Turing's Delirium

by Edmundo Paz Soldán

  He has thought about visiting Albert at the house where he lies secluded and dying, but before disturbing him he needs to have a sense of the Black Chamber and clarify the legend. These documents will help him to do that. And they will help him to forget about Kandinsky for a while.

  He ponders his empty bowl of Cheerios, disinclined to rouse himself for more. If only Supersonic were a robot—now that would be something. If he could buy a robot that he could send to the kitchen to bring him more Cheerios, and while we're at it, the bottle of Old Parr ... The monthly salary for a maid in this country was not even one hundred dollars. At times he was tempted to hire one, but he couldn't bring himself to do so. It would be far too strange having someone live in his apartment, serving him from six in the morning until ten at night, maybe rifling through his drawers when he was out. Once when he was on vacation in Cochabamba he had gone out with a girl whose father watched television without ever leaving his chair. Since he did not have a remote control, he used the maid to change channels. As he sat watching his favorite programs in the living room, the maid had to stand in the doorway the entire time, attentive to his slightest gesture. Ramírez-Graham would never forget that sight.

  As he reviews the documents, he thinks about Svetlana. He would give anything for her to be here in this very living room, he sitting in the chair and she sprawled on the floor, working on her laptop as she had in Georgetown, preparing a report for the insurance company where she works.

  But now he can't think of her without thinking about their son. He can picture him crawling on the rug, pulling Supersonic's tail, the dog patiently taking it—his software recognizing children and having been programmed not to react to their provocations. Ramírez-Graham looks down at his feet. Now he sees him, now he doesn't.

  The documents in the file he is holding tell of Operation Turing. He read the first few pages without paying much attention; Albert, after all, was obsessed with Turing and before giving that name to Sáenz had also used it to name a room in the chamber and a couple of secret operations. Ramírez-Graham soon discovers that this operation refers to the Turing he knows, to the head of the archives—a man he views as someone like his grandfather, useless but refusing to retire.

  He finishes his glass of Old Parr. Supersonic growls at the wind that buffets the windows. Reading on, Ramírez-Graham gradually learns that between 1975 and 1977, certain intercepted messages came into Albert's hands and were sent directly to Turing. The argument: they were particularly difficult, and Albert did not want to waste time having other analysts try to solve them. Turing had quickly become his right-hand man, and Albert believed him to be nothing less than infallible.

  The light of the lamp flickers, the images on the TV blur: another GlobaLux blackout. Ramírez-Graham closes the file and tries to resign himself. Patience, patience. No wonder everyone here is so religious.

  It's impossible—he'll never get used to so many annoyances. He just wants to do his work and not worry about whether or not the infrastructure is falling to pieces.

  Ten minutes later, the lamp and the television come back to life. He opens the file again. Something doesn't seem quite right. For a secret message to be considered difficult, first you have to try to solve it. Or was Albert capable of deciding at a glance how difficult a message was? And as far as he knew, Turing was not terribly fond of computers. He tried to decipher messages using pencil and paper, as if the real Turing had never existed, as if cryptanalysis hadn't been mechanized a century and a half ago. A truly difficult message needed to be attacked with the brute force of a Cray. An analyst came on the scene only after the computer had identified certain weak spots in the message. Even using that approach, a great number of messages went unsolved. And yet Turing had deciphered everything that Albert had put on his desk. Either the people encrypting messages in Bolivia in the seventies used extremely rudimentary methods, which was possible, or Turing was a natural, one of the most brilliant cryptanalysts in the history of cryptanalysis.

  Something does not add up. He tells himself that he'd better keep reading.

  The lamp and television go dark. He gets out of his chair, feels around for his cell phone. He doesn't know whom to call, what to do.

  In the darkness of his apartment, Ramírez-Graham pictures Turing twenty-five years ago, young, at the height of his power at the Black Chamber. He pictures him in an office full of papers, receiving the files that Albert hands him, immediately setting to work, not willing to let down the person who holds him in such high regard.

  For the first time he feels compassion for that tired old man he has relegated to the basement, whom he thinks of firing at any moment.

  Chapter 21

  JUDGE CARDONA LEAVES the hotel with his black briefcase in hand and comes upon a hostile, cloudy sky, the sense that drizzle is imminent. It had been brighter in the hotel room. He does not remember Rio Fugitivo being like this, a city of weak sunshine and gray clouds about to pour rain. Nostalgia has gotten the better of him, and the sunny days from his childhood and adolescence, which perhaps were few, have eclipsed all others. It happens to the best of us. We are restless creatures, governed by an incurable desire for paradise. But paradise is not what we have been given, so we invent it in our memories, based on a few furtive weeks when we were happy, perhaps in the beginning or somewhere along the way where the road forked and life took us. The tricks of fate, which can also bring happiness.

  There are police in the plaza and the neighboring streets are deserted, with sticks, nails, and stones scattered on the pavement and sidewalks and debris swirling in the wind. It is Friday afternoon. Yesterday, after the woman left, Judge Cardona overindulged in BMP and passed out on the white tile bathroom floor after vomiting violently. He woke up today at noon, a bitter taste in his throat and mouth, his palate extremely dry. "History was being made as I slept," Cardona, stroking his beard, says to the doorman..

  The doorman tells him that he was right to have stayed in his room. The evidence of yesterday afternoon's and this morning's confrontations is all over the streets. Everything is blockaded. Yesterday a group of demonstrators took the plaza and then the police took it back. Today they plan to reach the mayor's and the prefect's offices; the police have cordoned off the plaza. "If I were you, I'd stay in my room. This is going to get ugly. The demonstrators will be back with renewed force, and the police will use tear gas. I've seen it a thousand times. You learn a lot working in the main plaza." He blinks as if he has no control over the muscles in his eyelids.

  "Unfortunately," Cardona says, scratching his right cheek, "I have urgent business."

  Every time he comes to Río Fugitivo, something strange happens. Existing in multiple historical temporalities, its inhabitants dream of the modern convenience of cable TV but are anchored to the premodern past of strikes and street protests. It's no different from the rest of the country. Many Internet cafés do not progress make. Many supermarkets and shopping centers either.

  Cardona had better walk. Avenida de las Acacias is relatively close by, only about ten blocks away. He touches his briefcase and feels protected—from the future, the past, himself. His legs are tingling and exhaustingly heavy; the effects of BMP are still coursing through his body. Dry throat, nausea. Perhaps he should wait a while, until his mind clears, until the fog lifts. No, no, no. He has waited long enough. Neither lucidity nor a lack thereof will change the radical cruelty of the facts. There are such things as avenging angels, whose only purpose in coming to earth is to exterminate. Oh, to whom do you entrust your soul? Perhaps he should go to the cathedral on the other side of the plaza, behind the scrawny palm trees, as a prologue to what cannot then be undone. Perhaps the wine-colored spots, scattered over his body like an archipelago in entropy, will disappear from his skin, and with them any sensation of fulfilling a pact, any reminder of an obligation. But no. Someone has to be responsible for the cousin who is dead. Someone has to be responsible for Mirtha. Someone, however feverish he might be, has to atone f
or his own sins. All the questions he has about the hell of a dictatorship can be reduced to just one, or several grouped under the same theme: who is ultimately responsible when a life is taken? Who, conscious of his actions or not, assumed this celestial right? Infamy should not remain in an abstraction called "the dictatorship," it should be personalized in a body that breathes, in a face with eyes that avoid or meet your gaze.

  Cardona walks through a group of policemen. A sergeant with thick hands and a white mustache stops talking on his walkie-talkie and looks at Cardona as if he knows him from somewhere. The spots are easily recognizable; perhaps the beard has thrown him off. He asks Cardona for his ID card, his tone slightly annoyed; Cardona shows it to him. The sergeant is. surprised to discover a well-known name. He looks at Cardona as if making sure that the person in front of him is in fact someone who was once minister of justice. His tone changes: This is no time to be out on the street. The demonstrators are just two blocks away. Cardona replies that he has an urgent business meeting to attend and, since the sergeant is so worried about his security, asks him please to assign two officers to escort him.

  The sergeant calls over two of his men. "Mamani. Quiroz. Accompany the judge to the barricade and return immediately." Mamani and Quiroz, with their sleepy, fearful eyes, station themselves on either side of him. They could be my children, he thinks. But he has never had children. It had been difficult for him to find a stable relationship, to make plans for the future.

  Back when he was fifteen, he had put his obsessive interest in soccer and friends to one side and begun to focus on women, strange beings who actually scared him a little. Perhaps he was afraid because he went to San Ignacio, an all-boys school; by not having women around, by spending his time closed up in that masculine world of obscenities and masturbatory fantasies, he did not know how to treat them. Then Mirtha became his obsession, but she had disappeared as quickly as she had entered. Nothing had been the same with women since.

  Two fighter jets thunderously cross the sky, leaving a cottony slipstream in their wake. He snaps out of deep thought. Will it rain? Most likely. Seventy yards from the barricade he can see the fury on the demonstrators' faces: they are throwing cans and bottles and have started a fire in the middle of the street, using cardboard boxes and newspaper. "This is our mission—it's time for the Coalition!" The demonstrators' refrain is vague, out of sync. "This is insistence, it's time for resistance! An end, an end to this globalizing trend!"

  He is approaching the barricade when a rock hits him above his right eye. He lets his briefcase fall and brings his hands to his face. One of the officers escorting him has also been hit; he is on the ground and bleeding from his left temple. The demonstrators cross the barrier and are held back by a police squad. Cardona hears shots in the air, and dry pops; he realizes it is tear gas. There are shouts, the sound of metal on metal. "Fucking pigs!" The phrase rises above all the other noise, taking over. "Pigs go home!" There is blood on Cardona's hands: his right eyebrow has been cut. He feels sharp, hot stabs of pain above his eye. He can barely open it, and the pain makes him dizzy. Should he go to a hospital? He picks up his briefcase; he had better keep going. Haltingly, he reaches the corner and turns left. He begins to run down a seemingly never-ending street as he feels a stinging in his eyes and a bitter smell fills the air. Tear gas, he hears someone shout, tear gas. The doorman had been right.

  Cardona tries to keep moving with his eyes half closed. Adrenaline is suffocating his lungs. This is how Mirtha must have felt when she was facing the police and military at demonstrations. He had missed all of that. All he had wanted was for the university to reopen so that he could begin his studies. If it did not open soon, he would go to Brazil or Mexico. He had wanted to start a career, was worried about his future, not very interested in what was going on around him. One day he told this to Mirtha, who had come into his room while his sister prepared tea. She had asked him what he thought about the political situation and then told him she was surprised by his egotism, his ignorance of what was happening in their country. She was ashamed of him. I can imagine what's going on. I'm not dumb, but I'm not brave; I'm not a hero, he told her. It's not about that, she said, shaking her pigtails, it's about keeping our dignity. Then she had gone out into the living room. It was the last time he had seen her alive.

  He stops four blocks farther on, as he is leaving the Enclave. He passes by the building that at one time housed the telegraph company, Doric columns and two naked neoclassical goddesses flanking the entrance. He walks past a seven-story building; there is no sign to indicate what it is, but it must be important, because it is being guarded by several policemen. He can still hear shots being fired in the air. Television cameras arrive on the scene. A reporter shoves a microphone in his face and asks a few questions. Cardona keeps walking, his eyes burning. "Wait ... aren't you...?" Luckily, behind him several others are anxious to be interviewed. He does not want to have anything to do with cameras. He has not been around them for a long time now. And to think that at one time he had wanted to be in the limelight, to be in the best photos with Montenegro. Were about to announce the new criminal code. His office full of papers and requests for interviews. Weekends at the country homes of one ally of the regime or another, drinking Cuba Libres next to a pool, chatting with Montenegro's obese wife. It was rumored that she was behind the corruption in customs. Montenegro's godson, the ex-mayor of La Paz, white beard, affable smile, a glass of whiskey in his hand, approaching and remarking that Cardona must be hot, that he should take off his jacket. "In a while, thank you," Cardona had said, thinking about the file in his office with the concrete proof of bribes the godson had taken to accept a bid. The opposition was pressuring him to take the godson to court. He wasn't sure what to do, which he now thinks said a lot about him. Everything became clearer after Montenegro approached him beside that very pool and told him, in the same calm yet imposing tone his father had used with him when he was a child, to make that file disappear. It was not a suggestion; it was an order. "Certainly, general," he had said. "Of course, general." He also had photocopies of the invoice for a Beechcraft airplane for the presidency, $3 million, with Montenegro's signature authorizing the purchase. And he had a study by a consulting firm indicating that no more than $1.4 million should have been paid for that plane. So where did the money go? How could he ask the general? Time and again he had wondered whether he had the stomach for what passed as politics. He learned that he certainly did have the stomach for it. Next to the pool, the owner of the house—wearing a coquettish, incongruous white hat that covered her balding head—asked everyone to gather together to toast Montenegro's wife on her birthday, Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you. Montenegro looking sullen, beside him whispering, Forget about that plane, judge, you're either with us or against us. Trust me, general. I simply need to have my answers prepared; reporters, the opposition, will soon be asking questions. The water in the pool sparkling in the sunlight. Answers for everyone's questions except my own. The godson patting him on the back. If you don't have the answers, you'd better leave. Better late than never. Leave, hide from the cameras, from power, not be the one to show your face in such a shameful manner. Going for a swim, judge? It's a little too late, I think, general. It's never too late for anything, take my word for it.

  His eyes itch. He opens and closes them, again and again. The pain is throbbing. Even though his legs still feel stiff, the effects of the BMP have finally worn off. The violence in the street has forced him to wake up.

  It's never too late? Judge, know thyself. Can he understand himself? For years he thought he did. Everything was clear to him: the objectives, the motives, the reasons, the intuition. Now all is blurred, and his pride has prevented him from asking for help. Well, yes, he once did. He went to a psychiatrist six months ago, after a week of insomnia. Sitting on a black leather sofa in front of that young woman with glasses too big for her face and an Argentine accent, he couldn't think about anything but how his fr
iends would laugh if they knew. Men solved their problems on their own; shrinks were for sissies, and to top it all off they were ridiculously expensive and never offered concrete solutions. He told the woman about Mirtha, about his year of working for Montenegro. He said he had betrayed his cousin and felt the need to avenge her death, to kill those responsible. He told her he wanted to assassinate Montenegro, but he knew this was impossible. And if not him, then those responsible for Mirtha's death. At the end of the hour, the psychiatrist concluded that his concern for Mirtha, his need to avenge her death, was genuine. But, she asked, would he have felt the need if he hadn't destroyed his own self-image that year he spent working alongside Montenegro? She asked him to ponder that question and come back with an answer for his next visit, in a week. She called a couple of days later, to check on him. She was concerned that he was entering into a dangerous phase—all that talk of revenge and killing. Cardona listened to her and later asked what she meant by "dangerous phase." "Just that," she said. He remembered how uncomfortable he had felt on the black sofa, thanked her, and hung up. He never went back to see her.

  Four blocks away is the house where Albert is being kept. He can see it at the end of his visual field, unobtrusive, unnoticed by neighbors and passersby. Jacarandas along the avenue. It is the house where someone who for a time moved the strings of Bolivian history is taking refuge. He should leave everything that is past behind and worry only about looking forward. He should walk with steady steps to that house. Ruth had gone to get the concrete proof that accused Albert and her husband, naming them responsible for several deaths, including Mirtha's. But Cardona, once he had received confirmation of his suspicions from Ruth's mouth, does not need proof. All he needs is to maintain his conviction, to stay strong. There should be no doubt. Maybe the force of his actions will be enough to bring him peace, to make living with himself bearable once again. For the rest, all he needs is the target and the polished metal in the briefcase that he is holding on to so tightly—or that is holding on so tightly to him.