Havana Red by Leonardo Padura Page B

second rung of their sexual initiation via Luisito’s promiscuous arse; after experimenting with she-goats and sows, they tried Luisito’s dark hole, in the darkest tunnels of the quarry. And as none of them would ever admit to ancillary kisses and caresses to raise the temperature (you know, that’s really poofish, they’d argue when talking about these incidents), for all who made it, the relationship with Luisito was forwarded as proof of virility
reached at penis point . . . Luisito was; they weren’t: as if homosexuality were only defined by the acceptance of the flesh of others in female fashion. Later, when they started to have girlfriends and stopped playing baseball and leapfrogging on the street corners in the neighbourhood, they forgot Luisito and Luisito forgot them: then the boy began to cruise La Rampa and El Prado, in the company of other youthful inverts like himself, in flocks which sidled slowly and tetchily, like La Florida Park ducks, in search of welcoming lakes in which to splash, until in 1980, thanks to his undeniable homosexual condition, and hence as an anti-social, expendable dreg, he was allowed peacefully to board a launch in the port of Mariel and leave for the United States. The last news the Count had received of Luisito the Indian were two photographs which circulated in the neighbourhood, describing a before and an after, like Charles Atlas: in one he was sitting on a shiny sofa – both Luisito and the pearl pink sofa were most pansyish, Luisito with his high-lighted eyebrows and bouffant hair; in the other, on the same sofa, sat a rather fat, uglyish mulatta, who was none other than Louise Indira, a woman surgically transformed, the only recognized queer of his generation, there in the neighbourhood. And the Count wondered if Luisito the Indian had ever had any philosophical or psychonatural principles first to sustain his homosexuality, and second to carry through his irreversible transfiguration. Or could it simply be that from childhood he’d felt an irrepressible desire to dress up in lace and play with dolls, which would later lead to an obsession for slotting things in his backside?
    The Count moved away from the window and his memories as he felt the jungle call of his entrails galvanized by so much inactivity. The evening was
drawing to a close and apart from two dark, evillooking fish, which had absconded to the back of his fridge, he had no other edible products on the home front. He looked at his watch: seven forty-five, and dialled a telephone number.
    â€œIt’s me, Jose.”
    â€œOf course it’s you, Condesito.”
    â€œI’m really hungry.”
    â€œWhy you’re ringing me so late? You never change . . . But you’re in luck, because I got into a state looking for stuff here and there, and started late. Let’s see what I can rustle up.”
    â€œAnything will do.”
    â€œShut up, I’m thinking. I’ve got red beans on the stove and I was choosing the rice . . . Come round then, I’ve had an idea.”
    Â 
    â€œIt’s paisa mix,” Josefina announced, and her eyes shone with pride and satisfaction the way Archimedes must have looked just before he got out of his bath.
    Skinny Carlos and the Count, like two rather dim-witted pupils, were listening to the woman’s explanation. Feigning surprise was part of the ritual: the impossible would become possible, dreams reality, and then their Cuban longing for food would suddenly transgress any frontier of reality measured by quotas, ration-books and irremediable shortages, thanks to a magical trick only Josefina was capable of performing.
    â€œMy uncle Marcelo, who you know was once a sailor, fell in love in Cartagena de las Indias and lived in Colombia for several years. But the woman was paisa , as they call people from Medellín, and she taught him to prepare paisa mix, as Marcelo calls, or called it, may he rest in peace, the poor guy,