Heretics

by Leonardo Padura

  “Because of what he did in Venezuela?”

  “Maybe,” he said, thought for a moment, and added, “I think so. It appears that he went too far and they gave him a good smacking.”

  The young man smiled again, without much conviction. He may have been sad, but not depressed, thought Conde, who still didn’t understand anything: sad after kissing that blossoming blonde? At Frederic’s age, and at every other age he had been through, he would have been dancing a jig.

  “The girl you left at the bus stop, is that your girlfriend?”

  “Nah … a friend.”

  “What a good friend,” Conde muttered, envious of the kid’s youth and of the warmth of relations he maintained with his friends, and went back to the point. “Look, if Judy didn’t try to leave on a balsa raft and doesn’t show up, there are three possibilities that I can think of as being the most probable. Two are very bad … The first, that something happened to her, an accident, I don’t know, and that she’s dead. The second, that someone is holding her against her will, God knows why. The third possibility is that she’s hiding, and she would have reason to. If it’s the latter and you help me find her, and I see that she’s okay, doing what she’s doing because she wants to, I’ll forget it all and we’ll let her go on as is. But in order to dismiss the fucked-up possibilities, I have to see if it’s the third one. Do you get it?”

  Frederic was looking at him very seriously.

  “I’m emo, not an idiot … Of course I understand.”

  “So…?”

  Frederic lowered his gaze to his Converse sneakers, abused as they were. He did so with such intensity that Conde thought that at any moment the shoes would speak, perhaps like Zarathustra.

  “Judy’s Italian friend isn’t in Cuba, so she couldn’t have left with him … Our other friends from the group are out and about, so I don’t think she is hiding at any of their houses. The last ones to leave on a balsa raft were rockers, not our guys; I don’t think she even knew them. I don’t know why Yovany was talking about that and then mixed up one thing and another … I’ve thought a lot about all of this and I really don’t know where she could be. I think that one of the bad things you say happened—”

  “Yovany is…?”

  “Yes, the one from last night’s argument.”

  Conde nodded and lit a cigarette. He understood he’d been rude and offered the pack to Frederic.

  “No, I don’t smoke. I don’t drink, either…”

  The model emo, Conde thought. He even speaks to me with respect. And he decided that if Frederic was leaning toward the worst fate for Judy, then he should start to play the trickiest notes of that tune.

  “Again, I swear on my mother that I’m not a policeman anymore and that I’m not going to discuss this with the police … What kind of drugs did Judy take?”

  Frederic again looked at his disintegrating Converse, and this time Conde discovered three things: that the sneakers didn’t speak, that the kid’s silence was more eloquent than the most explicit response, and that Frederic’s head was a work of art on which the hairs that had been straightened made layers on his scalp that ended up looking like cabbage, with superimposed leaves. Conde persevered. “If she’s lost … could it have something to do with drugs?”

  “I don’t know,” the kid said at last. “I don’t take any of that … I’m emo because I like the group, but I don’t do what the others do. I don’t drink, I don’t do drugs, I don’t cut myself…”

  Conde picked up the detail about what “others do” in reference to drugs and decided to keep going, making him out to be dense.

  “Cut what?”

  “The body … arms, legs … to suffer.”

  To prove it, Frederic showed him his arms, free of scars. Despite already knowing about those practices, Conde couldn’t help but feel a stabbing pain. But he feigned surprise.

  “It can’t be—”

  “It’s a way of understanding the pain of the world: feeling it in your own flesh.”

  “And here I was, thinking you were all crazy. You really are crazy, dammit!”

  “Judy cuts herself and does drugs. As far as I know, just pills. Pills and alcohol make you fly.”

  “So are there others who take drugs besides pills?”

  Frederic smiled.

  “I’m emo, not—”

  “Okay … Her grandmother says Judy had piercings everywhere, but that she didn’t hurt herself.”

  “Her grandmother doesn’t know anything…”

  “So what do you know that could help me?”

  Frederic lifted his gaze and locked eyes with Conde.

  “Judy is very complicated, more than the average girl. She takes things seriously.”

  “Because of what she reads and all of that?”

  “Also because of that. I couldn’t imagine that everything about being emo was going to hit her so hard … She started looking for books and knew one by heart by Nietzsche, the one about the supermen, and she started saying God had died … But at the same time, she believes in Buddhism, in Nirvana, in reincarnation, and in karma.” Conde preferred not to interrupt him, let the enumeration go on, perhaps until a revealing point. “She said she was living life number twenty-one. Before, she had been a Roman soldier, a sailor, a Jewish girl in Amsterdam, a Mayan princess … and that if she died young, she would come back with a better fate,” Frederic said, and again interrogated his Converse.

  “She talked about dying? About suicide?”

  “Of course. There’s a reason she became emo, isn’t there?”

  “Do you talk about that?”

  Frederic smiled ironically.

  “Yes, just like the others…”

  “But you don’t believe in that. What about the others?”

  “Yovany and Judy talked about those things a lot. I already told you, they take everything seriously. He also cuts himself. Right now, he has a real gash on one arm.”

  “I didn’t see it.”

  “He had the sleeve on.”

  Conde recalled the tube of fabric covering the arm of Yovany, the pale emo who incessantly reminded him of someone. He concluded that, based on what he had seen until that moment, despite his appearance, Frederic didn’t mesh with the attitude of someone worried by suicide and possible reincarnation. He then took out the card he was carrying in his pocket and read the text to the kid.

  “What can you tell me about this?”

  “Judy read things by a certain Cioran. She had found him on the Internet when she was in Venezuela. I think this is by Cioran,” he said, and started looking in one of his notebooks as he spoke. “She likes to talk about what she’s reading, to pass on quotes to us, she wants to educate us, I’d say … Look, she wrote this in my notebook,” he said when he finally found what he was looking for, and read: “‘Stripping pain of all meaning means leaving the human being without resources, making him vulnerable. Although it may seem the strangest event to man, the most opposed to his consciousness, the one that along with death appears to be the most irreducible, pain is nothing more than a sign of his humanity. Abolishing the ability to suffer would be abolishing his human condition.’”

  As he listened to Frederic, Conde started noting how that story became complicated at each new attempt to peer into Judy’s mind, and, especially, how he was heading into a territory that was, to him, impenetrable and unknown: a field crossed with opposite paths marked by incomprehensible signs. And the girl could have gone down any one of them, since, if he understood anything in that mess, the quote Frederic had read appeared to point in another direction. How in the hell had he allowed himself to get caught up in this story?

  “She enjoyed and valued suffering, but held contempt for the body and, besides, took drugs to live in another world and didn’t believe in God, but did believe in karma and reincarnation and in the humanity of pain, besides?”

  “Before going to Venezuela, she still wasn’t really emo-emo, and I think she didn’t take drugs. When she
came back from there, she had already tried them, although it didn’t seem to me that she was addicted: it was like an experience, or at least, that’s what she said. Although, in Venezuela, more things happened to her, and she didn’t want to talk about that, or about what her father had done, although she said he was a big fake … What I do know is that there, since she could get online, she discovered several emo and punk websites where they talked a lot about these matters of the body and physical suffering, and she chatted with them. When she came back, she had become more emo than me, more than anyone, and started to get piercings, then a tattoo, and anytime she could, she talked about these things, about marks, about pain…”

  Conde assumed that Judy’s emo-masochist militancy could have encouraged a voluntary flight, but to carry it out, she would have needed some support. Especially depending on the place she aimed to go. And if she was alive and in Cuba, where in the hell could she be hiding?

  “If she had wanted to go somewhere, or hide … Did she have access to any money?”

  “She always had something, five, ten bucks, but no more. I imagine that, little by little, she would steal from her father, I’d say…”

  Conde noted the detail and continued.

  “What about the Italian? Tell me something about that story. Did he have anything to do with drugs? Did he give her money?”

  “It was a strange thing, because Judy doesn’t like men and…”

  Conde couldn’t help it. “Hang on! Are you telling me that Judy is also a lesbian?”

  Frederic couldn’t help it, either. He smiled again.

  “Well, what the hell have Judy’s parents and grandmother told you? They didn’t tell you that she’s gay, that she cuts herself, and that she’s going to be reincarnated? And they still expect you to find her? That seems very fucked up…”

  Conde felt the essence of what a fool he was, or, more clearly, the role of the idiot that he was playing in front of the kid. And he convinced himself that the operation to get to Judy’s core wasn’t going to be easy. With the image of Yadine in mind, he shot out his question. “Did she have any serious relationship, a girlfriend or something like that?”

  Frederic again interrogated his Converse.

  “Yes. But I can’t tell you who it was.”

  “Fuck that!” Conde exploded at hearing the kid’s response and took the opportunity to clean up his image by acting offended. “What the hell is this? Everyone here has to give an air of mystery, say just a little piece about things, offer nothing more than whatever the fuck they feel like?”

  If he had still been a policeman, Conde would have had other methods to shake down Frederic. Fear tends to bring down mountains, as Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama—perhaps a friend of Judy in one of her last twenty lives—could have said. But, for this very reason, among many others, Conde had ceased to be a policeman. He lit another cigarette and looked at Frederic. He was certain that, at least at that moment, that oracle had closed. Nonetheless, he decided to play a surprise hand when he asked, “Was Judy Yadine’s girlfriend, or did she have something going on with her?”

  Frederic smiled.

  “Yadine is a fool who wants to be emo and the truth is that she’s not anything … But she’s in love with Judy up to here…”

  Frederic held his hand up to his chin and Conde nodded. He looked at the young man and pleaded: “So then, you don’t have any idea where in the hell she could be, what happened to her or what didn’t happen to her?”

  Frederic pondered this for a few seconds.

  “There was another Italian. I saw him once. I don’t know if anyone else from the group met him. She called him ‘Bocelli,’ because he looked like the blind singer. And the other thing I know is that Judy wanted to get out of being emo. About a month ago, she told me we were too old for this, we should do other things, but she didn’t know what…”

  Conde took a drag and crushed his cigarette on the sidewalk. That last revelation sounded promising.

  “The super-emo wanted to leave the tribe? So what was she going to get into then?”

  “The truth is, I don’t know…”

  The man looked at the kid and understood that the dialogue was coming to an end. But he needed to know two more things. He tried it.

  “Help me understand something, kid … Do you really, really think that Judy wanted to commit suicide, or is that all a character she created?”

  Frederic thought about it and smiled at last.

  “Judy didn’t create a character. She was the most authentic girl in the group. She dressed like an emo, talked like an emo, but she thought a lot … That’s why it doesn’t seem to me like she wanted to commit suicide … Although if she wanted to, she would also do that. Judy is capable of doing anything … But no, I don’t think so…”

  “Shit, Frederic, keep helping me understand … Tell me, why does a kid like you become emo?”

  The young man moved his head, negating something, and caused one of the leaves of his cabbage bouffant to come out of place and fall, defeated, over his face.

  “Because I’m tired of being told what I have to do and how I have to be. Only because of that. I think it’s enough, right? And because it makes me seem more mysterious, and that helps you get more girls.”

  “Now I understand you … I already saw some of the results. So what about Bocelli? What’s that guy like?”

  “I don’t know, I only know him by what Judy would say about him … And he did take drugs.”

  Your life has gotten complicated, Mario Conde, he thought, and felt exhausted, with as much desire to abandon the story as to find meaning to it.

  “Thank you very much for what you’ve told me. If Judy doesn’t show up, I might come back to see you,” Conde said, and held out his hand. He shook the kid’s hand and, before releasing it, wished him luck on his journey through the Nirvana of Emolandia.

  4

  “Of course it’s me … Wassup?”

  “Get over here now, the leader has collapsed like socialism in the country of the Soviets…”

  Very much despite what Nietzsche stated and what he himself had thought for years, in recent times, Conde was ready to believe in the existence of God. It didn’t matter which one, since at the end of the day, they were all more or less the same, and at times, even the same, despite people, with different understandings of God, falling on top of each other, kicking and fighting (at best) every once in a while. Now it seemed evident that some god must have peered out of that sky and, in a moment of boredom, exercised divine will. That god, taking his role very seriously, appeared to have decided: I’m going to throw some rope down to that unlucky idiot who’s always broke and doesn’t even have one peso to give his girlfriend a nice gift for her birthday … On the bus, as he traveled toward Yoyi’s house, Conde started to calculate, without much success, what he would make from the percentage distribution of the book deal, and from there, he went on to the very difficult deliberation of what would be the most appropriate thing to give Tamara for her birthday … now that he would have money. In that process, anytime some scruple over the fate of the books tried to come up, Conde would give a mental push, trying to remove it from his conscience. And, to be on the best terms with himself, he would raise the Pigeon’s most pragmatic reasoning: if they didn’t do it, someone else would. In that case, better them than those other guys, the sons of bitches who were never in short supply and among whom must be the invisible kidnappers of several of the bibliographic gems of the marvelous library discovered by Conde a few years before and that, because of those same scruples, he had refused to negotiate so as not to participate in their irreparable exit from Cuba … which in the end, “the others” had carried out in order to grow fat with the proceeds and feel as happy as clams.

  Almost without his noticing, in a sibylline way, Conde’s theological and literary reflections as well as his birthday party plans were driven out of his mind by the emo mystery novel into which, with the disinterested solidarity of his u
ncontrollable curiosity, Yadine Kaminsky had thrust him. Something always escaped him every time he tried to imagine a definition as a starting point: Who was Judith Torres? Without the answer, it seemed impossible to find out the cause of her disappearance. The fact that she was emo could be essential, but perhaps it would only end up being a secondary component in the configuration of her character. At least one certainty existed: Judy was not the simple (for lack of a better word, in a terrain in which simplicity did not exist) rebellious adolescent and black sheep of the family. What most besieged the former policeman’s thinking lay in Judy’s relationship with herself: her reading, her musical tastes, her perception of a world that, according to her grandmother, was a universe created by her, herself. All of these ended up being more intricate connections than they usually were at the young woman’s age. There was something much more inaccessible inside the girl, as the four personae he’d managed to put together for her indicated: the sketch handed over by a lovesick Yadine, that one drawn by her grandmother, the one that Frederic and perhaps other emo friends knew, and the one that Conde himself had outlined as he searched around in the girl’s room and got closer to some of her more difficult obsessions. Her certainty that God had died (something that at that precise moment, Conde the atheist refused to accept just like that) turned out to be more complicated than an inability to believe in divine plans, or different than a lack of faith in otherworldly lives and powers. Judy appeared to have elaborated an entire philosophy, capable of including a credence in the existence of an immortal soul but simultaneously in the free will to guide it and, further still, in the need for that free will as the only path to individual self-fulfillment, without interference from the castrating religious or mundane powers, the keepers of faith and established morality.

  The discovery of the young woman’s lesbianism had, to some degree, come to alter the perspectives from which Conde had started to contemplate her. If she identified as a lesbian, why would a girl like Judy, who idolized freedom, decide to shroud the identity of her partner in secrecy? Something wasn’t right about that … To make the picture more complicated, there was her close relationship with the two Italians, the good one and the bad one, which even opened a pathway to drugs, among other thorny possibilities. And what about the mystery of what had happened in Venezuela? Was it an experience capable of personally affecting Judy or was it the result of the shadowy business that cost her father his removal and the hounding of an ongoing investigation? Was it only because of her cyberspace encounters with emophile philosophers, tribal theorists of the painful, physical practices such as punishment of the body and the search for humanity? Conde knew that he was amassing too many questions for a policeman who was no longer a policeman and whose only tools were his tongue, his eyes, and his mind. And Judith Torres was evading him every time he tried to corner her …