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at the root by a clumsy, furious hand, which scored the flesh, pulled at it, sawed at it, till the entire masculinity of a man who’d returned from the beyond was severed. His body was finally thrown into that turbid sea, a possible offering to certain lethal gods, at a spot where water black with shit, urine, vomit and menstruation issued forth from the city to which Miguel Forcade had returned quite unsuspecting he would never leave it again.
    The Count and Major Rangel exchanged looks of disgust: the infinite cruelty of that murder smacked of enraged sacrifice, livid revenge perhaps years in the planning and finally executed when oblivion had apparently buried for ever the unpredictable source of a hatred unleashed now like an October cyclone on the tropics.
    And they thought: Miguel Forcade Mier must have died from some ancient crime; perhaps from his time
as a repossessor of expropriated goods, when so much wealth abandoned by the Cuban bourgeoisie running for cover with such a hue and cry was confiscated in the name of the people and its government, who should now own everything. Furniture, jewels, works of art, coins ancient and modern, accumulated over more than two centuries by a dialectically defeated social class, had now to pass through the hands of the Official Expropriator charged with the mission of assigning them a more just destiny. Would he always do that? Logic began to suggest not: the bewildering temptations offered by those historically doomed fortunes might have corrupted the vanguard ideology of the man who almost thirty years later, the sign of a traitor cut into his forehead, would die castrated. One could imagine that a part of those recycled riches, minimal no doubt but very valuable (say a Degas that never reappeared, a Greek amphora lost to an oblivious Mediterranean, a Roman bust lost to memory, or collection of Byzantine coins never again exchanged by merchant owners of every temple there ever was?), passed through his hands with the promise of a revolutionary redistribution that never happened and that he perhaps finally paid for in that death of blood, wood and iron . . . But, why was it necessary to castrate him?
    Although the crime may not have been that distant or remarkable, perhaps it was no less forgettable for a memory perversely trapped by the physical or moral consequences of that sin: Miguel Forcade Mier had later climbed the ladder of power via the technocratic route, under the hospitable shadow of five-year plans imported from Asian steppes littered with efficient kolkhoses and sovkhoses – neither the Count nor the Major could remember the difference – infallible
German Democratic economic organization, so perfect it seemed eternal, transplanted to an underdeveloped, one-crop Caribbean island that was nevertheless ready – or so it was often said – to make the great leap into a veritable socialist economic miracle . . . That power wielded by the National Office for Planning and the Economy was no small power: there passed through the hands of the man who would become a sexless cadaver with fish-eaten eyes decisions on trade and people’s lives, on the investment of millions and possibilities for collective and individual futures, the authority to give, to move, to place, take away and defer, from almost Olympian heights. But Miguel Forcade had leaped fatally into exile from that brilliant National Office, at the peak of its glory though soon to sink to depths of infamy, for no apparent overriding motive: they never discovered what had impelled him to defect, for he was never heard to express sentiments in public, like those usually voiced by people at his level: they always fled a dictatorship, aspired to freedom and democracy, no longer wished to be accomplices, now they had seen . . . And how did he ruin the life of whoever at the time, so ruthlessly his victim never found the peace of oblivion or balm of forgiveness?
    The origins of such a perverse