“Good afternoon,” said Maria Antonia as she opened the door.
The policemen greeted her and the Count told her he wanted to speak to her and Alexis’s parents.
“Why?” asked the woman, who’d switched on her alarm lights.
“About the medallions…”
“But the fact is,” she began and sirens followed lights: imminent danger, the Count registered.
“They don’t know you found it?”
The black woman nodded.
“But they have to be told… That medallion can tell us a lot about Alexis’s death.”
She nodded again and beckoned them in.
“Mrs Matilde is the one at home.”
“And comrade Faustino?”
“He’s at the Foreign Ministry. On Monday he was to leave for Geneva, but the mistress is still so edgy…” she added, and the Count and Manolo saw Maria Antonia, the woman with winged feet, skim the floor as she flew into the house, after pointing them towards the big leather armchairs in the ante-room.
“We’ll put the screws on her, Conde.”
“Don’t you worry, this black lady knows more than me and you.. .”
Matilde looked a very sick old woman. In the three days since the Count had informed her of her son’s death, the woman seemed to have lived twenty destructive years, devoted daily to tarnishing the veneer of vitality she’d preserved. She greeted them sleepily, and sat in another of the armchairs while Maria Antonia stood there, as her status as a submissive maid demanded. The Count again felt he was in the middle of a theatrical performance too much like a pre-packaged reality where everyone had their role and seat assigned. The Great Theatre of the World, what nonsense. The Tragedy of Life, yet more nonsensical. Life is a dream?
“Now then, Matilde,” Manolo began, and it was evident he found the conversation difficult, “we’ve found out something from Maria Antonia that may be very important for our work, though equally it may be quite irrelevant… Do you follow?”
Matilde barely moved her head. Of course she couldn’t follow, thought the Count, but he decided to wait. Manuel Palacios had canine instincts and always got back on the trail. Then the sergeant told her about Maria Antonia’s find and added his own conclusion: “If that medallion is yours and Alexis hid it there, well, there’s no problem. But if it’s your son’s, we think it might clear up certain things.. .”
“Which, for example?” asked the woman, apparently awaking from hibernation.
“Well, it’s all supposition, but if he put your medallion there, perhaps he was thinking of committing suicide and didn’t want it to be lost… Although there’s another possibility, which is less likely: that someone else put it there…”
“When?”
“Perhaps after Alexis’s death,” Manolo Palacios answered, and the Count looked at him. I shit on your mother, the lieutenant then said to himself, surprised by that strange possibility he hadn’t envisaged. Might the murderer have hidden the medallion there? No, of course not, the Count tried to tell himself, although he knew it was an option. But why?
“What’s all this about, Tona?” Matilde then asked, barely turning towards the black woman. Striking a dramatic pose, Maria Antonia recounted her discovery, very early this morning, and her call to Alberto Marques. Matilde turned to look at her, and finally said, “Please bring me the medallion.”
Maria Antonia glided into the house, while Matilde looked at the two policemen.
“They weren’t exactly the same. I differentiated mine from Alexis’s. The man on mine had a line etched under his left arm,” she said, and sank back into a silence which extended anxiously in the minutes before Maria Antonia returned. “Give it me,” Matilde then told her; she peered at the shiny figure trapped in the circle and said: “This is Alexis’s.” There wasn’t a trace of doubt in her voice.
“Just as well,” sighed Sergeant Manuel Palacios, betrayed by the intensity of his desires, and the Count rushed to harness Matilde’s burst of vitality.
“We also want to ask if you are sure this is Alexis’s writing.” And he showed her the page from the Bible.
The woman stretched out her hand mechanically to reach her glasses on the corner table, and Maria Antonia moved to place them in her hand.
“Yes, I think so. You look, Maria Antonia.”
“It’s his,” said the servant, without recourse to spectacles, as confident, the Count supposed, as she would be in the art of identifying the creators of renowned Italian Madonnas… The lieutenant noted the empty ashtray, and this time held back. He spoke, looking at both women.
“Madame, the medallion, this page Alexis tore out and wrote on, and the dress he wore on the night are very peculiar items. Did Alexis ever mention the word suicide in your presence?”
You cannot imagine what a mother feels when she discovers her son is homosexual… You think everything’s been in vain, life’s come to a halt, it’s a trap, but then one begins to think it isn’t, it’s a passing phase, everything will return to normal, and the son you dreamt of as married and with children of his own will be a man like any other, and then you begin to look at every man, wanting to swap them for your son, that son you think still has time to become what you wanted him to be. But the illusion was short-lived. Alexis was never going to change, and more than once I even wanted him to die, before seeing him transformed into a homosexual, pointed at, execrated, belittled… I know if there’s a God in heaven he won’t forgive me. That’s why I’m telling you now, quite calmly. Moreover, I got used to the inevitable and realized that above all, he was my son. But his father didn’t. Faustino would never accept him, and converted his disappointment into contempt for Alexis. Then he preferred to stay longer outside Cuba, and leave him here with Maria Antonia and my mother. And that was very hard on Alexis: can you imagine what it’s like to feel different and scorned at school and at home with your own father rejecting and denying you? One day, after the theatre, Faustino and I were chatting to friends, and Alexis left in the company of a boy like himself, a thirteen-year-old, and Faustino averted his gaze to show he didn’t even want to acknowledge him. It was all too cruel. It was giving Alexis a guilt complex, and worst of all I persisted in wanting to cure him, as if it were possible to cure either that or his preference for men. I took him to several psychiatrists, and I now know that that was a mistake. It made him feel unhappier, more scorned, more different, I don’t know, as if he were the leper in the family. It was then he began to go to church and apparently nobody humiliated him there, and he also began to chat to Alberto Marques, when he was working in the library in Marianao, and his life developed in those directions, far from me, from his family… He became a stranger. After he had his last row with his father and Faustino kicked him out of the house, he came barely once a week, to speak to his grandmother and Maria Antonia, and sometimes he would chat to me, but he never gave me space in his world. My son was no longer my son, do you understand now? And I was very much to blame. I helped him to be an unloved person, and he began to say perhaps it would have been better if he had not been born or had even killed himself: he said that to me one day. Is that what you wanted to know? Well, he did say that… And now would you be very surprised if I told you I also wish I were dead? If I told you these two hands created Alexis’s death? Tell me, can there be a worse punishment than this?