Read Online Havana Red by Leonardo Padura - Free Book Online Page B

of all, the guy had to suffer a ten-year sentence of silence and solitude. Perhaps of the two hundred worshippers he has now, four or five carried on seeing him after he was destroyed, with all that stuff about queers, ideological deviants and idealists and foreignizers and the trip on socialist realism and art as ideological weapon in the political struggle . . . They took the guy out of circulation and sent him to run some bookshop or other, I’m not sure. Bloody hell: a stack of years without a single line of his published in the paltriest magazine, critics were banned from mentioning him when they wrote about the theatre, he disappeared from anthologies and even from dictionaries of writers. Straight: he no longer existed. He crumpled in the air, whooosh! not because he’d died or left the country, which amounts to the same thing. No. But because he was forced to change his routines. He became famous in the queue
for bananas, and the queue for bread, at the Policlinic and milk stand . . . It’s terrible, right? But almost nobody talks about the kind of queer he was and still is. Do you know the story about the rent-a-blacks? Well, you know, it’s amazing. The gist is he was talking to a black bugger and saying he’d pay him to fuck him, but on one condition: he’d have to take him by surprise, so it would be more exciting. And he told the big black guy to enter his house and rape him one day that week. Then he’d settle down to read, every day at that time, until lo! one day the black came and he started to run around the house and the black chased after him, and he shouted and hid and the black finally grabbed him, took his clothes off and bang! gave it him from behind. You heard of anything more poofy? And the stories about when he went beautiful boy-hunting in the street . . . and a thousand similar stories. He was a queer and a half! But do you want me to tell you what’s truer than all this, truer than all his queer business, his being annihilated, his betrayal by his old girlies, or the way they worship him now? Do you want me to? Well, the truth is that that queer who shits himself when anyone shouts after him has got balls down to his ankles. He took it like a man and stayed here, because he knew if he’d left the island he’d have died for sure, so he didn’t play anybody’s game: he shut his gob and bolted himself in at home . . . I wish I’d got half the spunk that queen’s got . . . Fuck, get on your way, you motherfucker, my poetess is coming round the corner. You know what this crazy woman calls me? Mickey Rourke, hey, that’s neat! I’ll be fucked, not a drop of rum left. This lousy place!

    The Count plunged into Seventeenth Street with a bad taste in his mouth – and it wasn’t the rum’s fault – prow pointing seawards and hull battened down so as not to be over-awed by the galling sumptuousness, apparently oblivious to the test of time and other erosions, of those palaces which had one day expressed the pride of a class at the height of its creative splendour and given the street the nickname from time immemorial of Millionaires’ Row. The success of those extremely rich men – who couldn’t get over their shock at being so flush, by merely hitting the three buttons of political, financial or even smuggling bravado – needed visual confirmation so badly that they insisted on giving their fortunes eternal form, and hired all the necessary talents to perpetuate the triumphs they glorified in stone, wrought iron and glass, throwing up the most dazzling mansions in the whole city. Immersed in the afternoon reveries of an aimlessly wandering mariner, he didn’t even ponder how it was possible to live in a forty-roomed house or what one might feel seeing the dawn through the panes of glass that went into that stained-glass window of St George and the dragon or the tropical glade on a gigantic skylight, bearing