Conde sighed.
“You yourself told me that there are things it’s better not to dig around in…”
“Or that we should dig around in. If they don’t come up, all the better. And if they do come up, then fuck it … What I want—what I need—is the truth. Because of everything I’ve told you.”
“The truth? Well, the truth is that right now I don’t know how to help you … But if we find something out and with that something you can recover the Rembrandt, what are you going to do with that painting?”
Elias Kaminsky looked at his interlocutor.
“If I recover the painting, I think I am going to donate it to some museum, I don’t know which; perhaps a Jewish one that’s in Berlin. In memory of my grandparents and my aunt. Or to the Rembrandt House, or better still, to the Jewish Museum in Amsterdam, in memory of the Sephardic Jew who took the painting to Poland and no one knows who he was or what the hell he was doing in the middle of those pogroms … I still don’t know what I would do, because it’s rather improbable that I will recover it. But that is what I would do. I don’t want that painting for myself, no matter how much of a Rembrandt it is, and less still the money that could come from it, as tempting as it might be…”
“That sounds good,” Conde said, so susceptible to romantic and useless solutions, after weighing for a few moments the painter’s dreams and considering the possible fates proposed for that painting of a young Jew who looked too much like the Christian image of the Messiah. “Let’s see what we can do…”
“So you’ll help me?”
“You want to know the truth?”
“About my father?”
“Yes, of course, there’s the truth about your father … But now I’m referring to my own truth.”
“If you’ll tell me…”
“Well, half of my truth,” Conde began, “is that I don’t have anything better to do than waste my time, and trying to find out the why’s of a story like this one is something I like to do. The other half is that you’re going to pay me a lot for doing so and, given my own state and that of this country, you can’t turn your nose up at money like that. And the third half of the truth is that I like you. With all of those halves, you can put together a pretty good and large truth. And it gets even better with the feeling that we’re going to get somewhere … Even if we have to walk a lot before we do, right? By the way, since we’re going to keep going on with this … could you advance me some of my pay? I’m really in the fuácata.”
“Fuácata?”
“Broke, in poverty, penury … Yes, in the fuácata. Like Rembrandt when they took his house away with everything inside of it…”
* * *
The morning of June 14, 1642, Amsterdam enjoyed one of the most splendid days of its brief and barely temperate summers. That silver light, always pursued by its painters, tinged by the sun’s reflection on the sea and the canals that cut across and surround the city, delighted in its encounter with the gardens, flower beds, and flowerpots where, encouraged by the heat and light, the highly coveted tulips, which, since their arrival to the world’s richest city, unfolded proudly and competed with each other to achieve the most unbelievable tones on the chromatic scale.
But that day, Rembrandt van Rijn, a native of Leiden, painter and renowned member of Amsterdam’s Guild of Saint Luke since 1634, didn’t have the heart to appreciate that extraordinary show of light and color. Wearing a black suit, high boots, and a hat that was also dark, he had made the trip from his house, number 4 of Jodenbreestraat—Jewish Broad Street—to the Gothic Oude Kerk, beyond the little plaza and the De Waag market. Rembrandt was following the funeral procession of a humble carriage in which traveled the remains of what had once been his wife and most relied-upon muse, Saskia van Uylenburgh. Along with the painter, as if those accompanying him revealed the essence of his unconventional character, at the front of the procession were three of his best friends: one was Cornelis Anslo, a Calvinist preacher of the Mennonite sect; another was Menasseh ben Israel, a former Jewish rabbi and a Kabbalah expert; and the third was the Catholic Philips Vingboons, the city’s most sought-after and successful architect.
Following the recitation of the funeral prayers, as the grave diggers deposited the body of Saskia van Uylenburgh in Oude Kerk’s ossuary, Rembrandt van Rijn cried out his grief. The young woman’s illness had been drawn out, devastating, and even though Rembrandt knew that her consumptive state was irreversible, for many months he had trusted that something close to a miracle would occur: perhaps between God and Saskia’s youth they could achieve an unexpected recovery. But two days before, it had all ended, putting an end as well to all of his dreams and faith in miracles, and the man couldn’t do anything but cry.
That same afternoon, while in the solitude of his study looking at the gigantic and incredible group portrait of The Militia Company of Captain Cocq, which was just awaiting some final touches before going out to the luxurious salons of Kloveniersdoelen, headquarters of the exclusive society of arquebusiers, the painter swore to himself that he would never again cry. For any reason. Because there was only one thing that could make him cry: the death of Titus, the only one of his four children with Saskia to survive. And Titus would not die, at least not before him, as the laws of life demanded. And if life forced him to see Titus die, instead of crying, he would curse God.
That man bestowed with genius, awarded the spirit of eternal nonconformity, the tireless pursuer of human and artistic freedom, although beaten by more failures and frustrations than his journey through this world deserved, was able to maintain this promise for years, until life shook him once again, with a mean force bent on knocking him down. Then Rembrandt van Rijn, so worn-out, no longer had the energy to fulfill the oath he had made to himself. Before he died, Rembrandt would have to cry four more times.
Because Rembrandt cried on the afternoon in 1656 on which, beaten by the pressures of his creditors, he had to declare bankruptcy and leave his dear house at number 4 Jodenbreestraat, while the members of the Court for Patrimonial Insolvencies drew up an inventory of all of his belongings, works, objects, and souvenirs accumulated for years, to be sold at public auction and the proceeds given to the creditors.
He would cry again on the night in 1661 when the leaders of Amsterdam’s city government, without paying a cent for the work they requested, rejected, on the basis of considering it inappropriate, rough, even unfinished, his work The Conspiracy of the Batavians Under Claudius Civilis, that masterpiece devoted to celebrating the mythical birth of the country in the times of the Roman Empire and capable, in and of itself, of revolutionizing and moving forward seventeenth-century painting by two centuries. Such was the drought in commissions to which they had sentenced him, by considering him an out-of-fashion artist whose style was rough, that in the last five years he had received only two commissions: The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Deijman (a bad copy of the one he dedicated to Dr. Tulp) and Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild. Because of that, pushed to get some money out of the rejected work, the painter made the terrible decision of cutting that marvelous canvas to try to sell at least the fragment including three phantasmagoric figures with dark eye sockets, as if they were empty, appearing behind a glass cup: the only fragment of the piece that would survive, and which would be sufficient to immortalize the painter. Any painter.
The man would cry again on July 24, 1663, when he put in a tomb at Westerkerk the corpse of Hendrickje Stoffels, the woman who had been by his side for almost twenty years, who had given him love, a daughter, and was the model for some of his most beautiful and daring works, and, above all, who had orchestrated the miracle of making him laugh again and done so more times than he ever thought possible.
And, when he no longer had the strength to curse God, he would have to cry on September 7, 1668, when, against nature, he saw his son Titus die; just fifteen days shy of turning twenty-seven. He cried over that death so much that, just one year later, he would die, too, regretting the Creator�
�s macabre delay. Since, if divine justice existed, He should have taken him a few years earlier to at least avoid the last two reasons for his tears.
If the most devastating events that would cause him tears after having made that promise in 1642 were the deaths of the kind Hendrickje and his beloved Titus, the most dramatic must have been the mutilation of what appears to have been the most explosive and daring of his creations—more, much more even, than The Militia Company of Captain Cocq, which would turn into one of the most famous works of global art history with the unlikely name of The Night Watch. Because on that day, Rembrandt had also cried for the death of his freedom.
By contrast, the most vulgar, meanest, most aggressive and regrettable of the reasons for his tears was him being thrown out of his house for nonpayment and the amputation of his memory due to the loss of the small and multiple treasures that had accompanied him throughout his life: exotic objects coming from every corner of the known world—stones, shells, maps, and souvenirs for which only he knew the reasons they had arrived at his home and remained there. He also had to hand over to the sale the collection of engravings and watercolors by Andrea Mantegna, the Carraccis, Guido Reni, and José de Ribera, engravings and xylographs by Martin Schongauer, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Albrecht Dürer, Lucas van Leyden, Hendrick Goltzius, Maerten van Heemskerck, and Flemish and contemporaries like Rubens, Anthony van Dyck, and Jacob Jordaens; he lost the xylographs made based on Titian and three books printed by Raphael as well as the various albums with etchings by the most well-known Nordic engravers. Rembrandt even had to hand over his own tafelet—those notebooks of pictorial notes that had become so popular and so common among the country’s artists—to those vultures from the Court of Insolvencies.
“His biographers say that Rembrandt, using a hood so he wouldn’t be recognized, went to the first of the public auctions of his belongings. They claim that from a corner of the main salon of the Keizerskroon Hotel, in the Kalverstraat, while he watched the disheartened bidding for the objects that were part of his life, although he had more than enough reasons to cry, that time Rembrandt managed to hold it together … The poor man was broke, in the fuácata … The fucked-up thing is that, with the price of his tafelet alone, today he would have been able to buy five houses like the one he lost.” Elias Kaminsky pulled his ponytail a few times and at last began his tour, moving forward along the dark streets of Havana, the city in which his father had been happier and luckier.
* * *
The last time they had sat down to drink whiskey at the former office of Dr. Valdemira they had bottomed out, among other things, a bottle of reserve Ballantine’s that, without their knowing it yet, was a legacy left by the already deceased Rafael Morín, whom they had thought was still alive until that moment and, consequently, still Tamara’s official husband. Those drinks, redolent of wood and of an intense gold color, had helped them melt her last inhibitions and his policeman’s precautions to act on their overflowing human anxieties and their most animalistic desires. With the taste of Ballantine’s in their mouths they had gone to bed so that he could fulfill his oldest and most persistent erotic dream and she could purge herself of a burdensome marital dependence that was suffocating her. Both had felt how the act of coupling, so nervous despite the alcohol, implied much more than a physical resolution. It entailed a complete spiritual freedom that the revelation of her husband’s death would end up sealing.
The country where they lived had also changed since that time period, and a lot. The illusion of stability and of the future went up in smoke after the fall of walls, and even of friendly and brotherly states, and those dark and sordid years at the beginning of the 1990s came immediately after, when all aspirations were reduced to the mere achievement of common subsistence. They were collectively broke, the national fuácata … With the uneven recovery that followed, the country would never again be what it had wanted to be. Just like they couldn’t, either. The country was realer and harder, and the people became more disillusioned and cynical. But, above all, two perceptions had shifted: that which the country held of them and the one they held of the country. They learned of the many ways that the protecting heavens in which they’d been made to believe, for which they had worked and suffered privations and prohibitions for the altar of a better future, had been reduced to something that couldn’t even protect them in the way they had been promised, and then they looked from afar at a land that was broken and inadequate and they devoted themselves to caring for (it’s a manner of speech) their own lives and fates, and that of those closest to them. That process, at first glance traumatic and painful, was, in reality and essentially, liberating, through and through. They came to know the certainty that, at the end of the day, they were much more alone but were also introduced to the benefit of feeling that they were both freer and masters of themselves. And of their poverty. And of their lack of expectations of a future that, to make it all the more bleak, they knew to be worse.
The struggle to survive on which they had insisted all of those years, almost twenty, had been so visceral that on many occasions they only aspired to glide through the murky foam of their days in the best possible way. And get to the next day. And start again, always at zero. In that war for life or death, they became hardened and had to forget codes, niceties, rituals. There was no time, space, or possibility for the exquisiteness of nostalgia, only to ride out the Crisis, which Conde always evoked, thus, with a capital C. But when oblivion thought it was the victor, many times, memory, with its inconceivable capacity for resistance, had come out waving a white flag.
Before getting to Tamara’s house, Conde made an important stop, with the very dear purpose of celebrating memory’s capacity for resistance and of repeating a founding ritual. With the money he had earned, he bought a bottle of whiskey, square, with a serious and black label. With that bottle in one hand and a tray with its finest glasses and ice in the other, Conde started walking to the former office of Tamara’s father, where the air conditioner was already going at full blast, with its pleasant purring, satisfied with its victory over the heat of the September night.
Sitting in the deep leather seats worn with use, next to a fireplace that had never seen a fire burn, Mario Conde and Tamara Valdemira tasted their drinks as if it hadn’t been almost twenty years since the last time they had done that in that place and with whiskey, but conscious of the length of time that had passed since that liberating night. And they recognized their luck, since, despite all of their misfortunes, they were still there and in each other’s company.
Outside, rain began to pour, crossed with lightning. Safe from all inclement weather, they drank in silence, as if they had nothing to say to each other, although, in reality, they didn’t need to speak, since they had already said everything to each other. The years and the blows had taught them to fully enjoy the moments in which enjoyment was possible, so that, greedy, they could later draw on that ephemeral feeling of a life enjoyed from the warehouse of indelible earnings, a translucent container of memories that could always be broken if bad times approached, in which there would be even more reasons to cry. And they also knew that that was a possibility permanently lying in wait. But now they were there, tenacious and drinking, locked away of their own will between walls raised to protect the best parts of their lives, their only inalienable belongings.
Their second drink finished, they looked into each other’s eyes as if they wanted to see something crouching there beyond the other’s pupils, in some remote fold of their consciousness. As if everything they meant to each other was in their eyes. Leaving aside their mountains of frustrations, seas of disappointments, deserts of abandonment, Conde found behind those eyes the pleasant and protective oasis of a love that had been offered up to him without any demand of commitment. Tamara, perhaps, discovered the man’s gratitude, with its invincible surprise before the certainty that something invaluable belonged to him and completed him.
Hand in hand, like nearly two decades before, th
ey went up the stairs, entered the room, and, with less haste and more pauses than before, they took refuge in the security of love.
Outside, the world was coming undone under the rain and electric discharges, the chaos and uncertainty, that always foretell the Apocalypse. Or perhaps a Messiah.
11
Miami, 1958–1989
Daniel Kaminsky had to wait until the month of April 1988 to turn the longest-lasting and dearest dream of his life into reality, immortalized in a photo.
Strictly speaking, Daniel had never been the kind of guy you could consider a dreamer. His own son, Elias, had always considered him the opposite: a basic pragmatist willing to make the concrete decisions required of him by each situation, owner of a proverbial capacity to adapt to his environment, an ability that had allowed him to live in Cuba as a regular old Cuban, and to regain his condition as a Jew in Miami, without ever giving up that of being Cuban, thus saving the two sides of his soul, always in dispute, from the shipwrecked feeling of alienation, although since then he had been steeped in insurmountable regret over the noisy world he had lost.
Nonetheless, that same man capable of programming himself with equal measures of coldness and passion had lived for almost forty years with that romantic dream residing in his mind, and he kept it alive all that time, giving it color, shape, words; very convinced, besides, that that dream would come true before death—la pelona, as he called it when he spoke to his son in Cuban Spanish—came for him and he told Elias, before and after the photo was taken, and always as if it were the first time, the image of an old dream kept in the best corner of his proverbial hope chest. As such, on the April afternoon in 1988 when he could finally celebrate the fulfillment of that desire, Daniel Kaminsky got ready with the care that he bestowed upon an experience he had practiced numerous times in his imaginings. On his head he placed the old black cap, rather faded already, with the fraying yellow M, the same one he had purchased in 1949 at a stand in the then just-opened Grand Stadium of Havana. In the upper pocket of his white guayabera he placed the printed card he had saved in a plastic case. And lastly, after caressing for a moment the ball with its time-worn leather, he placed it in the right pocket of his wide, striped muslin pants, from where he was able to remove it with the same quickness and skill with which, in the movies seen at the palace of illusions that Old Havana’s Ideal Movie Theater was to him, cowboys took out their Colt .45s in the dusty prairies of the Old West.
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