Of that tribe of the faithful, the most vulnerable member was Skinny Carlos, whose heart, liver, or stomach could (even all at once) burst at any moment, although, in recent times, their owner seemed to walk with a more measured and pleasant rhythm. He even smoked less and ate with a certain discretion. Because, following Dulcita’s widowhood, what the woman and Carlos tried to maintain in secret, with adolescent strategies, was no mystery to any of their other friends. Despite Skinny’s physical limitations, it was obvious that, however and whenever they could, they had to be desperately rolling around together again, following the habit they acquired when they were studying at the ever recurring high school of La Víbora.
So what was worrying him? That the country was falling apart in plain sight and accelerating its evolution into another country, more similar than ever to the cockfighting ring to which his grandfather Rufino tended to compare the world? Concerning that, there was nothing he could do; worse still, there was nothing he was allowed to do. Did it worry him that he and all his friends were getting old and continued with nothing in hand, same as ever, or with less than they had had since they had lost even their dreams, much of the hope promised for years, and, needless to say, their youth? In truth, they were already used to those circumstances, capable of branding them as a generation that was more hidden than lost, more silenced than mute. Was it that the book business was getting increasingly precarious every day? Well, it sometimes yielded unexpected and very advantageous dividends. Could it even be that the national baseball team never won international tournaments anymore? There was a lot that could be done in this realm: for starters, tell everyone who fucked up a national brand as sacred to the Cubans as baseball, which had always been more visceral than mere entertainment, to go to hell. So what if they decided to get married and the routine of married life revealed to him that, in the end, he had the right conditions to cease procrastinating with a thousand reasons and excuses, and compelled him to sit down at last and write that squalid and moving novel he had dreamed of for years and years? Well, maybe he should just write it and be done with it.
Without his wanting to, Judy’s indomitable story pushed those digressions aside and came to the surface. In reality, each step Conde took toward the girl resulted in a newer and greater distance, as if veils were falling over her face, insistent on hiding and even blurring her. Candito’s ideas and those of Dr. Cañizares, in addition to the elaboration of her thinking as relayed by Yovany, had reinforced a more urgent concern in Mario Conde’s former policeman’s spirit. If at the beginning he was convinced that Judy was hiding of her own free will, determined to live on a planet where she found the freedom she wanted so badly, that certainty had now been consciously removed. The complexity existing in the girl’s mind could be, in fact was, charged with explosive components. Might she have truly committed suicide? Was the hate toward her father merely an ethical reaction? Had she willingly entered the jaws of an Italian wolf, as Yovany had suggested? He hoped he was wrong, but he had a bad feeling about each of his questions.
Now it seemed interesting to Conde that his association of Judy and Daniel Kaminsky’s heresies, fueled by that insistent presence of some copies of great Dutch painters and encouraged by Elias’s reappearance, would have reminded him that the Jewish Pole’s sister had the same name as the missing young emo. The image that Elias Kaminsky had given him of the other Judith, a vision created by the grief-stricken mind of his father Daniel and simultaneously related in turn to the biblical Judith, had begun to move through Conde with a chiaroscuro and drama made tangible by Artemisia Gentileschi: Judith as Holofernes’s executioner, at the precise moment in which she slashed the neck of the Babylonian general and preserved the freedom of the kingdom. Conde thought he liked the image, but the fusion of the biblical heroine with the Polish girl wiped out in the Holocaust seen through a famous seventeenth-century painting could help him very little in resolving the mystery of a Judith lost in the torrid, chaotic, and Cuban present, because he couldn’t imagine the emo as anyone’s executioner … Except her own. Or was there some other connection between the Polish girl and the young Cuban girl who shared a biblical name? Why did he think this? No, he didn’t know … But he sensed that there was some reason for it.
The problem for the private detective and, he supposed, for the professional policeman who was increasingly and with greater intensity engaging in the hunt for the missing girl was the lack of the most minimal trace capable of guiding them. The path marked by the Italians seemed to be the most promising, although the absence of those characters had blocked him from exploring that possibility. Because of that, he was even more frustrated by the lack of evidence and by having to shed certain assumptions after the conversations with other emos and with Judy’s teacher-lover.
What Mario Conde did know, something he sensed before and now had been able to reliably prove, was that Judy and her friends were the most visible and most remarkable tip of the iceberg of a generation of certified heretics. Those young people had been born just in the most arduous days of the Crisis, when there was more talk of Option Zero, which, at the height of the disaster, could have sent Cubans to live in the fields and mountains like indigenous hunter-gatherers of the Neolithic island in the digital and space age. Those kids had been born and raised without anything, in a country that was starting to distance itself from itself in order to turn into another place in which the old slogans sounded more and more empty and undone, while daily life was emptied of promises and filled with new demands: having dollars regardless of how they were obtained, making a living on your own, not aiming to participate in public life, looking at the world beyond the island’s reach as if it were a piece of candy and aspiring to leap toward it. And they made that leap without any romanticism or fairy tales. As Dr. Cañizares told him in her way, for those young people the lack of faith and trust in collective projects had generated the need to create their own intentions and the only visible path for them to arrive at those intentions had been freedom from all burdens. Not believing in anything but themselves and in the demands of their own lives, personal, unique, and volatile: after all, God was dead—but not just the god in heaven—ideologies are not to be consumed, commitments tie you down. The depth and breadth of that philosophy had managed to show Conde the most painful framework of that world that, he intuited thus, his eyes had barely been able to examine. It was true that many times Yoyi the Pigeon had insisted on showing him that reality by way of a pragmatic cynicism and absence of faith. And that somebody like Yovany’s mother, fighting aggressively to get ahead, had reached the heaven of the good life without feeling nauseated by the past-its-shelf-life mouthful she needed to swallow. But the few years separating Yoyi’s generation and the mother of the pale emo from that of young people like Judy seemed to be centuries, one could almost say millennia. The disasters that these kids had witnessed and been victims of had generated individuals determined to distance themselves from any commitment and to create their own communities, reduced spaces in which they could find themselves far, very far, from the rhetoric of triumphs, sacrifices, and new planned beginnings (always directed at triumph, always demanding sacrifices), of course, without consulting them. The terrible thing was that those narrow paths appeared to be flanked by bottomless precipices, often fatal. An antinatural component even powered the searches of some of these young people: self-harm by way of drugs, marks on their bodies, pretensions of depression and rejection; a break with the traditional ethical limits concerning the practice of promiscuous, alternate, empty, and dangerous sex, often devoid of emotion and feeling—and even devoid of condoms, in times of unaffected depression.
If that was the path to freedom, without a doubt, it was a painful way, like many of the roads that have aimed to lead to redemption, either earthly or transcendental. But, despite his many prejudices and his prerevolutionary morals, now that he knew more about that emancipating effort, Conde couldn’t help but feel a warm admiration for some young people who,
like Judy the philosopher and leader, felt capable of throwing it all to the flames—“It’s better to burn out than to fade away,” Cobain dixit—including their bodies. Because their souls were already incombustible, further still, unimprisonable. At least for now.
Bothered by everything because he’d had to acquire that knowledge that was so unpleasant, he placed the coin in the telephone and dialed the direct number to Manolo’s office. He was going to tell him to tell the special—or were they spatial?—investigators the detail about the deal involving a lot of dollars in which Alcides Torres appeared to be involved, but, above all, to demand a new effort by the criminal investigators to find Judy, if she was still findable. Anything possible to find her quickly and alive. Because, based on the accumulated evidence and despite her dangerous friendships, Judy could be the greatest danger to Judy herself.
Instead of a secretary, like in old times, it was a machine that answered with its eternal “at your service!” Major Palacios was not available. If he pressed one, he could leave a message. Two, and he would be connected to an operator. Three, four … As he was about to hang up, he pressed one. “Leave your message,” he was encouraged.
“Manolo, are you cross-eyed or what?” he said, hung up, and told it all to go to hell. Even Judy. He had enough with his own problems.
8
“What would you like to listen to?”
“The Beatles?”
“Chicago?”
“Fórmula V?”
“Los Pasos?”
“Creedence?”
“Yeah, Creedence” was the agreement again. For a thousand years now, he liked to listen to John Fogerty’s compact voice and the primitive guitars of Creedence Clearwater Revival.
“This is still the best version of ‘Proud Mary.’”
“That’s not up for discussion.”
“He sings as if he were black. No, he sings as if he were God. What the hell … That’s why he never got married.”
Conde looked at Carlos, but Skinny, as if he hadn’t said anything, focused on the act of placing the compact disc in the exact slot, pressing the button that would swallow it, and later the one aimed at making the music play.
It had been Dulcita’s idea: they would celebrate a classic birthday, in the best “chichi” style, very cultivated in Miami, according to her. With the exception of the guests of honor and Conde, the rest of them, including old Josefina, would all arrive together, some aboard a car she had rented, others in Yoyi’s convertible Bel Air, beeping their horns. They would enter the house with balloons in their hands, birthday hats on their heads, a bouquet of flowers, and a cake crowned by fifty-two candles, already lit. And they would do so singing “Happy Birthday to you.” The birthday cake had been designed in two halves: one covered with blue meringue for Tamara and the other with violet-colored cream for Aymara. White letters spelled out the indispensable “Happy Birthday,” but this time with the two on the end, the number charged with squaring the greeting.
Candito, Rabbit, and Yoyi, under the watchful eye of Josefina—also sporting a birthday hat and a whistle hanging around her neck—had been in charge of taking out the rest of the provisions prepared by the old woman: a leg of roast pig, a pot of black beans and rice shining with the perfumed oil of Tuscan olives, the perverse yuccas, split open like desire, their insides moist with a dressing of sour orange, garlic, and onion, and the brightly colored blooming salad. They left for last the bottles of red wine, the beer, the rum, and even a bottle of soda—just one, lemon, the kind Josefina liked—since it wasn’t the day for geriatric idiocies, as Skinny warned.
The table set, Dulcita gave Rabbit and Luisa the order to serve the plates, without anyone tasting anything, since it was time to make a toast. She then removed from her purse two incredible bottles of Dom Pérignon and searched through Tamara’s crystalware, a family heirloom, for the Baccarat glasses most suitable for champagne. Even Candito, now absolutely abstemious, accepted the glass brimming over with effervescent liquid, since he knew that he would be the witness to a great event. Almost a miracle.
When each person had a glass in hand, Carlos tapped on his with a fork to demand silence, followed by all. Then he asked that another glass be filled and placed it on the table. Only when he had the glass in front of him, from the wheelchair that had made him misspend the last twenty years of his life, did he begin his speech:
“In September of 1971, six of those present here, in addition to an absent one whose glass is served”—and he pointed at the fine receptacle placed on the table—“we began to walk down an unpredictable path, full of potholes and even cliffs, the most beautiful one that can be traversed by human beings: the path of friendship and love. Thirty-seven years later, the physical remains but indestructible souls of those seven magnificent beings gather here to celebrate the perseverance of love and friendship. We have been through many things in these years. One of us is looking at us and listening to us from a distance, but he does look at us and he does listen to us, I know it. The other six, some more fucked-up than others, are here (although sometimes we wander over there). Some of us have become what we dreamed of being, others have become what life and time have forced us to be. Since we are sectarian, but with democratic tendencies, we have even grudgingly accepted, but accepted nonetheless, subsequent additions that enrich us. That is why, with us here today, sharing our story, our nostalgias, and our happiness, are friends like Luisa and Yoyi, already indispensable although condemned to the eternal rank of soldiers without any possibility for promotion … I’m sorry … And out of recognition for the amount of hunger she has satisfied in us and all that she has put up with, my mother is also here…”
Whistles, applause, and spontaneous cries of “¡Viva!” for Josefina. A renewed demand for attention by Carlos.
“As I was saying: we have the great fortune of being able to get together today to celebrate, eat, drink, and confirm that we were not mistaken when we chose each other, decided to love each other and submit ourselves to the tests of friendship. But today is a special day, and that is why this toast is also special, with some Dom Pérignon that even Candito is going to drink, that even the absent Andrés must drink … And will drink, with his soul. Because today, when we celebrate the twins’ birthday, today my soul’s brother, Mario Conde, is going to say the words that thirty-seven years ago he dreamt of saying and that, fortunately, all of us still on this side are going to hear…”
At that moment, the telephone rang and Carlos asked Rabbit to pick it up. Rabbit asked who it was and, smiling, put it on speaker.
“So what the hell is Conde going to say?” Andrés’s voice over the telephone made Tamara cry. “He has to say it quickly, I still haven’t wished the twins a happy birthday or said anything to Josefina about some medicines I’m sending her…”
“Conde,” Carlos invited him.
Mario Conde looked at each one of the members there listening, even the telephone. He placed his glass on the table and got close to Tamara. With his two hands, he took one of the woman’s hands and, in the least ridiculous way he could, pronounced the phrase:
“Tamara, would you dare marry me?”
Tamara looked at him and remained silent.
“¡Ay, mi madre!” Josefina, who was the most excited by the telenovela-esque scene, couldn’t keep from exclaiming.
“What’s going on, what’s going on?” Andrés’s voice demanded over the telephone.
“Tamara’s thinking,” Rabbit yelled. “Anyone would take their time to think about it.”
The woman smiled and was finally ready to speak.
“Mario, the truth is that I don’t want to marry anyone…” Tamara’s words surprised the others, who remained tense, waiting for some explanation or for disaster. “But, since you bring it up, I think that if I ever got married again to anyone, it would be you.”
A commotion of hoorays, bravos, yells of Damn, Tamara is really brutal. While the engaged couple kissed, relieved by the way they had
come through that tight spot, others lifted their glasses and Carlos, anticipating what could or perhaps would never come to be, was throwing fistfuls of rice from his wheelchair.
“Happy birthday, Tamara. Happy birthday, Aymara,” they managed to hear Andrés’s voice over the telephone, who added: “Jose, I’m about to send you some new medicines for your circulation that are really good. I’ll explain how to take them on a little piece of paper…”
“Thank you, mi’jo,” Josefina yelled toward the phone.
“Conde,” Andrés continued, “Elias Kaminsky says he’ll call you soon.”
“He already called me,” Conde yelled. “And some gossip told him about what’s happening here right now…”
“Really? You don’t think that I…?” Andrés laughed. “After all, Conde … Well, I’m going, big hugssss.” Their far-off friend said goodbye and a click could be heard that cut off the line and the flow of spent dollars with it.
Yoyi then approached Tamara.
“An engagement like that”—and he put his hand in his pocket, from which he withdrew a small box—“deserves a ring like this … This is my wedding present.”
And he gave the stone-studded ring to the bride, who looked at him in confusion, as if she had never seen it before. Then she showed it to the other women, with the most feminine of pre-matrimonial pride. A typical scene of the very refined and classic chichi aesthetic.
“Is this really crazy, ridiculous shit truly happening to me?” Conde asked Candito, observing the scene of the women with the birthday hats, the glasses of champagne, the ring, the congratulations.
“Well, it seems like it to me … And you know what the worst part is?”
“There’s something worse? Tamara didn’t even say she was going to marry me…”
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