Half an hour later, when they had already exhausted the subject of preparations for the following day’s party and were drinking the coffee Conde had brewed, the man told himself that he couldn’t keep dragging this out.
“Tamara, for days I…”
She looked at him and smiled.
“Go on, I’m listening. Give me a little drag,” she asked, after drinking just a few drops of coffee, to get the flavor. She smoked from Conde’s cigarette twice and returned it to him, then immediately pressed him: “So for days, what…?”
Conde sensed the trap: his dusted-off policeman’s instinct was warning him of danger.
“Do you know about this thing?”
“Me?! This thing? What thing?”
The exaggerated surprise gave her away.
“Skinny, Dulcita, Yoyi … Who has loose lips?”
Tamara let out a hearty laugh. When she laughed, she was more beautiful.
“Since it’s your birthday and all of those sons of bitches are going to be here, well, I thought…”
The woman couldn’t keep it going. She was too soft with Conde and making him suffer that way, although amusing, seemed cruel to her.
“Last night, when you talked to me about ‘the thing,’ I wasn’t sleeping. I pretended I was, then I heard you … I even snored a little.”
“So…”
“And today, Yoyi came by the clinic with the ring to see if he had to make any adjustment for my finger. It fit me perfectly. And it’s beautiful.”
“But, how could he dare…? So…?”
“Well, if you ask me, I will officially become your girlfriend. And if you ask me later, I will think about whether it’s worth it to get married or not. But first, boyfriend and girlfriend, as it should be. I have to think about the rest … A lot. It’s not just any ‘thing’.”
Conde smiled, stood up, and placed himself behind Tamara, who was still seated. Delicately, he lifted her chin and kissed her: her saliva tasted like olive oil, Parmesan, and basil, with a hint of coffee and tobacco. Tamara tasted like real things and the best in life. The man felt another “thing” stretching out, despite the exhaustion and the mental confusion accumulated in a day that had been too long and hot.
From the table they went straight to the bedroom, where the future boyfriend and girlfriend handed themselves over to their respective knowledge of each other’s needs in order to enjoy a calm and deep round of mature sex, which was, as such, sweeter and juicier. Conde, through whose perverse mind at some points had passed the created images of Ana María, Yadine, and Judy, rebellious, fresh, handed over to their feminine games, thought at the end of the process that this was the last time he would make love with a Tamara who was fifty-one years old, single, and free of commitments. The next time, it would be with a very similar woman, but at the same time different.
7
Conde was imagining Garbage II running around the grassy yard that could be seen through the window of Tamara’s kitchen. In his dream, he was horrified (in reality, it was the kind of thing that made him laugh) to see the dog digging in the earth, tearing apart the grass, ripping apart shrubs and flowers with his teeth, shitting on the plastic chairs placed below the trellis. That would be his way of expressing that living confined, even in a golden cage, was not his definition of the good life. Freedom, for him, was freedom, without much philosophical thought—and as the dog’s owner, Conde had always accepted it—and Garbage II enjoyed wandering the streets of his neighborhood, following dogs in heat. That way of life, chosen of his own will, was, for the animal, more important than two meals a day and anti-tick baths.
The smell of the coffee that was starting to percolate took him out of his problematic zoological digression. He waited for it to rise, added sugar to the coffee, and, as he was about to drink his first sip, the phone rang. Whoever it is can wait, Conde thought, drinking the resuscitating infusion and, at last, around the tenth ring, lifted the receiver.
“Yes?”
“Conde?” the voice asked. It was familiar, but he didn’t identify it right away.
“Yes…”
“Listen, it’s me, Elias Kaminsky,” said the far-off voice, and then he greeted him with true affection as he sat down in the living room’s armchair. “I called your house before, but—”
“What happened? Is there news?”
“Yes, very good news … A legal case is going to be opened claiming the painting for the Kaminsky family. I managed to have it heard in New York’s civil court and have already hired some lawyers who specialize in recovering works of art. These lawyers have even managed to return to Jewish families works that were seized by the Nazis. So I have a lot of hope.”
“They must be expensive as hell,” Conde commented, unable to imagine how that world of first-world lawyers and judges worked.
“That Rembrandt is worth it,” Elias confirmed. “I called you because I want you to do me the favor of talking to Ricardito…”
“Why don’t you talk to him yourself?”
“The thing is, I’m embarrassed to tell him that if I recover the painting, I’m going to give him half of the money … I’m afraid that he won’t want to accept it…”
“Well, you can give it to me and that solves everything … Let’s see, let’s see, what do you want me to tell your relatives?”
“The thing is that news of the trial could reach him and I don’t want him to feel pushed aside, or to think that I’m doing things with the Rembrandt behind his back … Just tell him that this case is being opened, that it’s sure to last years, and that there’s no certainty that we will win, although I hope that, yes, we do win … And if we win—”
“When you say years … How many years do you think?”
“Nobody knows, everything is complicated and slow … Sometimes more than ten years. Tell Ricardito.”
“Holy shit, ten years…! Okay, I’ll tell him…” Only at that moment did Conde recall his personal dealings with Yadine and look for a way out. “Elias, can I wait a few days to talk to Ricardo?”
“Yes,” the other man said. “But why?”
“Nothing … Complications I have.” Conde chose not to mix the stories together and looked for a way to distance himself from the required explanation. “So when are you thinking of coming to Cuba again?”
“Right now, I don’t know, but soon. Remember that you owe me a meal at Josefina’s house, with your friends … Oh, shit, so are you going to marry Tamara after all?”
The question surprised Conde, who took a few seconds to discover the origins of that rumor: Andrés, via Carlos.
“Well, I don’t know. I’m not sure that she wants to marry me…”
“Congratulations, in any event.”
“Congratulations to you about the trial … And don’t worry, I’ll see Ricardo.”
“Thank you, Conde. I owe you a day’s pay.”
“Put it down as volunteer work so I can win the socialist medal…”
“Noted. Thank you, and I send you a hug. Well…”
“Hold on a moment,” Conde stopped him, pushed by the force of an irrepressible doubt.
“Talk to me…”
“Your father, Daniel, he really never again believed in God?”
Elias Kaminsky took a few seconds to respond.
“I don’t think so…”
“Okay … That’s what I thought. Well, I’ll take care of talking to Ricardito, don’t worry.”
“I hadn’t told you that about my father? Why are you asking?”
This time, it was Conde who had to think about a response.
“I don’t really know … Because in the past few days some things have happened that made me think it’s easier to believe in God than to not believe … Look, if God doesn’t exist, any god, and men have been hating each other and killing each other over their gods and for the promise of a better great beyond … But if in truth there is no God or a great beyond or anything … Forget it, Elias, I’m really fucked-up right
now, and I start thinking about this shit…”
“It’s not shit, but I just noticed that, yes, you are fucked-up…”
“Yes, but I’m not the only one…”
Elias Kaminsky was silent on the other end of the line, and Conde regretted having conveyed that feeling to him, so he decided to say goodbye.
“Well, don’t worry, I’ll talk to Ricardito … And when you find out anything new, call me … To let me know…”
“Of course I’ll call you…” Elias began, and stopped. “Conde, I want to thank you again.”
“Why? With what you paid me—”
“For what you made me think … Forget it. I’ll call you any day now.” He said goodbye and dropped the call.
Conde put the receiver in its place and realized that after the coffee he had not had a cigarette. He lit one and smoked it. He had the certainty that that conversation was altering something in his mind. Something indefinable, crouching in a dark corner, but there regardless.
“Fuck me,” he protested as he crushed the butt. “As if I didn’t have enough already…”
* * *
“Nietzsche, Death Note, Nirvana and Kurt Cobain, a little bit of Buddhism,” the recounting began, and gained momentum for the ascent. “Blade Runner with its replicants, piercings, tattoos, cuts on arms and legs, a little bit or a lot of drugs, online chats with groups of fundamentalist emos, and she was leader of the tribe in Cuba, but she had decided to stop being emo and leader. A lesbian and virgin besides, disgusted by what her corrupt (and, according to you, typical, certified son-of-a-bitch) father was doing. A true believer that God is dead and that dying was the best thing He could do to free people from His dictatorship … That girl is just a ticking bomb!” Thus concluded Dr. Cañizares as she reviewed her notes after Conde gave her details about the young disappeared girl’s personality and her vital and existential circumstances. Conde had tried to be as explicit as possible for the sake of clarity, and for that reason the only thing he had hidden was the fact that Judy’s most sustained gay relationship had been carried out with a teacher from her high school, since it appeared episodic to him and dangerous to reveal.
Dr. Eugenia Cañizares was considered the foremost Cuban authority on the subject of the body issues of young people addicted to punk, emo, Rastafarian, and freak philosophies. She had devoted years to living with the anxieties and anguish of those kids and to exchanging notes with specialists like the Frenchman David Le Breton, who was, according to her, a charming guy and the most coherent of those who studied the subject. Cañizares’s book about the history and the present practice of tattooing in Cuba was one of the results of that contact.
The woman, who was somewhere in her early sixties, bore the marks of the influence that her objects of study exercised over her. In each ear she wore four hoops, on her hand she had a small tattoo of a butterfly, and she wore a load of bracelets and necklaces in all colors and materials imaginable, more colors and materials than she could pull off without bordering on ridiculous at her age. In a way, with that load of cheap jewelry and her aggressively green eyes, she looked more like one of the witches from Macbeth than a sociologist, according to Conde’s schematic criteria.
“In the background of this behavior there always exists great dissatisfaction, many times with the family. But that circle expands outward to include society—also oppressive—which they try to break with, or at least distance themselves from, to find other family and social alternatives: hence belonging to the tribe. The tribe is usually democratic, nobody forces you to belong or to stay, but as a whole, it fuels the feeling of voluntary choice, and with it, that of freedom, which is the ultimate aim of this searching. Freedom at any price and zero family or social or religious pressures. And forget about discussing politics … But it’s not just the freedom of the mind with respect to the ideas imposed by a system of old-fashioned relationships, but also the freedom of the mind from the body it inhabits. As you can imagine, aiming for all of this in a socialist, planned, and vertical country … is playing with fire!
“Note that, from the times of the Gnostics—as Nietzsche would take up again, and now the post-evolutionists—the body is considered a poor container for the soul. Because of that, an important basis for the development of those philosophies, processed by those young people, is that man will not be completely free until any concern regarding the body has disappeared from him. And to begin to distance themselves from the body, they accentuate its ugliness, its darkness. They harm it, they mark it, dirty it, although many times they also drug it to get rid of it without getting rid of it.”
As he listened, Conde tried to follow her along that flow of revelations that could bring him face-to-face with a concept of the search for freedom that, in the end, didn’t do anything more than lead to its denial, since it opened the gates of other prisons, as far as he understood—he, the militant agnostic and, with all certainty, pre-evolutionist. The most corrosive thing was the fact that, for the past few years, he had lived in the same city with those young people but had barely stopped to look at them, since he considered them a class of postmodern clowns determined to set themselves apart from social codes by making themselves notably different. He had never granted them depth of thought and libertarian objectives (libertarian more than liberators, he stood by this idea, based on the anarchy of their searches) despite the shackles they placed on themselves. But they were their shackles, and that piece marked the difference. The difference that Candito would talk to him about. The difference that Judy seemed to be in search of. The difference in a country that pretended to have erased them all, and that in its everyday reality was being filled up by strata, groups, plans, dynasties that destroyed the presumed homogeneity conceived of by political decree and by philosophical mandates.
“The Gnostics, who mixed Christianity and Judaism to aim to arrive at knowledge of the intangible, are in the origins of all of these juvenile philosophies, although its practitioners almost never have the slightest idea of it … Those who think about it a bit consider that the soul is captive in a body subject to a fixed duration, to death, to a material and, as such, dark, universe. That is why they have taken hate for the body to the extreme of considering it an indignity without remedy. That process is called ensomatosis, because the soul has fallen into the unsatisfactory and perishable body in which it is lost. Man’s flesh constitutes the damned part, condemned to death, aging, illness. To reach the intangible, it is necessary to liberate the soul: always liberation, always freedom, as you can see … But all of this thinking, poorly anchored and even more poorly woven together, functions in very different ways in the minds of these kids. Because, while they disdain the body, they also often fear death. And they insist on correcting the body, in surpassing what Kundera (why do you think Judy reads him?) called the unbearable lightness of being. Do you remember Blade Runner and its creatures who are physically perfect but also condemned to death…? These young people congratulate themselves for living in what Marabe calls post-biological time, and what Stelare refers to as post-evolutionist, although the truth is that the majority of them don’t have any idea of these syntheses, but rather of their consequences, sometimes only of their fanfare … But, whatever the case may be, they participate in the certainty of living in the time of the end of the body, that regrettable artifact of human history that now genetics, robotics, or computers can and should reform or eliminate…”
“So are we going to end up having a big head and thin arms, or strong arms and an empty head? Because the replicants in Blade Runner are big and athletic…” And he stopped in his foolish diatribe when he was about to give his male chauvinist evaluation of the female replicants, who, as he recalled, were hot.
“What I want to tell you is that overdosing on all of those concepts can have very bad results. The search for depression opens the doors to real depression, anxiety for freedom can lead to freedom but also to licentiousness, which is a poor use of freedom, and the rejection of the b
ody often leads to more shadowy depths than some holes in the ears, clitoris, or penis, or some cuts on the arms. The nonexistence of God can lead to the loss of the fear of God … You have to find this girl, because someone like that is capable of doing anything. Even against herself.”
Shit! Conde thought, already feeling fatigued by the new information.
“The worst thing,” Cañizares continued ceaselessly down the hill of her theories and obsessions, “the terrible thing, is that although they seem to be a small group, those young people are expressing a feeling that is rather pervasive in their generation. They are the result of a loss of values and categories, of the exhaustion of believable paradigms and expectations of the future that run across all of society, or almost all of it … Or another part of it that says and does more or less what it really thinks. The margin between political discourse and reality has become too wide, each is going on its own way, without interfacing, although the discourse should be the one following reality and redefining itself…”
“Can you put that another way, Doctor?” Conde begged her. “The thing is, I’m getting old and stupid…”
The woman made her bracelets jingle and smiled.
“My friend, the thing is that those kids don’t believe in anything because they’re not finding anything to believe in. That whole story about working for a better future that has never arrived, they could care less either way, because for them, it’s not even a story anymore … It’s a lie. Here, the ones who don’t work do a little better than the ones who do work and study; the ones who graduate from the university later find it damn hard to be allowed to leave the country if they wish to leave; the ones who sacrificed themselves for years are today barely scraping by with pensions that aren’t enough to even buy avocados. So then they don’t even try to make it work: some go wherever they can, others want to do so, others live however they can, others become anything that will make them money: whores, taxi drivers, pimps … And others still become freaks, rockers, and emos. If you add all of those others together, you’ll see that it’s a hell of a lot, there are so many of them. That’s what there is. Don’t think about it anymore. That’s what we’ve come to after the same old song with the fraternal dispute to win the flag of the collective national vanguard in the socialists’ emulation and the condition of the exemplary worker.
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