Heretics

by Leonardo Padura

  Three days before New Year’s Eve on Christian calendars, some knocking at the door alarmed the young man. Like a hope that he could not give up, he dreamed that, at any moment, his beloved Mariam Roca would appear before him. Elias knew well of the girl’s skills in slipping out, so many times put in practice during the many clandestine meetings they maintained in their years of amorous and carnal relations. He knew, besides—or at least he thought he knew—that Mariam would never be among those who would condemn him for his actions. He knew well the young girl’s way of thinking, but at the same time, with each passing day, he was getting a better notion, through the girl’s attitudes, of how paralyzing fear can be. Moved by the hope of seeing his beloved, he opened the door to see whether it was Mariam: in front of him were the flattened nose, the eagle eyes, and the cavity-ridden teeth of the Maestro. And he immediately had one certainty: at last, some door had opened.

  The Maestro had in his hands a bottle of wine and on his body, several more. Perhaps because of that, the greeting was so effusive: a hug, two kisses on the cheeks, and a Christmas wish like the one believers in Christ usually exchange. But even so, it did not weaken the certainty in Elias that the man was bringing a solution.

  With two glasses served of the rough and dark wine that the Maestro could afford, they sat down to talk. The painter, in fact, was bringing him good news: his friend Jan Six would hire Elias to go to one of the ports in the north of Poland on a merchant ship already under contract. There he should close the purchase of a large shipment of wheat that, for decades, the Dutch were importing from those regions. Since that deal required presenting bills of exchange for thousands of florins, Six and his associates preferred to deposit that fortune in the hands of the young Jew before giving it to the ship’s captain, about whose honesty they had begun to hold serious doubts. Once the deal was carried out with the Dutch agents in that port and with the Polish providers, Elias would hand over the papers of the already completed purchase and the shipping guides to the captain and then he could do whatever he liked, whether that be stay in Poland, Germany, or somewhere else in the north, or return to Amsterdam, where perhaps things would have calmed down.

  As he listened to the details of that commission capable of opening an unexpected and strange escape route, the young man started feeling an unforeseen anxiety over the evidence that, yes, he would leave, perhaps for always, his city and his world. And he understood that, instead of an escape, his departure would be a self-expulsion. Nonetheless, he knew well that it was his only viable choice, and he thanked the Maestro for his interest and help.

  “Don’t thank me for anything,” the painter then said, and left his glass of wine on the floor. Only at that moment did Elias notice that the man had not tasted the drink. “What has happened to you can only be seen as a defeat … And the worst thing is that no one can be blamed. Not you for having dared to defy certain laws, not your brother Amos and the rabbis for wanting to judge you and condemn you: each one is doing what he thinks he should do, and has many reasons to back up his decisions. And that’s the worst thing: that something horrible seems normal to some … What makes me saddest is confirming that stories like yours have to happen, or that regrettable withdrawals like that of Salom Italia do, so that we men finally learn how faith in God, in a prince, in a country—obedience to mandates supposedly created for their own good—can turn into a jail for the substance that differentiates us: our free will and our intelligence as human beings. It’s the opposite of freedom and—” He cut off his sentence because, with the vehemence that had been taking him over, one of his feet knocked the glass over and spilled wine on the wooden floor.

  “Don’t worry, Maestro,” Elias said, and leaned over to pick up the glass.

  “No, I don’t worry over something so trivial, of course not … What the hell can a little bit of lost wine and another little bit of dirt accumulated matter to us now…? You don’t know how I would like for our friend Ben Israel to be here now so that he, so knowledgeable about sacred things, could try to explain to me how God can understand and explain what is happening to you. I’m sure he would speak of Job and mysterious designs, he would tell us that the laws are written in our bodies and would show us the perfection of the Creator telling us that if in the Torah there exist two hundred and forty-eight positive prescriptions and three hundred and sixty-five negative ones, which add up to six hundred and thirteen, it is because we men have two hundred and forty-eight bones and three hundred and sixty-five tendons, and the sum of all of them, which again is six hundred and thirteen, is the figure symbolizing the parts of the universe … I would let him finish and then I would ask him: Menasseh, in all of these shitty stories, where would you put the individual owning those bones and tendons, the concrete man of which you like to speak so much?” The Maestro turned the palms of his hands up, to demonstrate the void. But Elias did not see the void: on the contrary, there was, on those hands, fullness. Because those were the hands of a man who had exhausted himself creating beauty, even from the confirmation of misery, all that age, pain, and ugliness, the hands through which so many times the sacred had manifested itself and become concrete. The hands of a man who had fought against all powers in order to hammer the armor of his freedom …

  “And when does Six’s boat leave?” was, nonetheless, what Elias had to ask. The Maestro, surprised, had to think before responding.

  “On January fourth, in a week, I believe … Six will explain everything to you … I hope he pays you well.”

  “The sooner it sets sail, the better…” Elias said as the Maestro stood up, stumbled, and gave him a stained smile by way of goodbye.

  “There’s nothing more to say,” he muttered, “one defeat, another defeat,” he said, and left the attic. This time, the void was created. Elias Ambrosius felt that a part of his soul had just left him. Perhaps the best part.

  After thinking about it a lot, he decided that he would go to say goodbye to his parents. At the end of the day, they did not deserve another punishment. But he postponed it until the day before the departure, when he already had in his hands all of Jan Six’s instructions, the documents for the business, and the monies for his own pay, remunerated with an excess of generosity, certainly due to the Maestro’s pressure.

  When he left his father’s house, after having again placed in the old desk almost all of the books that had belonged to his grandfather Benjamin—he decided to only take with him a volume by Maimonides, his copy of De Termino Vitae, his Hakham’s work, and the strange adventure of a Castilian hidalgo who goes crazy from reading novels and believes himself to be an errant knight—he stopped by the attic and picked up his sketches and paintings and those that his colleagues had presented him, all of them displayed in an album he himself had bound. Outside of that book he left with only the linen on which the Maestro had portrayed him, the last and best portrait that he himself had made of Mariam, and a sketch of his grandfather in watery gray lines, besides a small landscape that his good friend and confidant, the blond Keil, had given him: those four pieces were too significant to leave behind, and he rolled them up and placed them inside a small wooden chest he had bought for that purpose at the market. With the rest of the works, including several oil portraits of Mariam, all placed in the album, he again went to house number 4 on Jewish Broad Street and knocked at the door painted green, convinced that he was doing so for the last time in his life. When Hendrickje Stoffels opened, Elias asked to see the Maestro: he wanted to give him a New Year’s gift, as proof of his infinite gratitude. Hendrickje Stoffels smiled and told him to come back later: the Maestro was sleeping off the first drunkenness of the year of the Lord 1648. Elias smiled. “It doesn’t matter,” he said, and held out the notebook. “Give this to him when he comes to. Explain to him that it is a gift … That he can do whatever seems best with it. And tell him that I wish him, you, and Titus that the Holiest, blessed may He be, give you all much health, for many years.” Hendrickje Stoffels smiled again as she plac
ed the file the young man gave her against her chest and asked him: “Which God, Elias?”

  “Any one of them … All of them,” he said, after thinking for a brief moment, and added: “May I?” And with the palm of his hand, he caressed the ruddy and smooth cheek of the girl whom his Maestro had sketched so many times. Elias Ambrosius went down the steps toward the street, clean and brilliant as a carpet laid out by the recently fallen snow. He was again a man who wept.

  Book of Judith

  1

  Havana, June 2008

  From his grandfather Rufino, Mario Conde should have learned: curiosity killed the cat. But, like many other times, the former policeman, stirred in his softest parts, was incapable on that occasion of following the advice of the old man who had made such vain efforts to shape Conde’s sentimental education.

  That torrid and sticky June afternoon, as he was entering his house hugging two bottles of recently acquired rum, what Mario Conde wanted least was a visitor, any visitor, particularly a visitor capable of altering his plan to spend an hour in the shower, another having a nap, and then to while the night away at his friend Carlos’s house, allowing the rum to dissolve all their tensions. Furthest from his imagination was that his unexpected visitor, who came with a disquieting and insistent knock at the door, would be Dr. Ricardo Kaminsky’s granddaughter, Yadine the Goth (loaded down with piercings), whom he had met several months before and who (at the very dawn of the ensuing discussion through which she ensnared the man, and after which, his curiosity piqued, he would be dragged into complicating his own life and proving, once more, that parallel lines always end up crossing) started by making things quite clear. “You are completely wrong. I am not a goth or a freak. I’m emo.”

  “Emo?”

  Beginning in the early morning, Conde had experienced one of his typical, tense days as a delicate negotiation unfolded that, should it succeed, would yield some juicy gains for all involved. Three weeks before, his partner, Yoyi the Pigeon, had received an order he couldn’t pass up. “The Diplomat” was one of Yoyi’s regulars who, unsatisfied with his salary as a First World public servant, moonlighted as the courier of literary gems for collectors and sellers in his European country, specialists with bookstores and Internet sites who knew that, with patience, good maps, and some luck, they could still hunt down certain marvels in some of the private Cuban libraries that had survived the cataclysms of the most difficult years and even the blandest aftershocks of the interminable Crisis, throughout which many people had to sell even their souls in order to stay alive.

  The list that Yoyi received this time was of the kind that took your breath away. It began with nothing less than a request for two volumes of the Comedias de don Pedro Calderón de la Barca, in a very rare and coveted 1839 Havana edition, illustrated by the master engravers Alejandro Moreau and Federico Mialhe, and whose price outside of Cuba could reach one thousand dollars. The interested buyer continued his demands with three books by the always indispensable Jacobo de la Pezuela: the Diccionario geográfico, estadístico, histórico de la Isla de Cuba, in four volumes, edited in Madrid in 1863, and of which Yoyi had already sold one copy to the Diplomat for five hundred dollars; the four-volume Historia de la Isla de Cuba, also edited in Madrid, printed between 1868 and 1878, which could fetch a similar price or more; and his Crónica de las Antillas, the 1871 Madrid edition, which could be viably resold for three hundred dollars. But without a doubt, the crowning jewel on the list was the problematic Historia física, política y natural de la Isla de Cuba, compiled in thirteen volumes by the versatile Ramón de la Sagra and printed in Paris between 1842 and 1861 (with the addition of 281 engravings of which 158 had been colored au naturel) and whose price on the island’s domestic market could reach seven or eight thousand dollars.

  To successfully deal in rare books, Yoyi and Conde had to tiptoe around narrow and already overexploited paths. For starters, they had to figure out where to set their sights, without causing too many waves. Then, if they got a productive lead, they needed the patience and dexterity of professional excavators, since the majority of those who still owned these kinds of books claimed some knowledge of their value and thus always aimed too high, clamoring for irrational prices, convinced that they were holding something akin to Gutenberg’s Bible. Secondly, the partners had to appear to be simultaneously very interested and not at all desperate, since, in general, these people didn’t tend to be in a rush and, even with reasonable expectations, were in a position of power. In cases like these, the best course of action (according to Yoyi’s business genius) was to present themselves as what they really were—mere intermediaries between someone who possessed a valuable book and the presumed and anxious buyer, an individual who was nearly impossible for the former to find due to the nature and price of the product. The cost of fomenting an agreement between both parties had been fixed at a (nonnegotiable) twenty-five percent of the sum of the sale (fifteen for Yoyi, ten for Conde), starting with a gesture of faith in the seriousness and trustworthiness of the respected middlemen. Although this arrangement didn’t always work out, when it did, it ended up being most satisfactory for all of the parties involved, and Yoyi neatly complied with each particular term of the negotiation. But if the seller turned out to be stubborn and mistrustful, he would have only one option: the book (usually tracked down by Conde) would be bought by Yoyi (who possessed capital). Mid-sale, Yoyi would pull on his pirate costume (eye patch, wooden leg, hook, and all) and make sure to bring the seller’s expectations down to reality.

  Since they’d received that fabulous request, Conde had spent several hours of each day of the previous three weeks trying to track down the books, desperately digging in terrain that was more and more sterile. Just two days before the appearance of Yadine the Emo (not a freak or a goth), when he was on the verge of giving up, the former policeman had found the clue that would steer him to that old political leader from the early days of the Revolution who (who would have thought!) was willing to talk about some of the gems found in the library he had appropriated during the Revolution.

  Because of his preeminent political background, shortly after the triumph of the 1959 Revolution, the leader had been assigned a splendid house, until shortly before then the property of a certain bourgeois family, one of the many who had left the island in those turbulent years with just two suitcases full of clothing. The owners had had to leave behind, among other goods, a well-stocked library in which, with the exception of Calderón’s comedies, existed still (among hundreds of other appetizing treasures) the rest of the books requested by the Diplomat. The old compañero of political ambitions, despite having been discreetly removed from the spheres of power years before (after having destroyed several economic plans, businesses, and institutions with reliable ineptitude), had managed to maintain his lifestyle thanks to the conversion of his enormous, luxurious, formerly bourgeois dwelling into a small hostel where, under his beloved oldest daughter’s management, rooms were rented out to bourgeois foreigners. But the recent decision of his also beloved grandchildren to depart for other lands in the world where one didn’t have to live withstanding such heat and uncertainty had made him determined to sell part of the library. Thus he was an excellent candidate for closing a lucrative sale of the books, a sale that would help his grandchildren (were they also New Men?) achieve geographic resettlement in lands that were, of course, bourgeois.

  The previous afternoon, the preliminary conversations between Conde and the former political leader, geared to the purchase of those specific books, had reached the culminating point of talking real prices (without agreeing to that final figure between what was possible for the buyer and dreamed of by the seller). As such, it required the presence of Yoyi the Pigeon, who, that morning, had joined the mission, determined to lay his cards on the table: it was either a sale with fixed commissions based on mutual trust in the good faith of those involved, or, in the absence of that credence, a straight-out purchase that the Pigeon, indignant over
the presumed lack of trust by the owner, would carry out as ethically as a pirate. At the end of an afternoon of a tense negotiation, the options had been left in suspense and Yoyi had decided to withdraw as if he were doing so definitively, although he was already more than convinced, as he would tell Conde while he gave him a lift to his house, that the former leader, so frenzied and fundamentalist in his previous position of power, so affectionate with his beloved grandchildren, and in his present fall from grace, so in need of cash, would contact them shortly, willing to negotiate the sale of the clamored-for gems and, if the occasion presented itself, the rest of the treasure as well. Thus would the old man drop into their hands like a ripe mango.

  “Look, man, either way, take this so you can get a leg up.” Behind the wheel of the 1957 Chevy Bel Air, the young man counted several bills he had withdrawn from his pocket and gave a thousand pesos to his partner, who accepted them with the same shame and anxiety as always. “A little advance.”

  In reality, Conde wasn’t at all sure that they had broken the seller’s will, and the feared prospect of losing that gold mine pushed him into a sadness and depression aroused by continued poverty from accumulated monetary and spiritual debts. But, he thought, he wasn’t going to feel much more miserable for having accepted the Pigeon’s thousand pesos, and less still now, when he could see terra firma on the horizon. So, to avoid the slightest hint of dignity, he stopped at the Bar of the Hopeless and left weighed down by two bottles of that cheap, devastating, and even nameless rum that, for a few months already, Conde and his friends had been calling the Haitian.

  * * *

  He recognized her at first glance. Although it had been almost a year since their fleeting and only meeting, Yadine’s peculiar face, still presumably goth, had remained intact in his memory. The lips, nails, and blackened eye sockets, the silver hoops in the visible ear and in her nose, the rigid hair falling like the wing of an ominous bird over half her face made her countenance something that was truly unforgettable, at least to a Neanderthal like Conde.