Heretics

by Leonardo Padura

  12

  Havana, 2007

  From that vertiginous height, the view encompassed an exaggerated part of a tempting sea, crossed with incredibly precise swaths of color and shades invented by the ruthless scourge of the summer sun. The gray snake of the Malecón, spread at the foot of the improvised lookouts, marked, in dramatic contrast, a precise, oppressive arc, as if it were joyously fulfilling the mission of serving as the wall between what is contained and what is open, between what is known and what is possible, between what is crowded and what is deserted. Along that entire generous portion of ocean handed over by the mound of steel and cement, not a single boat was visible, which added to the desolate feeling of looking over a hostile or forbidden expanse. On the seaside, he saw some submerged reefs, in all probability placed there by a man, since they made some dark crosses, definitively gloomy; on the city side, he contemplated rooftops, antennas, ramshackle pigeon coops, sputtering cars trapped under clouds of fatal exhaust, trees eroded by the salt spray, and slow people made miniature by virtue of the distance capable of erasing even the joys and tragedies moving them. Lives flattened by perspective and perhaps by more painful and permanent reasons that Conde didn’t even dare guess. People like him, he thought.

  A woman of about thirty—one with perfectly sculpted flesh in its most splendorous state, almond-shaped eyes with a come-hither gaze, and smelling of liberally applied Chanel No. 5—had opened the door for them. After telling them that Papi—that was what she called him—was taking a quick shower but would be right out, she left Conde and Elias Kaminsky with the smell of her perfume, the echoes of her local speak, and the magnetism of the memory of her in the living room that opened onto a terrace overlooking the sea, which they leaned out to look at. The former policeman, always suspicious due to his years in that profession, would ask himself what kind of Papi of that edible woman Roberto Fariñas could be: her biological father or the lucky Papi of more out-of-the-way and penetrable possessions?

  Although he had prepared himself mentally for all the emotions, before that exultant landscape that the terrace offered and the lingering presence of that woman’s image in his mind, Mario Conde understood how smug his aspiration had been: a fleeting vision of desire and the contemplation of how unfathomable what was waiting for them in Roberto Fariñas’s apartment had shaken him, to the point that he felt his supposed abilities as a truth revealer were overcome by the continuous flow of surprises.

  Conde had psychologically prepared himself, since he knew that, in all certainty, he would be witnessing the provocation of a mortal leap into the past, perhaps embellished with some unforeseen pirouettes. And he supposed that, with the effects of that fall, the most unanticipated revelations could come to light, implicating several beings, revelations capable of filling the dark parentheses of one or more lives. Spaces that, sometimes, it is best to leave empty.

  The spectacular penthouse where Roberto Fariñas lived was located on the tenth floor of a building on Calle Línea, just 250 feet from the Malecón. In his preparation for that meeting, which Conde had set up without any great delay and in which Elias Kaminsky insisted on participating, the former policeman had managed to find out, with Rabbit’s indispensable help, that the apartment’s ownership dated back to 1958, when the building was constructed and Fariñas’s father had gifted it to his unruly and rebellious offspring as the brass ring with which he could remove him from the turbulent sea of political activities. But, while one hand received the keys to the futuristic penthouse, with the other the young man continued to pull the trigger in his actions as a clandestine combatant. Had Fariñas been one of the participants in the attacks of that time period? That was another historical void, sealed under lock and key.

  After the triumph of the revolution, while his whole family was going into exile, Roberto Fariñas handed himself over to his political loyalties and started working in different areas, redesigning the country that would soon go to another social system. His merits in the hard years of struggle kept him close to the decision makers, especially in the economic and production sectors, but after the 1970 sugar harvest debacle, in which the country set out with the intention of harvesting ten thousand tons of sugar (the tons themselves capable of promoting the island’s great economic leap), the man’s star, perhaps due to some cosmic collision related to that fiasco and kept secret even from Rabbit’s inquiries and contacts who specialized in historic gossip, started to fade, until it was extinguished in obsolescence behind the desk of some ministry, from which he had retired several years before. Since then, Roberto Fariñas was invited, every now and again, to a remembrance act in honor of the martyred heroes and nothing more.

  While they contemplated the sea’s deceptive calmness, Conde came out with a question he’d been putting off for several days.

  “Was Fariñas the friend who talked to your father about envy as a Cuban trait?”

  Elias smiled as he lit up a Camel.

  “No, no. That was a guy he met in Miami Beach. Perhaps the only friend he made there, although never like the ones he had here. In Miami, things weren’t even the same with Olguita, Pepe Manuel’s old girlfriend…”

  “The communist?”

  “My father asked her that every time he saw her. ‘Hey, Olguita … weren’t you a communist?’ Well, that guy was a Cuban who went by Papito. Leopoldo Rosado Arruebarruena. The classic Cuban macho with a gold chain and two-toned shoes until he died of old age about three years ago. Papito left here in 1961; he said it was because of the law that closed Havana’s brothels … A country without whores is like a dog without fleas: the most boring thing in the world, he would say … A nice guy, loquacious, he made a living by whatever came up and didn’t care about politics … My father loved talking to him, and every once in a while he would invite him over to our house, him and whatever woman he was with at the moment, to have arroz con pollo … Papito was the one who told him about envy being like a Cuban national pastime.”

  “What did he tell him?”

  “Papito thought that Cubans can put up with anything, even hunger, but not the success of another Cuban. Since they all think they’re the best in the world—and I’m saying what he used to say, the most amazing, intelligent, the most clever, and the best dancers—every Cuban has a winner inside of him, a superior being. But since not everyone wins, the compensation they have is envy. According to Papito, if the successful one is American, French, or German, no problem, Cubans fall over with admiration. But if it’s someone like them, a Latin American, a Chinese person, a Spaniard, they think it’s some lucky asshole and don’t pay much attention … Now, if it’s another Cuban, they are overwhelmed by a carcomilla—yes, Papito would say carcomilla—an itch in their asses that they can’t stand … and envy comes out of their pores, and they start to shit all over the winner. I don’t know if it’s true, but…”

  “It’s true,” confirmed Conde, who in his time had seen many outbreaks of Cuban envy directed at other Cubans.

  “I assumed that … Papito would say it so humorously that—”

  “Living with this curse of being completely surrounded by water is to blame…” They were interrupted by a voice quoting the poet Virgilio Piñera and forcing the men, taken with the panorama and lost in the digression about the Cuban national character, to turn around toward their recently arrived host, who smiled as he looked at Elias. “Holy shit, kid, you are the very likeness of your Galician grandfather.”

  Faster than Elias could keep up with, the man squeezed him in a hug. At seventy-eight, Roberto Fariñas exhibited an appearance that was too young but looked good on him. His arm muscles looked compact and worked on, his chest was solid, and his face, carefully shaven, was so lacking in wrinkles that Conde dared to assess two possible deals he had made: either with the devil or with the plastic surgeon.

  Their host shook Conde’s hand forcefully, as if he wanted to prove his physical power (perhaps to make tangible his ability to be the Chanel lady’s Papi), and, with
a smile, enjoyed the reaction of surprise and pain he caused in his visitor. Back in the living room with the wide hurricane-proof windowpanes, they found the table set with coffee cups, glasses of water, a bucket of ice, and a bottle of Irish Jameson Limited Reserve.

  “You have to try this whiskey. It’s the best of the best … Do you know how much this bottle cost me? I’m embarrassed to say…”

  Despite the propaganda, Elias Kaminsky chose only the coffee. Conde also accepted the coffee and turned down the drink, a superhuman effort on his part, especially given the prospect of having only one opportunity to drink it. If he was going to be left wanting, it was better to not even try it at all.

  “You’re missing out,” their host warned them. “You don’t know how happy I am to see you … Oh, you are the spitting image of your grandfather…”

  Roberto Fariñas focused on Elias Kaminsky, and for several minutes he ignored Conde in the most colossal way, while Conde, almost with pleasure, accepted his role as an invisible guest in that meeting between two strangers who had actually known each other since long before one of them had come into the world. Because of that, without ceasing to listen, he was able to focus on observing the concentration of valuable objects on display in the living room: a forty-eight-inch (he guessed) flat-screen TV with a whole home movie theater system, a living room set made of real leather, a bar with more bottles with shiny labels, in addition to candelabras, vases, and other illustrious and refined objects. Where did the retired Fariñas get the money for all of that?

  “I don’t know why, but I was always sure that one day this would happen,” Fariñas began, talking to Elias. “Just like I knew from a certain point on that I would never again see your father, I knew that someday I would see you … And I even knew why I would see you…”

  A light went off in Conde’s head at that moment. Now he suddenly understood why Elias Kaminsky had requested his services and demanded that he be present at that meeting: out of fear. The painter, Conde thought, wouldn’t have really needed him to get to that Havana summit where surely some of the answers to his questions—perhaps more definitive answers—lay. A telephone call would have sufficed to deposit him there, in front of the man his father had confirmed he could rely upon for whatever was needed, fully conscious of what that offer could mean. But Elias’s fear of hearing a revelation he didn’t want to hear, although he needed to know, had forced him to seek out neutral assistance, a presence on which he could lean if everything came down. The price of several hundred dollars, which represented a fortune to Conde, was, to Elias—the inheritor of three supermarkets opportunely sold to large American chains, a moderately successful painter, and the presumed inheritor of a Rembrandt—nothing more than the down payment on a larger gain: not having to face the truth by himself, whatever that truth might be.

  “My father spoke of you and Pepe Manuel a lot. He never had friends like you again. How is it possible that, in over forty years, you never spoke again, never even wrote each other a letter?”

  “Because life is a real barca … as Calderón de Shit once said,” the old-young man said, and laughed at his own joke, as archaic as it was, but more worn from use. He seemed to be a fan of destroying literary references. “But I was up to speed on your lives. I always was.”

  “How so, if you didn’t talk to each other?”

  “No, I didn’t talk to your father. But I was in touch with Marta … When they told us that having a relationship, that any contact with those who lived outside the country was practically a crime of treason to the homeland, we discovered a system to stay in touch. My godmother, who stayed in Cuba and could care less what others said about her, wrote letters to Marta that I dictated and sent with her own return address. And your mother replied to her. That’s how I knew you had been born, for example. That’s how I got the photo of the bronze-inlaid marble tombstone that your father bought for Pepe Manuel at that horrible Miami cemetery. I also found out about the cancer, the operation, and the atomic missile that they put up the Pole’s ass. And she found out things about me. That I became a widower in 1974. Marta and Isabel, my wife, loved each other very much … Well, it was a close relationship behind your father’s back and that of the political Taliban around here.”

  Elias tried to smile and looked at Conde. The revelations were starting, with their accompanying surprises. Where had his mother put those letters? How had she received them to avoid his father finding out about that sustained yet pleasant infidelity? Or had Daniel been aware of that connection and hidden it from him?

  “The last letter, she wrote when the Pole died. By the silence that followed, I was able to guess what had happened to her and then a friend confirmed it. I’m not going to give you the other letters, but I want to give you this last one as a present. It’s one of the best love letters ever written. When I read it, I knew that Marta’s life was over. Because her life was Daniel Kaminsky. Her love for you, excuse me for saying so, was more a consequence of her love for the Pole than because she gave birth to you…”

  Now the painter did not smile. As he pulled on his ponytail, the approaching tears dampened his pupils. Roberto’s words didn’t reveal anything to him: he knew what that relationship had meant to his parents, the struggles they endured to make it happen, the sacrifices and the things they gave up in order to sanctify and preserve it, the silences they kept to not sully it. But, coming from a surviving witness from the time in which it had all began as puppy love, they added the devastating connotation brought by sixty years of persistence, a time period in which so much had changed, but not the decision that had most had an impact on the lives of the scruffy Pole Daniel Kaminsky and the little Galician, nearly rich, Marta Arnáez. And on his own life.

  From the backpack he had brought, Elias then removed a small wooden box. He opened it and, like a magician, removed a glass cube within which rested a baseball, yellowed with age and marked with blue letters.

  “Although I didn’t know if I was going to see you or not,” Elias said, “I brought this, because it is more yours than mine. You see? It’s dedicated to Pepe Manuel, signed by Miñoso…”

  The foreigner held out the glass cube, which Roberto Fariñas took delicately, as if he feared destroying it.

  “Shit, kid,” he muttered, moved. “What a time that was, dammit! How we lived, at what speed, what things we did, and how we enjoyed it all … And suddenly, everything changed. Your father was away, Pepe Manuel was dead in the most absurd way, I was a socialist leader without ever having wanted to be a socialist or a communist … It was never the same again … A while ago, I read a book by a Spaniard, who’s not a bad writer, incidentally, in which a character quotes Stendhal with some words that are the honest-to-God truth. The Spaniard says that Stendhal wrote, ‘No one who has not lived before the revolution can say that he has lived…’ Did you hear that? Well, I can put my seal of approval on that phrase. I’m telling you, since I’m a survivor…” he said, and concentrated on his memories, perhaps the happiest ones, as he looked at the ball placed on the glass urn. “I was with Daniel the day Miñoso hit this ball out.”

  “That story I know. There are others I don’t…”

  “Sometimes you don’t need to know everything.”

  “But the thing is that my father lived until the end with one regret,” Elias began, but Roberto, after placing the glass cube on the coffee table, rushed to stop him with a flash of his hand.

  “You really want me to talk to you about your father? That I tell you the things I would have wanted to say to him for the last fifty years?”

  Elias dared to think about it. Even though he had no choice. Conde noticed that the painter wanted to look at him, but didn’t dare.

  “Yes, as if I were him.”

  “Then I should start at the beginning … Your father lived with that regret you mention because he was a sacrosanct moron. A pigheaded Pole who was lucky not to meet up with me again, because I would have kicked his ass … Not for what he did or didn
’t do, that doesn’t matter, but because he didn’t trust me. I never forgave him for that.”

  Stoically, Elias received that diatribe without ceasing to pull on his ponytail, so much so that Conde feared it would be ripped out of his scalp at any moment. From the witness stand, Conde saw that Roberto Fariñas’s threats and insults came enveloped in a cover of affection resistant to all storms, the pre- and post-revolutionary years, the lack of understanding and the forced and sought-out distances. They sounded like learned, perhaps even practiced, sound bites.

  “One of his problems was that I could think that he had killed the son of a bitch who conned … yeah, your grandparents and your aunt. But ever since I learned how they killed Mejías, I realized your father didn’t do it. And it was easy to know why he hadn’t killed him: Daniel would have never killed a man like that. Not even that colossal son of a bitch. What complicated everything was that when they found out Pepe Manuel had escaped them, they put me in jail for almost three weeks, interrogated me twice every day, and gave me several blows, despite my last name and my father’s connections … And since I was in jail, I couldn’t talk to the Pole again. When they let me out, he had already left. Lucky for him, since he could have been the next one to go to jail.”