Taxi a Sodoma

Synopsis

Madrid, the nineties. In the small hours, the editor of Conmoción — one of those lurid weeklies that no longer exist — wakes his star reporter, Paco Lavetusta, with a bombshell: the city's archbishop, Arnulfo Roca Valente, has been found dead in his own flat, hanged inside a wardrobe, wearing a papal mitre, nipple clamps, and his testicles bound with the tail hair of a wild young stallion. The police immediately arrest the prime suspect: Cipriano Almonacid, known as Manos, the dominant rent boy the scene calls El Castigador de Villacañas. Lavetusta — forty-five years old, a cat named Ulises, a boyfriend on Erasmus in Venice and a notebook crammed with contacts in every bar in Chueca — suspects from the very first moment that the case is nowhere near that simple. He begins pulling at the thread alongside his photographer Wally, German correspondent Barbara Platsch and a cast of characters as absurd as they are endearing: Pepe el Cojo, rent-boy agent; El Ácido, best friend and rival in promiscuity; a gay Christian association; sadomasochist visual artists; a clandestine art dealer; and a lawyer who goes by Lola Penales. As the investigation unfolds, the archbishop's double life comes to light: a man who in public led demonstrations against divorce, abortion and homosexuality, and who in private was an obsessive collector of erotic art, a devoted reader of the Marquis de Sade and a soprano cross-dresser who staged entire operas for his trusted rent boy. The past explains the present: as a boy, Roca Valente watched fascists take away his parents — a Republican schoolteacher and a Socialist doctor — to be shot; from that moment he decided to become the worst of men so that one day he could take his revenge from within the Church itself. While Manos survives a poisoning attempt in prison and another in hospital, Lavetusta and his allies mount a rescue operation that veers into farce, leak explosive documents to the German and Spanish press, and discover that the archbishop's will names his former rent boy as his sole heir. Running alongside all this, Lavetusta pulls Andrés — an ex-lover he calls Sito — back from the edge of self-destruction: a former mod turned existentialist punk, part-time cannabis dealer and devoted reader of Cervantes, with whom he begins a tender, lopsided and happy relationship. Between Basque pintxos, drag-queen parties and lightning trips to Berlin, Taxi a Sodoma builds a choral, irreverent and erudite panorama of investigative journalism, institutional hypocrisy and a gay community that decides, against every literary tradition, to be happy.

Machine translation, pending review.