Havana Red by Leonardo Padura Page A

the means as its own end: the mask for the pleasure of the mask itself, concealment as supreme truth. That’s why he thought it logical to identify human cross-dressing and animal camouflage, not for the purposes of hunting or self-defence, but to fulfil one of the dreams eternally pursued by man: disappearance. Because it wasn’t likely, all in all, that the only meaning of such morphological transformation was capture of male prey, as with certain insects which vary their looks in order to simulate the aspect of attractive flowers loved by others who then fall bewildered into the lethal trap; nor was the disguise about deception, as with certain insects whose aggressive physique scares off possible
assailants. It was, on the contrary, the will to be masked and mistaken, to negate the negation and join the common tribe of women, which perhaps guided a transformism that could so often prove to be grotesque.
    But if erasure were the ultimate goal of cross-dressing, the practical results of the exercise had its equivalents in the animal world which one could compare – through a series of case-studies – with the sad destinies of those transvestites who were always found out despite all their efforts: the inevitable Adam’s apple, hands that had grown by natural design, a narrow pelvis, alien to any sign of maternity . . . The book quoted a study, carried out over forty-seven years, which demonstrated how birds’ stomachs contained as many camouflaged as non-camouflaged victims, according to the statistics recorded in the region. Was disguise then futile, vulnerable and without guarantees of safety? And Muscles concluded, quoting someone who must have known more than he did, that transvestites confirm only that “a law of pure disguise exists in the living world, a practice which consists in passing oneself off as somebody else, and that’s clearly documented, beyond debate, and cannot be reduced to a biological necessity derived from rivalry between the species or natural selection”. So then, what the hell was the big deal? All that simply to conclude that it was a simple game of appearances. No, that clearly could not be the case. But could it be entirely chance for a Catholic transvestite who moreover wasn’t a transvestite to transform himself on the day the liturgical calendar set as the date of the Transfiguration? It couldn’t be so, it must be a coincidence, it’s too recherché , thought the Count as he shut the book and looked through the window from which he could see the old English castle,
all white stone and red tiles brought from Chicago, which had risen up opposite the quarries, on the neighbourhood’s most prominent hill.
    He’d suddenly remembered poor Luisito the Indian, the only self-confessed little queer of his generation, there in his neighbourhood. He remembered how Luisito was treated as a kind of plague-carrier by the boys playing baseball, marbles and leapfrog among whom the Count grew up. Nobody liked him, nobody accepted him, and, more than once, several of them threw stones at Luisito until his mother, Domitila the mulatta, came out, broom in hand, to rescue him, cursing the mothers, the fathers and the whole lineage of his aggressors. Theirs were cruel attitudes and successive nicknames – Luisita, the first and longestlasting; Luisito the Duck; Rubber Bum (because of his abundant buttocks, already predestined for certain uses and abuses); and Cinnamon Flower, because of his Indian skin-colour – constant insults and a historical marginalization culturally decreed for all time: it’s his fault if he’s such a pansy, they said, as did the other mothers, who taught their children not to walk with that different, inverted, perverted boy, infected with the most abominable illness one could imagine. Nevertheless, the Count discovered that some of the stone-throwers who cursed him in public on certain propitious nights climbed the