It had always been difficult for Conde to conceive of a young person making an attempt on her own life, even when he knew that those attitudes were very common. But if Judy had killed herself, which was inconceivable, in her case, it reached tragic proportions: so much thinking about death, playing with it, contempt for life and the one thing that kept her going—her body—had perhaps been the one to lead her down that absurd path. Could the girl truthfully have believed in her future reincarnation? Did she really think that solutions could be found with an exit? Perhaps even that by ceasing to be, she would be free? Hadn’t she understood that not even the replicants wanted to die after they tasted the miracle of being alive, the ephemeral but enormous privilege of thinking, hating, loving? No. Judy, as Frederic said about himself, could be emo but not such a moron. Or could she? If she had killed herself, she would have some reason, and it would be an important one: much more important than fading emo militancy or flirtations with a self-destructive philosophy. But if someone had taken her to that end, none of what was known would end up mattering: only her killer’s hidden reasons. But, who could want Judy dead badly enough to risk acting on it? Why make the effort to hide the body but leave the bloodstained clothing strewn where they were bound to be found and, further still, be incriminating, or, at least, leave the door open to other searches? If Bocelli was behind that act, why disguise it as a suicide…? What about the money, did Judy have it with her that day? As he thought more with his poor and aching brain, Conde started understanding that some piece still didn’t fit in the puzzle that he had managed, with so much effort, to build based on the different faces of Judy obtained in his research … By her own choice or by a killer’s hand, Judy was dead and her exit from this world should have been related to the way in which she aimed to live in it: free. That certainty was the only thing Conde had. And for Judy, perhaps, it had been the only thing that mattered. Finding the guilty party would not bring her back to life, back to her family, back to her disquieting reading and her passionate militancies. Nothing anymore would bring her back from her dreamed-of Nirvana. At least until her reincarnation. Or, in the end, would she now in reality be more free?
At some point in the afternoon, the physical and mental fatigue overcame Conde. Like so many other times, he felt himself gliding through sleepiness until he found himself in the dream that returned to him the image of his grandfather Rufino. This time, the old man appeared clearly and convincingly, as if he were alive and it were not a dream. Because he had come to take him out of his unhealthy state of mind with the persistent recourse of reminding his favorite grandson that the world, at the end of the day, had always been and would always be a cockfighting ring.
* * *
As he got older, with terrifying inexorability and speed, Mario Conde had had countless occasions to confirm, thanks to dreams like that afternoon’s, and to many other examples encountered in the starkest reality, the fact that, in truth, he had learned almost nothing from his grandfather. And he couldn’t blame that pedagogic waste on Rufino el Conde, who had been prodigious in his advice, his practical demonstrations, and attempts at imparting lessons that were even metaphysical at times, focused on training his grandson in the very complex art of living life. The old man had started to undertake that careful instruction, almost Socratic, as far back as Conde could remember, when the old man started taking him with him to the cockfighting pens where he raised and trained his animals, and to the official rings, at first, and later clandestine ones, after the revolutionary and socialist prohibition on cockfights; those circular enclosures, like copies of Roman circuses, in which the ferocious disciples were made to fight until the death and where bets were placed.
Looking at and listening to his grandfather, trying to respond to his constant questions, he would have had the enviable opportunity to become the owner of a sharp practical philosophy that the by-then ancient Rufino el Conde had cultivated in each circumstance. The grandfather adorned his lessons with such glorious maxims as the one that went “Curiosity killed the cat” (as his grandson had just felt, in his own flesh and that of another) or “All I know is that you should play when you’re sure you’re going to win, and if not, it’s better not to play,” a sentence that was generally flaunted minutes before the start of a fight of dubious prognosis. Almost always, as his grandfather gave that advice, he was placing, on the most inconceivable sites of his body or his outfit, the drops of Vaseline heavily loaded with mild or hot pepper of which, like a magician of indecipherable skills, he would spread a practically undetectable but sufficient amount on the feathers of his cock just before the fight started, to suffocate and debilitate his opponent. Playing to win.
“But that additional help has to be used as a very last resort, you know?” he declared from his stool, leaning against a post, that son of a Canary Island–born fugitive who reached port in Cuba back in what was still called “the time of Spain.” “What matters is that you yourself have stacked the deck in your favor, the way you prepare a cock: from the time you pick the parents until you train it to turn it into a perfect machine. That means that you teach it not to let it be fucked up by the other cock … Do you understand me, my child? I’m asking you if you understand because it’s important for you to learn this: in life one has to see himself as if he were a cock … I bet you don’t know why?” He would insist at this point in his speech so that his interlocutor, even when he understood him perfectly and knew the answer due to having heard it hundreds of times, would raise his shoulders and shake his head no, ready for the surprise and revelation. “Because the world is a damned cockfighting ring in which you go in to annihilate your opponent and only one of the two comes out with all of his feathers intact: the one who doesn’t let himself get fucked up by the other one,” Rufina would conclude and finish off with “Everything else is just filler.”
As a gamecock, Mario Conde would have been considered a failure. Perhaps because, despite the grandfather and great-grandfather he’d had, he turned out to be dragged down by defective genes. For starters, he was lacking spurs and he was too soft, as a woman would once tell him, rightly so, many years before. Then, he didn’t know how to use his beak or his wings, since he was just a sentimental piece of crap, as he would tell himself with good reason. Not due to coincidence or bad luck, but because of his glaring inabilities, he had received so many spur marks, pecks, and kicks in the ass over the course of his years that they were branded on his soul. So many that, had his grandfather Rufino el Conde seen them, he would have withdrawn his last name and perhaps even twisted his neck like those chickens that he preferred to put in the cooking pot before letting them loose within the confines of a cockfighting ring, since just by looking at them, he knew that they would be a lost cause in life’s battles.
In a country that was turning into a high-walled cockfighting ring by the day, in which the strange custom was practiced of having many cocks fighting among themselves, each trying to take something from another one and not have anything taken from him, Conde felt like a puppet that, with great difficulty, avoided the blows, looking for a tiny space to survive. The most terrible thing turned out to be knowing that nothing could be done about his defects: in life’s cockfighting ring, his manifest destiny would always place him on the receiving end of pecks that weren’t even meant for him.
If in the reality of his day or in the flexible universe of his dreams, he would have known how to pray, Conde would have liked to pray for the immortal soul of Judith Torres. But, in the face of his devotional inabilities, he had to resign himself to wishing her luck in the journey toward her next earthly stop. Perhaps she could land in a place and a time at which life wasn’t confined to the oppressive limits of a cockfighting ring.
10
Havana, July 2008
The invincible vocation for nostalgia had been what decreed the choice: almost without thinking about it, he had chosen the point where Paseo del Prado comes undone, like a wilting flower, following its meeting with el M
alecón’s always aggressive exposure. Twenty years before, Mario Conde, still a lieutenant investigator, had arranged a meeting at that crossroads with the theater producer Alberto Marqués to begin an amazing journey through Havana’s homosexual nightlife, a nocturnal round overflowing with revelations about the survival strategies and reaffirmation of those ignored, further still, marginalized individuals, who were at times even condemned. That outing had made an indelible mark on his memory that, by spontaneous generation, had moved him to choose the spot for this new encounter.
As he waited for Major Manuel Palacios’s arrival, Conde forced himself to not get caught up in digressions. The fact that, after five days of silence, his former colleague had called him and proposed having a beer could be due to too many reasons for him to get entangled in trying to predict them. In any event, what was clear in the telephone conversation maintained a few hours before was that, six days after having found the corpse of Judith Torres, the police were still incapable of giving any definitive answer regarding the circumstances in which the girl had died.
Over the course of those same days, Conde’s spirits had managed to recover, more or less. The police order to keep himself at the margins of Judith Torres’s case, in addition to his personal decision to try to forget that regrettable story, had combined with the favorable circumstances that, instead of taking his planned vacation (which in his case consisted of the most compact dolce far niente possible), he had seen himself forced to work and concentrate on less painful matters. Because Yoyi’s diplomat friend, made aware of the library of the former leader that still retained some juicy marvels, had asked for a list of works that the old man would be willing to sell and of the going prices. As could be expected, Yoyi had charged him with that tedious but saving mission, which had required that he keep his five senses on alert. Besides, Conde had definitively forbidden himself from giving in to other unhealthy desires that went through his head: that of attending Judy’s funeral or of holding a final conversation with the sure-to-be-inconsolable Yadine. And for that reason he had even decided to indefinitely postpone the moment for passing on to Ricardo Kaminsky the message from his relative Elias about the litigation involving the painting.
In an effort to maintain the purpose of not trying to guess what he would find out (or not) anyway thanks to the conversation with Manolo, Conde focused on looking at the surroundings and trying to establish, on that return, how much the panorama had changed since that far-off night of learning about gays. The remains of the old Basque façade had disappeared and in its place, the hotel promised for years by an ad had not been erected; the small plaza of the old La Punta fortress, placed at the entrance of the bay, had been restored and now seemed to be occupied by a statue of Francisco de Miranda. On the ground floor of the triangular building on the corner of Prado and the abominable Calzada de San Lázaro someone had opened a bar that Conde, thanks to the dollars he had earned in recent days, had his eye on. The rest of the components remained stuck in time, with their dramatic warnings: there was the same class of little gay trolls in search of victims—who didn’t even look at Conde—the Mexican bay leaf trees marked by salt spray and sea wind survived, the buildings that were definitively deceased or in their death throes, the remains of the old Havana jail, and the unsolvable enigma of the bust dedicated to poet Juan Clemente Zenea, on whose bronze face his maker had tried to express the inescapable tragedy of the bard capable of making himself the repository for all hate. Accused of being a traitor, by Cuban independence activists as well as by colonial Spanish authorities, that ethereal being had confused his possibilities, daring to play his cards in the realm of politics, to end up executed in the trenches of La Cabaña fortress, visible on the other side of the bay.
The sun was beginning its final descent when Major Palacios got out of his car and approached Conde. Already in the mind-set of the invitation to drink some beers, Manolo had unburdened himself of his uniform jacket and was wearing a sleeveless shirt, very worn, that made him look like the physical monstrosity that he was.
“Wassup, my friend?” was his greeting, with his hand held out.
“Poor guy,” Conde said, pointing at the bust of Zenea. “He believed that he could think with his own head and that poets can play politics. It cost him very dearly. They said horrible things about him and later dedicated a bust to him. What a shitty country…”
“Well, I see that today you’re feeling happy and even patriotic.”
“Yes, luckily … When I’m feeling down, I think that this country is a real shithole and a half. Come on, let’s go sit over there.”
They took the most distant table, in a wing of the porch overlooking the Prado, through which the scarce breeze coming from the sea ran more freely. They asked for beers and, as a snack, some croquettes allegedly made of chicken, which, at least, ended up being edible.
“I can tell you have some cash…” Manolo said as he refilled his glass with the blond beer.
“Not much,” Conde said, who was embarrassed by the fact of having money almost as much as he was of the more frequent situation of not having any.
“Just in case, don’t erase me from your will.”
“No, I would never.” Conde smiled and drank from his glass in order to immediately push Manolo. “So?”
Manolo took a deep breath.
“The forensics discovered that Judy had had sexual relations, perhaps shortly before dying. In her vagina, there were remains of the lubricant on the one type of condom currently sold in Cuba.”
“And what else?”
“Well, nothing else. There are no signs of violence, it’s as if it were consensual … At the end of the day, we’re in the same place…”
“And you called to tell me this?”
Manolo looked at the bust of Zenea as if he were deciding whether to speak or not.
“Well, not really in the same place … Bocelli returned to Cuba three days ago…”
“What are you saying?” Conde’s surprise was resounding.
“He was going to Mexico for some business and he returned … They held him at the airport when he arrived.” Manolo paused and drank to the bottom of his beer, more out of thirst than the desire to savor it. With a gesture, he requested another. “You can imagine the shit show that took place. Ambassador, Italian consul, and fucking everybody involved … But the guy agreed to a DNA test…”
“So he was clean?” Conde asked, guessing the predictable answer.
“The lab results arrived just now. The blood that was on Judy’s clothing was not his … It appears that the guy is clean.”
“But that doesn’t mean that he wasn’t the one who had sex with her.” Conde tried to find his way in the dark.
“We don’t have any way to prove that. Remember that they used a condom. Forget it, we had to let him go. Tomorrow he’s leaving Cuba … They say he’s not coming back.”
“That’s better,” Conde said. “I don’t think we’re going to miss him too much.”
Conde looked at the street, where, in one fell swoop, night had established itself. The cancellation of that possible clue didn’t even leave the investigation in the same place, but rather, more behind. Everything related to Judy was definitely turning out to be complicated.
“There’s more … The lab finally established that one of the substances Judy had in her body was a hallucinogenic.”
“What drug was it?”
“That’s the problem … They don’t know for sure. It’s a strange substance, not a common drug around here.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“What you’re hearing: she had taken a drug similar to ecstasy, but that isn’t common among those who take those things here in Cuba. It’s like ecstasy squared, with more chemical shit.”
“That son of a bitch…”
Conde scratched his arms as if he himself were suffering from classic withdrawal symptoms.
“And the latest: yesterday, they put the girl’s fathe
r in jail, your friend Alcides Torres,” Manolo dropped as if he were talking about the summer heat.
“Shit, Manolo! Why don’t you just say everything at once, dammit?”
“Because I can’t … I only have one mouth. And they’re going to sew it shut if they find out that I’ve told you all of this…”
“What happened to the guy?”
“He’s being investigated. I’m sure he’s in so deep that he’s even got shit in his hair…”
Conde did not feel petty: he was truly and deeply happy with that act of historic justice. For once, a son of a bitch was paying for his faults. And he tried to imagine what Judy’s reaction would have been if she had been able to learn of the foreseeable end of her father’s career.
“Judy knew that Alcides was involved in some deal that could make him a lot of dollars.”
“With what they were sending from Venezuela, I don’t think they could become millionaires,” Manolo assured him, his forehead wrinkled and as cross-eyed as ever. “But they got a nice kickback from it…”
“Well, then the guy was dealing in something else and not in the businesses you imagined … And something else that would yield him a lot of dollars.”
“What the hell could it be?” Manolo had taken the bait out of curiosity. “How much is ‘a lot of dollars’?”
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