Heretics

by Leonardo Padura

  “I knew it, dammit! Now, what’s this about him dying?!” Conde exclaimed, with the joy of victory. Yovany smiled, relaxed, Frau Bertha settled into the forbidden armchair and Manolo looked at Conde the way one looks at a crazy person or a child, and even crossed his eyes more when Conde addressed him, exulted. “Every day I prove it, dammit: it’s a small world! Yovany is the son of Abilio the Crow!” And, addressing the boy, “Your father was a classmate of mine in elementary school … We called him the Crow, because he was so white and so tiresome … Wait until Rabbit finds out, he’s not going to believe this.”

  They all smiled, even Major Palacios, accustomed to being witness to the methods of the man who had helped him so much to understand what he had shortly before qualified as “the mysteries of the human soul.”

  “Well, Yovany.” Conde started speaking again, without ceasing to smile. “The best part of the party is over. Now we’re going to clean up the shit…” His tone changed imperceptibly when he asked, “Why don’t you tell us now about what happened on that farm in el Cotorro the night that Judy Torres died?”

  Frau Bertha raised her eyebrows and Yovany recovered his maximum paleness. Nearly the funerary white paleness that Cristina y los Stops sang about.

  Conde, without asking permission, took out a cigarette and lit it. He seemed relaxed.

  “Let’s see, to help you think and decide … We have the DNA of some blood that was on Judy’s clothing. If we test you, in four hours—” He looked at Manolo, who interrupted.

  “In one hour…” the man in uniform corrected him, lying shamelessly.

  “In one hour, we can find out if that blood is yours … So … Can we keep things moving here and you’ll tell us?”

  Mechanically, Yovany removed the headphones from his neck and placed them next to him on the sofa. His hands were shaking when he tried to place the curtain of hair falling over his face behind his ear.

  “Doesn’t Yovany’s mother have to be here…?” Frau Bertha started to ask, but Conde didn’t let her finish.

  “That would be fine … But about two months ago Yovany turned eighteen … He’s already a man, responsible in the eyes of the law. What do you have to say to us, Yovany?”

  The boy looked at Conde with an unexpected challenging attitude.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about…”

  Conde listened to him and felt a wave of fear. Had he been mistaken in his conjectures? Wasn’t the thing about DNA proof enough? There was only one way to know. By tightening the screws.

  “You know it pretty damned well, kid … That scar you have on your left arm and that you tried to hide from me the other day … I’m sure that that’s where the blood on Judy’s clothing came from…” Conde said and could read on the young man’s face that he had touched a nerve. He decided to throw himself into the void, confident he would land on his feet. “And I’m sure that with the money you steal from your mother and that your father sends you every once in a while, you bought the drug that you and Judy took that night, the drug that made you crazy, the one that first led you to rape Judy and, when you realized the mess you’d gotten yourself in, or she made you realize, you proposed that you both cut your arms to seal some kind of emo pact or I-don’t-fucking-know-what, it’s all the same, and you cut yourself first, but knowing full well what you were doing, because you had already done it other times. And then you cut her. But you cut her for real, opening her veins … And when you thought that she was about to die, you threw her in the well that, coincidentally, was there. Or not coincidentally, as you’re going to explain when you yourself tell us the story and say why you went to that place, although I can already imagine … You went all the way there because you were really, really pissed off at Judy, because Judy, none other than Judy, the one who made you emo and put all those ideas in your head about Nirvanas, pain, hate for the body, freedom at any cost, that same Judy … Wanted to stop being emo.”

  Frau Bertha had begun to slide across the genuine leather armchair, with the risk that, at any moment, she could fall on her ass on the spotless marble-tiled floor. Yovany, meanwhile, seemed to have been consumed in just a few minutes, after having been stripped of his arrogance and self-assuredness. Conde looked at him and, without being able to help it, felt how the usual unease was beginning to creep over him as usually happened in these cases. That kid, who had had every opportunity and then some, who had enjoyed in his youth privileges and luxuries that the majority of people his age didn’t even know existed—and that Conde and his own father, Abilio the Crow, could have never even dreamed of in their school days of being condemned to dragging along one lone pair of shoes for a whole year—that kid enmeshed in a libertarian tribal crusade, had fucked up his life. Forever. The paths of redemption and freedom tend to be arduous like that, Conde thought.

  “I threw her in the well … But she cut herself on her own. And I didn’t rape her, we slept together just because, because it happened…”

  Manolo, who had placed himself on the edge of his seat, decided that his turn had come.

  “But you gave her the drug…”

  “That wasn’t me, either … That Italian friend of hers had sold it to her … Bocelli … It was Judy’s idea that we go to that farm. She had been there once, on one of those kids’ scouting outings, and had found the well … She liked that place, I don’t know why, since it was just pasture like any other. One of those Judy things … When we were there, we took those pills and … That’s where everything got fucked-up. We lost control, we were way out of it … We slept together, we talked about cutting ourselves, about other lives and all that shit. Then she told me she was going to leave the emos because she had discovered another spirituality. She had discovered that God was not dead, or that He was resurrected, I’m not sure, but that He existed. That God existed…! And as proof, she dared me to cut my arm. She had the scalpel, she carried it around with her … I was so high on the pills that I cut myself any which way … But she cut herself for real, she opened her veins up and down. Judy was crazy, she wanted to kill herself, she wanted to see God … That was her way of ceasing to be emo…”

  “But when you threw her in the well, she was alive…”

  “I believed she was dead, I swear to you … She was bleeding like crazy, she wasn’t moving … So what was I to do? Leave her there, for the dogs and vultures to eat her?”

  “What in the hell do you use your cell phone for? You could have called the police. It would’ve been easier to believe you then than now.”

  “But you have to believe me, dammit! In that shitty field, there’s no cell phone coverage! Judy was crazy, completely out there with the drug, she cut herself! I don’t know if she went too far or if she really wanted to fuck herself up…”

  Yovany was shouting and crying.

  “I’d like to believe you, but, man, I can’t,” Manolo said in a low voice, as if he were talking about inconsequential matters. “I believe that, in addition, you stole Judy’s five hundred dollars. Didn’t you kill her because of that?”

  “No, I’m telling you no … She had three hundred and forty left, the rest she had spent on the drugs. I have them saved upstairs, I haven’t even touched it. I put it inside the book she had with her.”

  Conde remembered that lost detail … Alma had told him that when she said goodbye to her, the last day she saw her, Judy had a book.

  “What book was it?” he wanted to know, perhaps to close the circle of understanding Judy Torres.

  “Dante’s Purgatory.”

  Conde thought for a moment: not even that post-evolutionist Cioran, or the readings of Buddha or less still Nietzsche. Nor was it The Inferno or Paradise, but rather Purgatory, perhaps because that was where she thought of heading. No, it wasn’t possible to close the circle around Judy: she always escaped through some crack. But Yovany would not slip away from Manolo.

  “You weren’t that crazy if you took the money, and if to have sex with her you put the condom on bef
ore—”

  “I always put it on! Always! Even if I’m drunk or high, I put it on! You have to believe me! Upstairs, I have all of the money!”

  Manolo was shaking his head. Conde was about to believe him. But that story, which he had caught when it appeared to be evaporating, had flown out of his hands. So much thinking, searching, dreaming about freedom for one to end up in jail and the other bled to death at the bottom of a well and wandering through Purgatory in search of God. What a disaster.

  “Yovany.” Conde returned to the conversation. “Did Judy talk to you about a big deal that her father wanted to do?”

  “Yes … In Venezuela.”

  “And did she know what he would be dealing in?”

  “With television sets and computers and stuff like that, right?”

  “She never talked to you about a very valuable painting?”

  Yovany pouted, no longer able to hold back the flood of tears.

  “No, no, she didn’t talk to me about any painting and I didn’t cut her, I didn’t cut her…”

  Yovany had started to cry, like the boy he still really was. More than a woman’s weeping, the former policeman was affected by the tears and sobs of a man. He imagined Yovany in jail. The pigs would have a feast with that pale flower. Then he noticed that he felt sick, trapped by a nauseating vertigo, as if the drunkenness of the previous night’s premonition had returned to his head and his stomach to make him pay for his infinite excesses. The vomit of coffee, alcohol, and sadness made a dark and irregular star over the floor of shining marble tiles.

  12

  Havana, August 2008

  Cuban summer, during the month of August, can become exasperating. The relentless heat, the sticky humidity that fuels perspiration and rank odors, the rains that evaporate and turn oxygen into a gas on the verge of combusting, attack and make everything worse: allergies, skin, glances, and especially moods.

  Conde knew that that predatory meteorological environment was not the best to make certain decisions. But, for too many days, he had been dragging along that demand and, as he covered the well-worn path between Skinny Carlos’s house and Tamara’s, he made the decision: he would speak.

  He had spent the first part of the evening in conversation with Carlos and Rabbit, by the shade of a bottle of rum. It ended up being a dull exchange, more weighed down by nostalgia than was healthy, as if none of the friends wanted to exit the pleasant caves of memory and face the blinding light of an aged present without much hope, now dominated by that infernal heat, to boot. At some point in the conversation, as the sweat ran down to his eyes, Conde had felt, moved by an unknown source, that his spirit couldn’t keep carrying the weight he placed on it. Then he had fallen into a prolonged muteness.

  Carlos, who knew him better than anyone and, besides, couldn’t control his need to try to solve his friend’s personal conflicts, took it upon himself to break through to him in the most subtle way he knew.

  “What the hell is wrong with you, beast? Why are you so quiet, huh?”

  Despite the fact that he showered three or four times a day, sprinkling himself with water from the yard’s hose, Skinny exuded a penetrating acidic smell caused by the ignition of his corporeal mass. Conde looked at him and felt devastated. But he did not harbor the least desire to open the floodgates, even when he knew his friend would not give up easily. Either he said something to him or he killed him. He looked for an in-between solution, with the hope of escaping.

  “I’m in a bad state … It must be because of this shitty heat…”

  “Yes, the heat is unbearable this year,” Rabbit, the most sober of the three, backed him up. “Global warming … The world is getting fucked-up, fucked-up…”

  “But there’s something else going on with you…” Carlos opined, cutting off the possibility of a retreat through the apocalyptic gap Rabbit had opened up for him.

  Conde took a sip of his drink. That infamous rum really must have been Haitian.

  “It’s about my marrying Tamara…”

  Carlos looked at Rabbit with a face that said, Where did this come from?

  “Did she say something to you?” he asked.

  “No, she hasn’t said anything…”

  “Then what?” Carlos expressed his inability to understand.

  Ever since Conde discussed the subject of matrimony with Tamara, and what had always been a dream, a possibility, a more or less predictable end, had turned into an express plan thanks to that impulse, a feeling of suffocation had started to prey on him, and, lately, his stomach was in such knots that it made it difficult to breathe. The main problem lay in the fact that even he himself didn’t clearly understand the reason he was reacting that way. Because he didn’t know for sure, either, why he’d had to knock on that door. And now, he knew less still if he should enter or turn around and walk away. His constant desire to continue sharing his life with that woman was still unaltered and decisive. He knew perfectly well, besides, that getting married would only be a legal or social formality; it was all the same, as easy to enter as it was to dissolve, at least at a given time and place. Why then that deep, petty, insidious fear? Conde had, for himself and for the world, just one response: because, whether he wanted to get married or not, whether he more or less accepted the challenges of cohabitation and even trusted that Tamara would admit him with all of his burdens (even the canine burden, made tangible by Garbage II), once the woman became his wife, the relationship would weaken one of the few things that still belonged to him: his freedom. That of getting drunk or not, sharing his bed with a street dog, of buying or not buying books, of starving or eating, of not deciding to write, of living like a pariah, of becoming melancholy without the need to explain it to anyone … Even investing his time searching for an emo who in turn was in search of a resurrected God and, seemingly, harbored the hope of finding Him. The problem got complicated when Conde considered those possible losses against what could be the woman’s aspirations to enjoy the calm life she always sought and that, he knew well, she would never want to give up. What about love? Might the story about love conquering all be true? Is it even capable of overcoming routines? Conde didn’t believe it. Why in the hell couldn’t he have let sleeping dogs lie?

  “Then nothing, Skinny … I don’t want to get married, but I don’t want to lose Tamara. And if I tell her that deep down I don’t want to get married, that I’m scared to try it again, maybe…”

  Carlos finished his drink. He looked at Rabbit and then at Conde.

  “Can I tell you something?”

  “No,” Conde said immediately.

  “Well, I’m going to tell you: you got yourself into this mess … Now, you’re fucked. But try not to be too fucked-up, my brother. We’re all fucked-up enough without getting any worse…”

  An hour later, standing in front of Tamara’s house, as he looked at the concrete figures stolen from the imaginations of Picasso and Lam, capable of exerting a permanent attraction over his spirit, Conde thought through his strategy. It remained to be seen whether he didn’t fuck himself up too badly.

  Tamara was in the studio that had belonged to her father and later her first husband, the deceased Rafael Morín. The place where, he assumed, Conde could have the necessary comfort and privacy to undertake his always postponed literary projects: to write squalid and moving stories, like that son of a bitch Salinger who … The air-conditioning took the temperature down ten degrees and improved his spirits.

  The woman was filling out some forms that she had to take to the dental clinic the next day.

  “Let’s see if they fix the dental chairs, if they put in the lights that we need, if they give us soap to wash our hands and towels to dry them, if there’s always water, if they give us full sets of instruments, if the gloves arrive…”

  “So how in the hell do you remove molars? With little pieces of string, as if they were baby teeth?” Conde didn’t understand.

  “Almost,” Tamara admitted.

  Conde too
k a deep breath and dove in without more delay.

  “Look, I wanted to ask you something … I’m afraid, but I don’t have any choice, because … Tamara, do you really want to get married a lot?”

  Conde placed emphasis on the adverbial quantity that had been maliciously pursuing him recently. How much is wanting to get married a lot? The woman dropped her pen and took off her reading glasses to better concentrate. He, of course, felt a chill go through him. Of fear.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Don’t start, Tamara. Answer me…”

  Now she was the one who took a deep breath.

  “The truth is that it’s all the same to me … To me, it was as if we were already married. Almost … But you are the one who wants to sign papers … And because of that, before screwing up what we have, then I’d marry you if you ask me to, if it’s important to you…”

  The feeling of relief washed through Conde’s body like new blood. He felt on the verge of happiness.

  “Well, Tamara, I propose the following: if we’re fine like this, isn’t it better to let sleeping dogs lie?”

  “What about the ring?” she said, alarmed.

  “It’s yours. Keep using it.”

  “What about morning coffee?”

  “That will still be up to me.”

  Tamara smiled.

  “What about everything else?”

  “The rest is all yours … But whenever you want, we can use it.”

  Tamara stood up.

  “Why are you so soft and so complicated, Mario Conde?”

  “Because I’m a moron,” he said, and kissed her. It was a long kiss, wet, exciting more due to the mental relief than to the hormonal convergence. And at that moment, Conde even felt like he wanted to marry that woman whom the most pleasant of cosmic plans had placed in his path, a lot. But, for the moment, he kicked aside that desire and concentrated on his remaining desires.

  Outside, the heat was burning the city, its streets, its houses. It was even burning its people and the few dreams that they could still have.