Heretics

by Leonardo Padura

  “No … Now I’m going to talk to your son-in-law, because, to keep going, I need to know certain things … And tomorrow I have an appointment with a person who has spent a lot of time studying young people like Judy—emos, freaks. Especially people who tattoo themselves, get piercings or hurt themselves … And after that, I don’t know, truly, I don’t know. Judy appears to be a labyrinth, and the worst is that I don’t have any idea of how or where I’m going to find a way out because I haven’t even been able to enter it.”

  The woman rested her chin on her open hand and her elbow on the arm of the chair. She was looking out to the garden, barely visible in the light coming from the porch.

  “Did you already talk to her literature teacher?”

  “Yes,” Conde said, and remained expectant.

  “The two of them had … something more.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’m telling you. They were … girlfriends. Or once had been…”

  Conde remained silent. Until he surrendered.

  “She doesn’t have any idea, either, of what could’ve happened to her.”

  The woman looked at Conde.

  “What did she say to you?”

  Conde thought about what would be appropriate to reveal to the grandmother.

  “Something that surprised me,” he said, taking advantage of the most tempting path. “Judy wanted to stop being emo. Did you know?”

  Alma nodded, but said: “No, I didn’t know. Although it’s to be expected. Judy is too smart…”

  “But all of her emo fundamentalism … By the way, there’s a kid from Judy’s group called Yovany. Do you know how I can get in touch with him?”

  “She had a little book with telephone numbers and addresses. Let me see … The police were going through Judy’s things and, incidentally, they haven’t returned her computer to us.”

  Alma stood up and went up toward the second-floor rooms, and Conde at last could light the cigarette demanded by the taste of coffee. Since talking to Yadine, meeting the albino emo again seemed interesting to him. His gaze, nonetheless, concentrated on the magnificent reproductions of Dutch paintings hanging in the living room. Vermeer of Delft, De Witte, and getting closer to the landscape, he read the copied signature: Jacob van Ruysdael. The fact that a few months before, a Rembrandt had come into his life and that he now had allowed a girl to enter his life in whose house existed a marked interest in Dutch painting seemed to him a circumstance that must respond to one of those works of a cosmic nature that the Pole Daniel Kaminsky had spoken of to his son Elias so many times. So, did those things happen just because, or due to some inscrutable will?

  A few minutes later, the woman returned with a piece of paper in her hand.

  “Alma,” Conde asked her, still standing before Ruysdael’s winter landscape, “why do you have these reproductions of Dutch paintings?”

  The woman also looked at the landscape for a response.

  “They’re first-class reproductions, made in Holland by painting students as academic exercises. Coralia, Alcides’s mother, bought them in Amsterdam for almost nothing, back around 1950. That was before she had the accident that left her an invalid. And he inherited them when she died, about four years ago. Coralia lived in her wheelchair until the age of ninety-six, and never wanted to get rid of her fake paintings. But they’re pretty, right? Especially this landscape … I would say that today, these reproductions would be worth quite a few dollars…”

  Conde looked at the copies a little bit more, and couldn’t help his mind returning to the story of the fake Matisse that seemed authentic and that had stoked the ambitions of various people. And to the Cuban fate, still unknown, of the portrait of the young Jew executed by Rembrandt whose ownership was being challenged by Elias Kaminsky. Could one of those reproductions be worth a lot of dollars? No, at the levels at which Alcides Torres moved, it couldn’t be a lot of dollars.

  Alma Turró finally handed the piece of paper to Conde.

  “Look, this must be Yovany … Here you have the address and telephone number.”

  When he went to put the paper in his pocket, Conde understood that something wasn’t quite right.

  “Was the address book in Judy’s room?”

  “No, I have it in my room … The thing is, I called everyone she wrote down there. To see if anyone knew anything about her.”

  “And what did you find out?”

  “Nothing that would help me to find her.” The woman took a deep breath as she sat down again and focused on Conde. “Look, if you stop looking for her, it’s going to be as if she were lost forever. Don’t you understand that? You give me hope that—”

  “The police will keep going. It’s an open case.”

  “Don’t try to fool me…”

  “I’m going to continue … But, I’m telling you, I’ve run out of leads. Or, someone is blocking me. Maybe even Judy herself,” said Conde, who, upon seeing himself on a road that had reached its end, had the sudden premonition that in reality someone was cutting him off. At that moment, Alma raised her chin and made a canine gesture, with results capable of surprising Conde.

  “There are Karla and Alcides,” she announced, stood up and picked up the tray to enter the kitchen. Before leaving, she added: “I’m going to give you Judy’s address book. Maybe it will help you somehow.”

  “Of course. Thank you…”

  Alcides Torres came in, falling over himself with excuses, a last-minute phone call, traffic. Karla, his wife, held out her hand and sat down in the chair her mother had been sitting in previously. Karla was forty-some years old, which looked good on her from the nose down and from the forehead up. Her eyes were a well of pain, sadness, and insomnia. Alcides, who was perhaps a few years older than Conde, at last settled into a rigid armchair and let out a sigh of exhaustion. Just behind him was the sign in which the Maximum Leader was asked to command however and for whatever purpose.

  “Conde, right? Alma told us about you, and I appreciate, we appreciate, your interest…”

  “There’s not a lot I can do…”

  “So you don’t know anything?” Alcides asked him.

  “I know many things, but not what happened to Judy.”

  “So what do you need to know to continue?” Karla interrupted, anxious.

  Conde thought for a few moments and finally spoke.

  “May I speak to Alcides alone?”

  The woman’s response was an arrow that went straight through him and nailed him against the chair.

  “No. Speak to both of us.” And she maintained her gaze fixed on the former policeman, without looking at her husband. “About anything. It’s my daughter…”

  Conde wasn’t expecting that precise circumstance to tell and ask Alcides Torres what he needed to, but if they gave him no other choice … He dove in.

  “Well … I don’t have any proof to support it, but it seems that right now there are only three possibilities: the best is that Judy left because she wanted to leave, and she’s somewhere where she does not want anyone to find her, especially you; the other, that something very serious happened to her … But it would be really strange for there not to be any trace whatsoever. The worst is that she may have done something to harm herself.”

  “No, my daughter is not suicidal. She may be as strange as she is, but she is not suicidal. Let’s think of the best,” Karla proposed as she swallowed what Conde deemed to be a bitter pill. “What can be done?”

  “Wait. Keep looking for her…” Conde enumerated, and decided to continue on the path they had opened for him. “Or, if you’re so sure that she wouldn’t harm herself, leave her alone. Because whatever may have happened, something is sure: Judy didn’t want to live with you, with your rules. That’s why she created her own world and threw herself into it headfirst. A world of emos, German philosophers, Buddhas, of anything that could be very far from you, of what you defend or aim to defend. She wanted to feel free of that burden and, at the same time, more
at ease with herself…” he said, and looked straight at Alcides Torres. Conde felt the push of his conscience and Judy’s ideas, and he couldn’t contain himself anymore. “Because what you were doing, Alcides, was disgusting to her. What Judy saw in Venezuela and what cost you your position blew the lid off of things … Your daughter discovered your worst side and couldn’t and didn’t want to be near you.”

  Alcides Torres was looking at and listening to Conde with submissive attention, as if he didn’t understand or as if the discussion was about someone foreign to him. That unforeseen torrent of Judy’s disapproval, which emerged like vomit from the former policeman’s soul, seemed to have surprised him to the point of freezing him. His wife, from her spot, had lowered her gaze and was moving the tip of her right foot, tracing small circles, without daring to speak, perhaps wounded by her own feelings of guilt or some trace of shame. Was she part of her husband’s corruption schemes? Conde, already immersed in the depths of his unveiled hostility, continued firing.

  “The worst part is that, in order to not reach that conclusion, Judy went through her own hell. But when you went to Venezuela and she saw what she saw, she couldn’t take it anymore. And you know what? I don’t doubt that she herself may have denounced you…” The blood that had been rising to Alcides Torres’s face seemed to disappear, leaving a sickly lightness in his skin, and Conde went for the kill. “Later, Judy mistreated her body and her mind, she got involved with emos, she did drugs, she became friends with some sinister people who helped her escape herself, she began an intimate relationship that distanced her from you and all of the shit that you did to steal whatever came your way and to get involved in a deal that could yield you lots and lots of dollars…”

  Alcides Torres stood up, propelled by the last springs of a battered dignity or by the mainspring of his surprise, and lifted his right arm, ready to strike. Conde, prepared for a reaction like that, pushed the chair back and dodged the reach of his fist, which Alcides left suspended in the air, perhaps due to Alma Turró’s shrieking, “Alcides! What in the hell is wrong with you…! Can’t handle the truth?”

  With his arm still up in the air, Alcides Torres was looking at Conde, who pronounced a phrase that hadn’t passed his lips for many years but that, at the critical moment, Conde enjoyed letting loose.

  “If you touch me, I’ll rip your arm off…”

  Conde, who had never ripped a leg off of a cockroach, took another step backward, free already of the burden of rancor and frustration, more willing to avoid than to provoke: after all, he had said what, for many, many years, he had wanted to say to guys like Alcides Torres. Just when he was going to continue his retreat, Alcides’s voice stopped him.

  “Forgive me,” he said as he lowered his arm and turned toward his mother-in-law. “Alma, I love my daughter, I want her to return, I want to ask her forgiveness … Everything I have done—”

  Alcides cut short his apology and left the living room to go upstairs to the second-floor rooms.

  Karla, still sitting in her chair, had not stopped looking at Mario Conde, and he discovered that her gaze had recovered part of its lost vitality.

  “At some point, somebody else had to say it to him,” she spoke at last. “Judy was the first, about three or four months ago … Alcides came to tell her that the way in which she was living and acting was harmful to him, that he wasn’t going to allow her exhibitionism or her speeches about freedom, that having a daughter who lived in Miami was already problem enough … And Judy exploded. She let out everything she thought about him, even worse than what you have said, especially because his daughter was saying them to him … Ever since then, she stopped talking to him.”

  Conde felt his heart rate normalizing.

  “What she saw in Venezuela affected Judy very much,” Conde said, and put a cigarette to his lips, although he did not light it. “This is important, Karla. How much money could Judy have left with?”

  It was obvious that the woman was not expecting that question.

  “I don’t know.” She tried to be evasive.

  “The thing is, having or not having money can be the difference between having disappeared or being hidden…”

  Karla took a deep breath and looked at her mother before turning her attention back to the former policeman.

  “She stole five hundred dollars from her grandmother that my daughter Marijó—María José—sent her from Miami…”

  Conde thought: Five hundred dollars was not much to buy a seat on a launch leaving Cuba, although it was a lot for someone who needs to buy very little to get by. But, at the same time, for five hundred dollars in Cuba, there could be people willing to do a lot of things, bad things. In that story in which he only heard half-truths, all of this new information, more than certainty, brought other questions. And brought with it that fucked-up notion of what constituted a lot …

  Karla again moved her foot, when she demanded Conde’s attention.

  “I’m going to ask you something, a favor: if you can find Judy, or if you have any idea of who could know where she is, I want her to know that her grandmother and I love her very much, that despite everything, her father also loves her, and we can’t forgive ourselves for what we have done to her. We already have a daughter who decided to go live far away from us, so we can understand if Judy prefers to do the same. But she should know that whatever she does and wherever she is, we’re going to keep loving her.”

  * * *

  Conde walked along the battered sidewalk of Calle Mayía Rodríguez and smelled in the air a stench of scrap metal, burnt gas, and dog shit. The shit was sticking to the soles of his shoes, the stink of scrap metal and gas came from a 1952 Chrysler that two black men, their color deepened by the grease and soot covering them, were trying to revive. They were the real smells, of everyday life, to which he so desired to return.

  Karla’s request, made with Alma Turró’s visual consent, was again pushing him toward the path that he would have preferred to abandon. But the feeling of freedom brought by his conversation with Alcides Torres still surprised him. He had, looking for information, ended up exorcising old rancors, frustrations, and deep hatreds for characters like that Alcides Torres who so reminded him of Rafael Morín, Tamara’s deceased husband. In reality, had he said to Alcides what he would have wanted to yell at Rafael? He would have to ask when he saw some psychologist friends.

  That afternoon, before leaving his house, the former policeman had dared to reread the prologue to Thus Spake Zarathustra, trying to reflect the mirror of Judy against that transcendental and mystifying spiel of Nietzsche—an author who, on the same lamentable level as Harold Bloom, Noam Chomsky, and André Breton, among others, channeled an illuminated prophet who hit him with a one-two punch and kicked him in the most vulnerable parts of his anatomy. As he was reading, he tried making the effort, just the effort, to understand the sympathetic relationship that, across a hundred years, an eighteen-year-old Cuban emo could establish with the German who had clamored for a New Man divested of the burden of God and all of the submissions demanded by Him. And that was when he started to focus more on the emo-fundamentalist expressions of Yovany, the boy who was so capable of disturbing Yoyi. As he digested Nietzsche with difficulty, he convinced himself that perhaps the young man was the person most suited to explain Judy’s mental confusion, as Candito had classified them with such benevolence. When he had nearly finished reading the prologue, he received a call from Yoyi, who was always able to bring him back to the reality of his own life: the next day, the Pigeon explained, the Diplomat would settle his debt with them, and afterward they had to visit the former political leader to pay him his part and, of course, distribute the earnings.

  “And do you still have the ring?” he had asked him, trying to sound casual.

  Yoyi laughed heartily.

  “So you finally want it?”

  “I was thinking … I don’t know what in the hell I was thinking,” he said, since it was the truth.

 
“Look, if I were you, I would think it’s a good birthday present and—”

  “I already thought that, my friend,” Conde interrupted him.

  “Then it’s yours, man … I’ll give you a very special price. But on one condition.”

  “Don’t start fucking around, Yoyi. This is already complicated enough without you making conditions and—”

  “Look, man, the discount comes with this condition, or there’s no discount,” the other man continued. “It’s easy: I want you to let me hand it over to Tamara, of course, on your behalf … And if you get married, that you let me be the godfather of the wedding.”

  “Hey, you, no one’s going to get married.”

  “I said if…”

  “If it’s if, Skinny isn’t going to forgive me if I take away the pleasure of him fucking me over again. He’s the godfather of my weddings and divorces ad vitam.”

  “No one says there can’t be two, three godfathers for a wedding, or as many as you feel like.”

  “If … Tomorrow I have something at eleven.”

  “I’ll pick you up at nine, and in an hour we close the deal. I’ll see you, godson.”

  “Stop screwing around, Yoyi…” Conde had said before hanging up the device.

  Now, in front of Tamara’s house, looking at the concrete sculptures inspired by Picasso’s and Lam’s figures that covered the front of the building and made it stand out, Conde concluded that his grace period had ended and he should fulfill the promise in the note he left for Tamara that morning. Before entering, he made sure his shoes were clean. He couldn’t talk about those matters while stinking of shit. Or was it better to let sleeping dogs lie?

  Since she was expecting him, Tamara, who was not terribly fond of cooking, was making the effort to prepare something edible: rice, onion omelettes, and a tomato salad. A shameful menu. If old Josefina saw that, she would have a stroke. So this is the woman you’re thinking about marrying, just like that, just because you like her, and now you decided that maybe you want to get married? Conde toasted some bread crusts, improved them with the olive oil brought by Aymara from Italy, and turned them into a delicacy with some leaves of Italian basil planted in the garden and a sprinkling of grated Parmesan that he tossed on top.