Havana Red by Leonardo Padura

painter in the eye. “But we’ll be back, Salvador, and get this into your head: try to be straight, for I can see you’ve got a few numbers that might win you the jackpot. Good evening.”
    As the painter voiced his final protests, they went into the street and got into their car. Sergeant Manuel Palacios turned the first corner tightly.
    â€œSo the Transfiguration . . . Why did we leave, Conde? Didn’t you see how I’d got him?”
    The Count lit a cigarette and lowered the window.
    â€œSoftly, softly,” he urged his sergeant, and added, “What did you expect, that the man would say yes, he’s a bugger who took advantage of the other guy to sell his work and that last night he killed him because Alexis said his paintings were a load of shit? Don’t fuck around, Manolo, you extracted what there was to extract and he had nothing else . . . Let them check his blood group and investigate him at the Centre and in the studio he’s got on Twenty-First and Eighteenth,
and see if anyone saw him last night. Tell Headquarters to give you a couple of guys, better still if they’re Crespo and El Greco, and let me stay at home, for I’ve got a book I have to read. You get an early night, tomorrow we’ll go and see Faustino Arayán and ten other people . . . I’ll tell you this: you’re a much better policeman than I am . . . Pity you’re so skinny and sometimes go squint-eyed.”
    Â 
    The Count realized that while reading he couldn’t get out of his mind the image of the mask behind which Alexis Arayán hid, the closest he’d ever come to a transvestite. And that he was searching not only for explanations to a mystery, but to something definite: his desire to return to talk to Alberto Marqués. Each paragraph in his book became a weapon for a possible verbal duel with the Marquess, an idea with which to scale his heights and level the dialogue. It gave him a knowledge of the subject that would let him close in on that sordid business which had finally begun to attract him the way he preferred: as a challenge to his apathy and prejudice. Mario Conde the policeman was a bad case of idées fixes and the pursuit, in each case, of his own obsessions. And the story of that dead transvestite (perhaps symbolically transfigured into ephemeral significance) contained all the ingredients to fascinate him and lead him to its resolution. Consequently Alexis Arayán’s fake female face appeared at every moment as a graphic complement to the treatise on metamorphosis and bodily self-creation penned by Muscles, thanks to which various things were becoming clearer to the Count: cross-dressing was more vital and biological than the simple perverted exhibitionism of going into the street dressed as a woman, as he’d
always viewed it viscerally as a red-neck macho. Though he’d never been completely convinced, it was true, by the primary attitude of the transvestite who changes his physical appearance in order to enhance his pick-up rate. Pick up who? Heterosexual real men, with hairy chests and stinking armpits, would never knowingly tangle with a transvestite: they’d bed a female, but not that limited vision of woman, whose most desirable entry-point had been blocked off for good by the capricious lottery of nature. A passive homosexual, for his part, preferred one of those real men, because that was why they were homosexual and passive, for heaven’s sake. And an active homosexual, hidden behind his appearance of a real man – crudely put: a bugger, cultured archaic version: bougre — didn’t require that often obscene exaggeration to feel his sodomizing instincts aroused and penetrate per angostam viam .
    The book attempted a philosophical explanation of that contradiction: the problem, as the Count thought he saw it, wasn’t being, but appearance; wasn’t the act, but the performance; it wasn’t even an end, but