The praise provoked by the Marquess’s presence lasted more than ten minutes, until gradually the chorus deserted and picked up cushions, and the dramatist took his nearest listener by the hand and led him to the Count, signalling to him not to get up.
“Look, Alquimio,” he said, and the policeman thus discovered he was his host at that party, “this is my friend, the Count… He is a regrettably heterosexual writer and also knew Alexis…”
“Pleased to meet you,” said Alquimio, extending a gentle hand which slipped on the runaway moisture of the Count’s. “If you’re a friend of the Marquess, you’re a friend of mine and everything in this house is yours. Even me… Tell me, what would you like to drink?”
“Give him rum, my boy,” interrupted the Marquess. “As he reckons he’s a creole macho…” and he smiled as he lurched round and swayed towards a corner where a lad with the face of a fresh fish seemed to be expecting him.
“I’ll get you a rum right away, Conde. Do you want it in a glass or a goblet?” Alquimio asked, and the Count shrugged his shoulders: in such cases the content, not the container, were what mattered. Then his smiley host also went off, but in the direction of what must be the kitchen. Meanwhile someone had put on some music, and the Count heard Maria Bethania’s voice and assumed she must be a regular visitor to the scene. From the metaphysical, objective solitude of his cushion he could concentrate on scrutinizing aspects of the party: there were more men than women and despite the music nobody danced, they conversed in groups or couples, always changing their place or composition, as if perpetual movement were part of the ritual. It was as if they had itchy behinds and couldn’t keep still, the Count concluded. On his visual tour the policeman alighted on various oily glances directed his way, dispatched by pansies of the languishing type who seemed to lament his immaculate heterosexuality, just proclaimed by the Marquess. The Count surprised himself by taking out a cigarette in would-be Bogartian style, as if he wanted to raise his stock in that pink market: he felt desired, with all the accompanying ambiguity, and was enjoying that fatal attraction. Am I turning into a queer? he wondered, as a green goblet, cheerfully brimming with rum, appeared before his eyes.
Sparrow bun smiled as she gave him his drink, and crossed her legs as she stood there before falling in yoga position on the cushion that had mysteriously appeared in front of the Count.
“So you’re hetero?” she asked, examining him like a strange beast on the endangered list.
“Nobody is perfect,” quoted the Count, and took a long swig that he felt circulate from mouth to stomach and from stomach to blood, like a necessary liberating transfusion.
“I’m Polly, Alquimio’s niece,” she said, as her fingers combed back the fringe falling over her forehead.
“And I’m the Count, though not of Monte Cristo.”
Polly smiled. She must have been in her twenties and wore a purple baby-doll outfit from a sixties movie. She also wore round her neck a cameo brooch tied to a purple ribbon (from which movie did that come?), and though she wasn’t pretty or a bundle of visible fleshly charms, she belonged to the category of beddable item of the first order, according to the Count’s devalued erotic requirements.
“What do you write?”
“Me? The odd short story.”
“How interesting. And are you postmodern?”
The Count looked at the girl, surprised by that unexpected aesthetic interpolation: should he be postmodern?
“More or less,” he responded, trusting to postmodernity and hoping she wouldn’t ask how much more or less.
“I like painting, you know, and I’m really a mad postmodern queen.”
“No kidding,” the Count said and finished his rum.
“God, you’re terrible, you really gulp it down… Give me your glass. I’ll get you a refill.”
The Marquess waved to him from his corner. He was still there, the fish on his pedestal, and seemed happy with life, in the shadow of the blond locks he’d restored to a sparsely populated pate.
“Here you are,” said Polly, and now his glass was full to the brim.
“Thanks. And are you hetero?”
She smiled again. Hers were a sparrow’s teeth, tiny and sharp.
“Almost always,” she confessed and the Count gulped. Could she be a transvestite? With that little bun? “The fact is, if a person wants to reach their potential, all their bodily potential, they must try a homosexual relationship at least once. Hasn’t the Marquess told you that?”
“No. He knows I follow a macho-Stalinist line.”
“Your choice… But you’re lacking something very important in life.”
“I’ve managed so far. Don’t you worry. Hey, did you know Alexis?”
She stroked her cameo and sighed: “What they did to him was horrible. The poor boy. He never harmed anybody, did he?… Others are more violent and go too far with men, the types who go prospecting in lavatories and such like. But he didn’t. I’m a would-be painter, as I told you I think? And I liked talking to him, when he came to see my uncle. He knew heaps about painting, particularly Italian painting.. . And when I talked to him he said his problem was that he really fell in love and couldn’t stand changing partners every other day.”
“But they’re into lots of changes, aren’t they?”
“Yes, not many have very long relationships, which was what he wanted. He was more a woman than a man, a woman in the head, you know what I mean?”
“No, I don’t think I do.”
“Well, he’d have liked to live in a house with a man, as if he were his husband, and nobody else’s, and just be that man’s wife. Do you get me now?”
“More or less. What I don’t understand is why he walked down the street dressed as a woman, as if he’d gone searching for a man.”
“Yes, that’s very odd, because he was really quite a prude. And I should tell you the real transvestites are scared stiff now because they say this might be the start of a serial lynching. But that must be them being hysterical.”
“So they’re hysterical?”
“Transvestites? Completely. As they want to be women and there’s no woman who isn’t hysterical. But Alexis wasn’t, I don’t think he was hysterical, though he was a champion manic depressive…”
“Polly,” the Count then took a risk, “you know, I’d like to write about this scene. Tell me a bit about the people here today.”
She smiled again, she could always put on a smile and look ingenuous. “Anyone would think you were police.”
The Count had recourse to all his powers of bluff: “And you’re like a postmodern sparrow.”
A gentle titter followed that left Polly’s brow resting on the Count’s knee. No, of course she’s not a transvestite, he tried to persuade himself.
“My God, it’s horrible, there’s a bit of everything here,” she said, looking the policeman in the eye, as if making a confession.
And the Count discovered that in that room in Old Havana, on first evidence, there were men and women who had made their mark because they were: militants on behalf of free love, of nostalgia trips, or of red, green and yellow parties, ex-dramatists with and without oeuvre, writers with ex-libris but never published, queers of every tendency and leaning: queens – drags on full beam and the perverted sort – luckless little duckies, hunters expert at high-flying prey, buggers on their own account who give it in the arse at home and go into the countryside if there’s horse on offer, inconsolably disconsolate souls and disconsolate souls in search of consolation, A-I cocksuckers with ass-holes sewn up for fear of Aids, and even freshly matriculated apprentices in the Academy of Pedagogy in Homosexuality, the chief tutor being none other than uncle Alquimio, winners of national and international ballet competitions, prophets of the end of time, history and the ration book; nihilists converted to Marxism and Marxists converted to shit, every kind of chip on the shoulder: sexual, political, economic, psychological, social, cultural, sporting and electronic; practising Zen Buddhists, Catholics, witches, voodoists, Islamists, santeria animists, a Mormon and two Jews, a pitcher from the Industriales team who pitches and bats with either hand; fans of Pablo Milanes and enemies of Silvio Rodriguez, expert oracles who know who will be the next Nobel Prize for Literature as well as Gorbachev’s secret intentions, the last pretty boy adopted as nephew by the Famous Person in the Higher Echelons, or the price of a pound of coffee in Baracoa; seekers after temporary or permanent visas, dreamers, femmes and hommes, hyper-realists, abstract artists and socialist realists who’d renegued on their aesthetic past; a Latinist; the repatriated and the patriotic; people expelled from everywhere one can be expelled from; a blind man who saw, disillusioned and deceivers, opportunists and philosophers, feminists and optimists, followers of Lezama (frankly the vast majority), disciples of Virgilio, Carpentier, Marti and one adept of Anton Arrufat; Cubans and foreigners; singers of boleros; breeders of fighting dogs, alcoholics, rheumatics, dogmatists and head-cases; smokers and non-smokers; and one macho-Stalinist heterosexual.