Heretics

by Leonardo Padura

  Roberto explained Pepe Manuel’s situation to the Pole and even revealed his hiding spot. Following the massacre of the Presidential Palace attackers who were caught in a surprise raid on the Calle Humboldt apartment, at that moment their fugitive friend had two options: go to the mountains to join one of the guerrilla groups in action or, keeping in mind his nonexistent military abilities, leave the country for the United States, Mexico, or Venezuela, where other fugitives from the opposition were dedicated to raising moral and economic support for the combatants or waiting for the much-discussed landing in Cuba. Then Daniel asked him why he was telling him all of that, and Roberto responded, “Because I think that it’s best for Pepe to leave Cuba, and for that he needs money.”

  A friend of Roberto’s older brother was the son of a certain Román Mejías, a high-ranking immigration official who, for many years, felt strongly hostile to Batista. With enough money, that official could certainly draw up documents that were as close as possible to legal ones that would, of course, allow Pepe Manuel to board the ferry to Miami as calmly as possible. The price? With things as they were, according to Roberto’s brother, it would never be less than the outrageous sum of ten thousand pesos. Could they each put in five thousand? Roberto asked him then, and without thinking about it for an instant, Daniel said yes. At the end of the day, he would tell himself afterward, although he was clueless about the bloodletting, he owed Pepe Manuel all of the tickets, at five cents each, that he had gifted him in the far-off times in which they went to that palace of dreams, the Ideal Movie Theater, to feast on films, documentaries, newsreels, and even some comics.

  * * *

  Conde didn’t want to smile, but he had to. Once more, he confirmed how history and life are a spider’s web in which you never know where certain threads cross and even become knotted together to form the fates of people and even of a country’s history. When Elias Kaminsky mentioned the name of Pedro Pérez to him, the Canary Islands–born fighting-cock breeder in Las Guásimas, the image of the man everyone knew as Perico Pérez appeared in his memory fully shaped. That character, showing up as a figure in a story so removed from him, had been one of his grandfather Rufino’s best friends, thanks to their shared love for fighting cocks. Conde clearly remembered Perico Pérez’s farm, at the end of an unpaved alley at the town’s entrance. Access to the property was through a simple wire gate, and the path to the house was flanked by the very dark, wrinkled trunks of the sweetest tamarinds Conde had ever tasted in his life. Beyond the house, with its brick walls and Cuban-made shingled roof, were the cow stalls, the simple livery, and a long hallway-shaped shed with a guano roof, under which ran the rows of cages where were housed the magnificent birds for which the fighting-cock breeder charged breeders and fighting fans a small fortune, among them—as Conde knew well—Ernest Hemingway himself. At the back of the property, beyond the well with the mechanical water pump, rose the ring where the Canary Islands–born man trained his cocks and, to the right, before the malanga, yucca, and corn plants, a low dirt-floored hut, a hurricane-proof building of trunks nailed to the ground at a forty-five-degree angle, tied together at the top and covered with palm leaves that simultaneously served as walls and a roof: the dirt hut that Conde remembered well and where José Manuel Bermúdez had been hidden for eleven months, until his friends Daniel Kaminsky and Roberto Fariñas obtained for him the passport that would take him out of Cuba and, at the time, save his life.

  When Conde told Elias Kaminsky about that extraordinary coincidence, the man took it as a favorable omen.

  “If you already discovered where Pepe Manuel was hidden, you’re going to discover what happened to my father and to the Rembrandt painting.”

  “Are you superstitious?”

  “No, it’s a premonition,” Elias said.

  “I’m the one with the premonitions around here,” Conde protested. “And I’m still not getting any of the good ones, the ones that hurt right here.” He touched the left side of his chest.

  Conde had waited for Elias Kaminsky on the porch of his house, with the percolator ready on the stove. Sitting on the iron chairs, they had drunk the recently brewed coffee while they enjoyed the brisk September morning that would soon be a memory.

  “But what I do have is a bunch of questions.”

  “I imagine,” the painter said, and Conde discovered how Elias, every time he was being evasive or feeling overwhelmed, pulled slowly, but persistently, at the ponytail gathered at his neck. “But I prefer that you let me finish the whole story, try to understand it better than I do myself, and that you have it as close to complete as possible.”

  “We’ve been doing this for three days … For now, answer just one question.”

  “First you ask and then I decide,” the painter said, determined in his strategy.

  “Why were you so moved when you read Joseph Kaminsky’s tombstone? To which law does the epitaph refer? Of what remorse is he speaking?”

  Elias smiled.

  “You’re like a machine gun. You must be desperate.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “I’m going to try to answer you … Let’s see, the easiest part. Being as Pepe the Purseman was, surely he was talking about Jewish Law. I’m not sure what the thing about remorse means, at least not yet, although I have some suspicions. And I felt moved because I suddenly felt the solitude in which that man, who, as far as I know, was someone good and decent, must have lived. Luckily, he had Caridad with him until the end … But in every other respect, he was alone, and I know well what the abandonment of being uprooted is. I myself feel at times that I don’t belong to any place, or that I belong to many; I’m like a puzzle that can always be taken apart. I suppose I am North American, the son of a Polish Jew who commanded himself to be Cuban among other things while here so that he wouldn’t suffer from being uprooted and other pains, and of a Catholic Cuban, the daughter of immigrants from Galicia, Spain, who at decisive moments took on her husband’s pragmatism when he decided that the best thing was to be Jewish again, and so she converted. I was born in Miami when Miami was nothing: because, if anything, what it most looked like was a bad copy of a Cuba that no longer existed. But I wasn’t raised among those Cuban-Cubans, but rather among Cuban Jews and Jews from a thousand other parts of the world, a community in which we were all Jews but not equal”—he made the sign for money with his fingers—“and we didn’t even feel equal. At least my parents always felt Cuban. So I am very familiar with what I am talking about. Uncle Joseph, as opposed to my father, wanted to continue being what he had once been, but everything around him had changed: the country where he lived, the family he had once had, the way of practicing his religion … In the end, not a single rabbi was left in Cuba, almost no Jews were left. Well, even black beans became scarce … So he must have felt like a shipwrecked man. Not like the sailor my father imagined when he went back to Kraków in his dreams … but like a real shipwrecked man, without a compass or any hope of touching on dry land, because that land had disappeared centuries before, as all Jews know well. Can you imagine what it is like to live like that, forever, until the end? Not only could my father not be with him when he died, he only found out a month after he had been buried. Well, luckily Caridad was there…”

  “I can imagine that feeling you’re talking about and almost understand it,” Conde said with a certain hint of remorse for having forced Elias Kaminsky to voice that diatribe. “With all of that, you still want to see the house where your father once thought he was happy?”

  The painter lit another of his Camels and became lost in a long silence.

  “I have to do it,” he said at last. “I came to Cuba to understand something, as my father went back to Kraków once to find himself and, in the end, to discover the worst in himself … And although it may be the worst, I also need to know, I have to know.”

  * * *

  Following Conde’s instructions, the car Elias was driving left the ever hostile Calzada del 10 de Octubre in order to
enter the heart of Santos Suárez via the more pleasant Avenida de Santa Catalina. As they moved forward on the blooming flamboyant tree–flanked street, Conde was explaining to the foreigner that that area was one of the realms of his life and his nostalgia. Very nearby lived many of his oldest and closest friends (also Andrés’s friends: before leaving, Elias should meet them, he told him) and the woman who had been something like his girlfriend for the last twenty years.

  When he got to Calle Mayía Rodríguez, Conde indicated that Elias should turn to the right and, two blocks down, take a left and stop before the house that was, according to the address written down, where Daniel and Marta Kaminsky lived until April 1958. Conde, who had relaxed talking about his friends and lovers, felt at that moment how something deeply hidden started to stir in that search.

  “That was my parents’ house?” Elias Kaminsky asked, halfway between stunned and overwhelmed, but Conde answered him with a question. “Who did you say lived in the big house on the corner?”

  “A police chief under Batista.”

  “But who?”

  “I can’t remember the name,” the painter said, almost apologizing, without understanding Conde’s interest in the detail.

  “It’s just that … Pull the car over here and lend me your phone!” Conde said.

  When he moved the car and got close to the curb, beneath the cool cover of an ocuje tree with a gnarled trunk, the painter held out his phone to Conde. Without offering any other explanation, the former policeman dialed several keys until he had composed a number and hit the green button, trusting that that was the necessary step to work that apparatus with which he neither had nor pretended to have the least familiarity.

  “Rabbit?” he asked, and got right to it. “Yes, it’s me … Okay, but shut up now and tell me something … Whose was the pretty house on the corner of Mayía and Buenavista that you like so much? The old owner…” Conde listened for a few seconds. “Uh-huh, Tomás Sanabria … And he was what?” He listened again. “Uh-huh, uh-huh. And before that?” He paused again and almost yelled, “I knew it, of course I knew it! Well, I’ll call you later to explain,” he said, and, however he could, ended the call and returned the phone to Elias, who, behind the wheel, hadn’t stopped looking at him with his eyes practically out of their sockets, trying to piece together what was intelligible.

  “But what happened?”

  “The one who lived next door there was Tomás Sanabria, Havana’s second chief of police. That was your parents’ neighbor who always had a patrol car in the street to protect him.”

  Elias Kaminsky was listening and trying to process the information. But he seemed incapable of following Conde’s logic.

  “That man, Tomás Sanabria, was a son-of-a-bitch murderer and a sadist … Do you know if he had anything to do with your father or with your father’s painting?”

  The painter lit a cigarette. He was thinking.

  “No, not that I know of. He told me about the policeman who lived next door to them, but right now, I don’t think he even told me his name.”

  “That Sanabria was very close with the son of Manuel Benítez, who was named after his father, Manuel Benítez, and according to some, was Batista’s best friend … You already know, Benítez the elder was the one who sold the fake visas to the passengers of the Saint Louis.”

  Elias Kaminsky’s surprise was obvious and resounding.

  “Could it all be a coincidence?” Conde asked out loud, but talking to himself. “A chief of police who was friends with Benítez’s son, living next door to the son of some Jews that Benítez conned with some fake visas? Couldn’t all of those people, or at least some of them, have something to do with that Rembrandt painting?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” Elias said, and seemed sincere, in addition to stunned.

  Not even that response managed to stop the accelerated growth of a premonition that was taking over Mario Conde’s entire body and consciousness. Several paths could cross at the heart of that story.

  * * *

  The mansion that Tomás Sanabria had built for himself, now in the hands of someone with enough political or economic power to have taken it over, had survived the passing of decades triumphantly and in good shape. By contrast, the more modest neighboring building, where Daniel Kaminsky and his wife, Marta Arnáez, had spent four years of their lives, had not had the same luck. At first glance, it was not due to problems with the quality of the building, since the columns, architraves, and roof still looked solid despite their age. It had to do with the effects of the scourge: doors and windows had been subject to multiple indignities, the walls seemed to have been bitten by giant ants and painted for the last time when the Marianao club still existed as the team of the socialistically exterminated Cuban professional league, and several of the porch’s tiles had been broken, while the low wall separating it from the street had lost all of its whitewash, part of the fence, and even some bricks. What had once been a garden, meanwhile, had devolved to the point of being mere brush with serious aspirations of becoming a garbage dump. Even the trunk of the ocuje tree in the flower bed appeared eaten away by hate and malice.

  “Are you sure that this was my parents’ house?” Elias Kaminsky had to ask, leaning on the car so that he wouldn’t fall backward before the contrast between the bitter reality of the present and the mental image of some photos and his father’s evocations of a happy past suddenly sullied.

  “It must be.” Conde had no choice but to pour salt in the wound.

  “I wanted to go inside…” Elias Kaminsky began to say, and Conde took advantage of his pause.

  “It would be better not to even try. What you’re looking for isn’t in there. Those ruins are no longer your parents’ house.”

  “At least they never came back,” the man consoled himself.

  “It would have been like returning to Kraków just after World War Two, I’d say … No, it can’t be a coincidence that just next door lived Tomás Sanabria.”

  The painter didn’t seem very interested in the original owner of the neighboring house, moved instead by the one having to do with his past—in reality, his parents’ past.

  “What happened when they left in 1958?” Conde tried to lead the conversation down a path that interested him.

  “My Galician grandparents were able to sell the house shortly after. My father, who was short of funds after handing over five thousand pesos to buy Pepe Manuel’s passport, used that money as a down payment on the little house they bought in Miami Beach and to leave his uncle Joseph some cash. The university was closed, but Uncle Pepe was saving money for his stepson’s studies, Caridad’s son … That’s how he was. Since he saved his money under the mattress, he later lost nearly all of it when they decreed the change of money here and would only agree to change two hundred pesos per person…”

  Conde nodded; he knew the story. A landmark in the process of generalized poverty.

  “From what you tell me, your parents didn’t even have time to sell the house. Can I think that, because of José Manuel Bermúdez’s problem, they also had to flee?”

  “No, it wasn’t because of Pepe Manuel. Although it had a lot to do with that story. As I told you, while trying to arrange his friend’s departure, my father ran into the Rembrandt painting again.”

  “How is it that he came across the painting again?”

  “Because he was at the home of that immigration official, that Mejías, the one whom Roberto and my father went to see to buy Pepe Manuel’s passport.”

  “And Mejías didn’t have anything to do with Sanabria?”

  “Not that I know of … or as far as my father told me…”

  Conde felt at that moment how the crossing of worlds that had been parallel until then, but unknown to each other, inhabited by fighting-cock breeders who turned out to be one and the same, chiefs of police, and revolutionaries chased by those police, in addition to renegade and non-renegade Jews, formed a whirlwind that crashed in his mind to create a spa
rk. The same as, or at least very similar to, the ones that, in his days as a police investigator, had so helped him get out of jams.

  “Tell me something before we continue with this interminable story and so that I can understand something…” He started to speak to Elias as pleasantly as possible, but couldn’t help the leap to a stricter demand. “Is what you want to know going to help you get back the Rembrandt painting?”

  Elias pulled on his ponytail a bit. He was thinking.

  “Perhaps, but not especially. I think.”

  “We’re talking about more than a million dollars … So what in the hell is it that you want me to help you find out? Is it what I imagine?”

  Elias Kaminsky remained calm. Now, with barely a thought, he answered with obvious prior knowledge of the answer.

  “Yes, I think you can imagine it. Although it’s difficult to know, I want to be positive whether it was my father who killed Román Mejías. The man showed up dead in March of 1958, killed in a rather horrible way, and my parents took off barely a month later … But above all, I want to know why my father didn’t recover the painting that belonged to him, especially if he did what he seems to have done. And where in hell that painting has been all these years…”

  9

  Havana, 1958

  Daniel Kaminsky was able to feel how the world stopped turning, with a spectacular planetary full-stop brake that could throw everything out of its place and send it reeling, flying through the air, taking each thing out of the corners in which they had settled or taken refuge. But once inertia was conquered, the globe had started to move, even though the young man had the dizzying perception that it was doing so in the opposite direction, undoing the last nineteen years of his movements, as if searching for that exact week in the past, forgotten by many, painfully lived by him, in the last days of May 1939, when they forced him to acquire the acute conviction that he had ceased to be a child. The point of that return was the Genesis-like moment in which that canvas—on which appeared the face of a young Jewish man too similar to the image of the Jesus of Christian iconography, the same canvas that for three centuries had accompanied the Kaminsky family—had been separated from his parents’ custody so that, with that desperate gesture, it could attempt to facilitate the supreme act of granting life to three Jewish refugees: the same three Jews who, rejected by the Cuban and American governments, would soon after be devoured by the Holocaust, but always, always, always after the painting had come out of its hiding spot and passed into hands that, in some way, had taken it to the place where it now hung, with the greatest pride and impunity.