“Yoyi, in this circus, how do you know which ones the emos are?”
“For fuck’s sake, man, by the clothes and the ‘curtain’… Let’s look for them…”
“Listen, tell me if you see the vampires. Although I’m sure I’ll know them by the fangs and because, instead of rum and Coke, they’ll be drinking Bloody Marys.”
Yoyi approached a group while Conde, who didn’t stop thinking about what he was learning, explained to himself that world of ironic codes in order to protect himself from his perplexity, and watched from one of the passage’s corners those New Men of the future, which was already the present. When Yoyi returned, the young man was smiling.
“They’re down there, before getting to G and 15…”
They crossed Calle 17 then, and just behind one of the new and ever more horrible statues of Latin American forefathers (that had been erected to fill the spaces left by the vanished effigies of Cuban presidents from the time of the Republic) they saw the inhabitants of the small but sovereign nation of Emolandia. The hairstyles with the straight lock of hair flattened over half their faces, the black and pink outfits, those striped sleeves like zebra skins, the metal hoops in various parts of their anatomy, and their darkened lips, eyes, and nails were the signs that distinguished them from the rest of the natives seen prior to this moment. Conde, unable to deny that he still thought like a policeman deep down inside, stopped the Pigeon in order to try to locate Yadine in the group, but didn’t find her. He then took the time to observe and get his first image of this group. While the other tribes had sung, talked, or kissed each other, the young emos remained silent, seated on the damp grass that must have been soaking their asses through, their gazes fixed on anything or nothing at all. The circular structure of the group favored the movement of a plastic bottle going counterclockwise, as if journeying on an impossible time travel toward nothing. Watching them, Conde thought that perhaps he was beginning to understand the incomprehensible: these adolescents were tired of their surroundings. Nonetheless, they didn’t seem determined to do anything to solve that state of profound fatigue beyond decorating themselves, getting drunk, and marginalizing themselves every night, without worrying too much about finding a way out … besides self-alienation. As Yadine’s basic philosophy had suggested to him, they only aimed to be and to seem. Emos were the grandchildren of an overwhelming historical exhaustion and the children of decades of consciously distributed poverty; beings stripped of the possibility to believe in anything, solely determined to escape to a corner of their own creation, perhaps even inaccessible to all who fell outside of that mental and physical circle that, without further contemplation, the former policeman decided to breach. Heeding an impertinent and unstoppable impulse, Conde took the three most agile strides he’d made in recent years, walked toward the group, and sat down between an emo and an emette, or however they called themselves.
“Would you give me a drink?”
The kids had no option but to return to filthy-real reality; an extraterrestrial turned out to be something too out of the ordinary to just be ignored. And besides, the shameless and insolent alien was asking them for a drink.
“No,” said the emo in front of him, clutching the bottle. Conde looked at the young blond kid, who was so white he was nearly transparent, with his hair falling over his right eye, his lips painted deep purple, one sole fake sleeve and a shiny ox hoop in his nose. He was so androgynous that he would require close observation under a microscope and only then could one aim to determine his gender identity.
“Okay. After all, it must taste like shit,” Conde defended himself, moving a bit toward the emette sitting to his right and calling over to his friend, “Come, Yoyi, cram yourself in here, we’re going to get a little depressed…”
Yoyi, who had watched Conde’s absolutely odd actions with surprise, approached slowly. Even to a former rocker turned everyday warrior, Conde’s approach seemed out of control. That’s why he murmured, “Excuse me” before sitting down in the spot offered by his friend. Besides, it was obvious that Yoyi found no charm in sticking the seat of his Armani jeans on the ground.
“What the fuck!” The blond Pale Face recovered his testosterone and began to protest. The others were going to join in when Conde cut them right off.
“I came to find something out: Is Judy dead or alive?”
The bomb set off by the former policeman’s malice left them mute. But their faces spoke volumes.
“Necessary clarification…” Conde said, lifting his index finger. “We are not policemen. We want to know what happened to her, to tell her grandmother,” he chose to say, since he didn’t know whether he should mention Yadine’s participation or not. “The real police say someone mentioned that Judy wanted to leave Cuba and that maybe she boarded a balsa raft and … Forgive my impertinence and allow me to introduce myself: Mario Conde, it’s a pleasure.”
The kids listened to the unwelcome personage and exchanged looks while some searched out Pale Face, who was doubtless some kind of leader. Beneath their masks, Conde guessed they were between fourteen and eighteen years old and confirmed that his speech had had some effect and if he wanted to get something out of that buzz among the emos, he should act quickly.
“They told me that emos love balsa rafts and—”
Pale Face started speaking.
“Judy was always talking about doing things she later never did … She had told me about leaving on a balsa raft…”
The only black emo in the group cleared his throat. He had the advantage, Conde thought, of saving himself lipstick, but must have spent great effort and a number of chemicals to manage the straight-haired curtain across his face.
“I don’t believe that,” the kid said and looked at the leader.
“Well, she just repeated that to me the other day,” Pale Face reacted, as if he were annoyed. “Whether she did it or not is another thing. But let’s hope she got the hell out of here…” He whispered the last words as he fiddled with the striped sleeve covering his left arm from the wrist to his biceps. Who did that almost transparent kid look like to him? Conde again asked himself. Trying to stay ahead of the growing silence, he searched for a way to keep the young people talking.
“Is it fun to be emo?” he asked, trying to rile them up.
“You’re emo because you’re emo, not to have fun,” the emo girl sitting next to him said. “Because it hurts us to live in a shitty world and we want nothing to do with it.”
Condo made a mental note of that phrase, which was almost identical to the one said by Yadine the previous afternoon. Could it be the tribal motto, lines from its emotional anthem?
“And what do your parents have to say about that?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care,” she said, and immediately proclaimed, in more than perfect English, “It’s better to burn out than to fade away, as Kurt Cobain said.”
A couple of “Yeah, yeah”s, flat but approving, followed the emette’s speech and Conde asked himself who that poet or philosopher mentioned by the pyromaniac in the making could be. Cobain? Wasn’t Billy Wilder the author of that phrase? Then he recalled the occasion on which he, still a policeman, had had a conversation with a group of freaks from that long-ago time: the freaks wanted to be free and distanced themselves from oppressive society to breathe in their freedom and fuck like the damned. If these emos didn’t want anything but to display themselves as asexual phenomenon, and besides were the kind who would rather burn themselves just to enjoy the immolation, things were getting worse.
“Have any of you seen the photo of Judy that her mother sent to that TV program where they talk about lost people and dogs?” He tried to sound casual.
“Yes, I saw it! It didn’t look like her, her hair all done up,” said another emo girl, farther away and even smiling, to corroborate Conde’s suspicion.
“So is it true that Judy had an Italian boyfriend?”
The black emo began to shake his head no, without letting t
he curtain come off of his face.
“I’m a friend of Judy’s … from school,” the kid said. “The Italian guy wasn’t her boyfriend. How could he be when he was an old man of about forty…”
Conde looked at Yoyi: What the hell would he be, at over fifty? And why hadn’t Yadine touched on the specific point of that Italian guy?
“So then?”
“She said he was her friend. That she liked to talk to him, that he really understood her … He used to give her books, he would buy them in Spain…”
“Listen to that!” protested the pale emo, who for some reason was bothered by the dark emo’s opinions.
Conde looked at Yoyi again: that story about the kind old Italian man was fishy. He stayed focused on the black emo.
“So you say that she didn’t talk about leaving Cuba?”
The kid thought about his response.
“Well, one time … but after that, she never talked about it to me again. Everyone talks about leaving, and a bunch do go, but Judy was doing something here that she liked a lot: fucking over her dad.”
“Well, that’s normal … Can I have a drink now?” He addressed Pale Face, who was still holding on to the bottle while operating the keys of his cell phone and looking at something on the screen, as if the talk had ceased to interest him. Grudgingly, the kid held the bottle out to him. Conde smelled it; he’d swallowed worse than this, he told himself, and threw a stream of it down his throat. He swallowed, snorted, and offered the jug to Yoyi. The Pigeon, of course, rejected the offer. “One last thing I’d like to know … for today … Why do emos have to be depressed for the pleasure of being depressed? Aren’t there enough things out there to truly depress someone? Isn’t it too hot in Cuba to get depressed just because?”
Pale Face looked at him with hate, as if Conde was profaning sacred dogmas. Yes, yes, the kid reminded him of someone. After thinking about his question, the emo answered him. “It’s been a long time since I saw a guy as idiotic as you. And I could give a shit whether you’re a cop or not.” The anger overtaking him forced him to pause. Conde, willing to accept it all as long as he found out more, noted the glee in the faces of the other presumed depressives. “The only thing we really want is to not have a shitty life like you had and have. I’m so sure you’re bitter because you never did what you wanted to. You lapped up all the stories they fed you … Because you’re a coward and an idiot. And in the end, for what? What did you gain with them?”
The emo paused, and Conde thought he was waiting for a response, which he agreed to give him.
“I gained nothing at all. If anything, I lost … because I’m an idiot.”
“Did you hear that?” Pale Face said, triumphant, addressing his brethren. Then he turned back to Conde, who had managed to maintain the stupid smile he considered imperative at that moment. “At least we don’t allow ourselves to be led like lambs. We’re going to lead the lives we want and we aren’t going to pay tribute to anyone, man or god. We don’t believe in anything, we don’t want to believe…”
“Unbelievers or heretics?” Conde needed clarification, without knowing why, or perhaps because that last phrase, that proclaimed willful absence of faith, had touched off something in his memory.
“It’s all the same. What matters is not believing,” Pale Face continued, displaying his obvious leadership and releasing pent-up rage. “That’s why we don’t want them to give us shit, so that they can’t come back later and say they gave us something. We don’t talk about freedom, because that word was taken by sons of bitches for themselves and they wasted it: we don’t even want that from all of you … We grab what belongs to us and that’s it … And if we can, then we get away from here, it doesn’t matter where, Madagascar or Burundi … So now go fuck off, because the mere sight of guys like you makes me even more depressed.”
As the transparent kid went on with his emo pride speech, Yoyi had started standing up, as if lifted by a jack. He let him finish his rant and then exploded, “Okay, you little shit, I’m just going to ask you one thing: Where in the fuck do you get the money to walk around with those Converse you have on and with that BlackBerry that doesn’t do shit here in Cuba?”
“Hey, listen, I—”
“Either answer me or shut up. I already let you speak, and in democratic Emolandia, everyone gets his turn…” Yoyi thundered, causing the young people from adjacent tribes to turn and stare. “Do you know what I have to do to have a cell phone? Well, run all kinds of risks with the real police every day, because they exist and in spades … God knows where your father, your mother, or the guy who gives it to you up the ass gets the money to support you, dress you, and pay for your whims. So stop being an ass and making yourself out to be so pure and such a heretic. And if you really want to get depressed, listen to what I’m going to tell you now: that Dolce & Gabbana sweatshirt you’re wearing is faker than a three-dollar bill! Do you want more reasons to be depressed? Then listen up: you’ll never be free! And do you know why? Easy-peasy: because you don’t get freedom if you hide in a corner. You have to earn it, asshole! And because imbeciles like you are the ones enriching the makers of Converses, BlackBerrys, and of MP4 players, which are, incidentally, complete and utter shit…” Yoyi took a breath and looked at Conde. “I’m getting the hell out of here, man, I can’t take this. And you,” he addressed the albino emo, “if you don’t like what I said to you and you want to work out some aggression, come with me and you’ll be really depressed when I’m done…”
Conde, still sitting, felt the dampness concentrated on his ass and how numb it was getting. He looked at the emos, furious or surprised by Yoyi’s explosion, and watched the transparent leader sputtering, but without moving from his spot. He noticed that, at that point in the debate, the only one who seemed depressed was the black emo. Fighting his own muscles, he managed to stand and put on his best smile.
“Forgive my friend … He’s like that, impulsive. He was a rocker, you know. I was … I played ball.” And he made a gesture signaling goodbye, as if announcing his definitive withdrawal from the playing field.
3
Back when Mario Conde was a baseball player (or, to be precise: tried to be one), and an avid consumer of the Beatles, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Blood Sweat & Tears, he had also been a victim of depression, but for more concrete reasons. He was living the final days of an adolescence experienced without any grace and without having ever worn on his feet (or on any other part of his body) anything coming close to resembling some Converse or Dolce & Gabbana article, even a fake one. It was then that he arrived at high school in La Víbora and, in the same natural way that the acne faded from his face, he started acquiring some of the things that would round out his life: some friends—Skinny Carlos, who really was skinny then—Rabbit, Andrés, and Candito the Red; his enjoyment of literature, complicated by the alarming desire to write like some of the authors he read, like that son of a bitch Hemingway or that asshole Salinger, who hadn’t published anything else in forty years; and the first, most painful and constant love of his life: Tamara Valdemira, Aymara’s twin sister. And it was Tamara who was the reason for his first depression. (Hemingway would depress him later, when that author made a deeper impression on him. Salinger would simply disappoint him with his insistence on not publishing again.)
Although the twins were alike in all the ways that a human being could resemble another, so much so that to facilitate their identification, their parents decided that Tamara’s color would be blue and Aymara’s mauve (for hair ribbons, socks, bracelets), ever since he saw them, despite their uniforms and identical faces, Conde fell definitively, unmistakably, monumentally in love with Tamara. The young man’s furious shyness, the young woman’s alarming beauty, and the fact that Tamara came from a world so different from his (she was the granddaughter of a famous lawyer and daughter of a diplomat, while he was descended from a cockfighting breeder and a bus driver) made Conde suffer his passion in silence, until the ever expansive Rafae
l Morín showed up, led the cat into the bag, and, incidentally, smothered the hopes of Mario Conde. He endured an unhealthy but very justifiable adolescent malaise for many months—impossible to alleviate even through frequent masturbation, an art in which he came to consider himself a specialist and even an innovator.
Almost twenty years later, that bitter story from the spring of his youth had segued into chapter two in an unforeseeable and explosive way. Rafael Morín disappeared and fate wanted Lieutenant Mario Conde to be burdened with searching for the unblemished leader who, by poking around in all the right places, was quickly revealed to be anything but unblemished and only reappeared to be deposited six feet under, covered besides in the disgrace of his fraudulent businesses. Since then, Tamara and Conde (who was going through a rather traumatic separation and divorce) had maintained a pleasant and placid relationship in which each one gave the other their best selves without giving up what was left of their personal space. Conde even thought that the health of their relationship was perhaps founded on the fact that neither one of them, even when they had thought of it now and then, had dared pronounce any intention to see it through to the cursed word: “matrimony.” Although the fact of not invoking it did not imply, either, that the word and all it signified was not circling around them, like a vulture and its prey.
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