“Well, it’s not avocados that are falling to the ground. It’s big turds … and we’re running after them.” Manolo mimed hunting free-falling, rotten avocados. “The embezzlement and illegal businesses are worth millions … No one knows how much has been stolen, skimmed, given away, and squandered in fifty years.”
“And here you were, putting away those little old sellers of plastic bags, ice pops, and clothespins…”
“Now we’re going after the big fish. But besides, in the Sábado Gigante operation, we’re looking for those who capture satellite signals from Miami and distribute cables so people can watch Miami channels … There are thousands upon thousands of them … Also, bringing down the brothels and sex clubs, of which there are a ton. That blew up because they killed a girl with some drug they put in her and then threw the corpse in a garbage dump. There are even some Italian pimps mixed up in that and—”
“How nice, right? The best of all possible worlds … and now, suddenly, they discover that this world is full of corruption, whores, drug addicts, perverts who prostitute young girls, and the pigs who looked like saints because they were always yes-men.”
“And amid all this shit, how do you expect the bosses to ask us to investigate a missing crazy girl who surely met her maker on a balsa raft trying to get to Miami? Come on, tell me?”
“Her friend says that her parents and grandmother swear on all that is holy that the girl didn’t leave Cuba … She didn’t even get in touch with a sister she has in Miami.”
Manolo took a loud breath.
“This morning, when you called, the first thing I did was look for her file … The girl was emo and those people, most of them, have a lock of hair over one eye and a sneaker practically hanging around their necks. But not just any sneaker, Converse, the kind that cost a hundred dollars and—”
“A hundred dollars for sneakers?”
“What world are you living in, man? Look, to be emo, you have to have sneakers like that and some other brand I can’t remember, and a cell phone, but not just one for talking and sending short messages; rather, the kind that has a camera and can play music and videos. You have to wear black clothing, better if it’s by Dolce & Gabbana, either authentic or made in Ecuador; it doesn’t matter. You have to wear bracelets, those covers that they put on their arms as if they were sleeves, gloves that are also black—in this fucking heat—and you have to treat your hair with some kind of chemical that leaves it straight and stiff so you can wear it as if the wing of a vulture were hanging in your face … Do you know what they call that strand of hair? The curtain…”
“The curtain? Curtain? What’s that, man?”
“Stop being cute and do the math: you need at least five hundred dollars just to become emo … What I earn in two years.”
“And how do you police get on with the emos?”
“Let’s see … on Calle G, all those characters get together: the emos, but also the rockers, the freaks, the Rastas, the metalheads, hip-hoppers … ah, and the Mikis.”
“There are more every day … What is this? Star Wars?”
“They’re all more or less the same, although they’re not the same. The Mikis, for example, are the ones with the most cash because their parents are well connected in one way or another … We try not to mess with any of them since all they do is drink rum, play music, piss on the street, shit on the porches of houses in the area, fuck each other in any dark corner…”
It was Conde’s turn to laugh.
“How you’ve all changed! When I was in high school, you got carried off to jail for wearing shorts in public … So what’s the deal with drugs with these kids?”
“That’s the real problem, drugs. When it comes to that, we do get fierce. The thing is that on weekends, a whole mess of them get together and that makes things difficult for us. What we do is look for the seller through the buyer and every once in a while, we land a big fish.”
“So how do you do it?”
“For fuck’s sake, Conde, what the hell do you think informants are for? We have a Miki policeman, a metalhead policeman, and a vamp policeman—there are also vampires on Calle G.”
Conde nodded as if what he were listening to was the most natural thing in the world. And, it appeared, it already was. Either way, Manolo was giving him another reason to be glad that he was watching that show as a spectator and not as a working policeman charged, perhaps, with carrying out a vampire hunt. Had the country gone crazy? Was Yadine wearing sneakers that cost a hundred dollars?
“So you can’t do anything to find the girl?”
“She’s not a girl, Conde, she’s eighteen years old. She’s a little too old to be messing around with that emo nonsense or whatever it is, to be getting depressed just because, and to be cutting herself to feel pain and … And they say they’re not masochists.”
“Shit, Manolo, I feel like I’m about to turn a hundred. I don’t understand jack. They fucked up our lives so much with everything about sacrifice, the future, historical predestination, and one pair of pants per year, to get to this? Vampires, depressives, and proud masochists? In this heat?”
“That’s why I’m telling you that if she didn’t just get the hell out of here, surely she’s having a great time out there, enjoying some foreigner’s money God knows where, taking whatever drug they’re taking these days. Or cutting herself up into little pieces … All I can ask of those in charge of the case is that they not put it at the bottom of a drawer. But I’m sure that they themselves are too overwhelmed looking for pimps, whores, traffickers, con men, corrupt officials, and all kinds of sons of bitches to spend any more time on the emo who got lost because she wanted to. Besides, I don’t have to tell you, after seventy-two hours, a person who disappeared doesn’t usually reappear.” Manolo smiled at his own verbal genius, and added, “At least, not alive.”
Conde lit another cigarette and passed the pack to Manolo, who shook his head no.
“On what day did she supposedly get lost?”
Manolo took out a beat-up notebook from the pocket of his standard-issue pants.
“May thirtieth … eleven days ago,” he read, did the math, and added, “Three days later, her mother filed a missing persons report. She said that sometimes Judy would get lost for one or two days, but not three. For an investigation, that lost time is fatal, you know that.”
“And is there anything interesting in the file?”
Manolo thought for a few seconds. He had put his glasses back on so Conde could no longer enjoy the drama of his intermittent blinking.
“Did you already talk to her parents?”
“No, not yet.”
“Her parents even sent a picture of their daughter to a TV show … But it took a lot of work for them to say that their girl had been seeing an Italian guy for a while … a certain…” Manolo went back to searching the notebook, which looked like it had come out of a garbage dump. “Paolo Ricotti … The name jumped out at me because we’ve had an eye on that guy, for being a pimp, maybe even a corruptor of minors, but they haven’t been able to catch him in the act.”
“And what’s that character doing in Cuba?”
“Businessman … friend of Cuba … the kind who makes donations in solidarity … But what I don’t understand now is why you’ve gotten involved in this whole thing with the emo, huh, Conde?”
Conde looked at the building where he had worked for ten years. He searched out the window of what had once been his cubicle and, despite himself, couldn’t avoid feeling a wave of unhealthy nostalgia.
“I think it’s because I’d like to talk to this Judy … To truly understand what being emo is…”
Manolo smiled and stood up. He was familiar with those evasive responses from Conde and decided to get straight to the matter.
“Or is it that you’re feeling antsy because you still think like a cop?”
“Like my grandfather used to say: May God free us of this illness, if we haven’t already gotten it … Thanks, Manolo.”
&n
bsp; Conde held out his right hand and Manolo, beyond shaking it, held on to it.
“Listen, compadre, aren’t you interested in the father?”
A spark ignited in the former policeman’s mind.
“Yes, of course…”
“The guy is in deep. He was one of the heads of Cuban cooperation in Venezuela. There’s a shit-ton of imports on the left…”
“And?”
“And that’s all I know … But I also got a bee in my bonnet and I’m going to find out more.”
“I’m interested in whatever you find out. Even if it doesn’t have to do with his daughter. Disgraces never travel alone…” he stated and, mechanically, patted himself below his left nipple, the place in which his premonitions (usually painfully) awakened.
“Oh, no, Conde, don’t start talking about your premonitions … And look, put some cow shit on your head. They say that works … Because you’re going bald like nobody’s business…”
* * *
After several days of threatening to do so, the sky reared up and opened the floodgates: lightning, thunder, and rain flooded the afternoon, as if the end of the world had arrived. When it rained so apocalyptically and the heat receded, Conde knew an unbeatable method to await the passing of the summer storm: he filled his belly with the first thing he happened upon, let himself fall on the bed, opened a slow-paced novel by a Cuban poet always at hand for those circumstances, read a page without understanding a damned thing, and when he received that kick to his brain, wrapped in the sound of the rain, he fell asleep—and so he slept that afternoon—like a freshly nursed baby.
When he awoke, two hours later, he felt damp and heavy. The heaviness was due to sleep; the dampness, to Garbage II, who, in need of a refuge to spend the summer gale, had found his master in his glory and, fur still wet, was sleeping cheek to cheek with Conde. The man thought he should take advantage of the dog’s sleep to kill him at that very moment: it was what that tamed son of a bitch deserved. But when he saw him sleeping with the tip of his tongue showing between his teeth as he emitted light little grunts of pleasure caused by some pleasant dog dream, he felt disarmed and got up as delicately as possible so as not to interrupt the siesta of … that bastard who deserved to be killed for having drenched the bed.
The rain had stopped, but clouds still covered the sun. As he made his coffee, despite himself, Conde thought about his conversation with Manolo. Could there be some connection between what Judy’s father was doing in Venezuela and the girl’s disappearance? Logic warned that there should be no link, but logic also tended to be quite fickle, he told himself.
After drinking his coffee and smoking a cigarette, he resolved to start the engine and called Yoyi the Pigeon.
“Talk to me. Have we heard from the seller?”
“Not yet,” the Pigeon said. “Give him time, two or three days. Or do you not trust my Spidey sense anymore?”
“More than ever … Listen, Yoyi, are you busy tonight or can you come with me to see something I’m interested in but that doesn’t make a lick of sense to me?”
“Is there money involved?” he asked, since he couldn’t not ask, that Yoyi the Pigeon.
“Not a dime. But I could use your help … I want to see if I can find a woman.”
“For yourself?”
“Not exactly. Too young: she’s eighteen years old … An emo.”
“An eighteen-year-old emo? I’m in.”
Two hours later, Yoyi was swinging by to pick him up in his Bel Air. Since Conde had found out that the best time to see those characters was after ten at night, his partner had invited him to kill time by satisfying their hunger, and they carried this out at El Templete, the old port diner reborn as the city’s most expensive restaurant, whose clientele, 99.99 percent of the time, consisted of people born or living abroad, or who were a new breed of Cuban entrepreneurs, the only ones in any position to overcome the price barrier of the establishment’s delicacies. But Conde wasn’t surprised to see how, from the parking attendants to the chef, everyone greeted Yoyi (a street rat like no other) with a reverence usually reserved for Arab sheiks.
Once they had eaten like princes and had their fill of drink—two bottles of a Ribera del Duero reserve red—they left the Chevy at the house of a friend of Yoyi’s, who would be sure to guard it as if it were his unsullied virgin daughter, and walked along Calle 17 in search of Calle G, formerly Avenida de los Presidentes. A couple of years before, on the avenue’s central path, Havana’s urban tribes, as those rough inhabitants of the night—among whom, it happened, there were even tropical vampires—had given to calling themselves, had staked their claim.
On several occasions, from inside a car or bus, Conde had noticed—always with great disinterest—the concentration of kids who, especially on weekends, had taken over Calle G’s nights. From the start, they had seemed like a curious spectacle to him, scarcely understandable and rather singular. According to what he knew, everything had begun with a street gathering of rock fans who had nowhere else to go and, shortly after, turned into a massive concentration of bored kids and nonconformists. They were self-excluded as opposed to marginalized, determined to waste time, immersed in chatting and drinking, and at the close of the night had a sexual plug-in through any of the available outlets. But he knew little more about that world, so distant and different from his own.
While they were eating, Yoyi had explained a little bit to him.
“Let’s see if you understand.”
“I’m not going to understand, but go ahead…” Conde agreed.
“All these kids want is to be left alone and talk shit without anyone bothering them. The subject of conversation varies according to the tribe. The rockers talk about rock; the Rastas, about how to dreadlock their hair; the freaks, about how to dress more extravagantly; the Mikis, about cell phones and clothing brands…”
“Intellectual matters … What about the emos?”
“Those are really tough, man. They don’t talk much, because what they like is being depressed.”
“Everyone mentions the depression to me … They really like it? It’s not a pose? I’m intrigued by that…”
“To be emo, you have to be depressive and think about suicide a lot.”
“I told you I wasn’t going to understand.”
Yoyi, who usually avoided sweets, scarfed down a plate of shrimp in garlic that he had insisted on as dessert, took a drink of wine, and sought a way to open up Conde’s understanding.
“The deal with all of those kids is that they don’t want to seem like people like you, Conde. Or even like people like me. They try to be different, but, above all, they want to be what they decide to be and not who they are told they have to be, as has been happening for a while in this country where people are continually ordered around. They were born when everything was the most fucked-up and they don’t believe any tall tales and don’t have the slightest intention of being obedient … Their goal is to be on the outside…”
“Now I’m liking this more. That I understand…”
“Right, man. They belong to a tribe because they don’t want to belong to the masses. Because the tribe is theirs and not affiliated with those who organize and plan everything.” And Yoyi pointed up high.
“I’m understanding … but not the main thing. So how do you know all of this?”
Yoyi smiled as he patted his pigeon chest.
“Because back in the day, I was a rocker … Nuts about Metallica.”
“Well, look at that … I never got past Creedence…”
“But in my time, it was like a game. When I talk to today’s rockers, things are more complicated.” Yoyi touched his head to indicate the location of the complication. “And it’s all serious. At least, that’s what they think.”
That night, cooled off by the evening rain, the street was overflowing with young people. At first glance, Conde confirmed that the majority of them were adolescents, almost prepubescent, who all seemed to have dressed up
for a futuristic carnival. There were human circles around some who were focused on playing their guitars; kids who walked on one side or the other of the avenue’s main corridor looking for something they weren’t finding or perhaps not looking for anything; others were sitting on the ground, surely damp due to the afternoon’s shower, passing around a two-liter plastic bottle with a dirty dark liquid, seemingly high-octane. Some were wearing tight clothing, others baggy pants; the latter had crests of gelled hair on their heads, medieval executioner’s bracelets on their wrists, chains with locks around their necks; and others had hoops in their ears, painted lips, and pink clothing. Fed up with and alienated from an oppressive hierarchy, bored with everything, self-selected for marginalization, anatomically and musically obsessed with asexuality, candid, irritated, active tribal militants, anarchists without a flag, seekers of freedom. Rather than a Havana street, Conde felt like he was walking around Marsport, of course without Hilda. But that was Havana: a city that finally distanced itself from its past and, amid physical and moral ruins, foreshadowed an unforeseeable future.
Perhaps because he needed to remind himself what planet he was on, Conde couldn’t help but recall that in the same city where the ten lost tribes had now to come to be, a few years before, when he himself was a teenager, certain dark warlocks of limitless powers had come out to the streets to hunt any young person who displayed hair a little bit longer or pants a little bit tighter than what they, those warlocks, considered admissible or deemed appropriate for the hair and extremities of a young person immersed in a revolutionary process determined, with those and other methods, to create the New Man. The weapon of mass destruction most wielded by the Red Guard had been scissors: to cut hair and cloth. Thousands of young people, judged merely by their capillary, musical, or religious preferences—or by sexual or sartorial matters—as social scourges who were unacceptable in the parameters of the new society being built, had not just been sheared and had their clothing redesigned. Many of them even ended up as recruits in work camps where, through difficult agricultural tasks under military regime, they were supposed to be reeducated for their own good and for the good of society. Being considered a troublemaker, showing hippie inclinations, believing in some god or having a nice, lively ass constituted an ideological sin, and the hordes of revolutionary purity, tasked with weeding the moral and ideological path to a better future, had a very productive harvest with those presumed perverts in need of correction or elimination. (Meanwhile, the real harvest, the sugar one, the development and subdevelopment one, wasn’t getting good results.) And, as he recalled all of that, Mario Conde couldn’t help ask himself if all of that pain and repression against those who were different, merely for being so, if that mutilation of freedom in the land of promised freedom, had been worth anything; at least, based on what he saw now, no. And that made him happy. Very, very happy. But … had the warlocks really disappeared or had they just gone underground, awaiting their time, even when life had taken from them the possibility of more time? Nonetheless, of the motley, undone world through which he moved now like a blind man without his cane, all that kept buzzing in his ears like a bothersome noise was the certainty that some of those young people enjoyed depression and practiced self-mutilation, even a culture of death, attitudes that the former policeman considered unnatural, further still, un-Cuban. The certainty was growing more and more in him that that incomprehensible attitude had been the push that had led him to this point.
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