When the policeman lifted the canvas, the photographer took his chance to snap another picture, as if still needing to record that precise angle on the death of a carnivalesque creature who, according to his identity card, went by the name of Alexis Arayan Rodriguez. Now he was a red bundle, two pale protruding white legs, their muscles tensed, in violent contrast with the sun-scorched grass. A purple, puffy female face topped the body. A red silk sash of death was pulled tight round his neck.
The Count lowered his arm and the policeman, bored out of his mind, dropped the canvas. The Count took out a cigarette and Sergeant Manuel Palacios asked him for another. The Count gave him one reluctantly: Manuel Palacios said he didn’t smoke but, really, what he never did was buy his own. The Count looked towards the river.
In the morning, under the leafy canopy of the Havana Woods, one lived the illusion that the city’s luck was in and summer had lost its way. A pleasant breeze, carrying the dark odours of the river, rustled the branches of poplar trees and arrogant carobs, of almond trees that opened out like circus tents and of oleanders, laced with delicate lianas that criss-crossed to form hanging plaits. The Count remembered how, as a boy, he’d been to several birthday parties in the arbours in the woods that were hired out, on the other side of the bridge, and that once, aping a Tarzan hanging from the lianas in the oleanders, he’d scuffed on a stone new orthopaedic boots his mother had given him to wear to the party. The two accusing furrows on the black leather of his annual pair of new shoes earned him a week of punishment, no watching television, no listening to the episodes of the Guaytabo series, no playing baseball. The Count had never forgotten because it was precisely the week Guaytabo the Indian met old Apolinar Matias in Anatolio the Turk’s tyre-repair shop and initiated their indestructible friendship as strugglers on behalf of justice against evil. And he’d missed that memorable encounter.
The Count looked towards the river and reflected how fortunate it was that people were still thieving, murdering, assaulting, embezzling in the city, ever more enthusiastically, for it was his personal salvation. Terrible, but true: that death by strangling the forensic doctor was now trying to explain to Detective Lieutenant Mario Conde and his aide, Sergeant Manuel Palacios, had enabled him to fight off the void and feel that his brain was working again, and that it had more to its existence than headaches from repeated hangovers.
“What do you reckon, Conde? Yes, it’s a man. Dressed and face-painted like a woman. Now we’ve got murdered transvestites, we’re almost part of the developed world. At this rate we’ll soon be making rockets and going to the moon…”
“Cut the crap and continue,” said the Count, throwing his cigarette butt in the direction of the river. Sometimes he liked to speak like that and this forensic, for a reason as elusive as it was inevitable, always made him react curtly. Perhaps it was just his easy familiarity with death.
“I’ll go on, but I’m not talking crap…” the forensic retorted and, as he listened, the Count tried to imagine the scene.
He saw Alexis Arayan, a woman without all the gifts of nature, tarted up in red, wearing a long, antiquated dress, her shoulders draped in a shawl that was also red, her waist emphasized by a silk sash, walking out with someone in the starry night of the Havana Woods. The Count reckoned a breeze was blowing, and the night must have been more appealing and welcoming than in the rest of the city. The footprints preserved from Alexis’s sandals signalled the journey from road to woods. The other footprints belonged to her companion, a corpulent man, who must have leered at Arayan’s face in eager anticipation: her finely drawn eyebrows, eyelids with pale purple highlights, mascara’d eyelashes and a mouth as gorgeously red as that strange dress which belonged to a vague, doubtless, distant past. Perhaps there were kisses, teasing gropes, caresses from Alexis Arayan Rodriguez’s delicate fingers and varnished nails. Then they stopped by the battered trunk of a hundred-year-old blossoming flamboyant tree, and a tragedy of equivocal love was unleashed.
“You know something?” Conde interrupted the forensic’s narrative and looked over towards the covered corpse. “Yesterday was the sixth of August, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, and so what?” the forensic now interjected.
“So you lot can see the benefits of going to catechism… August sixth is the Catholic celebration of the Transfiguration. According to the Bible, on that day Jesus was transformed before three of his disciples on Mount Tabor, and, from a cloud of light, God called on the apostles to listen to him for ever. Isn’t it too much of a coincidence that this transvestite was murdered on August sixth?”
Sergeant Palacios folded his arms over his undernourished pigeon chest (he was only palatial by name) and looked at the Count. The lieutenant enjoyed that glance where a timid, squint-eyed hesitancy lurked: he knew he’d surprised his skeletal subordinate, and his subordinate liked him surprising him like that.
“And how the fuck do you remember that, Conde? As far as I know you’ve not been inside a church for thirty years or more.”
“Less, Manolo, less. The truth is I always liked that story: in catechism classes I always imagined God in his cloud, illuminating everything, like a spotlight…”
“Hey there, Conde, and what if Alexis disguised himself day in day out?” asked the forensic, smiling triumphantly at his question and prompting the Count to think of other reasons for his aversion.
“Then end of mystery,” the Count admitted. “But it would be a pity, wouldn’t it? The transfiguration of Alexis Arayan… sounded good. Well, on with your story.”
He saw them halt under the flamboyant tree. A glimmering moonbeam sweetly pierced the foliage, lending a silvery hue to the big man and fake woman, a couple on whom the breeze rained down a shower of red petals. Perhaps they kissed, perchance they caressed, and Alexis kneeled, like a penitent, surely intending to satisfy his companion’s urgent need with his nearest available orifice: the grass patches on his knees betrayed such genuflection. Then he plunged into the finale of the tragedy: at some moment the red silk sash went from Alexis’s waist to his neck and the big man mercilessly terminated the breathing of the woman who wasn’t, until her heavily made-up eyes bulged out of their sockets and every sphincter opened its floodgates, dislocation by strangulation.
“And this is what I can’t square, Conde. The big guy killed him from in front, judging by the footprints, right? But it appears the transvestite didn’t struggle, didn’t scratch, didn’t try to wriggle. ..”
“So there was no fight?”
“If there was, it was a battle of words. The dead man’s nails don’t carry any traces of anything, although I’ll provide a conclusive report later… But now comes the second mystery: the murderer began dragging the corpse that way, look at the grass, do you see? As if to throw him in the river… But barely moved him two yards. Why didn’t he throw him in the river if that was what first came to mind?”
The Count observed the grass where the forensic was pointing and the canvas which now covered Alexis Arayan’s body and hid the patch of red cloth that had so alarmed the early morning jogger, who’d departed his daily route only to discover a corpse already crawling with ants which had rushed to the magnificent banquet.
“But the strangest of all is yet to come: after killing the transvestite, the big man pulled her knickers down and inspected her anus with his fingers… I know because he wiped himself clean on the gown afterwards. What do you make of that, lads? Well, that’s as far as I can take my little tale. When they do the autopsy and finish the other tests in the laboratory, perhaps we’ll have more to go on. Now I’ll be off, downtown, as there’s been another little murder in Old Havana…”