Turing's Delirium (11 page)

Ruth appears in the doorway wearing a cream-colored flowered robe, a cigarette in her hand. She seems nervous. You turn off the television.

"Have you heard the news?"

"Yes, unfortunately. I'll probably have to go back to the office."

"Flavia's in Playground, as usual. We really have to limit her time. The bill last month was far too high."

"Yes, something will have to be done. Just be patient—it's her last month of classes."

"Oh, I'll speak to her. She's got you wrapped around her little finger. You start out fine, raising your voice, sounding firm, until she looks straight at you and you melt."

"There's nothing wrong with being kind."

"And what exactly do you win by being kind? It's as if she's living in a hotel. She comes out of her room only to eat. To speak to her, you practically have to e-mail her. Or phone her. I read somewhere that it's not good to let your children have computers in their room. Who knows what they can access."

You wish you were with Carla, letting her rest her head on your chest and fall asleep in your arms. The unmistakable expertise of her tongue can't compete with the vulnerability that hides behind the aggressive façade. You picture the marks on her forearm, fascinated. You've tried to help her, even paying for her to check into rehab; she didn't last long, just three days. The first night she got out, a silly argument pushed her over the edge and soon she was throwing glasses and cans of Cuba Libre at the wall, insulting you as if she didn't know you. You would like to do more than you already have, but you know that addiction, any kind of addiction, winds up capturing whoever dares approach it.

"I was at the doctor's today. I've been getting nosebleeds, all the time."

"Really? I wonder why."

"Worry, maybe. Anxiety. Or something worse. My mom died of cancer. Well, she killed herself before the cancer could. I guess that's what worries me."

"You think a few drops of blood mean you have cancer? Let's not overdo it..."

Her face has aged. When you first met, her complexion was so smooth that a geisha in her prime would have envied her. Now her skin is losing its elasticity; it is a mask that no longer fits her skull. So many years have passed since the day you were introduced, in the cafeteria at the university. If you hadn't come in out of the rain that afternoon, into that smoke-filled room, and if you hadn't run into a friend who was chatting with Ruth...

"What're you thinking about?"

There she is, sitting next to you on the sofa, the woman who had shared her passion for cryptography. That woman who snored as if she had the hiccups, whose skin smelled of moisturizers, was the person responsible for the course your life had taken. And to think that when you met her, you were studying biology...

"Someone found a way into my private e-mail account this morning. They sent me an easily decipherable code. I spent the whole day worrying about the message, when I really should have been worrying about how they accessed my account. Who? And why?"

"Maybe they chose you for a particular reason. What did the message say?"

"That I'm a murderer. That my hands are stained with blood."

"Aren't they?"

"They aren't."

"Then you've nothing to worry about."

That tone of voice ... When Montenegro returned to power in 1997, Ruth asked you to resign. Despite the fact that he returned by democratic means, she had only seen Montenegro as he had once been: a pathetic dictator. She had never been able to separate, as you had, the work from the ends that had been achieved by means of it: the defense of governments with doubtful morals. So scrupulous, so attuned to ethical questions, she had threatened to leave you more than once if you didn't resign. And yet she was weak; you didn't do what she asked and she is still with you.

"I'm not worried," you say, somewhat agitated. "I've never shot anyone. I've never even touched anyone. I never left my office."

"The same old argument. Only the one who pulls the trigger is guilty."

She stands up, stubs out her cigarette in the ashtray, and leaves the living room. She's angry. Should you have been more sensitive when she mentioned her nosebleeds? She is such a hypochondriac that you don't know what to take seriously anymore. If she has a headache, it's a fatal tumor. If she cuts her leg, it'll become infected and she'll lose it to gangrene. Ruth has become rigid over the years, has lost her soft edges. What a contrast to those endless nights spent at her house when she would tell you, passionately, about the code that had saved Greece from being conquered by Xerxes; when she taught you, using pads of tracing paper that quickly ran out, to decipher monoalphabetic and polyalphabetic substitution codes, to understand them using ADFGVX, Mayfair, and Purple. To others, you were a couple of bores; to the both of you, those were the nights when magic happened, when you fell in love.

One hundred sixty-nine brown vertical stripes. Had they chosen that number intentionally?

You need to go to the bathroom. Damn bladder rules your life! You have to get up at least three times during the night. Ruth always thought it was strange that you could function during the day after such a fitful night. But you have never needed much sleep. She used to; there was a time when her sleep was so deep that you could go in and out of the room, turn the light on, root through drawers, and she wouldn't even stir. Now her frequent insomnia gives her nothing but grief, puts her in a bad mood during the day.

Those nights when you were young, when you would visit her at her house, not only had you fallen in love with her, but you had realized that you wanted to be a cryptanalyst. Ruth had discovered cryptanalysis when she was a child; she and her father would send secret messages in crossword puzzles that they wrote themselves. One day a question about the origin of what they were doing led her to an encyclopedia, then to the public library, and, later, to become obsessed with the topic. She had mastered the history and theory of cryptology, she could even decipher complex codes (although it might take her hours), but she lacked the intuition that, combined with technique, was needed to find the key that would unlock the secret message. You had an abundance of intuition, at least in this area. You even gave yourself over wholeheartedly to mathematics, a science for which you had a certain ability but that didn't necessarily attract you. This much is certain—you never wanted to become a cryptanalyst of algorithms sitting in front of a computer. It didn't take you long to become the student who surpassed the teacher. Still, there were no territorial jealousies. Ruth preferred theory to practice, the colorful anecdotes that allowed her to build arguments as solid as they were unusual regarding the course of world history.
The laboratory for you,
she would say,
and someday I'll write the book.

But where could a cryptanalyst find work in the country in which you were unlucky enough to have been born? Emigrate to the United States? Send your résumé to the NSA? You continued studying biology, looking at codes simply as a sophisticated hobby. At times you would play with them and ask yourself whether an expert geneticist was not, in a way, also a cryptanalyst; there were secret messages in DNA too, and deciphering them would perhaps lead you to the primitive nucleus of life. But no, you preferred to work with words. You began to develop your own secret codes, irritating your friends with letters they could read but not understand.

Everything changed as a result of the political instability. The university was closed. Montenegro was dictator, and the military was fighting a bloody battle to eradicate communism, whose revolutionary flags were sparking unrest in middle-class students, politicians, and workers. The two of you found yourselves at a loss for what to do. A cousin of Ruth's in the military, knowing your skills, offered you both work at the Dirección de Orden Político (DOP, the Office of Political Stability), which was later renamed the Servicio de Inteligencia de la Nación, the National Intelligence Service, or SIN. Albert, an American consultant from the CIA, was organizing an agency that would report to the DOP; its exclusive mission would be to intercept and decode messages from opposition parties. Ruth's cousin could arrange an interview with Albert. "You'll be providing a great service to the country," he said, twirling his long mustache. "We're surrounded by conspirators with foreign backing. We need trained people in order to face them on equal terms. We need to excise this cancer from our organization."

You swirl your glass of whiskey—concentric circles forming on the surface—and remember that key moment in your life. Ruth had squinted her eyes and looked at you, unsure. Work for the military? For a dictatorship? It was you who convinced her: it was a job to survive, there was no need to be so righteous. "It can never be just a job to survive," she had said. "It's better to die of hunger than to work for the wrong cause." "Easy to say, but it's not a luxury we can afford right now." Ruth's next words, spoken softly, were as sharp as a knife: "Don't you believe in anything with conviction, Miguel? Do you at least believe in God?" "There's order behind chaos," was his well-thought-out reply. "There's purpose behind chance. Our mission is to search for order and purpose. If both of those words are synonymous with God, then I believe in him. That is, I believe in the possibility that one day I might find him. But don't ask me to look for him in a church."

You asked her at least to let you meet with Albert—you wouldn't lose anything by it. Oh, how you returned from that meeting in the plaza: transformed, seduced by that handsome, blue-eyed man with long brown hair and graying beard, who was so cultured and spoke proper Spanish, his accent indefinable, somewhere between German and American. You finally convinced Ruth, and you both started to work for Montenegro's government. She didn't last long. You did. You have been working for the government ever since. You have served, without favoritism, spineless dictators and cruel ones, democratic presidents who respected the law and others quite open to breaking, by any means possible, the backbone of the unions and the opposition. To do so, you concentrated obsessively on your work without wondering about the consequences. In your eyes, the government is a great abstraction, an enormous, faceless machine. You follow orders without questioning them; your principles are those of the current administration. And this is how they have repaid your loyalty: promoting you, but in reality distancing you from the action.

You finish your glass of whiskey, get up off the couch, and take the stairs to your room, thinking about Carla, about Flavia, about the message you received. On the wall is a wood-framed, yellowing, somewhat faded picture of all the personnel who started the Black Chamber. The photo had been Ruth's idea: all eighty of you were lined up in two rows on the stairs at the entrance. Some were looking at the camera, others to one side. Groups of five people formed one letter of a bilateral cipher code that was written by Francis Bacon in
De Augmentis Scientiarum.
According to that code, the combination of two letters was enough to represent all the letters in the alphabet. Thus,
a
was represented by
aaaaa, b
by
aaaab, c
by
aaaba,
arid so on. In the photo, those who were looking at the camera stood for the letter
a
and those who were looking to one side the letter
b.
The first five in the first row, from left to right: front, side, front, front, side—the letter
k.
Thus, the eighty of you spelled out the phrase
knowledge is power.

To the left, also in a wood frame, is a black-and-white photograph of Alan Turing; behind him is the bombe—the enormous machine he invented to defeat Enigma and that was a precursor to the computer. You stop. A little black ant is walking on the glass that covers the photo, just on Turing's cheek. You take out your handkerchief and squash it.

You look at the ant carefully. His decapitated body is still moving. Nothing happens by chance; there is a reason for every action, even though most often that reason is hidden. What does the ant on Turing's photo mean? The impotence, the desperation at being faced with the continuous proliferation of messages around you, slides down your throat like bile. Sooner or later you will take out a knife and cleave it into the heart of the world, so that it will reveal its secrets once and for all. But no, violence is not for you. It's more likely that you'll wind up vanquishing or being vanquished by your attempts to understand the stubborn, continuous whispering of the universe.

You put your handkerchief in your pocket and continue up the stairs.

Thanks to Ruth, you already knew about Turing when you met Albert. You were honored when, three months after starting work at the Black Chamber, Albert decided that all of his advisers should have nicknames and he named you Turing. By that time your exceptional ability to decipher messages had made you Albert's top adviser.

Your cell phone rings for the second time that night: they need you at the Black Chamber.

R
UTH SÁENZ KNEW
the ritual by heart. She would walk into classrooms where chalk particles floated in the morning light filtering in through the windows; she would set her Argentine brown leather briefcase—survivor of taxi abandonments and sudden downpours—on the table; ignoring the handful of sleepy adolescents who were supposedly her students and who would look at her indolently, she would write the day's topics on the dark green chalkboard; she would turn around and after a few minutes of announcements, a couple of comments to lighten the mood, to make her students feel that there was nothing to fear, that they were all in it together, begin her well-practiced routine. The clicking of her heels crossing the room from left to right, her voice that started out doubtful but gained confidence, her restless hand that took every opportunity to write cryptic signs on the board.

It has been twenty years already. She can still remember the days when not even a freckled, green-eyed student's frenzied asthma attack had derailed her. Now all it takes is for her to spy the outrageous color scheme of a student's clothing or, yesterday, the inopportune ringing of a cell phone for the next few lines of her mental paragraph to be covered by a black spot, blotting them out, erasing them.