Yoyi, recently showered and wearing a fair dose of cologne, still shirtless, was waiting for him on the porch of his house, engaged in the obsession he had for sucking the medallion over his plucked pigeon’s chest.
“What a break, man,” he said, all of his enthusiasm unbridled, when his business partner approached. “If we sell it for what I anticipate, do you know how much you get?”
“I’ve been trying to do the math for two days, but no … Four hundred dollars?” He dared to pronounce the alarming figure.
Yoyi had put on his linen shirt, fresh and unblemished. With the key to his Chevy in one hand and his best smile on his lips, he grabbed Conde’s ear with the other hand to better whisper to him.
“That’s why you failed math … You get almost a thousand bucks, man … One-zero-zero-zero!”
Conde felt his legs go weak, his stomach leapt, his heart stopped. A thousand dollars! He had to keep himself from kissing the Pigeon.
“Yoyi, Yoyi, remember that I’m an old person, my health … You’re going to give me a heart attack, dammit!”
“The former leader called me and says that, since we’re serious people, he accepts the sale by percentages. But he wants discretion and prefers that we do the transaction outside his house. And since we’re so serious, he asked me, as a sign of good faith, to leave him two thousand big ones on deposit.” And he smacked his pocket, where the evidence of a bulge announced the excellent health of the young man’s businesses. “What a character!”
When they were getting into the Bel Air, Conde looked at the June sky and lifted his index finger up high, in his best sports stance, and communicated his conviction to whoever was lingering in the celestial sphere. Some god had definitely survived and was hanging around up there.
“Nietzsche was an idiot,” he said.
“And now you realize that?” Yoyi smiled as he pressed the accelerator.
“I owe you one, friend. That money is saving my life … The thing is … Let’s see,” he finally dared. “If Tamara were your girlfriend, what would you give her for her birthday?”
Yoyi thought very seriously.
“An engagement ring…”
“An engagement—? But I don’t want to get married … for now.”
“And you don’t have to get married. But a ring is perfect … White gold, with some nice semiprecious stones … I myself can sell it to you, man. A really pretty one, and with a friends and family discount!”
* * *
Added to the atmospheric heat of June in Cuba was now an interior combustion caused by the noisy entrance of the devil into his body. The proposal dropped by Yoyi regarding the engagement ring had had an unexpectedly deep impact on Mario Conde’s consciousness. The idea of commemorating Tamara’s birthday with that gift which, in all certainty, would be appreciated by the woman, so taken with courtesies, formalities, and old habits, was tempting. But, in equal measure, it was dangerous, since if there was one thing Conde and Tamara had discussed little and poorly throughout those twenty years of intimacy, it had been the possibility of getting married. Would Tamara take that gift as an obligation? Should he ask her before giving it to her and annihilate any surprise effect? Did he really want to get married? And what about her, did she? Did they ever have to get married? Did giving a ring imply having to get married? How had Yoyi guessed that lately, that possibility had been going around in his head?
After satisfying his hunger with the food that Josefina had saved for him just in case—and it was almost always the case—Conde and Carlos went to the porch in search of the relief of a breeze. But while Carlos explained to him the organizing strategy for the party they would have in two days, for which he had already distributed verbal invitations and inalienable responsibilities to guarantee a sufficient amount of edibles and beverages, Conde couldn’t stop thinking about the damned ring.
“So there will be nine of us: Rabbit, Aymara, Dulcita, Yoyi, Luisa, Tamara’s ugly dentist friend, you, Candito, the birthday girl, and a waiter.”
“Candito is coming?”
“And how! He told me that that night he’s closing the church because he can’t miss this party. Old Josefina is going to make us some filling things to eat with supplies that Dulcita and Yoyi are bringing, since they offered, also voluntarily and in advance, to make that contribution … What do you think?”
“Since when does Yoyi know about the party?”
“I talked to him a little while after you called me.”
Conde estimated: Yoyi had had several hours to think about the subject of the ring. That time turned his proposal into a premeditated and treacherous act.
“What did you say I’m responsible for?” Conde asked, trying to get back to the reality of the moment. To facilitate the process, he took a long swig of rum.
“The cake, the flowers, and two or three bottles of rum. And rum is rum, real, with a label, not that one they sell at the Bar of the Hopeless…”
Conde put his hand in his pocket and removed a bill worth fifty pesos convertibles.
“Yoyi gave me an advance until they pay us for the books we’re negotiating. I need you and Candito, who knows about flowers, to take care of my share. You buy the rum … I’ve gotten tangled up in the story of that damned emo and—”
“Tell me a little about it. Do you have any idea yet where in the hell she went?” Carlos imitated Conde and took a drink.
“I have thousands of ideas, but about where that girl could be, none. I’ve made things hard for myself, Skinny. Now it turns out that I’m the one who is most worried about where she could be or what could have happened to her … It’s not every day that someone gets lost who was out there warning that God is dead and philosophizing about the freedom of the individual. Tomorrow, I want to see if I can talk to Candito. He’s the one out of all of us who knows the most about God…”
“There’s a reason he’s an emergency pastor, right?”
Conde nodded, again valuing the persistent presence of a god in the story of a missing girl. Yes, perhaps his friend Candito the Red, who had turned into some kind of makeshift evangelical pastor, could help him understand the knot of acceptances and denials of the transcendental in which the young girl had pushed him. But Conde sensed, without knowing the exact reason for that feeling, that in Judy’s life and disappearance, there were other shadowy things that he hadn’t even brushed upon yet, and that it wasn’t by crossing the paths to heaven that he was going to arrive at the darkness enveloping Judy. Yes, he had to understand other things. Who could help him?
“Wait, let me call Rabbit. I thought of something that maybe he could give me a hand with.”
Conde picked up the cordless telephone that was on the porch’s little table. The device was also a gift from Dulcita, who was more and more generous and attentive to Carlos’s needs. He dialed Rabbit’s number, and when his friend answered the phone, he explained the reason for his call: he needed Rabbit to give him advice about who he could speak with to understand something about the subject of young people who harm and scar themselves. And if that person existed and Rabbit could try to get him an appointment, the sooner it could be done, the better. His friend agreed to find out.
“This whole matter is really heretical, beast,” said Carlos. “I can’t believe that they enjoy suffering and getting depressed, I swear on my mother, I can’t—”
“The world is crazy, Skinny … And I am, too,” he admitted, drank what remained in the glass, and stood up. “Although not so much: Judy knows what she wants, or at least, what she doesn’t want, and I know that you have to give me what money is left over from what I gave you … Now I’m leaving, I want to talk to Tamara about something.”
Carlos looked at the bottle of rum brought by Conde. Half of its contents still remained. Something much more serious than a lost emo must be tormenting his friend’s mind for him to ask for his money and leave mid-game when the best was yet to come.
“Conde … Are you going to tell me what in the he
ll is going on with you now? You arrived here looking down in the dumps and now you’re up to your neck in garbage. For fuck’s sake, today you did a deal that’s going to rake it in, you’re doing what you most liked doing when you were a policeman and you can do it without being a policeman, and in two days, we’re going to have a big party for Tamara’s birthday and, except for Andrés, all of us survivors are going to be here … What more could you want, beast? Tell me, what’s there to complain about, Dick Head?”
Conde smiled at Carlos’s final words, which went back to the joke about the redskinned warrior named Dick Head, who expresses to the great chief Eagle Head, son of the legendary Bull Head and brother of the brave Horse Head, the disagreeable side effects of his appellation. And he concluded that Carlos was right: What’s there to complain about, Dick Head? It seemed obvious: he couldn’t help himself. His capacity for suffering as a result of anything that came his way made him, in a way, a precursor of the emo philosophy. But he didn’t open the floodgates. The matter that was needling him was not something he could talk about with Carlos before having solved it with Tamara, because it concerned her as much as it did his own doubts.
“I’m not complaining, beast, I’m just being an idiot … If Rabbit calls, he can find me at Tamara’s.” Conde got closer to Carlos and leaned over his spilling-over anatomy, barely contained by the arms of the wheelchair, and couldn’t resist the wave of tenderness that pushed him to hug the damp, sweaty body of his invalid friend. If Skinny needed additional proof of Conde’s pitiful state, the latter was giving it away with that hug, free of alcoholic impulses. It was obvious that he was hurt. Carlos, contrary to habit, this time preferred to stay silent as he returned the sign of affection.
Conde decided to travel the distance to Tamara’s house by foot. He wanted to give himself more time to meditate on a way to solve his new conflict. What bothered him most about that situation was its vulgar financial origins, since if he didn’t have the thousand dollars on the horizon promised by Yoyi, then nothing of the sort could be happening. And they say that the rich don’t have problems! But, he asked himself, philosophically, was the problem the ring in and of itself, or its implications?
Tamara, recently showered and wearing a nightgown, was on the sofa watching one of those documentaries about animals that those responsible for the nation’s TV programming liked so much. Just at the sight of her, in those familiar daily, routine surroundings, Conde felt a stab of anguish. Did he really want to get married forever? But as he leaned over her generous cleavage to give her a kiss and inhaled the clean scent that Tamara’s skin gifted him, his anguish was displaced by a pleasant feeling of belonging. This made him start to come up with immediate plans.
“You keep watching that. I’m going to take a quick shower,” Conde said, and went to the bathroom.
As he washed off layers of filth and heat and handed himself over to imagining a satisfying sexual end to the day, Mario Conde thought that, truth be told, he could consider himself a very fortunate being: he was lacking thousands of things, he’d had hundreds stolen from him, he’d been tricked and manipulated, the whole world was going to hell in a handbasket, but he still possessed four treasures that, in magnificent conjunction, he could consider life’s best rewards. He had good books to read; he had a crazy son-of-a-bitch dog to take care of; he had friends to screw around with, hug, and with whom he could get drunk and recall, without inhibition, times past that, with charitable distance, seemed better; and he had a woman whom he loved and, if he wasn’t too mistaken, who loved him. He enjoyed all of that—and even money now—in a country where many people had barely anything or were losing what little they had left. Too many people he ran into while out and about on the street, who would sell him their books in the hopes of saving their stomachs, had already lost their dreams.
Like a long-term bachelor, Conde hung his recently washed underwear on the tub and recovered the pair he had left there the night before. He went to the bedroom and looked for the hole-ridden and gigantic shirt he usually slept in. As he heard the TV voice narrating the story of a hermaphrodite elephant, a friend to the birds and a fan of eating yellow flowers (maybe he was simply just a gay elephant?), he prepped the small coffee pot and brewed some coffee. At that hour, Tamara wouldn’t join in, so he served his portion in a cup and, with a cigarette in hand, went to the TV room with a resounding decision in his mind: the hell with it, he would ask Tamara if she wanted to marry him. After all, he thought, if I already want to give her a ring, why not throw myself in headfirst once and for all?
When he entered the living room, he found Tamara asleep on the sofa. To not wake her, he took a seat in the leather armchair purchased many years prior by Tamara’s father in London, when he served as ambassador to the United Kingdom. With the remote control, he turned off the television set: he didn’t have the energy for stories about elephants with sexual trauma. He drank his coffee and lit his cigarette. And he understood that that was the best time to launch his proposal: “Tamara,” he whispered and dared to continue, “what do you think about us getting married?”
The woman’s first snore was the only response to his big question.
5
The esplanade, baptized many years before as Red Square by some stunned and enthusiastic promoter of the indestructible Cuban-Soviet friendship, radiated from the blackness of its paving. They left their car on a side street and, as soon as they took refuge under the kind shade of a tree, Conde and Manolo, as they couldn’t help but do, handed themselves over to evoking the grotesque episode of the death of a young chemistry professor who, twenty years before, had forced them to go back and forth across Red Square to La Víbora High School. Thanks to that investigation, they ended up finding a mountain of shit—moral double standards, opportunism, social climbing, sexual, academic, and ideological deviances—and, the icing on the cake, a killer that neither one of them would have wanted to find.
Early in the morning, Conde had tracked down Major Manuel Palacios before he left his house (he now lived with his eighth wife) for work at investigation headquarters. Manolo protested as much as he could, but in the end agreed to see him around eleven and later accompany him on that trip to a present plagued by connections to the past. Since Tamara had gone out at dawn (it was the day that they did surgeries with the maxillofacial surgeons), Conde dared to leave her a note on the dining room table. He would try to return early to talk to her about something important, he wrote. He knew that he had conceived of that note with the worst of intentions: to not leave himself any margin for escape. Then he went to his house to change and feed Garbage II, who received him with a growl of reproach for subjecting him to abandonment. What if he got married and went to live at Tamara’s house, which was much more comfortable than his own? What would he do with his crazy dog, a fan of sleeping on beds and sofas after spending the day on the street rolling around with other dogs and even with hermaphrodite elephants (if any pachyderms with those qualities showed up)? If he took him with him, the most likely thing would be that, one week in, Garbage II and his owner would be declared undesirables and kicked out, both of them (the elephant, too, if it went with them), from a house where one lived in accordance to certain rules of etiquette that those riotous savages were surely unaware of. Admitted cause for divorce: the unbearable ungovernability of a man and his dog.
At headquarters, Conde explained to his former subordinate the steps he had taken in his search for the emo and the reason for his request for help: he needed to identify and, if they managed to do so, locate the Italian whom Judy had nicknamed “Bocelli.” To calm down Manolo, who was always anxious, he had brought up the subject by telling him that it was about a man who would be interesting for him and his policemen, since according to what he had found out, it seemed very possible that he had something to do with drug consumption and sales in the city. He needed Manolo’s support, since the only tangible way to identify Bocelli implied asking Immigration for details on Italians under the age o
f forty, frequent visitors to the country who had entered the island in the last two months. They must use that information to confront Frederic, from whom Major Palacios, in his condition as a real policeman (the kind who can interrogate and imprison you), also had to get the identity of Judy’s mysterious girlfriend, as tempting as an unexplored island. Somewhere between the Italian and the hidden girlfriend could lie the reasons for the emo’s disappearance, forced or voluntary.
As he waited for the information about the Italians, Conde nonchalantly tried to introduce the other subject with which his former subordinate could help: Alcides Torres’s Venezuelan story, which showed up again and again as the background to the daughter’s rebellions. To his surprise, that day Manolo reacted as if he’d been wounded: regarding that investigation, they, the same detectives as always, didn’t know anything. With the argument that they weren’t dealing simply with common criminals, the investigation had been handed over to a special corps that was tracking Torres and other similar cases. But what was clear to the “same detectives as always,” like Manolo himself, was that it had to do with corruption, pure and simple. If Alcides Torres was still out there looking for his daughter and driving his Toyota, it was solely due to the fact that they hadn’t been able to implicate him directly in those shadowy dealings with the containers loaded down with flat-screen television sets, computers, and other technological delicacies purchased in Venezuela, later resold in Cuba. But, in Major Palacios’s opinion, when two of your subordinates have cake, they let you try the icing at least, right?
Heretics Page 49