cruel, repressive vocation, for which certain aptitudes are necessary, do forgive me. Like, for example, being ready to beat someone else into submission, or destroy their personality through fear and threats… But they are socially and sadly necessary.”
“So who then?”
“The real bastards are the others: the self-appointed police, volunteer commissars, improvised persecutors, unpaid informers, amateur judges, all those who think they own the life, destiny and even the moral, cultural and historical purity of a country… They were the people who tried to finish off people like me, or poor Virgilio, and they succeeded, you know. Remember how in the last ten years of his life Virgilio never saw a single book of his published, nor a play performed, nor a study on his work published in any of those six magical provinces which suddenly became fourteen with a special municipality. And I was transformed into a ghost guilty because of my talent, my work, my tastes and my words. I was one huge malign tumour that had to be extirpated for the social, economic and political good of this beautiful, pre-eminent island. You see what I mean? And as it was so easy to parameterize me: whenever they measured me, whatever the angle, the result always came out the same: he’s no use, no use, no use…”
The Count recalled yet again the meeting in his headteacher’s office at school, when they were informed that La Viborena was an inappropriate, inopportune and unacceptable magazine and they had to recant ideologically and literary-wise.
“How did you find all that out?” he decided to ask, with a degree of historicist sadism, opening himself up to a flurry of darts poisoned with ironic resentment.
“I’ve worked at it and for a few years even enjoyed telling the story. And now it barely hurts, you know? But before… And why are you so interested in all this?”
“Curiosity pure and simple,” suggested the Count, unable to admit his real reasons. “I’d like to hear your version, right?”
“Well, I’ll tell you. They’d already suspended the works we were performing that had been advertised while I was rehearsing Electra Garrigo, when they called us to a meeting in the theatre one day. Everybody went, except me. I wasn’t prepared to go and listen to what I knew I’d have to listen to. But afterwards they told me how they got the people together in the entrance hall and called them in, one at a time, like at the dentist’s. You know what it’s like waiting for three or four hours in a dentist’s waiting room, hearing the drill and the cries of the people going in? Inside they’d put a table on the stage, where there was still part of the set for Yerma, with its mournful atmosphere, draped in black… There were four of them, a kind of inquisitional tribunal, and they’d put one of those enormous tape recorders on the table and told people how they’d sinned and asked them if they were ready to change their attitudes in the future, if they’d agree to engage in a process of rehabilitation, to work in places where they’d be sent. And almost everyone admitted to sinning, even added sins their accusers hadn’t mentioned, and bowed to the need for that purifying purge to cleanse their past and spirit of pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-critical tendencies… And I understood them, I really did, because many thought it was right such accusations were made and even felt guilty for not doing the things that they were told they ought to have done, and became the most vicious critics.. . of themselves. They called a kind of mass meeting afterwards: the protagonists were still behind the table on the stage with the people in the stalls. All the lights were on… You ever been to a theatre with the lights on? Have you seen how it loses all its magic and the whole world of artifice seems fake and meaningless? Then they talked about me, as the main person responsible for the theatre’s aesthetic policy. The first accusation made was that I was a homosexual who flaunted his condition, and they added that in their view homosexuality had a clearly anti-social, pathological character and that the accords negotiated to reject such manifestations of milksop softness or its propagation in a society like ours should be even more draconian. They were in a position to prevent ‘artistic quality’ (people insisted the guy talking opened and closed the quotation marks, as he smiled) being used as an excuse to circulate certain ideas and fashions which were corrupting our selfless youth. (It has to be said that the guy doing all the talking was a mediocrity who’d tried to make it as an actor but was never more than a poseur, and his reputation was down to the fact his was tiny and he was nicknamed Titch.) Nor would well-known homosexuals like me be allowed to influence the training of our youth, and for that reason they would assess (he said ‘carefully’, this time the quotation marks are mine) the involvement of homosexuals in cultural bodies, and relocate all those banned from having contact with the young, and they wouldn’t be allowed to leave the country in delegations representing Cuban art, because we were not and never could be true representatives of Cuban art.”
The Marquess sighed, as if releasing a great wave of exhaustion, and Mario Conde felt he was awaking from a long dream: through the dramatist’s words he’d entered a theatre of cruelty and heard the words of the protagonists wrapped in dense, real tragedy where destinies and lives were decided with a chilling sang-froid.
“I never imagined it being like that. I thought – ”
“Don’t think anything yet,” the Marquess snapped, his verbal hostility taking the policeman by surprise. “You wanted to hear the story? Well, let me go on, for the best is yet to come… Yes, because the aesthetic judgement came next: they said my work and productions attempted to transform elitism, extravagance, homosexuality and other social aberrations into a single aesthetic subject, for I had deviated from the path of purest aspirations through that philosophy of cruelty, the absurd and total theatre, and they wouldn’t allow me my ‘haughty arrogance’ (his quotation marks again, because it was a very useful textual quote) in apportioning myself the role of exclusive critic of Cuban history and society, at the same time as I abandoned the stage of real struggles and used the peoples of Latin America as themes for creations that turned them into the ones preferred by bourgeois theatres and imperialist publishing houses… I really don’t know what it all meant, but that’s what he said word for word, and he also said my person, my example and work were, as everybody acknowledged, incompatible with the new reality.. . And finally they took a vote. They asked everyone to raise their hands if they agreed that artists should join the struggle by criticizing harshly the horrors of the past and thus contribute with their work to the eradication of the traces of the old society still surviving into the period of the construction of socialism. The vote was unanimous. There was a vote against manifestations of elitism, namby-pambyism, hyper-criticism, escapism and petty-bourgeois remnants in art, which was also carried unanimously. They voted on everything you could possibly vote on, almost always with complete unanimity, until it came to the vote on whether I should stay in the theatre group, the same group I had founded, named and devoted my whole life to, and of the twenty-six present, twenty-four raised their hands, called for my expulsion, and two, only two, couldn’t stomach any more and left the theatre. Then they voted on whether those two should stay in, and they were expelled by twenty-four in favour with none against