Heretics

by Leonardo Padura

  Uncle Pepe the Purseman had also introduced changes able to improve his daily life. While remaining the man he always was, he had chosen to move to a modest little house on Calle Zapotes, in Luyanó, a single-family house with its own bathroom and kitchen where, as a housewarming gift, the luxury of a brilliant white Frigidaire was awaiting them, purchased by Daniel and Marta. Since long before the marriage and move took place, the furrier had allowed his amorous relationship with Caridad Sotolongo to become public knowledge—although, for reasons of space, they had continued to live in their separate quarters in the tenement on Acosta and Compostela. The fifty-something Pole had valiantly taken on the brunt of the deep racial prejudices existing in Cuba, and as such, as soon as his relationship with Caridad began, he never allowed himself to be bullied by the indiscreet and even disdainful stares that placed them both under the same scorn as they walked hand in hand, the pale Jew and the fleshy mulata, going to the movies, to the Martí theater, or, to the surprise of everyone who knew the Pole and his relationship with money, to the kosher restaurants in Pepe the Purseman’s old neighborhood.

  The greatest cause for concern hounding Daniel Kaminsky’s life was related to his friends Pepe Manuel Bermúdez and Roberto Fariñas. Pepe Manuel had enrolled at the University of Havana, where he was studying Law—What else? Daniel always said—and had followed his vocation as a student leader. By 1955, from the ranks of the Directorio Universitario, he was actively participating in the opposition to Batista that was growing by the day throughout the country. Roberto, meanwhile, who had decided to return to the fold and was working in the family business, was active in a clandestine group of Orthodox Party sympathizers, who became radicalized after the attack on the Moncada Barracks and were insistent on removing the general and his band of violent accomplices from power, even by force. Nonetheless, Pepe Manuel and Roberto’s political activism never came up against Daniel’s permanent and pragmatic apolitical stance, and the complicity between the friends and their girlfriends (Pepe Manuel had surprised the others with the news that he was breaking up with Rita María, while trying to incorporate into the tight-knit group his new girlfriend, Olguita Salgado, who came to them with the reputation of being a communist) continued to be as close as it was during high school, and each one of them enjoyed the other’s company, the trips to the beach, the dances at the social clubs with the many and very good orchestras of the time, and the evening or night outings to the Grand Stadium of Havana.

  Based on his conversations with his friends and what he managed to hear on the street, Daniel started to feel how the mean shadow of fear, increasingly tangible and damaging, was quickly changing with a macabre force that state of grace he enjoyed so much. To the naked eye, the political situation in the country had gotten tense, and more and more forces, one way or another, with peaceful or violent means, were opposed to General Batista’s de facto government. But that man who in the shadowy days of 1933 had leapt from sergeant to general and ruled Cuba’s fate publicly or from the shadows, and even from afar, was trying to keep that juicy position at any cost. Although, to do so, he had to resort to extreme methods of repression and violence: like all men addicted to power and its many benefits, financial or spiritual. Batista, of course, had amassed an extraordinary fortune and simultaneously created a network of financial commitments that a group of American Mafia leaders had joined, among them the Polish Jew Meyer Lansky, who became a regular presence in Havana, although, as Uncle Joseph used to say, luckily that embarrassment to the Jews spent his time in casinos, cabarets, and secret meetings with Batista and his secretaries and not in the synagogue.

  For the first time since he arrived in Cuba, Daniel Kaminsky felt too many silences. And not only because he moved away from working-class and raucous Old Havana to the more bourgeois and residential Santos Suárez. Perhaps it was some sort of innate capacity, as he would one day explain to his son, a genetic predisposition, the historic experience accumulated over centuries by his line to sense danger and terror, thanks to the most unusual or subtle signs. In this case, it was silence. Because of it, although his life had developed as best as it could and he remained removed from politics as much as he could reasonably stay at the margins of something so ubiquitous, he had the sense that the surrounding environment was charged with danger. And events, which were isolated at first and then began to occur daily, would prove him right. That explosion of fear would happen just around the time that, thanks to Miñoso, the Tigres de Marianao had their greatest moment of glory. In a not-so-unpredictable way, the expansive wave of fear reached Daniel’s life, led by the actions and needs of his friend Pepe Manuel and by the hand of his friend Roberto Fariñas as well. The perfect ruse of fate was that those complicated and dangerous political games would be the ones to again place Daniel Kaminsky before the portrait of the young Jew too similar to the image of Christian iconography’s Jesus, the same portrait engraved in the pleasant family photo that had crossed the Atlantic with him almost twenty years before.

  8

  Havana, 1958–2007

  Once he showered to remove from his skin the uncomfortable feeling of proximity to death that cemeteries provoked, Conde decided that, with the last pesos tucked into his pockets, the least he could do was buy half a bottle of rum at the Bar of the Hopeless before stopping by Skinny Carlos’s house on his way to see Tamara. But not even the prospect of relaxing as much as possible and having a couple of drinks, or talking to his friend and seeing the girlfriend who had put up with him for so many years, managed to erase the malaise that had started to take hold of the former policeman with the latest installments of the story that Daniel Kaminsky’s son had so carefully delivered in bite-size portions. That afternoon, when they left the Ashkenazi hallowed ground and Conde felt that the story was headed toward comprehensibility, when at last the circumstances hidden by time—for whose supposed revelation he had been hired—would appear, the painter decided to return to his hotel under the pretext that perhaps the lobster he’d eaten for lunch had upset his stomach. Conde then had the certainty that the visit to the necropolis had had a much deeper effect on the foreigner than the mere rejection of death and its rites from which he himself suffered. And the feeling of malaise had invaded him.

  Keeping with his habit from the prehistoric times when he was a policeman, when he arrived at Carlos’s house, after the first round of the aberration that was as raw as it was Haitian was served, Conde told his disabled friend the known details of the story in which, for one hundred dollars per day, Andrés had gotten him involved. All of the exasperation that he felt incapable of expressing to Elias Kaminsky, for subjecting him to a delayed entrance into the matter, came to the surface in that dialogue through which he sought to unburden himself.

  “I don’t know what the hell it could have been … But something happened when that man read the tombstone belonging to his father’s uncle.”

  “What did you tell me it said?” Carlos asked, immersed in the story.

  “‘Joseph Kaminsky. Believed in the sacred. Violated the Law. Died without feeling any remorse.’ Yes, that was it…”

  “Which law did he violate? The Jewish one or civil law?”

  Conde thought for a few seconds before responding.

  “The Jews are so complicated that they’ve made a mess of all of that, and many times the two laws coincide. Remember: ‘You shall not kill. You shall not steal…’ Religion as ethics and law, right? But I swear to you by Yahweh that I don’t know what the hell that man could have done or what law he violated. Was it because he let his nephew convert and marry a non-Jew? I’m not very sure, either, of what Elias’s father did, whether he ended up slitting some guy’s throat or not, if that’s just a suspicion or what … And less still of why in the hell Elias wants me. For me to listen to his story?”

  His friend thought it over for a few moments.

  “Yeah, it’s all really screwed-up … But be philosophical about it, salvaje. Think like a Jew and do the math: if th
e painter wants to come across as interesting and tell you the story little by little, but is paying you a hundred bucks in the meantime … it’s good business … With how screwed-up everything is around us … But surely he wants something else. No one goes around giving away money … and less still, a Jew … In my opinion, what he’s trying to find out has to do with something that’s going to help him recover that painting worth about two million … Shit!” Skinny pressed his temples. “I can’t even imagine what a million would be like, or half, or a quarter … But, two!”

  Conde nodded: yes, in the background of everything was the painting, its fate in Cuba, and, of course, its recovery, so, as Carlos suggested to him, he should be “philosophical” about it. But which philosophy? Marxism? It was all the same. At the end of the day, there was nothing better to do, since he didn’t have the energy or the desire to go back to kicking around the city in search of some old books from which he could earn, in the best-case scenario, two or three hundred Cuban pesos. In that September heat, it wasn’t profitable at all to waste hours and wear out shoes on chancy searches. He definitely had to start considering a change in profession. But how in the hell could someone as useless as him earn a living in a more or less decent way, refusing as he did to invest eight hours each day just to earn the four or five hundred pesos at the end of the month that wouldn’t be enough to support him? Conde’s individual outlook was as grim as the country’s collective outlook and he felt more and more worried. The foreigner sent by Andrés, with his offer of well-paid work, had arrived just when he was about to start making SOS signs. Forget it, he was going to accept all of that as a materialistic philosopher. So Marx the Jew resented Jews?

  “I’m going to have a problem on my hands when he tells me everything and demands that I find a response to something that he’s been obsessed with for years. Something to do with the painting, his father, or both. And also something to do with that uncle who violated the Law yet still died more at peace than anyone. Truthfully, I’m not sure that what the painter wants to know has anything to do with recovering the two-million-dollar painting. I think it’s something else…”

  “You’ve always been a believer … and a bit of a dumb-ass … It’s two million!”

  “There’s something besides the money. I’m sure of it…”

  “So forget it. You keep listening and when whatever is going to come up comes up, let it come up, and fuck it … Have a drink and go with the flow…”

  Conde shook his head. He had discovered that he didn’t even really have any desire to anesthetize himself with shot after shot. He felt so strange. In the face of Conde’s lukewarm enthusiasm for alcohol, Carlos claimed the rest of the rum, poured it in his glass, and drank it down in one gulp.

  “Conde, you’re unbearable … Listen, take the Jew wherever he wants to go, tell him whatever he wants to hear, and grab your money. After all, he seems to have too much of it, while you—”

  “Dammit, Skinny, stop playing the same old song. That’s not the way it is, salvaje … That man needs to know something that has really fucked him up. Look, maybe I should get the hell out of here. Yesterday I didn’t go to Tamara’s and she’s really got to be mad…”

  To relax, Conde decided not to think about the Kaminskys anymore as he covered the eight blocks to Tamara’s house on foot. When he arrived, he found the woman sitting in the TV room, seemingly calm, concentrated on enjoying an episode of House, an abominable and repulsive show to Conde. In his opinion, that doctor was the biggest, most petulant asshole, an imbecile and a son of a bitch who had emerged from a scriptwriter’s head, and just hearing his voice brought down his spirits again.

  When she saw him arrive, the woman stopped the show and, after receiving the most affectionate kiss Conde had in his repertoire of guilty kisses, she was silent, watching him.

  “Oh, come on, Tamara,” Conde protested. “You take out wisdom teeth, I buy and sell books or go in search of a lost past. Now I’m dealing with one out there … Look, it doesn’t matter. You know I was working.”

  “Okay, okay, don’t get like that, I haven’t said a word,” she said, as if she were apologizing, although Conde could feel her words dripping with the thickest irony. “But the Cuban detective with rum on his breath can’t even pick up the phone?”

  “Yesterday, the Cuban detective got home feeling like shit and with smoke coming out of his ears. Today, before coming here, I went to see Skinny. And you know how I am…”

  “Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. Let’s see. Are you going to stay the night tonight?”

  Shamelessly and quickly, Conde replied, “Of course I am.”

  The woman’s face relaxed. She took up the remote control again and turned off the VCR and the TV. Conde started to feel better when House’s face disappeared from the screen.

  “Have you eaten yet?”

  “I had a late lunch and Josefina gave me some malangas with olive oil and garlic that she had saved for me. I’m full,” he said, patting his stomach. “I just need to brush my teeth before I eat anything else. But something delicious that doesn’t raise my cholesterol…”

  Half an hour later, Conde and Tamara were enjoying their sexual banquet. That was just the medicine he needed, and he slept like a babe. Before sunrise, like a furtive hunter, the man left the bed. He brewed the coffee and left the house, but not before writing a goodbye note. He had hunting to do that morning.

  * * *

  Despite his professed atheism at the time and—although once again hidden—for the rest of his life, the sum of unforeseen circumstances that led Daniel Kaminsky to again meet up with the canvas painted by the Dutch master always seemed to him like the true manifestation of a cosmic plan.

  Perhaps that whole path had begun to take shape on March 13, 1957, just a month after the Marianao team’s grandiose victory. That had been the day set by a group of Pepe Manuel’s political comrades-in-arms who banded together in the Directorio Estudiantil Universitario to attack and seize the Presidential Palace and resolve the Cuban political problems by revolutionarily executing—as they themselves declared—the dictator Fulgencio Batista. The plan’s failure, nearly due to bad luck (or the tyrant’s good luck), led to a real witch hunt that turned into a massacre. Pepe Manuel, convalescing from an emergency appendicitis operation due to the suffocation of his useless gut, didn’t directly participate in the action. But the young man knew the plan and its masterminds. Later, Daniel and Roberto would know that, if not for his physical condition, Pepe Manuel would have actively participated in the attacks on the palace and the Radio Reloj station, where the students read their statement to the people. And, they thought, it was very possible that he would have also ended up massacred by the police, like many of the members of the Directorio Estudiantil Universitario enmeshed in the tyrannicidal attempt.

  The persecution that began then of all the known figures of the university political group was systematic, brutal, bloody. Fortunately, Pepe Manuel had managed to escape his house and hide at a location unknown even to his closest and most trustworthy friends: a small farm in the area of Las Guásimas, on the outskirts of Havana, where he was taken in by his godfather, a fighting-cock breeder from the Canary Islands named Pedro Pérez. Pepe Manuel’s only option, in those initial months, was to remain in hiding, and at the time, no one, not even his girlfriend Olguita Salgado or his two best friends, Daniel and Roberto, knew where he had ended up. That ignorance, they knew, guaranteed that Pepe Manuel would not be discovered. But at the same time it posed the greatest danger to Olguita, Daniel, and especially to Roberto, since his political sympathies with the fugitive were public knowledge and, if the police decided to interrogate them, they would surely be the ones to suffer the worse consequences, even more so without even having the terrible option of betrayal. As such, from that day, Daniel Kaminsky started to live in fear: his own tangible fear, dormant for years, that now became unbearable on certain nights when, tossing and turning in his insomnia, he heard the sound
of silence and his heart leapt when he thought he heard steps on the porch of the little Santos Suárez house and sweat poured over him as he waited to hear the knocks and the fateful cry of “Police! Open the door!”

  The passing of nine months after the failed attack on the palace, when time had gone by without the police looking for him, had helped Daniel to manage his fears. Roberto Fariñas invited him to see a baseball match in the just-kicked-off season and swung by the Santos Suárez house to pick him up. As usual, already, on the corner where now stood a luxurious mansion belonging to the former owners of Daniel’s house, was a patrol car full of cops permanently guarding the police chief’s safety. When he passed the patrol car, Roberto, as always, greeted them and pointed at the neighboring house, where he stopped the car to pick up his friend. But instead of going to the stadium, the men headed to El Vedado and sat down at a table in the restaurant/diner Potin, a place frequented by young people from bourgeois families. Roberto and Daniel considered it the place that was safest and most removed from suspicions to hold a delicate conversation in which their wives should not participate.