“Alma, that classmate of Judy’s, Frederic?” She nodded. “What’s he like?”
“He’s black, rather tall, very intelligent … Judy and he have been friends since early high school. That one really is a friend of hers, more than Yadine. Well, he was the one who got her interested in becoming an emo.”
“It wasn’t Yadine?”
“No.” Alma moved her head. “From what I heard one day, Yadine was goth or punk … but not emo. Until she met Judy…”
Conde nodded. Frederic had to be the black emo with whom he had spoken the previous night and Yadine was another multilayered onion, he concluded.
“Why did you go to the TV station with a photo of Judy without … in which she doesn’t look emo?”
“I said the same thing myself … It was Alcides’s decision. He didn’t want anyone to see what his daughter was really like…”
“What about school?”
“Yes, she maintained her interest in school and got good grades, as always. That’s why one of the things that makes me fear for the worst is that in a few weeks exams begin, and if she doesn’t show up…” The sob was now deeper, raw, and Conde again offered her the kindness of shifting his gaze. But this last fact confirmed his idea that the grandmother’s narrative about Judy was lacking some component that, already, he intuited was linked not only to her public attitudes, but also to her mysterious evaporation.
“Does she want to go on to study at the university?” he asked when the woman had recovered her calm.
“Yes … but she doesn’t know what.”
“That’s more normal,” Conde said with certain relief, and received a brief smile from the grandmother as recompense. “So why do you say that your son-in-law’s problems in Venezuela don’t have anything to do with Judy?”
“Nothing that Alcides did has any relation to Judy. Besides, Judy didn’t have much to do with her father, since a long time ago … He spent his days criticizing her, for anything. And look at what he was up to.”
“What was he up to?” Conde decided to explore that breach.
“Some men who worked with him would ‘save’ for themselves the pounds of luggage that Cubans who were going to work in Venezuela couldn’t use or didn’t want. I don’t know how things worked, but when there was a good amount of pounds accumulated, they would send a container with things that were then sold here. The two men involved in this mess were subordinates of Alcides and are in jail, because they were the ones signing for those deliveries … He swears he didn’t know what his people were doing.”
“And do you believe him?”
Alma took a deep breath.
“We were talking about Judy,” the woman evaded him. Of course she didn’t believe him.
Despite the fact that it was not the most appropriate reaction for that moment, Conde had to smile. Alma imitated him conspiratorially.
“Alma, why is almost everyone so sure that Judy didn’t try to leave Cuba?”
The woman stopped smiling. Her seriousness became deep. She looked at the photo of the two smiling girls.
“She wouldn’t have gotten herself into that without saying anything to her sister María José, who is in Miami…”
“María José?” Such a Castilian name surprised Conde, who was already used to hearing the most nonsensical names for the offspring of his generation: from Yadine and Yovany to Leidiana and Usnavy.
“Yes. María José left on a balsa raft and was on the brink of death … No, I am sure that Judy would have asked for my help to do something like that … Despite her character, or her act … No, she wouldn’t have dared…”
Conde nodded. It wasn’t worth reminding the grandmother that her granddaughter had many faces, as she herself had suggested, and that there were more than enough young people in this country who wanted to get far away. But for the time being that path was blocked, he thought. He needed to find a shortcut to the “other Judy,” perhaps the truer one.
“Alma, would you let me see Judy’s room?”
* * *
In the shadows, Kurt Cobain looked into his eyes, defiant, with the insolence that only those who believe themselves unassailable are capable. However, verifying that Cobain was a musician brought him certain comfort, since the incendiary phrase he’d heard the previous night, and that he had managed to translate for himself, turned out to be more pleasant if it came accompanied by some melody. Below Cobain’s blond image, the poster announced his affiliation: Nirvana. Conde barely knew it was an alternative rock band, and he had not a single image or note in his mind, like a good Neanderthal clinging to the pure sound of the Beatles and Creedence Clearwater Revival’s black melodies. But, hadn’t that singer committed suicide? He should find out.
The room, on the palazzo’s second floor, was wide but cavelike. The windows were covered with a dark fabric, barely pierced through by the ruthless summer sun. When he found the light switch and had a better view of the place, Conde verified that under the Cobain poster was the bed, made up with a purple-colored blanket, which served as confirmation of its owner’s taste for gloom. On other walls were posters for musical groups also unknown to Conde—a certain Radiohead and Thirty Seconds to Mars—but the real encounter with something very twisted came when, as he closed the bedroom door, the former policeman saw the poster reigning there. Below some dripping letters in scarlet (yes, he thought of the word “scarlet,” a strange color in the palette of his vocabulary) that warned DEATH NOTE was an image of a girl, without a doubt, Japanese, with a ferocious expression, rigid mouth, clenched fists ready to fight, and a strip of black hair over her right eye: a curtain, a screen? But the girl seemed covered by the strange and grotesque figure of an indefinable animal, with vampire-like wings, hair shooting up all over the place, and an enormous black-lined mouth—a clown ejected from the heavens or come out of the inferno. A Satanic image. Surely, this image must belong to one of the manga consumed by Judy. Going to bed every night and falling asleep while seeing that visage of fury and horror couldn’t be healthy at all. Or was the girl burning slowly with her individual fires?
He found a couple of school uniform items hanging in the closet, while the rest of the wardrobe was made up of a collection of emo designs. Black clothing dotted with shining studs, platform boots, and some Converse, apparently useless already due to how worn-down the soles were, portable sleeves (some pink ones, others that were black-and-white-striped), and some gloves designed to leave the fingers uncovered. According to Alma Turró, the afternoon on which she went out to not return, Judy was adorned in her emo attire. But there was the girl’s other battle gear, which added alarming ingredients to her disappearance, since a planned escape would have surely implied a selection of at least some of those clothes that were so specific.
On a small bookcase, he encountered what he expected and more. Amid the predictable tomes were several of Anne Rice’s vampire novels; five books by Tolkien, including his classics—The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings; a novel and a book of stories by a certain Murakami, obviously Japanese; Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince; a very, very worn-out copy of Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being; and … The Catcher in the Rye, by that son of the bitchiest bitch Salinger!—we already know his sins … But he also found more incendiary texts: a study on Buddhism, and Ecce Homo and Thus Spake Zarathustra by Nietzsche, books capable of putting much more than vampires, sprites, and alienated or immoral characters in the mind of a young person who seemed too precocious and impressionable, with an immense desire to separate herself from the flock. Inside Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, Conde found a rectangular card, handwritten perhaps by Judy herself, and what he read confirmed his first conclusion and explained the speech about disbelief by the previous night’s transparent emo: “The death of God supposes the moment in which man has reached the necessary maturity to dispense with a god who establishes guidelines and limits on human nature, rather, morality. Morality is inextricably related to the irrational [the copier had underlined thi
s several times], to unfounded beliefs, in other words, to God, in the sense that morality emanates from religiosity, from axiomatic faith and, as such, from the collective loss of critical judgment which serves the interests of the powerful and the fanaticism of the masses.” Had Nietzsche written that? Had Judy copied and processed that? The underlined idea at the end of the citation indicated a predictable feature in the developing picture of the girl as antiestablishment and determined in her pursuit of the uniqueness that freed her from the influence of power as much it freed her from belonging to the “fanatical masses.” But why had she been drawn to that first underlined phrase in which morality and irrationality were connected? What had led a girl so young to worry about ethics and faith?
As he asked himself what the police in charge of finding Judy could have thought about that room and its revelations, Conde scanned his surroundings looking for something he couldn’t specify, with the certainty that his discovery would help him understand the nature of and perhaps even the motives for Judy’s voluntary or forced disappearance. Without his noticing, the former policeman was again thinking like a policeman, or, at least, like the policeman he had once been. He again opened the closet, looked in the drawers, and flipped through the pages of books without finding what he was looking for. Amid the boxes of dozens of DVDs, he read a title he hadn’t noticed in his previous search and that enticed him: Blade Runner. He had seen that movie no less than five times, but it had been a while since the last occasion. He took the box and opened it to verify whether it was an original copy. It was. To find out, he had to lift the white card on top of the disc, which ended up having writing on the reverse side, in the same hand as the notes found in the Nietzsche book, although in more compact handwriting, almost miniature, forcing him to squint so he could better focus and read: “The soul has fallen into the body, in which it loses itself. Man’s flesh is the damned part, destined to age, die, degrade. The body is the endemic illness of the spirit.” Conde read those words twice. As far as he knew (and it wasn’t like he knew too much about those matters), it didn’t sound like Nietzsche, although he thought he recalled that through the mouth of Zarathustra the philosopher had talked about the soul’s feeling of contempt for the body. Was what was written a conclusion of Judy’s, a speech from Blade Runner, or a citation taken from some other author with those concepts meant to reflect utter contempt for the human body? Whatever its origin, it sounded unnerving, much more so given the specific circumstances of a disappearance that was perhaps voluntary, and clearly announced why Yadine had said that there was no one better than Judy to explain what it was to be emo.
Conde kept the card, put it in his pocket, and decided to go downstairs with the DVD to ask Alma Turró if he could borrow it: he should sit through Blade Runner again if he wanted to verify whether it was a forgotten speech from the movie. Either way, that combination of musical and philosophical Nirvanas, of ferocious emos and ultra-postmodern monsters, of vampires, elves, and supermen freed from bondage thanks to the death of God, all topped with contemptuous concepts of the body, could result in a complex mental state. The possibility of suicide grew in that light. He already knew, through Alma Turró’s words, that Judy had created her own world and built her own house in it. But now that he had some idea of the strange inhabitants of that universe (there were as many sharpened swords as in a manga), Mario Conde had acquired the certainty that the girl was much more than a girl who was lost, misplaced, or hidden of her own volition: she seemed to be a dramatic warning sign of the dangers of contemporary alienation. And a self-inflicted death had perhaps presented itself as the shortest and quickest path to that same longed-for freedom from the body and of the sickening sadness caused by what an emo had called “the environment.”
* * *
At the mere sight of the reverberating asphalt esplanade of the so-called Red Square, the hieratic bust of the Forefather, the flagpole without a flag, the old majaguas in bloom, the short steps and the tall columns supporting the building’s portico, Conde felt how the story of Judy’s disappearance was becoming his. For men like Conde and Skinny Carlos, everything that had to do with that profane sanctuary of what had once been and was again now La Víbora High School evoked a special connotation for those who refused to discard what remained of the most luminous moments of the past, fearful of a loss that could tear apart their memory and leave them abandoned to a present in which, many times, he felt the impossibility of finding his way. On that black esplanade, seated in the path of the stairway and the desks sheltered by the building that rose up behind the columns, Mario Conde had traversed three years with which he still lived, rather, with the consequences of which he still lived, as he was able to verify every morning and every night.
When the tide of warm nostalgia had settled in his spirit, Conde, beneath the poplar where he had taken refuge from the beating of the cruel midday sun, decided to take advantage of the wait and used the renovated phone booth nearby … First, he called Carlos to delegate the organization of a birthday party for the twins; he had to go through the whole playbook and do everything from invitations to the complex assignment of what each invitee should bring, conveniently divided between beverages and edibles. Then he called Yoyi to find out if he’d heard from the former leader who loved his grandchildren (and perhaps his dogs as well—he had to look into that), but the young man was still sleeping off the hangover of warlike rage that had exploded the night before during his close encounter with Emo World.
Past noon, a noisy flock of uniformed students came down the front steps on their way to the street. Hiding his body behind the coarse trunk of the poplar, he saw Yadine pass by and go off alone toward the Calzada. Watching her, Conde felt hit by nostalgia and disappointment. How many dreams of the future had he and his friends caressed as they walked down that same street, only to have them dashed to pieces in the brutal clash with the reality in which they lived? Too many … Yadine, at least, didn’t believe in anything, or didn’t have anything in which she wished to believe. Perhaps it was better that way, he told himself.
A few minutes later, when he had lost almost all hope, Conde saw Frederic Esquivel leave the building; he managed to identify the young black man he had met as an emophile practitioner the night before and who, according to Alma Turró, had induced Judy into embracing that world. From where Conde stood, he saw Frederic go to the right, accompanied by two girls, and he decided to follow him to try to approach him at the most propitious moment.
From his prudent distance, the pursuer tried to guess what the black emo had done about the hair that had been covering his face the night before and didn’t find an answer to his curiosity since, following school regulations, the kid had moved aside the fallen piece of hair to leave his entire face visible. One of his companions split off in search of Calzada del 10 de Octubre and Frederic continued walking with the other one, surely to the also nearby Avenida de Acosta. Luckily for Conde, it was the girl (a rather well-developed blonde, nearly stunning) who dropped anchor at the Route 74 bus stop, where she said goodbye to Frederic with a long, sustained, lewd, wet kiss accompanied by mutual ass-grabbing, very easy in Frederic’s case, since his fallen pants displayed, in the rear, more than half his underwear. As soon as they separated, the young man repositioned his member, excited by all the kissing, and continued on his way, as if he had just had a glass of water. About one hundred feet farther on, he crossed the avenue to turn at the first corner, toward the neighborhood of El Sevillano.
“Frederic!” The kid looked surprised when he turned around and recognized the man. Conde tried to smile as he approached him, thinking that if anything remained of the erection, he was responsible for making it disappear. “It was hard for me to recognize you … Can we talk for a minute? I just wanted to apologize for what happened yesterday, what my friend said and what I did. We were very impertinent with all of you. Do you have a minute for me?”
The hibernating emo kept silent. His black skin was shiny with sweat and su
spicion. Now he seemed less androgynous than the night before. Conde pointed at a low wall, with the benefit of the shade from a tree, while he explained that it had been Judy’s grandmother who told him his name and where to find him. Just in case, he again swore to him that he wasn’t a policeman.
“Look, the truth is that I used to be, but in another life, about a thousand years ago … And before that, I went to the same high school as you … Well, that doesn’t matter … Let’s see: right now I’m coming from Judy’s house and her grandmother spoke to me of you. Alma asked me to help them find out what happened to Judy, and I think your friend deserves that. If Judy tried to leave on a balsa raft—”
“She didn’t try to leave on any balsa raft, I already told you,” Frederic interrupted him, almost annoyed.
“So then surely she’s alive. But if she’s not showing up, there must be something…”
“Because of her father. That guy has always been a son of a bitch. She can’t stand the sight of him, even in a picture.”
“Why do you say that? What did he do to Judy?”
Conde shook at the mere thought of the source of the disappearance being mixed up in an act of paternal violence.
“He tried to kick her out of the house when she became emo. But Judy’s grandmother said that if her granddaughter left, she would also leave. It was all complicated, her father would say that we emos are counterrevolutionaries and I don’t know what other bullshit … He even came to my house one day to accuse me of steering his daughter off course…”
“So this Alcides Torres is into this line of bullshit?”
Frederic smiled.
“Worse than that … That guy is so afraid that he’s shitting himself…”
Heretics Page 47