It is the first time Cardona has ever done anything like this. He was a timid child who did whatever it took to distance himself from violence. As a boy, he was sickened by the sight of dogs or cats that had been hit by cars, their entrails hanging out, dead or on the verge of death. And he hated going to his grandparents' country estate, because his cousins would laugh at him if he didn't go out to hunt sparrows and hummingbirds with pellet guns. They called him Mary Magdalene, and he would look up at Mirtha out of the corner of his eye, hoping in vain that at least she would stop the attack. He can still remember those humiliating lunches when his cousins and his sister would sing
Mary Magdalene, that's you, Mary Magdalene, that's you,
until he would get up, run to his grandparents' room, and slam the door.
At times he thought that with a personality like his, he had been born in the wrong country. That's why he had hidden behind his legal studies; they were the desperate anchor, the rationality of law that would counteract the chaotic violence of the world. All in vain. In the country that held the world record for number of coup d'états, the law was a puppet that was burned at the stake with shocking frequency.
He looks at the guard slumped on the floor. He has fallen on his side, the bullets having gone in through his chest and abdomen. Cardona would have liked to have known his name. Just as some remembered him as the "spotted man," he would remember the guard as the "albino." He feels compassion for the guard's unjust death, for the family that will mourn him. It is they, the innocent ones, who always pay the price. Even when it's a matter of avenging an innocent death. He had wanted to defend them from his position as magistrate. At least he had in the beginning, before he discovered how sordid the system was, how corrupt the scales of justice were. He had been so naive, so idealistic. What would his cousins say if they saw him now? What would Mirtha say? From the looks of it, people are capable of doing things that life has not destined them for, at least not on its polished surface.
He walks into Albert's room. It is austere, with carnations on a table and photos on the walls, photos that tell the tale of victory. Albert, who had arrived in Bolivia as one more CIA agent sent to advise the dictatorship on intelligence operations and had quickly become indispensable to Montenegro. Albert, who did not want to go back to the United States, resigned from the CIAâor was he really a Nazi fugitive?âand achieved the miracle of organizing an efficient institution in this country, in charge of internal security, of monitoring the opposition, listening to their conversations, intercepting their secret messages, and decoding them. An institution so efficient that Mirtha and her comrades had not been able to elude it. Turing had deciphered the message that indicated where her group would hold a clandestine meeting and had given it to Albert, who had passed it on to the DOP so that they could take things from there.
The rain slides down the windows. Judge Cardona shivers. His clothes are wet. Albert is lying between the sheets in bed, surrounded by the smell of eucalyptus, old age, and decaying flesh. His body, or what remains of it, is connected to wires leading from a machine on one side of his bed. His heartbeats pulse in the graphics on the screen; perhaps they are artificially sustained by it. Cardona approaches the edge of the bed. Albert's eyes are open, the only sign of life in that skeleton covered by skin that has lost all elasticity. Even if he does nothing, this man is not long for this world. Cardona is the judge in charge of delivering the final verdict. The red-hot stabs of pain in his eyebrow do not let up. He had better hurry. He aims at Albert's chest, and the man continues to stare with wide-open eyes at a place that may not even be in this room. "Kaufbeuren," he says, out of nowhere. He's delirious, Cardona tells himself. "For my cousin," he announces out loud, solemnly, emphatically, in the booming voice that had left him long ago. "Mirtha. She could have given so much to this country. She could have done so much for this country. And for me. For me." He fires once, twice, three times.
O
N YOUR WAY BACK
to the Black Chamber, you find that the police have been able to clear some of the streets. Chewing a spearmint Chiclet, at several intersections you can see tires and wood burning in flickering flames, a landscape of confrontations that has been familiar since childhood, in a country where your fellow citizens will not accept the dictates from on high. At times the years pass by languidly, lazily, with no sign of movement on the earth's crust, but that peace is nothing more than a pause between shakeups, and it is simply a matter of waiting patiently for a new tremor to come. The epicenter varies: the mines, state universities, the tropics of Cochabamba, the highlands of La Paz, the cities. The motives vary: protests against a coup d'état, the minimum wage, hikes in the cost of gasoline and basic necessities, military repression, plans to eradicate coca crops, dependence on the United States, the recession, globalization. What remains invariable is a nerve center of discord. You know this because as hard as you try, it is impossible to isolate yourself completely, dedicate yourself to your work, and forget about the situation. Not completely, not here in this place. But you have to try. Being impervious to what surrounds you is the only way to survive, not to be dragged along by the gale of the present.
Lana Nova is reporting the latest news on your cell phone. The protesters had tried to take the mayor's and the prefect's offices, with a death toll of seven. Ah, Lana, how do you keep your facial muscles so calm in the face of such stabbing reality? Your creators endowed you with a few gestures, you are capable of insinuating emotions, but you still have a long way to go before you can fool us. If you were a replica trying to pass as one of us, we would have caught on to you long ago.
The city's prefect, a private businessman who missed the tranquility of his car dealership, had accepted responsibility for the protesters' deaths and had resigned with a speech that was almost prophetic:
There will be no GlobaLux, but neither will there be an adequate provision of electricity over the next fifty years. Our children and our children's children will continue to live with blackouts. A Pyrrhic victory, the kind we are used to.
A large group of demonstrators had laid siege to the GlobaLux offices and threatened to set them on fire; the manager in charge of the consortium shrieked that if order were not restored soon, his bosses would break their contract and demand millions in compensation from the government. The Resistance had claimed responsibility for spreading a new virus that was quickly propagating in government computers, destroying files along its way. The chairman of the Civic Committee and members of the church were trying to negotiate with the Coalition. The government had announced the deployment of troops, the militarization of Rio Fugitivo, and an urgent meeting of ministers at the negotiating table. The news continued: protests and blockades in Chapare and disturbances in the Aymara communities around Lake Titicaca...
You turn off your cell phone: too much information for your own good. You are going to have to block it out, stop it from capturing your unconscious, taking over your imagination. Otherwise you will soon be having nightmares of soldiers firing on civilians and white hands that are not so white, hands that are stained with blood.
There are more police officers at the entrance to the Black Chamber than usual. They submit you to questioning, as if it were your first day on the job. They study your ID card, compare your scanned fingerprint with the one on your identification. It's not their fault; the order must have come from RamÃrez-Graham, so exaggerated. As if this building were being targeted by protesters. As if the Black Chamber did not derive its power from its anonymity, on the edge of the Enclave, near the telecommunications building and the Museum of Anthropology. A familiar site, an amorphous neighborhood friend. Albert was a genius. If the Black Chamber had been established in La Paz, as Montenegro had wanted, it would have been the target of everyone's hatred. In Rio Fugitivo, the Black Chamber goes unnoticed and calmly weaves its web of intrigue.
You throw your gum into the garbage can, put another piece into your mouth.
One of the police officers has a metal pin in his lapel with a red-and-white shield on it. What does it mean? This is the question you always ask yourself, the inevitable search for the lair in which meaning is hidden. Because you assume that nothing you rest your eyes on is what it seems to be; everything is a symbol, a metaphor, or a code for something else. The nervous way the police officer gesticulates, his arms outstretched, moving his fingers as if he were using an incomprehensible language to speak to the deaf; the way his leather belt has skipped one of the loops on his pants ... All answers must lead to a single one. If the program that runs the universe were mathematical, there would be a primary algorithm from which the rest would be derived. If the program were computational, there would be three or four lines of code that could explain both the tides and the leopard's spots and the wide variety of languages and the movements of your right hand and the way houseflies fly and the birth of the galaxies and Leonardo da Vinci and Borges and Flavia's damp hair and the shadow thrown by willow trees and Alan Turing. At times you are tired of the incessant artillery of your brain, incapable of rest even in sleep, and you ponder the question and ask yourself,
What is the meaning of wondering about meaning?
Perhaps you are condemned to be an enigma to yourself. And perhaps it is worth applying that lesson to your attempts to trap meaning in the maelstrom of codes that surround and overwhelm you. Perhaps everything, deep down, is nothing more than an enigma.
The police apologize for the delay and let you pass. The hallways are bustling. Santana informs you that they have checked all the computers in the Black Chamber; some of them have been attacked by the new virus, others were spared. Like last time, there does not seem to be a clear motive to indicate why the virus chose some computers over others. The ones in the archives are working perfectly. He asks you to be careful when opening your e-mail and to notify him immediately if anything unusual happens. You would like to tell him that something unusual has been happening for days now: someone has penetrated your secret account and is sending you threatening messages. You say nothing.
You feel the need to urinate. Urgent jabs of pain in your bladder, incontinence reflected in your furrowed brow. You take off your glasses, clean the lenses with a dirty handkerchief.
Kaufburen. Rosenheim. Wettenhein. They must have something to do with cryptology. Perhaps they are lesser cryptanalysts that you haven't heard of before? More of Albert's delirious reincarnations? Pathetic and comical, believing yourself to be immortal.
Ruth is the historian; she could give you the answer in seconds. You'll ask her.
As you ride down in the elevator, you realize that you could open the door and Napoleon could be there on his horse, something unexpected and fantastical that will distance you from reality. O ye of little faith, perhaps it's time to go back to church. You haven't been for a long timeânot since you were a teenager, when you used to go with your parents. And perhaps what you've been feeling lately is reminders of your mortality. Perhaps the secret writing you're searching for is the writing of God.
A video message from Carla is on your phone. She has removed her makeup from the night before, and her skin looks old. Her resemblance to your daughter always surprises you. A Flavia of another color and a different hairstyle, a Flavia whom life is aging rapidly. She asks you to meet her today, she'll be waiting for you at six. It's urgent, she says, she needs your help. She has no one else to turn to. Her parents have turned their backs on her again.
You don't want to be moved, to fall into that trap, but you find yourself thinking that Flavia could have been Carla if she hadn't had your counsel and protection. No one is immune to anything.
Then you turn the logic around: Carla is one possible version of Flavia. Your paternal instincts won't allow you to abandon her. You will go see her. You turn off the video message.
You walk down the aisles of the archives to do something that has been on your mind since you left Albert's house. Various boxes of classified material in the archives contain the history of the origins of the Black Chamber. You do not have permission to read those papers, but who's going to know?
Perhaps there you will find the trail that will lead you to Albert's real identity.
K
ANDINSKY WILL NEVER
really know how the Restoration survived those first few months when Playground's police forces were suppressing it. He cannot even argue that they had underestimated his group, because in fact the government did everything it could to annihilate them. Lying on the parquet floor of his apartment, listening to electronic music through his earphones, sometimes he thought that their technical prowess was what had fooled the government's machinery, as functional as it was uncreative. At other times he suspected that their guerrilla warfare tactics had achieved the flexibility of movement that renders a large army impotent. He has even wondered whether the government of Playground intentionally allowed the Restoration to survive as generous proof that it was not as totalitarian as its critics might suggest. In this way of thinking, the Restoration unwittingly becomes the government's accomplice, since by fighting the government it allows the government to entrench itself even deeper in power.
He has had various theories, none of which are entirely convincing. In the end, he has wound up believing that what happened was one of those coincidences in which history specializes. Any number of things could have failed at any point, and yet they did not. Once the group had managed to survive the difficult battle of those first few months, everything became easier. His legend was being disseminated across Playground and attracted individuals who felt marginalized by the system, people with a great talent for manipulating Playground's technical rules and anxious to attack, at least symbolically, the structures of power that sustained it in the real world.