“Whenever, my prince,” the Marquess replied, and only then did he lower his arms.
“One last question, and forgive me if I’m being indiscreet… What were your feelings towards Alexis Arayan?”
The Marquess looked towards the empty room.
“Pity. Yes. He was too fragile to live in this cruel world. I also loved him.”
“And why do you think he dressed in Electra Garrigo’s costume?”
The Marquess seemed to ponder a moment, and the Count hoped to hear something that might clear up that whole business at a single stroke.
“Because it was a very pretty dress, and Alexis was queer. Do you need any other reason?”
“But he wasn’t a transvestite…”
The Marquess smiled, as if he’d given up.
“Ay, you’ve understood nothing.”
“That’s my lot recently: I never understand anything.”
“Look, don’t think I’m interfering, because I know who I can interfere with… But as I see the subject interests you so… Why not accompany me to a party tonight where you might see some transvestites and other most fascinating people?…”
High on nostalgia, the Count surveyed the unchanging landscape spread before him from his office window: crests of trees, a church belfry, the top floors of several tower-blocks, and the eternal, challenging promise of the sea, always in the background, always beyond reach, like the damned presence of water everywhere which the Marquess’s poet friend talked about so much. He appreciated the bucolic, solicitous landscape framed by the window, now diffused with the flat, harsh August light, because it allowed him to think and, above all, remember, and wasn’t he just one hell of a rememberer. And he recalled how much he’d wanted to devote himself to literature and be a real writer, in the ever more distant days of school and the first years of his unfinished university degree. He felt that Alberto Marques, possessed by certain Mephistophelian powers, had stirred that occasional ambition, which he used to think he’d definitively left behind but which, at the slightest provocation, returned to obsess him like a recurring virus he’d never really been cured of. Mario Conde felt that that premature pang, which had stung him, perhaps only worked as a wily move on the part of his consciousness to unload in someone else’s port a guilt that was only his: he’d never seriously applied himself, perhaps because the only real truth was that he was unable to write anything (that was both squalid and moving). He’d always thought he’d wanted to write stories about ordinary people, without grand passions or terrific adventures, small lives that pass through the world without leaving a single trace on the earth’s face but who carry on their backs the fantastic burden of living from day to day. When he thought of his literary preferences, and read Salinger, Hemingway’s stories, a few nineteenth-century novels, and books by Sartre and Camus, he still thought yes, it was possible, it might be possible. Was it an exhibitionist urge? he wondered, when he didn’t know whether he should regret an impulse to sincerity that had made him confess to the dramatist his eternally deferred artistic instincts, so inappropriate in someone professionally dedicated to repression and not creation, to sordid truths, not sublime fantasies. .. Smiles and sniggers, the only response he got from the Marquess, who’d carried on sniffing the non-existent scent from a bougainvillea, now riled him like a poor joke. Nevertheless, the stories that man kept teasing him with went beyond the limits of any prejudice, and he could no longer see him simply as that shitty queer he’d gone to meet barely twenty-four hours earlier. I’ll be fucked, he told himself, as he heard the door opening to allow the awaited figure of Sergeant Manuel Palacios to become a tangible reality.
“Why did you take so long, man?”
Sergeant Palacios flopped down in his chair and the Count was afraid it would come apart. Who the hell ever accepted him in the force? It must have been the same lunatic who recruited me.
“Let me get my breath. The lift’s broken down again.”
The Count glanced back at his landscape with sea, and bid farewell, until they next met.
“Well, what happened?”
“Nothing, Conde, I had to wait for Alexis’s boss. And I think I was right to because the waters are muddying.”
Sergeant Palacios took a deep breath before he spoke.
“Alexis was no longer with Salvador K. His boss at the Centre, one Alejandro Fleites, who also looks like one great queer, says Alexis and Salvador had cooled off recently and that he twice saw Alexis with a mulatto who works at the Film Institute, a guy called Rigofredo Lopez. You can imagine the kind of hulk… And he says someone told him, you know what they’re like, that Rigofredo and Salvador K. had a row in Alexis’s office. Fleites’s conclusion: jealousy. Then I went to the Film Institute and discovered Rigofredo’s been in Venezuela for the last ten days… What do you make of this can of worms?”
The Count sat back in his chair and only then asked:
“So what did he tell you about Alexis?”
“Little that’s new… That he was a hard worker, that he got on with painters very well, that he was very cultured and that he couldn’t imagine him dressed in red in the Havana Woods. Also that he was very shy and screwed up…”
“What about the Bible?”
“The Bible? Hell, yes, the Bible…” He paused for a long time as if his thoughts were elsewhere and then said, “Here it is,” and searched in the briefcase he’d put on the floor.
“Give it me, give it me,” demanded the Count, looking for the Gospels on the contents page.
St Matthew started on page 971 and, according to Father Mendoza, the Transfiguration episode was in chapter 17. He skimmed the tops of the pages till he reached chapter 16 and then 19, in a fatal leap which caught him by surprise like a cry for help. He then looked among the pages and discovered what was missing: the sheet with pages 989 and 990, where chapters 17 and 18 of Matthew ought to be.
“I knew it, for fuck’s sake, Alexis was thinking about the Transfiguration… Look at this, the page where it happens isn’t there. Let me see if it’s missing in the others.”
The Count slowly embarked on his quest for the verses in Mark and Luke, discovering that both had all their pages, and he found the story of the Transfiguration in Mark, chapter 9: “And his raiment became shining, exceeding white as snow; so as no fuller on earth can white them.” And also in Luke 9: “And as he prayed, the fashion of his countenance was altered, and his raiment was white and glistering.”
“Where was the Bible, Manolo?”
“In Alexis’s desk. In the unlocked bottom drawer.”
“And people knew it was there?”
“Well, his boss says he didn’t know… You didn’t tell me.. .”
“Not to worry. The problem is someone tore out the missing page. And look at this: he did it very carefully, you don’t notice the tear, do you? It was probably Alexis himself… Can you imagine what this means?”
“That there was something written there.”
“Something that annoyed or endangered someone, and that someone tore the page out. Or, if not, it meant something special for this boy and that’s why he decided to take it out himself. And if that was the case, it clarifies a lot for us, Manolo: the bastard was mad and transfigured himself in order to enter his own Calvary. I’ll bet my buttocks on it.”
“Hey, I’d bet something else if I were you. I think certain influences aren’t good for you… But remember Salvador knew the Bible was there.”
“You think it was him?”
“I don’t know, but I’d bring him in and tighten his ‘K’ into a ‘Q’ .”
“I’m not so sure, Manolo… If it was him, why would he mention the Bible? No, I don’t think Salvador is so stupid as to appear guilty of something so serious and be that guilty person into the bargain. What do you reckon?… Now I’ve got to talk to the Boss. Wait here.”