Heretics

by Leonardo Padura

  “Shit!” said Conde, now overwhelmed. Or, as he always preferred to say, ano-nadado: he was in it up to his ass.

  * * *

  “Are you post-biological or post-evolutionist?”

  Yovany’s epidermic pallor almost immediately took on a pink tone, as if the boy were coming back to life.

  “You know about that?” he asked him by way of reply, incapable at that moment of conceiving of that insistent, prehistoric character and former policeman being up on his possible post-anything militancies … And then a light went off in Conde’s head: Yes, shit, that nearly transparent boy reminded him of Abilio the Crow, his elementary school classmate! Abilio was so white, almost ghostly, that, for some reason forgotten by Conde, they had nicknamed him after that black bird that was also considered a bird of bad omens. What could have happened to that sullen and mysterious guy who raised his eyebrows just like Yovany, when asked about something he didn’t believe? Years without seeing the Crow or even remembering him and suddenly …

  After the mental blow delivered by Dr. Cañizares, capable of placing his presumptions on a scientific plane, Conde headed toward Yovany’s house, without much hope of finding him. What had pushed him in that direction, in the El Vedado neighborhood, was the conviction of Judy’s clear danger to herself and his desire to knock on the last possible door on his horizon, perhaps the very one that would lead him through the labyrinth of the missing emo. And if he didn’t find anything beyond that threshold, then the best thing would be to tell it all to go to hell at last and continue on with his usual life, with more gusto now that he had a thousand dollars.

  Once he was standing before the opulent mansion, with a fresher coat of paint and even better maintained than Alcides Torres’s house, Conde started to make his conjectures about the origins and possibilities of young Pale Face, the bearer of Converse shoes, MP4 players, and a BlackBerry. Looking at the huge house with its very high mainstay, a garden looked after with Japanese care, its wide porches, delicate and artistic wrought-iron gates and wood shining from a recent varnishing, the man had had two certainties: that the original owners of this dwelling must have belonged to some bigwig in the pre-revolutionary Cuban bourgeoisie, and that the current inhabitants were certified members of that crop of post-revolutionary nouveau riche that had arisen in recent years like a re-emergent illness, considered eradicated for decades by egalitarian and poor socialist planning, but ready to flourish. Official discourse on one side and reality on the other?

  After pressing the intercom embedded in the exterior wall and asking the electronic voice if Yovany was home, and even explaining that he was coming to see the boy since he was a friend of the father of one of Yovany’s friends (he didn’t hesitate to lie), the palace’s gates opened for him with a dramatic screech and, immediately, he was met by the typical woman who “helps in cleaning the house,” as socialist good taste had baptized the previously known maids or servants. The woman, white, robust, with an air of German governess about her (Federal or Democratic? Conde couldn’t help asking himself, always so focused on history), took him to a receiving room as large as a tennis court and ordered him to take a seat in the exact same electronic voice that Conde had attributed to the intercom.

  “Would the gentleman prefer coffee, Indian black tea, or Chinese green tea? Soda, juice, beer, or mineral water, sparkling or flat?”

  “Bubbly water and coffee, thank you,” Conde muttered, almost convinced that the woman was a new replicant model, purchased perhaps in the same store where Yovany’s BlackBerry had come from.

  Abandoned to the immensity of the living room with its spotless checkerboard marble-tiled floor and ceiling of plaster arabesques with a fleet of ceiling fans determined to keep the air cool, Conde felt the palpable evidence of his smallness and devoted himself to proving anew the existing distance between Judy’s house with its hastily made wealth, reproductions, and political posters and this overwhelming, pretentious mansion: on the walls shone original paintings by the most coveted Cuban painters of the last fifty years. A nude and well-endowed ephebe by Servando Cabrera Moreno, a dark city by Milián, a woman with disproportionate eyes by Portocarrero, a reclining mermaid by Fabelo, a disjointed doll by Pedro Pablo Oliva, a perfect landscape by Tomás Sánchez, a mango by Montoto—he counted and stopped when Frau Bertha (that had to be her name) returned with the coffee tray set with porcelain cups, silver spoons, the options of white, brown, and artificial (Splenda) sugar, some little chocolates, a glass of bubbling water, and a cloth napkin. As he drank the strong coffee, made perhaps in an espresso machine with grounds purchased in Italy, he again looked at all the artwork and guessed at the dozens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of dollars hanging there. So many dollars that they were capable of laughing in the face of that small fortune of a thousand dollars that had made Conde feel so powerful. Those were really adding up to be a lot of dollars.

  Amid that luxury of paintings, porcelain, wood carvings, Tiffany lamps, sculpted bronze, and fashionable furniture, the face of the recently arrived Yovany looked like that of a tick on a pedigree terrier. The boy, with his hair dripping down both sides of his colorless face, tattered pants and shirt with holes, sat down in front of Conde without greeting him, looking at him with a corrosive intensity that the former policeman, trained in those arts, disarmed with his question to the boy (who had at last reminded him of Abilio the Crow) about his “post-” affiliation.

  “I know more than you imagine … I was once even postmodern, now I’m post-police … Nonetheless, I don’t know who your parents are…” he said, and waved his hand around, as if caressing from afar the objects and paintings.

  “My father took off when I was a kid. During a layover in Canada, he went running off his plane from Russia and didn’t stop until he got to Chile … My mother, who is slightly smarter than a cockroach and harder to kill than Bruce Willis, then got together with a stupid old Spaniard who looks like he escaped from a nursing home, but has some crane businesses and shit like that here and is filthy rich … As you can see.”

  “And the Spaniard buys you those Converse?”

  The boy smiled. He had recovered his vampire-like paleness.

  “Why do you think the old man is rich? He’s cheaper than his fucking mother. The things I have, the other guy sends me from Chile. Just to fuck with my mother …

  Conde also smiled, but not because he was getting to know the palace dwellers, but because the words popped into his head from that version of “A Whiter Shade of Pale” by Procol Harum, sung in Spanish by Cristina y los Stop, about a loved one who, dead and buried, appears to the singer with a “white paleness” that to Conde had always seemed disgusting and necrophilic. A paleness like that of that boy whom Yoyi had called “bottle o’ milk.” A whiteness on which the reddish scar four inches long, which Conde had managed to see on the inside of Yovany’s left forearm, stood out like a scream.

  “Okay, okay,” Conde said, trying to find a way to focus on what, at the end of the day, he was interested in. “That scar on your arm…”

  Yovany’s reaction was electric. He hid his arm behind his back, like a child surprised with forbidden candy.

  “That’s my problem … What do you want? I’m not up for speeches…”

  Conde supposed he’d touched a nerve in the boy and decided to change the direction of his questions.

  “You know that Judy still hasn’t shown up. And I found out something that I’d like to confirm.”

  “What’s that?” Yovany still had his arm protected by his body.

  “I’ve been told that she wanted to stop being emo…”

  “That’s a lie! A lie!”

  The reaction this time, more than electric, ended up being explosive, as if instead of touching a sore spot Conde had wounded him, plunging a scalpel into him.

  “She was the most emo of all of us!” Yovany continued, still shaken up. “Who in the hell could say that? That black idiot Frederic?”

  “No, it was Judy
’s grandmother.”

  “That old lady doesn’t know nothin’… Judy wasn’t going to leave us. Judy was a brain, the one who knew the most about emo things, the one who always talked about freedom and not letting us be lied to by anyone—by anyone.”

  “How long have you known her?”

  “Since she showed up on Calle G. I was half emo, half Miki, half rocker, but one day I talked to her and, whoa … complete emo,” he said, and, apparently unconsciously, he displayed his arms so that his emo-belonging could be better appreciated. And Conde again saw the scar, recent, vertical, typically suicidal. Except that real suicides slashed both forearms. And died, right?

  “How did she convince you?”

  “Talking about the heresy that exists in the practice of freedom.”

  “Is that how she said it?”

  “Yes. And she lent me some books so that I could learn. Books that aren’t published in Cuba, because here the thought police don’t want us to know these things. Books where they explain that God is dead, but the dead god is not only the one in heaven: it’s the god that wants to rule over us here. Books about the reincarnation that we are all going to go through. And she talked a lot about what you can do with the only thing that truly belongs to you, your mind. Because even the body, she would say, could belong to them: they could beat it, put it in jail. But they couldn’t do that with your thoughts, if you were sure of what you wanted to think. That’s why we had to be ourselves, be different, and not let ourselves be ruled by anyone, by no bastard, neither here”—he pointed at the floor—“nor there,” he signaled the ceiling, where the fans were still turning. “And never, never listen to the sons of bitches who talk to you about freedom, because what they want is to keep it for themselves and fuck you over…”

  Conde felt an increasingly unmistakable desire to speak with Judy. Her ideas about freedom and tribal belonging, even after crossing the steppe of the brain of that dysfunctional kid, seemed challenging, more intricate than the reactions of a postadolescent rebellion. The former policeman recalled the Pole Daniel Kaminsky and his search for spaces of freedom to redefine himself. Another strange convergence, he thought.

  “When was the last time you saw her?”

  “I don’t know, about two weeks ago. She came to get me and we went over to the Malecón, before going to Calle G.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  Yovany thought for a moment, perhaps too long, before responding.

  “I’m not sure. About music, about manga … Oh, about Blade Runner. She was crazy about that movie and had seen it again.”

  “And did she or didn’t she talk about leaving?”

  “I don’t think so. She talked about that every once in a while, about getting the hell away, on a balsa raft or however. But no, that day I don’t think so. I don’t remember…”

  “The other night you told me that she had mentioned the subject recently.”

  “Oh, I don’t know what I said the other day,” he protested, and made a circular gesture with his finger by his right temple. He had been flying high. Perhaps to catch God in the act of hanging up His saber.

  “Tell me something about the Italians … Was she very good friends with Bocelli?”

  Yovany looked at Conde as if he were a smear on the slide of a microscope. For someone who was no longer a cop, he knew a lot and was a real pain in the ass, he tried to say with his scientific glare.

  “I don’t know anything about that Bocelli you mention, and I also don’t know how a girl as cool as Judy could get together with those disgusting and shameless guys.”

  “Why disgusting and shameless? You didn’t even know them…”

  “But I know that the only thing they wanted was a piece of her ass. What else could they want, huh? Listen, listen, look … Those guys, maybe they, I don’t know, even raped and killed her…”

  “Do you think they could have done that?”

  “More than that, too.”

  Conde thought the same thing. He then hesitated about his next question, but dove in.

  “Do you think that Judy isn’t showing up because she committed suicide?”

  The word “suicide” had the effect of another electric shock on the boy, who moved his left arm even farther back. If there was something he didn’t doubt anymore, Conde thought, it was the origin of that wound: Yovany was not looking for emo suffering, but rather, he had tried to kill himself. But, had his wound been stitched? His doubts were piling up. It seemed to Conde that the scar did not have the typical marks of stitches. Then, it had been so superficial that he had been able to staunch the bleeding with a rag. What kind of suicide attempt had that been? A test run?

  “Maybe…” Yovany at last whispered, paler than in his natural state. “She also talked a lot about that. She liked to cut herself, taste the pain, talk about suicide. How can you think someone like that is going to stop being emo from one day to the next because of some drooling old Italian or any old thing? No, Judy couldn’t leave us,” he insisted, with the vehemence capable of revealing to Conde the degree of Yovany’s mental dependence on Judy’s daring and dangerous philosophy.

  “And did she ever talk to you about her father’s business dealings?” Conde tried his luck with that dark point that had come up so often regarding the girl’s social and family rebellion.

  “She said something … But I can’t really remember. Some deal with lots of money…”

  “That’s it, without specifics?”

  “That’s it, and nothin’ else…”

  Conde took a deep breath, frustrated.

  “One last thing, Yovany, and I’m leaving … Where’s your mother?”

  “In Spain, and England, and France, around … Enjoying the ride and spending all this dumb-ass Spaniard’s money. My mother is thirty-eight years old, and the old man is two thousand…”

  Conde nodded and stood up. He didn’t know if he should hold out his hand to Yovany to say goodbye with a certain formality. What he did know was that he should shoot him the next question point-blank.

  “That wound you’re hiding … Did you try to commit suicide?”

  Yovany looked at him with hate. Pure, hard hate.

  “Get the fuck out of here! You’re making me sick!” he yelled, and left Conde in the empty living room, with his last question on the tip of his tongue: By any chance, was your father named Abilio González and did they call him the Crow…? The abandonment only lasted a few seconds. Like an overweight ghost, there appeared the image of Frau Bertha, who moved toward the front door and opened it. All she needed was the flaming sword to point out the path by which those expelled from the earthly paradise should exit.

  * * *

  One of the walks that most pleased Conde was the one that allowed him to wander in and out of the tree-lined streets of what had been in earlier times the majestic neighborhood of El Vedado. Between the house where Yovany lived and the site where he could pick up a shared taxi headed toward his rough and dusty neighborhood was precisely that magnetic landscape where, a few years before, he had discovered the most fabulous of the private libraries that he could’ve imagined and, in it, the traces of the most melodramatic bolero that real lives could turn into.

  Now he didn’t have the eyes or the will to enjoy that decadent and pleasant panorama, or barely enough presence to feel the stifling heat of June, mitigated by the poplars, Mexican bay leaves, flamboyant flowering trees, and acacias flanking the street. In his brain, two unrelenting concerns alternated, battled each other neck and neck, capable of blinding him, and both carried the names of women: Judith and Tamara.

  That morning, after speaking with Elias Kaminsky, he had escaped from the house of his nearly betrothed before she woke up. Tamara had made the necessary arrangements to take two days off, which, along with Sunday, made a long and relaxing weekend that her body, fifty-two years old already, was screaming for. The woman, as opposed to Conde, had the enviable capacity of being able to sleep all morning when nothi
ng required her to rise early. Because of that, her body’s sexual appetite satisfied and her soul’s expectations met, she had ordered her mind to sleep as much as possible so that all of them, body, soul, and mind, would be in the best condition to face a day that would surely be emotionally charged.

  Conde thought of what his life would be like from that specific day on. When that night, he and Tamara made public—to the only public who would be interested—their intention to begin to think about the possibility of getting married (that was more or less the plan), something would begin to be different. Or wouldn’t it? At their respective ages and after so much time in the relationship and sharing their lives, nothing had to change: only settle. Because they were fine as they were and the best thing, of course, was to let sleeping dogs lie. But, Conde told himself, with a desire for adventure and a talent for self-deception capable of surprising even himself, at the end of the day it all came down to a formality, to the two of them, and to the years they had left to live. Tamara and Rafael’s son was a distant presence, he was already twenty-six years old and, like so many young people in his generation, had decided to try his luck outside of the island. For years he had lived in Italy, first under the wing of his aunt Aymara and her Italian husband; now, independently, as a marketing specialist for Emporio Armani. He only materialized in the occasional telephone call, some photos sent by e-mail, and, very infrequently, the delivery of a suitcase full of clothing for his mother (but not even a single piece of Armani underwear for Conde) and two or three hundred euros. Mario Conde’s remaining human interests were made up of the fate of Garbage II (golden cage or street sloth?) and the lives of his friends who would celebrate with them that night.