Heretics

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  Once again for Lucía, the leader of the tribe

  There are artists who only feel safe when they are free, but there are also such as can breathe freely only when they are secure.

  —Arnold Hauser

  Everything is in the hands of God, except the fear of God.

  —The Talmud

  Whoever has reflected on these four things would have done better not coming into the world: What is above us? What is below us? What came before? What will come after?

  —Rabbinical maxim

  HERETIC. From the Greek αἱρετικός—hairetikós—adjective derived from the noun αἱρεσις—haíresis, “division, choice,” coming from the verb αἱρεϊσθσι—haireísthai, “to choose, to divide, to prefer,” originally to define people belonging to other schools of thought, in other words, who have certain “preferences” in that area. The term comes to be associated for the first time with those dissident Christians in the early Church in the treatise of Irenaeus of Lyon, Adversus haereses (Against Heresies, end of second century), especially against Gnostics. It probably derives from the Indo-European root ser with the meaning “to seize.” In Hittite, the word šaru is found, and in Welsh herw, both with the meaning “booty.”

  According to the Diccionario de la Real Academia de la Lengua Española: HERETIC. (From the Provençal eretge). 1. Common. A person who denies any of the dogmas established by a religion. 2. A person who dissents or moves away from the official line of opinion followed by an institution, an organization, an academy, etc.… Colloquial. Cuba. To describe a situation: [To be a heretic] To be very difficult, especially in political or economic aspects.

  Author’s Note

  Many of the episodes narrated in this book are based on exhaustive historical research and were even derived from primary sources, including Abyss of Despair (Le fond de l’abîme) by N. N. Hanover, a shocking and vivid testimony of the horrors of the slaughter of Jews in Poland between 1648 and 1653, written with such a capacity to unsettle the reader that, with the necessary cuts and edits, I decided to incorporate it into the novel, rounding it out with fictional characters. Ever since reading that text, I knew I would not be able to better describe the same explosion of horror and, less still, to imagine the depths of sadism and perversion reached in the reality that the chronicler witnessed and described shortly after.

  But since this is a novel, some of the historical events have been submitted to the demands of plot development in the interest of, I repeat, their novelistic use. Perhaps the passage in which I carry out this exercise most vehemently is the one with events taking place in the 1640s, which in reality constitutes a sum of events relating to the moment, mixed with incidents from the following decade, like the excommunication of Baruch Spinoza, the pilgrimage by the supposed Messiah Sabbatai Zevi, or Menasseh ben Israel’s voyage to London in which he achieved, in 1655, Cromwell and English parliament’s tacit approval of the presence of Jews in England, who soon began to settle there …

  In later passages there is a strict respect for historical chronology, with minor alterations in the biographies of some characters taken from real life. Because history, reality, and novels run on different engines.

  Book of Daniel

  1

  Havana, 1939

  It would take Daniel Kaminsky many years to grow accustomed to the exuberant sounds of a city built on the most unwieldy commotion. He had quickly discovered that everything there began and ended with yelling, everything sputtered with rust and humidity, cars moved forward amid the wheezing and banging of engines or the long beeping of horns, dogs barked with and without reason and roosters even crowed at midnight, while each vendor made himself known with a toot, a bell, a trumpet, a whistle, a rattle, a flageolet, a melody in perfect pitch, or, simply, a shriek. He had run aground in a city in which, on top of it all, each night, at nine on the dot, cannon fire roared without any declaration of war or city gates to close, and where, in good times and bad, you always, always heard music, and not just that, singing.

  At the beginning of his Havana life, the boy would often try to evoke, as much as his scarcely-filled-with-memories mind would allow, the thick silences of the Jewish bourgeois neighborhood in Kraków where he had been born and lived his early days. He pursued that cold, rose-colored land of the past intuitively from the depths of his rootlessness; but when his memories, real or imagined, touched down on the firm ground of reality, he immediately reacted and tried to escape it. In the dark, silent Kraków of his infancy, too much noise could mean only two things: it was either market day or there was some imminent danger. In the final years of his Polish existence, danger grew to be more common than merchants. So fear became a constant companion.

  As expected, when Daniel Kaminsky landed in the raucous city, for a long time he would process the pounding of that explosive, resounding environment, one alarm bell after another, until, with the passing of years, he managed to understand that, in this new world, silence tended to herald only the most dangerous things. Once he overcame that phase, when he finally came to live amid the noise without hearing the noise, the way one breathes without consciousness of each breath, young Daniel discovered that he had lost his ability to appreciate the beneficent qualities of silence. But he would boast, above all, of having managed to make peace with Havana’s racket, since, at the same time, he’d attained the stubborn goal of feeling like he belonged to that turbulent city where, lucky for him, he had been spit out by the wave of a curse of history or of the divine—and until the end of his days he would wonder which of these was more accurate.

  The day on which Daniel Kaminsky began to experience the worst nightmare of his life, and simultaneously to get the first hint of his privileged fate, an overwhelming ocean smell and an ungodly, almost physical silence hung over Havana in the wee hours of the morning. His uncle Joseph had woken him earlier than he usually did to send him to Hebrew school at the Israelite Center, where the boy was receiving academic and religious instruction in addition to the essential Spanish language lessons that would allow for his integration into the motley and diverse world where he would live only God knew for how long. But the day revealed itself as different when, after having imparted the Sabbath blessing and expressed his best wishes for Shavuot, his uncle broke with his usual restraint and kissed the boy on the forehead.

  Uncle Joseph, also a Kaminsky and, of course, also Polish, had by then taken to being called Pepe the Purseman—thanks to the masterful way he carried out his work as a maker of bags, billfolds, and purses, among other leather goods—and was always, and would be until his death, a strict follower of the precepts of the Jewish religion. As such, before letting him taste the awaited breakfast already laid out on the table, he reminded the boy that they should not merely do the customary ablutions and prayers of a very special morning, since it was God’s will, blessed be, that Shavuot—the great ancient festival commemorating the giving of the Ten Commandments to the patriarch Moses, and the joyous acceptance of the Torah by the nation’s founders—fell on the Sabbath. They should also offer up prayers to their God that morning, as his uncle reminded him in his speech, asking for His divine intervention in helping them resolve in the best possible way something that seemed to have become complicated in the worst way. Although the complications may not apply to
them, he added, smiling mischievously.

  After almost an hour of prayers, during which Daniel thought he would faint from hunger and fatigue, Joseph Kaminsky finally signaled that his nephew could help himself to the abundant breakfast featuring warm goat’s milk (which, since it was Saturday, the Roman and apostolic María Perupatto, an Italian woman chosen by his uncle as the “Sabbath goy,” had left on the burning coals of their portable cooker), the square crackers called matzot, fruit jams, and even a fair amount of baklava dripping in honey. The feast would make the boy ask himself where his uncle found the money for such luxuries, since what Daniel Kaminsky would always remember of those days, for the rest of his long years on earth—besides the torment caused by the surrounding noise and the horrible week that followed—was the insatiable and unending hunger that nagged at him like the most loyal dog.

  Filled with such a sumptuous and unusual breakfast, the boy took advantage of his constipated uncle’s delayed trip to the communal bathroom of the phalanstery where they lived to go up to the building’s rooftop. The tile was still wet with dew in those hours prior to sunrise and, defying all prohibitions, he dared to lean over the eaves to contemplate the panorama of Compostela and Acosta Streets, the heart of Havana’s growing Jewish population. The unkempt Ministry of the Interior building, an old Catholic convent from the colonial era, remained closed under lock and key as if it were dead. Under the contiguous arcade, the so-called Arco de Belén below which Calle Acosta ran, not a single being walked. Ideal Movie Theater, the German bakery, the Polish hardware store, Moshé Pipik’s restaurant (which the boy’s appetite considered the world’s greatest temptation)—all had their curtains drawn and darkened windows. Although many Jews lived around there, and as such, the majority of the businesses were Jewish-run and in some cases remained closed every Saturday, the reigning calm was not only due to the hour or to the fact that it was the Sabbath, Shavuot day, synagogue day, but also because at that instant, while Cubans slept the day away, the majority of the area’s Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews were picking out their best clothes and getting ready to go out with the same purpose as the Kaminskys.

  The silence of the wee hours, his uncle’s kiss, the unexpected breakfast, and even the happy coincidence that Shavuot fell on Saturday had really only come to confirm Daniel Kaminsky’s childish expectation of the day ahead. Because the reason for his early start was that, at Havana’s port, at some point around sunrise, the arrival was expected of the passenger ship the S.S. Saint Louis, which had set sail from Hamburg fifteen days prior and aboard which traveled 937 Jews authorized to emigrate by the German National Socialist government. And amid the Saint Louis’s passengers were Dr. Isaiah Kaminsky, his wife, Esther Kellerstein, and their small daughter, Judith—in other words, little Daniel Kaminsky’s father, mother, and sister.

  2

  Havana, 2007

  From the moment he opened his eyes, even before he managed to recover his dilapidated consciousness, still soaked in the cheap rum that marked his night with Tamara—because it was Tamara, who else would it be, sleeping beside him—a treacherous feeling of defeat stabbed Mario Conde as it had been doing for far too long already. Why get up? What could he do with his day? the nagging feeling asked him. Conde didn’t know what to say in response. Overwhelmed by the inability to answer himself, he left the bed, careful not to disturb the woman’s placid dreams, as a silvery thread of drool escaped from her half-open mouth along with an almost musical snore, higher-pitched perhaps because of the secretion itself.

  At the kitchen table, after drinking a cup of freshly made coffee and lighting the first of the day’s cigarettes that helped him so much to regain the dubious condition of rationality, the man looked through the back door, where the first light shone of what threatened to be another hot September day. His lack of prospects was so glaring that at that moment he decided to face it the best way he knew and the only way he could: full-on and in fighting mode.

  An hour and a half later, sweat pouring out of his pores, the very same Mario Conde was running around the streets of the Cerro neighborhood announcing his desperate aim like a medieval merchant. “I buy old books! Come on and sell your old books!”

  Ever since he had left the police force, almost twenty years before, and as a saving grace taken up the very touchy but profitable exercise of buying and selling used books, Conde had played all the roles he could in that business: from the old-fashioned method of a street vendor announcing his wares (which for a time hurt his pride so) to specifically seeking out libraries a former client or some informant noted, or even to that of knocking door-to-door on houses in el Vedado and Miramar, which, due to some characteristic that passed unremarked by others (an unkempt garden, windows with broken glass), suggested the possible existence of books and, above all, the need to sell them. Lucky for him, when he met Yoyi the Pigeon, that young man with an enormous knack for business, a while later, and started to work with him in search of only select bibliographies for which Yoyi always had so many specific buyers, Conde started to experience a period of financial prosperity that lasted several years and allowed him to pursue, almost without constraint, activities that gave him the most satisfaction in life: reading good books and eating, drinking, listening to music, and philosophizing (talking shit, really) with his oldest and closest friends.

  But his commercial activities didn’t have infinite potential. For the last three or four years since stumbling upon the Montes de Oca family’s fabulous library, sealed and protected by siblings Dionisio and Amalia Ferrero, he had not found another collection that extraordinary, and each request made by Yoyi’s demanding buyers required a great effort to meet. The terrain, increasingly mined, had become cracked, like the earth after a long drought, and Conde had begun to live through times in which the lows were much more frequent than the highs, thus forcing him to hit the streets more frequently in this sweaty, poor man’s way.

  Another hour and a half later, when he had crossed part of the Cerro neighborhood and taken his shouts to the neighboring Palatino, without any result whatsoever, fatigue, laziness, and the harsh September sun forced him to shut down for the day and climb aboard a bus that came from God knew where and that miraculously stopped in front of him and carried him close to his business partner’s house.

  Yoyi the Pigeon, in contrast to Conde, was an entrepreneur with vision and had diversified his activities. Rare, expensive books were just one of his hobbies, he maintained, since his real interest was in more lucrative matters: the buying and selling of houses, cars, jewels, valuable objects. That young engineer who had never touched a screw or entered any job sites had long ago discovered, with a clairvoyance that always surprised Conde, that the country where they lived was far from the paradise painted by newspapers and official speeches, and he had decided, as the most adept do, to turn misery to his advantage. His skills and intelligence enabled him to establish himself on many fronts, on the borders of what was legal, although not too far from the limits, in businesses that made him enough money to live like a prince, restaurant-hopping in designer clothing and gold jewelry, always in the company of beautiful women as they traveled in his 1957 convertible Chevy Bel Air, the car that anyone in the know considered to be the most perfect, enduring, comfortable, and elegant ride ever to come out of an American factory—and for which the young man had paid a fortune, at least in Cuban terms. Yoyi was, in effect, the prototype taken from the catalog of the New Man eked out by the reality of the moment: aloof from politics, addicted to the ostentatious enjoyment of life, bearer of a utilitarian morality.

  “Son of a bitch, man, you look like shit,” the young man said when Conde showed up, sweaty and with a face described so aptly semantically and scatologically.

  The recent arrival merely said, “Thanks,” and fell onto the springy sofa, where Yoyi, freshly showered after having spent two hours at a private gym, was whiling the time away watching a Major League Baseball game on his fifty-two-inch plasma TV.

  As
usual, Yoyi invited him to have lunch. The cook who worked for the young man had made cod à la Biscay, black beans and rice, plantains en tentación, and a salad full of several vegetables that Conde devoured hungrily and avidly, with the aid of a bottle of reserve Pesquera that Yoyi brought out of the special refrigerator where he kept his wines at the right temperature as required by the heat of the tropics.

  As they drank their coffee on the terrace, Conde again felt the stab of the overwhelming frustration hounding him.

  “There’s no more to be had, Yoyi. People don’t even have old newspapers around anymore…”

  “Something always turns up, man. You can’t lose hope,” Yoyi said as he sucked, as he usually did, on the huge gold medallion with the Virgin Mary that hung on the thick chain made of the same metal over his puffed-out pectorals, like the pigeon’s breast that gave him his nickname.

  “So if I don’t lose hope, what in the hell do I do?”

  “I can sense in the air that something big is coming down,” Yoyi said, and even sniffed at the warm September air. “And your pockets will fill up with pesos…”

  Conde was aware of where those sensory premonitions of Yoyi’s would lead and was ashamed of knowing that he had stopped by the young man’s house to prompt them. But there was so little of his former pride left standing that, when he felt too pinched for cash, he went there with his complaints. At fifty-four years old, Conde knew he was a paradigmatic member of what years before he and his friends had deemed to be the hidden generation, those aging and defeated beings who, unable to leave their lairs, had evolved (involved, actually) into the most disappointed and fucked-up generation within the new country that was taking shape. Without the energy or the youth to recycle themselves as art vendors or the managers of foreign corporations, or at least as plumbers or bakers, their only recourse was to resist as survivors. Thus, while some subsisted on the dollars sent by their children who had gone off to anywhere in the world but there, others tried to do what they could to avoid falling into absolute poverty or jail: work as private tutors, drivers who rented out their battered cars, self-employed veterinarians or masseuses, whatever came up. But the option to make a living clawing at the walls wasn’t easy and caused that stellar exhaustion, the feeling of constant uncertainty and irreversible defeat that frequently gripped the former policeman and drove him, with one rough push, against his will and desires to hit the streets looking for old books that would earn him, at least, a few pesos to survive.