Read Havana Red for Free Online Page B

policeman? He lit his cigarette and puffed the smoke in the direction of his interlocutor.
    â€œYou may drop your ash on the floor, Mr Policeman.”
    â€œLieutenant Mario Conde.”
    â€œYou may drop your ash on the floor, Mr Policeman Lieutenant Mario Conde,” the man said, and the Count demurred. You’ll get it from me, you wanking pansy, he thought.
    â€œAnd what else do you know?”
    Alberto Marqués shrugged his shoulders, as he shut his eyes and released another sonorous sigh.
    â€œWell . . . that he was strung up. Ah, my God, the poor dearie.”

    Perhaps the man was really upset, thought the Count, before going on the offensive.
    â€œNo, technically, he was strangled. His neck was pressed tight till the oxygen was cut off. With a red silk sash. And you know he was dressed like a woman, all in red, with a shawl and the whole works?”
    Alberto Marqués had let go of the chair arms and his right hand rubbed his face from cheek to chin. Touché , concluded the Count.
    â€œDressed like a woman? In a red dress? One as long as an old bathrobe?”
    â€œYes,” replied the Count, “what can you tell me about that? Because I already know it was this house he left yesterday.”
    â€œYes, he left here at about seven, but I swear I saw him just before and he wasn’t dressed like Electra Garrigó.”
    Â 
    The feast in Paris is never over, and everyone who has lived there retains distinct memories . . . And it’s so true, though Hemingway said it first, and he was the century’s most egocentric, narcissistic writer. My memories of Paris are a nostalgia in blue I’ve not managed to throw off in twenty years. Because when I arrived in Paris, in April 1969, a painfully beautiful spring had just begun and it made you want to do something to be happier, if happiness exists, to be more intelligent and all-encompassing, or be freer, if freedom exists, or could ever exist. And I remember feeling the magic of an affectionate, almost velvety sun bathing the Champs-Elysées, the grand Napoleonic palaces, the frivolous cafés, and I better understood what had happened the year before. I still feel the afternoon light on the rose-window of Notre-Dame’s
façade like a caress on my skin, and hear the dark, historic sound of the Seine by the Cité, and that black organ-grinder in front of the Louvre making his little African monkey dance to the tune of a Viennese waltz. I also remember the Rolling Stones concert when they tried to out-rebel the Beatles, and they were only two hundred yards away from me, under a cold sky of a Paris spring, among shrieking, liberated French blondes, daughters who’d aborted and mothers newly born of the revolution that might have been and was not, although after that month of May the world would never be the same again, because the revolution had been made: the revolution in customs and morality, the twentieth-century’s permanent revolution that Lev Davidovich Bronstein, alias Leon Trotsky, never imagined. I remember each day, each minute, each conversation with Jean-Paul Sartre and the inevitable Simone de Beauvoir, dinners with George Plimpton while he interviewed me for the Paris Review , researching the life, sensitive madness and papers of Antonin Artaud for an edition under contract of The Theatre and Its Double , the nostalgia I acquired upon the death of a Camus whom I never met yet always knew so well, the re-encounter, guided by the eyes and footsteps of Néstor Almendros, with the real sets of so much French cinema, and the pursuit, on the arm of my friend Cortázar, of the archaeological sites of pre-war jazz, cherished in bars like miraculous grottoes . . . I remember it all because it would be my last trip to Paris, if not my last tango, and memory anticipated history and sage memory knowingly manufactured its own self-defence and tucked away each happy moment of my last trip to Paris as if it