Heretics

by Leonardo Padura

  Whenever Conde woke up at Tamara’s house, he was seized by a warm feeling of estrangement and even, on occasion, an unforeseeable desire to get married. The first reason for that reaction had visual origins: since he tended to wake before the woman, the man enjoyed the privilege of spending several minutes in bed admiring the miracle of his luck and asking himself—the same question, again and again, during those fortunate, at least in that specific sense, twenty years—how it was possible that the previous night he had been intimate with a woman so beautiful, capable of bringing class even to the reflexive act of snoring as if playing an oboe d’amore typical of Bach’s cantatas? Tamara, who was just two years younger than Conde, had passed fifty with surprising dignity: tits, ass, abdomen, and face retained much of their original smoothness, despite the fullness of certain of those attributes, like the breast that, escaped from her slip, was calling Conde’s attention that morning. Tamara battled the collateral damage of age carefully: daily exercise, covering impertinent grays with a medium brown L’Oréal dye, a strict diet, through which—Conde guessed when he saw his own deterioration and counted his own excesses—she would soon appear to be his daughter. The second cause for his reaction brought with it a more conceptual character: How was it possible for Tamara to put up with him for so many years? To not think of that question, the most difficult one, on mornings like that, Conde usually left the bed like a fugitive and went to the kitchen to make himself the necessary eye-opening coffee. Although that day, instead of a painful premonition, this question lit a fire in his memory and kept him by the bed for a few minutes, looking at the naked nipple and the shine of saliva at the corner of the mouth of that sleeping beauty who … in two days would turn fifty-two.

  Smoking the day’s first cigarette, Conde saw through the open window how light was rising over what promised to be another infernal June day. He knew well that Tamara was no fan of birthday celebrations, less still since passing half a century, and perhaps because of that, it had taken him so long to remember. But now, the presence in Cuba of Aymara, who had lived in Italy for a long time, and who not coincidentally had the same birthday as her twin sister, created a more than propitious situation to have a celebration. And if he needed reinforcement and justification, there was Dulcita, Tamara’s best friend, who was also visiting the island then. Yes, the party was ready … The only problem being that, with the two or three hundred wrinkled pesos in his pockets, Conde did not have enough to even buy a birthday cake.

  As he got dressed, Conde smiled malevolently: yes, there was a reason Skinny Carlos was in the world.

  * * *

  As he distanced himself from Tamara’s house with his compass set on the home of the missing Judy’s family, Conde had no choice but to accept the dwelling’s locale as a (not fortuitous in the least) coincidence whose significance he wasn’t able to discover, although it did not cease to unnerve him: Judy had lived just a block and a half away from the house occupied for several years by Daniel Kaminsky and his wife, Marta Arnáez.

  Once he was standing before the address indicated by Yadine, Conde thought that in times past that palazzo on Calle Mayía Rodríguez must have belonged to some family with less funds than necessary to erect a mansion on Miramar’s Quinta Avenida, like the Cuban sugar and livestock magnates, but with enough to build that construction in an upwardly mobile middle-class neighborhood, as Santos Suárez had been in the 1940s and ’50s. Two floors, cathedral ceilings, solid and beautifully wrought-iron fences, an art deco air, and a surrounding porch crowned by a gallery of Spanish arches still in fashion at that time, all of it having received the reviving benefit of some coats of brightly colored paint. According to the information he’d been able to obtain that very morning from Manuel Palacios, this Alcides Torres, Judy’s father, had managed to acquire the attractive property at the beginning of the 1980s, when the straggling owners of the house set sail for Miami and, somehow, compañero Torres, brandishing his claims and political power, had used all of his contacts to establish his royal seat as a rising leader there.

  Conde delicately pressed the doorbell placed alongside the door. The woman he assumed to be Judy’s grandmother opened it. She was a woman in her sixties who looked very good for her age, but had the signs of deep grief on her face, angst that seemed to predate the disappearance of her granddaughter. Conde, who often tended toward wandering ideas, asked himself upon seeing her how a painter would capture and translate to canvas that vague but simultaneously obvious feeling: a woman’s sadness. If he knew how to paint, he would have liked to try.

  As soon as he introduced himself, his hostess realized who he was.

  “Yadine’s detective friend who is not a detective but was a policeman…”

  “That’s one way to put it … And you are Judy’s grandmother, right?” The woman nodded. “May I come in?”

  “Of course,” she said, and Conde entered the living room, very well ventilated by two large gated windows, a space where plants, decorations, framed pictures, and high-quality wooden furniture essayed to note the owners’ financial prosperity, Conde thought, as he accepted the hostess’s offer and sat down in one of the rattan chairs placed next to a window.

  “Thank you, madame…”

  “Alma. Alma Turró, grandmother of—” And she interrupted herself, overcome by a fit of sudden sadness.

  Conde chose to look elsewhere, waiting for the woman to recover. In his other life, as a policeman, he had learned how uncertainty over the fate of a loved one tended to have a more piercing effect than a painful definitive truth, many times processed with relief. But the game of deceptions and hopes to which the spirits of a person awaiting confirmation about a missing person are submitted always dragged along a pernicious and exhausting component. Suddenly, the woman stood.

  “I’m going to make you some coffee,” she said, obviously in need of a dignified escape.

  Conde took that time to study at his leisure those surroundings where the resounding falseness of some magnificent reproductions hanging on the walls stood out: Vermeer’s View of Delft, Emanuel de Witte’s well-known church interior, and a winter landscape, with a windmill in it, whose original artist he couldn’t place, although without a doubt, it was Dutch, like the other two masters. Why did they insist on crossing his path, anywhere he went, these damned Dutch painters? Nevertheless, on the best wall, the most visible, there was no work of art: like a declaration of principles, there reigned a gigantic photo of the Maximum Leader, smiling over the slogan WHEREVER, HOWEVER, FOR WHATEVER, COMMANDER IN CHIEF, WE’RE AT YOUR SERVICE! He continued his visual exam and noticed, on a small table, a frame that enclosed the image of two girls, about ten and four years old, their cheeks together, smiling: Judy and her sister who lived in Miami, he assumed … He tried to imagine a young emo, depressed and unsatisfied in that place, with all of its inhabitants standing strong, at the ready (at least that’s what they tried to make others believe), to do whatever might be asked of them. He didn’t manage it. Without a doubt, for that family, the girl’s attitude must have been as heretical as the enraged emo had mentioned the previous night, and he thought that in that house could lie the reasons for her disappearance, whether it was voluntary or caused by external forces.

  Alma Turró returned with two cups and a glass of water on a silver platter. She placed it all on a table, next to Conde, and asked him to serve himself.

  “May I smoke?” he asked.

  “Of course. I also smoke a few cigarettes every day. A little more now that my nerves are…”

  They drank the coffee and lit their cigarettes. Only then did Conde jump in.

  “You already know that Yadine came to see me. I explained to her that I am not a detective or anything of the sort and that I don’t know if I will be able to help you find Judy. But I’m going to try—”

  “Why?” the woman interrupted him.

  Conde took a couple of drags to give himself time to think. Because I’m curious and I have nothing better to do was a
possible response, although too strong. Because I’m an idiot and I allow myself to get involved in these messes seemed better.

  “The truth is that I’m not quite sure myself … I think mainly because of something Yadine said to me about emos and depression…” The woman nodded silently and Conde got back on track. “The problem is that it has been twelve days already without any news of her, and that complicates things. I talked to a former colleague and I know that the police are rather lost.” The woman nodded again, still without saying a word, and Conde decided to go in by the most traditional and simultaneously necessary way. “I’d like to know if Judy did or said anything unusual before disappearing, anything that would indicate her intentions…”

  The woman left the cigarette in the ashtray for a second, then immediately took it up again, as if she were making an important decision regarding the act of smoking. But she didn’t bring it to her lips.

  “Everything seems to indicate that I was the last known person to see her. That day…” She paused, as if she needed to breathe in more oxygen, and again left the cigarette. “Well, that day, she came home from school at the same time she always did, nibbled at a little bit of food, said she wasn’t very hungry, and went up to her room. Looking at that in and of itself, she didn’t do anything strange. From the perspective I have now, she seemed more focused or even depressed, at least quieter than at other times, but perhaps I’m imagining things … You didn’t know anymore whether she was truly depressed or depressed for fun and out of habit … What nonsense…”

  “And then?”

  “She spent a while in her room, came out to shower around three … At four thirty, she came down, said goodbye to me, and left.”

  “She only said goodbye to you? What did she say?”

  “Her mother had gone to the market, her father was fixing a spigot in the yard, but Judy didn’t ask about them. She said goodbye like always, told me she was leaving, that she didn’t know what time she would be back, and gave me a kiss.”

  “She didn’t call anyone on the phone?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “She didn’t eat anything before leaving?”

  “She didn’t even stop by the kitchen.”

  “Maybe she thought she’d eat something out, right?”

  “I’m not so sure. Sometimes, she would spend almost all day without eating. Other times, she would eat like a lion. I always told her that that wasn’t healthy or normal…”

  “What was she wearing? Did she have a purse, a backpack?”

  “No, she didn’t take anything. She was dressed as she always was when she went to Calle G. In black, with pink sleeves. Very made-up with dark colors. For her lips and eyes … With metal and leather bracelets … Well, she did take something: a book.”

  Conde felt that in that apparent normality there was something revealing, but where it came from and what it revealed escaped him. It became evident that in order to try to trace Judy’s steps, first he had to do whatever was possible to get to know her.

  “That was all on a Monday, right? And she said she was going to Calle G?”

  “Yes, Monday, May thirtieth, but…” Alma stopped in her reasoning, alarmed by something that had just become obvious to her. “No, I already told you that she didn’t say anything about where she was going. We all assumed she was going to get together with her friends … Although it was still early, and on Mondays they almost never go to Calle G.”

  “But she was dressed as if she were going there…”

  “No, you’re not understanding me. When she went out to meet up with her friends, she always dressed like that. She didn’t only go to Calle G. I don’t know why I thought and told the other policeman who asked that she had gone there. It was an automatic response … Sometimes they got together at one of their houses.”

  Conde nodded, but mentally noted his question. “If you didn’t go to Calle G, where in the hell did you go, Judy? To see one of your friends? To meet up with the Italian?”

  “Are Judy and Yadine very close friends?”

  “I wouldn’t say very … Judy is a bit of a leader and Yadine followed her around like a little dog, always imitating her in every respect…” The woman paused and dared to say, “As if she were in love with Judy … But Yadine is a very good girl.”

  Conde made another mental note, and followed it with several question marks.

  “Alma, I need you to tell me about Judy. I want to understand her. Two days ago, I talked to Yadine and, yesterday, I was with her friends on Calle G, and I’m more confused than anything else…”

  The woman took two drags and crushed her half-smoked cigarette.

  “Let’s see … I think that Judy was always a singular girl. I’m not saying that as an impassioned grandmother, but I have to tell you that she was more mature than she should have been every step of the way, and too intelligent. She read a lot, ever since she was eight, nine years old, but not books for children, rather, novels, history books, and I, who was the one who practically raised her, encouraged those interests … Perhaps she matured too quickly, skipping phases. At fifteen, she spoke and thought like an adult. That was when my daughter and my son-in-law, Alcides, were sent to work in Venezuela and took her with them. From that point on, everything got complicated. If you spoke with your police friends, I’m sure you already know that Alcides was stripped of his post for something that he did or didn’t do in Caracas and that he’s being investigated … Well, that’s neither here nor there. When they made them come back from Venezuela, the school year was about to end and Judy lost that year of her studies. But she also lost other things. It was almost as if they had exchanged her for another person: the prodigious girl who left was very different from the strange young woman who returned. She barely spoke to her parents; she talked to me, more or less, but didn’t open up, didn’t open up … It was as if she had returned to adolescence. With Frederic, a high school classmate of hers, she began to get together with those kids who call themselves emos, she got into wearing black and pink, and she herself became an emo. Luckily, she didn’t leave school, and sometimes I got the feeling that she was living as two people, one who was a student and one who refused everything, rejected everything. The one who was a student continued to be my hope that someday she would get over that sickness and return to being just Judy … I was even afraid that she had some kind of illness, schizophrenia or one of those bipolarities that show up around that age, and I took her to see some doctor friends of mine. On the one hand, they calmed me down, and on the other, worried me: there were no traces of bipolarity or anything of the sort, but she did have a great attachment to nonconformity, especially an obvious rejection of her parents, and that could be the origins of a depressive tendency, a sadness that could end up being dangerous … And wasn’t an emo pose.”

  “Forgive me for interrupting you.” Conde scratched his head and leaned forward in his seat to speak. “And for asking something, but … Did Judy used to harm herself?”

  Alma Turró made as if to grab the cigarettes, but stopped herself. Conde knew he had hit a sore spot. The woman delayed in responding.

  “Not too much … Psychologically, she did…”

  “Can you explain?”

  “I’ve read about some young people, especially the ones who call themselves punks, but also about emos, who cut themselves, mutilate themselves, tattoo themselves. They express their hate against society with hate toward the body. That’s how Judy would put it, just as it sounds … I don’t think Judy had reached those extremes, but she did pierce her ears, her nose, her navel, and used those hoops, and she got a tattoo on her back…”

  “All of that after she returned from Venezuela?”

  “Yes, after…”

  “Do the police know about that tattoo? What did she have tattooed?”

  “A salamander … Small, like that … And of course, the police know … To identify her if…”

  Conde took a deep breath. He had always been the ki
nd of man who, if he had to have blood tests, closed his eyes when he saw the nurse and asked for a piece of alcohol-soaked cotton ball to avoid passing out. His visceral rejection of pain, blood, any aggressive offense to the body, didn’t allow him to conceive of those self-harming philosophies. He only smoked (always Cuban tobacco) and ate and drank (everything that came his way, regardless of the national origin), trusting in the goodness of his lungs, liver, and stomach.

  “And you said that psychologically…”

  “Judy has gone about creating her world, a world that has less and less to do with this one that is ours. It’s not just how she dresses or does her hair, but also how she thinks. She eats vegetables, never meat; she doesn’t use deodorants or creams, but after her shower she rubs herself with cologne until she’s purple; she reads very complicated books and was obsessed with some Japanese comics, the ones they call ‘manga.’ And”—Alma Turró lowered her voice—“she would proclaim anywhere that all governments are gangs of repressors … All of them,” she restated, to calm herself down.

  As he received this information, Conde had the feeling that Alma Turró was not a reliable source. There was something more than nonconformity and adolescent angst in the girl’s attitude, as enumerated by her grandmother. Something more that might relate to her disappearance. Although she believed she knew her well, Conde was starting to think that the grandmother, despite having raised her, didn’t know Judy, either. Or only knew one of the two Judys well. What about the other one?