With the photos of thirty-two Italians who met the required parameters, Conde and Manolo were waiting for the students to come out. As usually happened in similar circumstances, Conde felt the heartache caused by his opportunistic decision to place Frederic in the position of revealing a secret the boy had committed to maintaining. He had done something similar in the case of the murdered professor when he practically forced a student from that institute to reveal information capable of placing the kid in the none-too-pleasant position of rat. Why in the hell had he agreed to get involved in this story? The former policeman was reproaching himself when they heard the bell that put an end to the high school’s morning session.
Like the day before, Yadine was one of the first to leave the building, and, alone as always, quickly, as if intent on something, she took the hill toward la Calzada. Minutes later, Frederic came out sporting his student look. Instead of two, today there were three girls accompanying him, including the spectacular blonde he’d been kissing as a good friend the day before. With the established routine, the first of the young women left the group toward her destination, and a few minutes later, it was the blonde who—after a kiss that was lighter but involved tongue—separated from Frederic and the other young woman. The pursuers had to walk for several blocks behind the couple who, as soon as they freed themselves of their companions, had started to engage in a frenetic kissing in the streets that forced them to stop every few feet and made Conde consider his inability to understand anything. When they got to Parque de los Chivos and sat down on a bench, the intensity and depth of their caresses reached higher levels. Their tongues went crazy, the young people’s hands acting like snakes trained in the art of sliding under clothing, and they insisted on sinking their teeth into nerve points, causing convulsive muscular disturbances in their respective bodies. Conde and Manolo, at a prudent distance, had to resign themselves to smoking, sweating, and evoking past times and loves, trusting that the kids wouldn’t throw themselves on the grass and go further (the girl already had her hand inside Frederic’s pants and the latter had one under his friend’s skirt, who at one point arched so far backward that Conde feared she would break in two). Perhaps the heat would exhaust their out-of-control ardor quite quickly. At one point Conde moved his vision away from the show and looked at his former colleague; he discovered that Manolo’s eyes had reached an extreme state of being crossed, attracted for too long by the fully clothed porno happening in the park.
Twenty minutes later, after a very long kiss, the young people separated themselves—although not without effort. The girl (this one had dark hair, was tall, thin, and well-proportioned) crossed the park with a convalescent’s gait, and Frederic, after readjusting his member so he could walk without breaking it, walked down the slope that led to Avenida de Acosta. Manolo, who already deemed he’d invested too much time in that voyeuristic pursuit that seemingly altered his hormones, decided not to wait anymore and hurried his pace to catch up to the kid.
“Frederic, wait there,” he yelled, and took advantage of the slope’s momentum to accelerate his stride. Conde, trailing behind him, couldn’t help but smile. Neither he nor Manolo were in a condition anymore to carry out street chases.
The young man had turned around and his face clearly expressed his feelings when he saw Conde in the company of a uniformed policeman who, on top of it, had bars.
“What do you want now?”
Conde tried to maintain his smile.
“Your pants are stained … We need a little more help … Not for us, but for your friend.”
The opening phrase hit its target and Frederic lowered his defenses and his gaze to see the proportions of the effusion. Conde knew that noting that evidence made him more vulnerable.
“What do you want?” he whispered as he used his backpack to hide the stain on his inner thigh.
“Look, Major Palacios”—Conde pointed at Manolo—“is also interested in finding Judy.”
“And we need to see if you can identify the Italian she used to call Bocelli,” the major took over. “I have some pictures here. Come see if it’s any of these men…”
Frederic looked at Manolo, then Conde, and took the folder where the pictures were. Slowly, he flipped through the pages without any expression taking over his face. At the fifteenth image, he reacted and said, “It’s this one. I’m sure. I only saw him once, but it’s this one … Don’t you see that he looks exactly like the singer?”
Conde took the folder and looked at the picture: a man of about thirty-five, lots of hair, and olive-colored skin. He turned the card over and read the details: Marco Camilleri, twelfth visit to Cuba; had entered the country last on May 9 and had left on the 31st, three weeks later … The day after Judy left her house with an unknown destination.
“He was in Cuba when Judy got lost, but…” Conde muttered as he tried to imagine what that coincidence could mean. And he was only able to wager the worst.
“But what?” Frederic wanted to know.
“If Judy is in Cuba, she can’t be hiding with him … But if before leaving Cuba, this Bocelli…” Conde’s mind was thinking what his mouth refused to say: that Judy had not disappeared due to a specific reason, but that her absence was as irreversible as death. Had Bocelli concluded his stay in Cuba or had he interrupted it for one of the reasons that Conde was guessing? In an almost automatic way, he looked at Major Palacios, who made a slight affirmative motion. He was thinking the same thing. “Maybe this man could have done something very bad to Judy.”
“He killed her?” Frederic’s question was almost a yell.
“We can’t know right now,” Conde stated, and decided in that instant to take advantage of the young man’s altered state. “But the person who is surely still here is Judy’s girlfriend, and we need you to tell us who she is.”
“No idea,” the young man began, ready to leave.
Manolo, with his senses on high alert, chose to get right to it.
“Look, Frederic, this isn’t a game. In case you don’t know, it’s called a criminal investigation … Judy has been lost for thirteen days, and is probably dead. We’re talking here on the street because my friend says you’re a good kid, but I don’t want to waste my time. So, either you tell us right now who in the hell Judy’s girlfriend is or we continue this conversation in a much less pleasant place, and I swear to you, you will tell us there. You can’t imagine how convincing we…”
“Ana María, the Lit teacher,” Frederic said and, without waiting for any commentary, started running down the hill.
Conde saw him go and felt more pity than relief.
* * *
She must have been twenty-seven, twenty-eight years old and was stunningly beautiful. Intensely black hair, tragic eyes that were jungle green, crowned by full eyebrows raised in slight surprise, lips as if silicone filled but in reality fattened merely by the nature of ephemeral ethnic mixtures. Conde saw himself threatened by small breasts pointing skyward like surface-to-air missiles, and perceived the woman’s hips either as an oasis of peace or as a battlefield. Her skin shone thanks to a smoothness reached at the point of her maximum splendor, tinged with that color made by a few drops of coffee in milk. Angelina Jolie? Conde’s male chauvinism—which could not be helped—forced him to consider that sexy woman who loved other women as a painful waste of evolution.
Ever since Frederic had given them the information, Conde had thought that that conversation should occur with a certain semblance of intimacy. Fortunately for him, it wasn’t hard to get rid of Manolo. The policeman, also alarmed by the proximity of dates between Judy’s disappearance and the departure of Marco Camilleri, aka “Bocelli,” had decided that the investigators should follow that lead, looking around in the records and simultaneously pulling the strings of the networks of informants capable of knowing something about the hot points that beat most insistently in that drama: Italians, drugs, and young girls. And he had gone to put that machinery in motion, with the promise of getting i
n touch with his former colleague if some revealing detail appeared.
When he returned to the school and found the teacher Ana María, Conde felt his pulse racing before the show of high aesthetic value offered by that beauty, capable of destroying all of his imaginings and prejudices that he was searching for a butch (for God’s sake, she was hotter than Angelina Jolie!). To his surprise, Conde barely mentioned the motive for his visit, and the woman agreed to leave with him to talk privately.
Thanks to the pesos convertibles remaining in his pockets, Conde was able to invite her to have a soda at a newly opened café, generally deserted and luckily air-conditioned. As they walked the streets of La Víbora in search of the proposed site, the man chose to keep their talk in the neutral and pleasant territory of his memories of the days in which he had studied at the institute where Ana María now taught, evocations that went back to a time before the teacher was even born.
In reality, Conde’s body craved a beer. But his professional sense made him settle for a soda, like the woman, after asking that the sticky table be cleaned for them. Knowing that it was an attack against his health and his principles, he took a drink of the dark, sugary liquid that tasted like syrup as he explained to Ana María the details of his interest in Judy and, without beating around the bush too much, the motive for which he had requested they speak: he had been told that she and the young emo had a close relationship—although he didn’t qualify it, neither the quality nor the closeness. (What a waste, dear God!) Ana María listened to him speak, taking sips from the plastic glass in which she had poured her soda, and Conde paused silently when he saw a pair of huge tears spring up from the green fountain of her eyes and run down the teacher’s smooth face. Like a good gentleman, he waited for the woman to recover, after drying her tears with a feminine gesture that allowed him to see, on the inside of her forearm, a very small tattoo of a salamander with its tail gathered up in the shape of a hook.
“I’m going to assume that you’re really not a policeman and that you wouldn’t be enough of a bastard to record this conversation,” the teacher began with authority and a regained control of self. “I’m going to believe you that, in reality, you’re interested in finding Judy for the good of Judy herself and for her grandmother’s peace of mind. And I’m going to ask you, of course, that if you get anything from this conversation that you only use it to recover Judy but without revealing where you learned it. This last thing is for three reasons that you will understand: because I am a lesbian and I like being so, but we live in a country where my sexual preference is still considered a disgrace; because I’m a teacher and I like being so; and, above all, because a teacher should not have an intimate relationship with a student and I was having one—or, more precisely, I had one—with Judy. If you reveal the existence of this relationship, I’m going to deny it. But although I could continue working as a teacher, it would do me irreparable harm. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Of course. You have my word that if something you tell me helps me find out where Judy could be, I am only going to use it to find her and tell her family. Although I should also warn you that I can forget about pedagogical or romantic indiscretions, but I wouldn’t be able to hide a crime should I find out that you are in any way implicated in this, and if the story of Judy’s disappearance becomes complicated.”
“What do you mean by this last part?”
Conde weighed his words, but decided on the most direct and resounding.
“If she has been kidnapped or if something worse has happened to her and you have any link to it.”
“Then we can talk,” she concluded authoritatively, and added, “But don’t have any false expectations: no matter how much I think about it, I don’t have the slightest idea of where Judy could be and less still of whether something happened to her. A few days before”—she hesitated, looking for the most appropriate word—“she left, she and I had broken up and the only place we talked was in the classroom, as teacher and student.
“Judy made her way into my life through a crack in my defenses: the one that goes straight to the heart. It sounds horrible, cheesy, but that’s how it is … It’s been six years since I’ve been teaching with my degree, nine that I’ve been at the front of a classroom, and never, not even when I was still a student teacher, had I even had the temptation to start an affair with a student, much less a sustained relationship. Perhaps because until just under a year ago, I had a steady partner, a deeply satisfying relationship that lasted twelve years … Perhaps because I am a teacher by vocation—not out of obligation or compulsion, like many others—and respect, or respected, to speak formally, the academic and ethical codes of the profession, which seem sacred to me, do you understand?
“When Judy became part of my classroom, recently arrived from Venezuela, I noticed that she was a very special young person, in her virtues and in her problems. She had an intelligence that was above average, she had read things the rest of the students would never read, in quantity and depth, and she could simultaneously be so mature and so childish that she seemed to be two people in one. Except that the mature Judy and the childish Judy wanted the same thing, although of course from different perspectives: not to act like a regular person, to be as free as someone her age could be, especially in this country where you can’t do what is forbidden … and to be willing to fight for that freedom. Her way. The mature one battled with her mind, and had her reasons; the childish one was on a stage wearing a costume, I’d say, playing a role. But both of them were searching for the same thing: for authenticity, a way of freely practicing what she wanted to practice.
“You already know that Judy is emo. She is so by choice, I would say also by conviction, not as a passing fad or in imitation, like the majority of kids involved in these things, do you understand me? Being emo allowed her to think like an emo and also act like an emo, with all of those accessories on display … According to what I know, since before leaving Venezuela, Judy was carrying within her the seeds of her rebellion, or of her nonconformity. She had seen too much fakeness, heard too many lies, learned of her father’s maneuverings and those of other characters like him. But she was still too young to understand the proportions of those opportunistic schemes. It’s obvious that she matured over there very quickly and discovered two things: that her father and other men like her father did not in reality practice what they stood for in their speeches. In short, they were a group of scoundrels of the worst kind, socialist solidarity scoundrels, to call them something, or the worst thing. And that caused a great feeling of rejection in her, of disgust, of hate … Then she discovered the other thing that changed her: the virtual world in which emos moved, in which some young people spoke with a lot of freedom about their cultural, mystical, and even physiological experiences, insistent on the search for their individuality. And she was able to see how beneath it all there was a philosophy, more complicated than appears at first glance, since it’s related to the freedom of the individual, which begins with the social and goes on to the desire to free oneself from the ultimate bind, that of the body. But, careful, don’t be confused. That freedom does not have a direct connection with any suicidal attitude, but rather with physical and spiritual will. Do you understand me? Judy isn’t lost because she committed suicide, I am more than certain of that. Or rather certain. Because, besides, she had decided to stop being emo …
“In any event, as soon as she came to my class, she turned into my star pupil, academically speaking. But in a strange way: she was as likely to read a work on the lesson plan in depth as she was to decide not to finish reading another one and expounded on the reasons for her attitude right in the middle of class, and they were never the banal reasons of the book being boring or her not liking it. That would put me in a real bind, a good bind, I think. As you can imagine, in reality Judy turned into a challenge. Yes, a challenge more than a star student. On all levels, understand me? And as a challenge, she dared me one day. It was about six months ago, w
e had stayed alone in the classroom, talking about Calderón’s Life Is a Dream. She was interested in the relationship between real life and dream life, the role of fate or the predestination of the individual, all of that about every human being marked by karma, and at one point she told me she dreamed about having sex with me and … other things that I’m not going to repeat to you now, of course. How had she discovered that I’m a lesbian and, further still, that I was so attracted to her? I found that disconcerting, since I have never taken my sexuality or my attractions to the classroom. Then I asked her how she dared to say that to me, to her teacher … And she said that I was so transparent, that she could see me inside and out, and that she liked everything about me and … She spoke like a fifty-year-old woman.
“We began seeing each other, although before that, I demanded the most absolute discretion from her. Something that, I see now, she didn’t fulfill, since you have come to see me because someone told you, and the original source can only have been Judy herself. Perhaps her childish side … Despite that, we had a mature relationship. Until she suddenly decided to end it …
“Judy needed to free herself or she was going to explode. She had freed herself of God, she wanted to free herself of her family. She freed herself of me, she was going to leave the emos. She was trying to cut off all commitments … She dragged her dissatisfaction with everything surrounding her everywhere, with the lies amid which she’d grown up. Everything she read, listened to, saw, deepened that feeling of having to rid herself of any burden in her search for total freedom, although she didn’t know too well how to carry it out … Look I have an example here. She wrote this in a reading exercise…”
Heretics Page 50