Heretics

by Leonardo Padura

  The teacher took an envelope from her folder and removed several handwritten sheets. She went through them and, when she found the one she was looking for, read: “‘Literature serves to show us ideas and characters like this one:

  “‘… he remained imprisoned with an entire city, with an entire country, as his jail … The only door was the sea, and that door was closed with huge paper keys, which were the worst ones. He was watching, at this time, a multiplication, a universal proliferation of papers, covered in stamps, seals, signatures and counter-signatures, whose names exhausted the synonyms for “permit,” “safe conduct,” “passport,” and however many terms could signify an authorization to move from one country to another, from one region to another, at times, from one city to another. The tax gatherers, collectors of the tithe, toll-collectors, revenue officers and customs officers of other times remained only as a picturesque warning of the police-like and political armed retinue that now applied itself, in all parts (some out of fear of the Revolution, others out of fear of the counterrevolution), to restrict man’s freedom, as pertains to his primordial, fecund, creative possibility of moving across the surface of the planet they had been blessed with the fate of inhabiting … He felt exasperated, kicked in rage, when he thought that the human being, denied an ancestral nomadism, had to submit his sovereign will of moving to a piece of paper…’

  “What do you think?”

  “Amazing,” Conde admitted. “It sounds familiar … Who wrote it?”

  “Guess…”

  “Right now … I recognize it, but no, I don’t know.” Conde felt outclassed.

  “Carpentier. Explosion in a Cathedral. Published in 1962…”

  “It feels as if it were written for right now.”

  “It’s written for always. Also for right now. Judy knew what literature is for … Because she added this,” she said, and again started to read. “‘If a country or system doesn’t allow you to choose where you want to be and live, it is because it has failed. Faithfulness by force is a failure.’”

  “More amazing still,” Conde admitted. “At that age, I was a moron … Well, more than now…”

  “I didn’t discuss that with anyone, either.” The teacher moved the paper, then placed it back in the folder, and smiled lightly. “Imagine the commotion that would have happened … Well, the fact is that things started to get more serious ever since she met Paolo Ricotti, a dirty old man who tried to court her with stories of his trips to Venice, Rome, Florence, the museums, the Roman ruins, the Renaissance. Above all, they talked about Ricotti’s specialty, Baroque painting … She loved talking to him and dreaming about what he promised … But without going any further, very aware of what he was up to. And then a friend of Paolo’s showed up, Marco Camilleri, the guy who, according to her, looked like Andrea Bocelli, and things became even more complicated, since this guy took I don’t know what drugs and she, who was desperate to try them, well … It’s hard for me to talk about this, I lose all perspective, I get jealous, these things make me angry. Although I know that that whole relationship with the two Italians didn’t involve sex, they were friendships too dangerous for a girl who in reality is only eighteen years old, no matter how liberal she is or how mature she seems.

  “I don’t know if it was because of my jealousy or because of something happening inside of Judy—the fact is that she decided to end the relationship. I don’t know if it was out of spite or rationality, but without thinking twice about it I said yes, that was best. Although I knew well how much it would hurt, I preferred to end something as soon as possible that was going to end anyway, and better still to do so without any complications. That was why it was only at the school that I found out no one knew where Judy was and, the truth is, at the beginning, it didn’t seem too strange to me, because I thought, and I still think, that she must be primarily responsible for her own disappearance. Surely she was all caught up in something; that was the real reason she wanted to end things with me and even with the emos, and, in four or five days, she would be running around here again, without any explanation and pleased with herself, as always when she did something capable of breaking with the norm … From the beginning I rejected the police’s idea that her grandmother told me about when I went to see her, since I know that Judy wasn’t going to get on a balsa raft with some group of kids. That didn’t interest her, nor had it gone through her head, nor is she one of those young people who do things out of peer pressure or enthusiasm … Well, you’ve seen how she thinks.” She took a breath and touched the folder. “So if she hadn’t tried to leave, and she wasn’t with the Italians, and she didn’t commit suicide and hadn’t been kidnapped … Then, she was hiding. I only thought it was strange that she wouldn’t have said anything to her grandmother or to me if she was thinking about hiding. Although that would imply that her childish side had too much influence, something utterly irresponsible. But with Judy, anything is possible. As you can imagine, with the days going by without any word from her, I started to think of other things, bad things, I don’t know … Do you understand me? No, surely you don’t understand me.”

  Conde stood up and asked for some napkins from the café’s server, who gave him two, counted out grudgingly. The napkins made up part of the server’s implicit perks. Conde placed them in the teacher’s hands and saw how, even crying, that woman was alarmingly beautiful. Perhaps more so. Do you understand me? Conde understood, and very well. He even felt it: like agony in his genitals, unbecoming of his age. And he also understood that for the second time someone very close to Judy was telling him about a double personality or capability of splitting in two, of a capacity for alternating masks that made that irreverent and daring young girl more unfathomable.

  When Ana María calmed down, Conde thanked her for her honesty and told her that her words were helping him very much to understand (the damned word so repeated by the teacher had rubbed off on him) Judy and, perhaps, to find the path by which she’d gone off.

  “I only want to ask you two or three more things … I just don’t understand very well,” he added, to satisfy the teacher’s pet phrase, and he succeeded.

  “Go ahead…”

  “What’s this story about Judy wanting to stop being emo? You can join and leave like that: to be or not to be?”

  “That’s the good thing about voluntary militancy. When you don’t want to do it anymore, you give it up and that’s it … As far as I know, because with Judy nothing is simple, she became emo searching for her own free space. And she found it, but she exhausted its possibilities. Freedom turned into rhetoric for her, and she needed something much more real.”

  “But what about all of that talk about God being dead, that she was going to be reincarnated, that the body is a prison?”

  “She kept thinking it, of course she kept thinking it. But she needed more. I don’t know what, but she needed more.”

  “And what you read me by Carpentier, doesn’t that have to do with leaving? She wasn’t interested in that text because of that?”

  “No, you’re mistaken … Leaving or staying is not what’s decisive. What matters is the freedom of people to leave or stay. Or the lack of that freedom … And others. Do you understand me?”

  Conde nodded as if he understood, although he was back to square one. Or not; in truth, he knew more and, despite her contradictions, Judy was becoming more and more attractive to him. It was worth finding her, he told himself, and launched the next question.

  “Did Judy tell you anything about what happened in Venezuela that affected her so much?”

  The teacher took a sip of her soda, perhaps to give herself time to think about a response.

  “I already told you: she got to know emo philosophy better, and also her father…” Ana María hesitated for a moment and continued. “Judy knew that her father was getting ready to do something that would make him lots of money…”

  “The things that he and his subordinates were bringing to Cuba?”

 
“No, those were trifles and he had almost nothing to do with that business. It was something else, something he took out of Cuba.”

  Conde felt a shiver of alarm.

  “Something he took out of Cuba that would make him lots of money? Did Judy tell you what it could be?”

  “No … But she talked about a lot of dollars.”

  Conde closed his eyes and pressed his index finger and thumb on his lids. He wanted to look inside himself: How much was a lot of dollars?

  “Judy didn’t give you any indication of what—?”

  “No, nor did I ask her. I didn’t and don’t want to know about those things. They make me nervous…”

  “Yes, of course,” Conde said, and decided to postpone reflecting on that alarming detail that altered some of his perceptions. So he preferred to move in another direction. “What about Yadine, Judy’s friend, is she a student of yours?”

  “No, she is a year below Judy.”

  “What do you know about her?”

  Ana María tried to smile.

  “That she was in love with Judy … She was falling all over herself for Judy,” she capped it, almost with satisfaction, perhaps because she felt victorious over that rival. But the more than trustworthy confirmation of the real nature of Yadine’s feelings for Judy and the unveiling of the deep causes of the sadness that dragged the girl along could indicate something revealing, perhaps unseemly, that Conde still couldn’t specify. Although this time, he didn’t veer off the path.

  “The salamander tattooed on your arm…?”

  “Something silly. Let’s say proof of love. Judy had it on her left shoulder, on the part below her shoulder blade…”

  “Of course,” the man said, and took a few seconds for himself. He wasn’t sure how to approach that other subject, and again chose to be direct. “How do you know that Judy wasn’t sleeping with either of those Italians she talked to and, seemingly, even did drugs with?”

  For the first time, Ana María smiled strikingly, before giving in to another wave of tears. Despite the crying, the teacher was able to say, “Because she doesn’t like men and because I know that Judy is a virgin. Do you understand me?”

  Conde, who had elegantly handled the other blows of information, felt surprised by that direct blow to the chin. Spread out on the floor, he heard the referee count to one hundred, or more. Now he didn’t understand a damned thing.

  * * *

  “Tell me something, so I have it all clear … God forgives everyone?”

  “All who repent and approach Him with humility.”

  “Does He even forgive the most son-of-a-bitch sons of bitches?”

  “He doesn’t make those distinctions.”

  “Distinctions…? Now, you always have to talk like that, with words like that?”

  “Bite me, Conde.”

  Conde smiled. He had taken his friend Candito the Red as far as he wanted to: more or less where he was when he had met him and Candito was a budding criminal. Although, Conde knew well, the journey achieved had ended up being only transitory, since the group’s mystic had years ago found in religious faith a permanent relief to the torments and doubts of a life that had seemed to fully satisfy him. And Conde was happy for him, keeping in mind something that was quite clear: better a Christian Candito than an imprisoned Red.

  In the last two years, increasingly more caught up in matters of faith, Candito had turned into something like a “pinch-hitting” preacher, the kind that go to bat when the game is really heated. The growth of the flock (that word also belonged to the white-haired mulato, who had once had bushy and saffron-colored wiry hair) had forced the official pastors to train various enthusiasts so they could work in some of the so-called houses of worship, where many, increasingly more, went for help, desperate and desperately in search of solutions, tangible or intangible, to an existence that had turned to shit in their hands. Perhaps for that reason, not only were the Protestant houses of worship and temples full, but also the Catholic churches, the waiting rooms of santeros, spiritists, babalaos, and paleros, even the mosques and synagogues in an inhospitable desert without Arabs or Jews. All of them full in the country in which atheism was imposed, and in the end, what was harvested was a mistrust and anxiety about comforts that reality did not provide.

  One of those emergency almost-pastors was Candito, who, while he didn’t possess a gift for oratory, had fireproof faith. For those willing to believe, the mulato could prove to be a convincing voice and even an example. His capacity to believe was so visceral and sincere that Conde had come to say that if Candito could guarantee for him the existence of a miracle, he would accept it. But, to admit that any son of a bitch (such as, for example, that Alcides Torres), also deserved divine forgiveness? No, Conde couldn’t believe that coming from the Red or even from God himself should He come down to confirm it.

  “Red, how much is a lot of dollars?”

  “What are you talking about, Conde?”

  “Let’s see, if I tell you that I’m going to earn a lot of dollars, how much would you guess?”

  “A hundred,” Candito said, convinced.

  Conde smiled.

  “And if I tell you that a guy who runs businesses is going to earn a lot of dollars?”

  The other man reflected for a moment.

  “I would think of millions, right? It’s all relative. Except for God.”

  The men had settled into the chairs that took up almost all of the space in the small cubicle turned living room. Behind a partition were the kitchen and the bathroom, while the opening made through the wall led to the bedroom that, in reality, had been another of the rooms of the cramped tenement until Candito’s father had managed to appropriate the neighboring living space. The two friends kept each other in balance, talking about a lot of dollars and even drinking the cold guava juice the host’s wife had served them. Conde had told him he would be visiting much earlier than he did, but, despite his tardiness, Candito had waited for him, with that capacity for patience that, thank God (Candito would say), he had developed.

  Perhaps due to the unbearable heat, the mixed-company tenement where Red had been born and still lived was displaying at that moment its calmest face: the inhabitants of several of the dwellings distributed along the hallway of what had once been the interior courtyard of a bourgeois house remained immobile, like desert lizards awaiting the setting of the sun to start moving. Nevertheless, radios and CD players, like inventions with minds of their own, competed in an eternal musical battle with which those piled-up beings with troubled pasts, facing a difficult present and an unclear future, knocked themselves out to spend their lives without recognizing pain. The volume of noise they consumed made conversation so difficult that Candito had to close the door and set a fan on high.

  “This flock is really something. How can you stand it?”

  “With many years of training and with God’s help.”

  “At least He throws you some rope…”

  After bringing him up to speed on the details of his solo investigation (due to his unforgivable curiosity), Conde explained to his friend what he needed from him. Things had changed so much in Candito’s life that, instead of information about criminals, Conde now was asking for opinions about the missing girl’s strange relationship with God, a mystical sphere outside of his dominion.

  “That girl seems too smart. But she has a lot of confusion in her mind,” Candito said at last, and Conde lifted his hand, asking him to contain himself.

  “Red, you’re not leading a church service.”

  Candito looked at him intently. Some flickering remains of the indomitable and aggressive man he had been could still shine in his also-red eyes, generally veiled by an expression of spiritual peace.

  “Are you going to let me talk or—?”

  “Okay, okay, talk…”

  “Does the girl have a few screws loose or not?”

  “Yes,” Conde admitted. He didn’t dare say it, but he preferred that his old frien
d talk about screws being loose than about mental confusion.

  “Your guava juice is going to get warm,” the mulato warned him, pointing at the half-empty glass.

  “It’s okay. I just had half a soda. I don’t want to risk an overdose…”

  “True,” Candito conceded. “Well, getting back to the subject at hand … I’m not gonna tell you that the loose screws in her head are the work of the devil, although it could be … Instead I’ll tell you it’s the result of how we’ve been living, of what we’ve been living, Conde. That girl is desperate to believe, but she doesn’t want to believe like everyone else, because she rejects the establishment, and she has been inventing her own faith: she likes the idea that God is dead but believes in reincarnation, she disdains the body but tries to save the soul, she attacks herself in any way she can, and is a lesbian although she maintains her virginity, she can’t stand her father’s falseness and, simultaneously, is the friend of some Italians whose sliminess can be sensed from afar … And all of this so she wouldn’t be like anyone else, or, better still, to be different from everyone else, because she got tired of the story that we’re all alike, when she sees that we’re nothing alike.”

  “So you don’t think her problem is with God?”

  “No. She uses God to seem more different … Don’t go down that path. Her problem has to do with things down here, I’m sure of it. Note that it’s not that she doesn’t believe in God: it’s that it seems more startling to say that He is dead. It’s not the same thing to be an atheist as to believe that God is already dead and is powerless … Or having lost the capacity to believe in something, as has happened to so many people we know. That’s very fucked-up, Conde, but it’s what we’re living now. I’m telling you … A girl like this one doesn’t just come up through spontaneous generation, she needs some fertilizer to grow, and that fertilizer is in her environment. If not, look around: How many kids her age are leaving and going anywhere they can? How many are near criminals or complete criminals, how many have become whores and how many are their pimps? How many spend their days looking up at the clouds without caring about anything? How many are more interested in having a cell phone or an MP-I-don’t-know-what-number than in working, because they know that by working, you don’t get to have an MP whatever or a cell phone…? Something very fucked-up is happening in Denmark. And, according to you, Shakespeare said that.”