Turing's Delirium (12 page)

That day had been like so many others. She had put up with a student who was applying lipstick while she spoke of the impact that decoding the Zimmermann telegram had had on the course of World War I. With her brightest smile, she had endured the student she discovered e-mailing his girlfriend. She had ignored, to the best of her ability, the dark-haired girl who was surreptitiously doing a crossword. But now that class was coming to an end, the hallway was becoming noisy, the seats in the first row were creaking, restless, and she felt the approach of something that all her colleagues had faced but to which she had naively thought she was immune.

"Prof, you have chalk on your back."

"Well, that's good. It means you're at least paying attention to something."

But she was the one who wasn't paying as much attention as usual. Class would be over at nine; just a few hours later she would be meeting with Judge Cardona. When they first spoke and she told him she was willing to tell him everything she knew, she hadn't been entirely sure. Slowly, she convinced herself that it was inevitable. The night before had been Miguel's last chance to accept his share of responsibility. Everything would have been different if he had. At least they would have had time to find a solution that would ease their consciences. Her conscience, she should say: all those years, giving Miguel one more chance. What had he said last night?
I'm not worried. I've never shot anyone. I've never even touched anyone. I never left my office.

It was time for her to accept that he was at peace with the past. She wasn't—thus the need to speak with Cardona, despite her anxieties and hesitations. She didn't know what it would lead to, but she was certain that she had run out of excuses. How did that quote from Dante go that she had recently read in a history book?
The hottest places of hell are reserved for those who in times of moral crisis maintain their neutrality.
Or something like that. Indeed.

Ruth walked toward the window. She had asked a rhetorical question—without first-rate cryptanalysts, would the Allies have won both world wars?—and decided not to fill the silence with her own easy answers. Let them make something up, dare to explore the obvious. She brushed chalk off her purple blouse, which went well with her new black pants. Out in the patio, around the immense pepper tree that had survived more than one fire, students were patting one another on the back and making plans for the rave that weekend, exchanging telephone numbers and chatroom nicknames, maybe even passing OxyContin and Ritalin between the pages of their notebooks. Such complacency; it made one feel guilty for bothering to try to teach them anything. Didn't they know that the university would be closing at noon to avoid the blockades and protests that were being announced for that afternoon? Rio Fugitivo was falling to pieces, and it was as if they hadn't heard. What had happened to the university as a place where one questioned the system and oneself? Perhaps it was different at the state university.

She moved away from the window. Maybe she should have done what many of her colleagues had: accept that her work didn't interest anyone else, simply devote herself to her research and make teaching secondary, a foggy, obligatory footnote. Twenty years, and all she had to show was an occasional thank-you postcard from a student who, passing through Helsinki or Aruba, for some obscure reason remembered some phrase of hers, some class, some chat during office hours.

One of her students held up her hand. It was Elka, tall and thin, dark-haired, her features slightly Indian.

"Without first-class cryptanalysts, the Allies would never have been able to defeat the Germans," she said. "But that supposition is just as valid as this other: with better cryptographers, the Germans would never have been defeated. There are so many factors that decide the course of a war—it's impossible for just one of them to be the deciding factor. Or one might be, just not the one we expect."

Elka was intelligent, even though she wasn't terribly interested in showing it. She hardly ever participated in discussions, didn't try her hardest on exams. Ruth was surprised to find her voice screeching, unpleasant. Maybe that was what inhibited her? At one time Ruth had been traumatized by her crooked teeth and thin lips, as if drawn with a fine brush. Ah, the difficulties and embarrassments of the genetic code.

"My whole class," Ruth said, walking nearer, adopting the most persuasive tone in her arsenal, "is aimed at convincing you that there
is
one reason that's more important than all the others. If Enigma hadn't been decoded during World War II, the war would have gone on for at least another couple of years and the outcome would have been uncertain."

"That's easy for you to say," Elka went on, looking nervously at the tile floor speckled with gum. "Every professor thinks that his or her science has the definitive answer to a problem. They don't realize that the limits of their own discipline blind them and prevent them from seeing the forest for the trees."

Why so aggressive? As Ruth walked toward Elka, out of the corner of her right eye she saw something that took her a moment to process. Once she finally had, the force of the impact surprised her. Gustavo, her best student—dimpled cheeks and James Dean sideburns—was oblivious of the discussion and, protected by a barrier of books on a chair, was typing industriously on his cell phone. Probably playing solitaire.

The lyrics from a song Ruth had once sung at a karaoke came to mind: "All your yesterdays've gone to waste, All your yesterdays are tomorrow's memory of loss." She turned around, grabbed her briefcase off the table, and left the classroom, slamming the door. Her heels echoed in the hallway. She walked quickly to her office.

A glass of water. The desire to break down in tears. She shouldn't be so impulsive. She usually wasn't. But she had been for two days in a row already. What was wrong with her? She wanted the ballet dancers that surrounded her on the walls, attentive Degas prints, to impart some of their peace to her. That's why they were there, after all. One, two, three ... The books on the shelves, the announcements for that month's concerts at the university, the blurry photo that one of her students had e-mailed from Moscow. Four, five, six ... In a metallic frame, a four-year-old Flavia playing in the garden with a toy rake, her smile wide, her expression bright—long, long before she withdrew into the shell in which she lived now. Ruth's favorite photo. Seven, eight ... Miguel in black and white, his hand over his mouth, unable to look directly at the camera. Why that irritating habit? Nine ... Yellow leaves in the plant pots; they needed watering. Ten. Her manuscript in the bottom right-hand drawer of her desk. The black book of Montenegro's dictatorship, nearly three hundred pages written in different codes.

She took off her shoes. Degas's dancers. Maybe that should have been her world.

A knock at the door. She wanted to shout, "No one's here!" Her good manners got the better of her.

It was Gustavo.

"Professor, I'm so sorry." His hands behind his back, as if hiding a knife. "It wasn't my inten—"

"I should have thrown it on the floor."

"It's nothing personal. Your classes are the most bearable, by far. It's the semester. By this point, all we can think about is summer holidays."

"At least you're honest."

"You know I love your class." His gaze was remorseful. "The topic is incredible—it's made me look at world history differently."

"What was on your cell phone that couldn't wait a few more minutes?"

"Battleship with my girlfriend in her statistics class."

"At least I'm not the only one."

"It has to do with your class. The German ships are sunk because the Allies have found the code. How do you keep the Germans from finding out that the Allies know, or might know, all their secrets? Knowing too much can be counterproductive."

"It usually is. Don't do it. Don't do it again. Please." Ruth shook her head in a gesture of defeat or exhaustion.

She prayed she would feel more optimistic when she saw Judge Cardona. She had to be able to maintain the conviction of her principles, latent for so many decades; her words had to be able to obey her ideas and wishes. All she wanted was to live up to the image she had once had of herself.

T
HE WOMAN HAS JUST LEFT
. Her high heels still echo in the hallway, harbingers of bad luck. In the dark room, seated on the wicker chair from which he conducted their conversation, Judge Cardona believes he has achieved an important victory. He scratches his right cheek, as if his nails might be able to make the spots disappear. He lights a cigarette and smokes it indolently, letting the ash fall onto the red paisley carpet. He is drinking a beer out of the bottle. Some of it drips onto his shirt. In his hands is the tape recorder. Victory? Pathetic moments, really, when the world becomes heavier. Pathetic as it is, it's a victory all the same. The vigil is embellished by sudden fury. He looks for the BMP in his briefcase. For months now he has been addicted to Bolivian marching powder. What a name. The world has always been devoid of sensation, is unable to stimulate him on its own. He needs chemicals to feel alive. He has tried other drugs—cocaine, heroin—but nothing has produced the euphoria that BMP does. When he first discovered it, he was drowning in indolence; not even the memory of his cousin meant much. A friend who was an LAB flight engineer passed him a couple of tablets at a party. He threw up in the elevator, but then his easily tired eyelids stayed open until the soft morning light; he wound up asleep in a bar at eight o'clock in the morning, his face in what was left of his fricassee. A powerful ex-minister of justice for Montenegro and all. What would the papers have said if a photographer had captured a moment like that? He hasn't given up BMP since then. He crushes two tablets, rubs the powder on his gums, and lies down on the bed.

The television is on. The Coalition's blockade was sporadic throughout the morning. It is now two-thirty on a Thursday afternoon, people are heading to the plaza, and neighborhood committees are beginning to protest. Soldiers are posted at strategic bridges and gas stations. He changes the channel, muting the volume: images of a bomb exploding at a nightclub in Bogotá. The news—as abusive as the excess of scandalous news is—works well, but his best BMP experiences have been while watching cartoons, especially Road Runner; the coyote's complete lack of common sense and his relentless persistence are ideal for the drug. This time, however, he would rather turn off the television. He rewinds the cassette. The agitated voice of the woman, whom he had known just how to steer to the best fishing grounds, would go well with BMP. Information that reveals broad tracts of his past is there, captured on tape. He can amplify that voice or turn it down; the tape is elastic and, with its continuous hiss, is willing to help bring what happened back to life. Perhaps now a small step can start him on the path to rebuilding his life.

"Everyone has a price. There's a price for everyone." That's what Iriarte, a university classmate, used to say when they would discuss corruption in the judicial system. "What's yours?" "None," Cardona would reply with conviction. Iriarte was now in jail for having accepted a bribe to free a well-known drug trafficker in the early nineties. Cardona had visited him a few times, had been moved by his skeletal frame, his sunken eyes. Iriarte wanted to die. "When I said that everyone had a price, deep down I thought I was immune. I repeated it as a way of banishing temptation. Like when someone says that we're all mortal, but inside they believe they're immortal and behave that way. Not me, I used to say to myself."

Cardona approaches the half-open window, pulls back the curtains, and looks out at the leaden sky threatening the city. His gaze rests on the military posts on the corner. The plaza is empty, but an explosion of voices, shouts, antigovernment slogans, can be heard from neighboring streets. Will the blockade complicate his plans? Ah, Iriarte, what would you have to say about me now? Pompous conviction that one is superior to everyone else, living with one's nose in the air, far from the masses...

When had it all started? It was impossible to say. He remembers that when Mirtha was murdered, he promised himself he would find the killers one day. Years later the dictatorship fell, and he celebrated it as a personal victory. It was time to be rid of that little man who had promised the country "order, peace, and work" but had not said anything about the cost of achieving them. Then Cardona became a lawyer and, albeit timidly, entered local politics. He was a right-winger, but the parties on the right were weak and fragmented. In the mid-eighties, Montenegro returned to public life and founded a political party that quickly became a real alternative. It was ironic; his party's ideology was eerily close to Cardona's beliefs. Cardona's friends invited him to join many times, but he could never bring himself to do it. He attacked Montenegro repeatedly, not because he did not agree with his ideas; mostly, it was because he felt that a dictator had to be tried and sent to prison, as in other South American countries. It was in pure defense of the rule of law, which said that those guilty of crimes, those responsible for abusing power, had to be punished.

The years went by, and in 1997 Montenegro became a democratically elected president. Cardona felt he had to accept the country's verdict. The wounds had been healed, there was no use being bitter about the past, it was better to look toward the future. He continued to attack Montenegro during his first years in office, especially when he used force to suppress protests—"dictators never cease being dictators"—but his convictions waned.

He was in his office late one afternoon, reviewing files on a criminal case, when his secretary knocked on the door and told him there was a call from the president's office. He was more than surprised. Why would Montenegro want to talk to him? Cardona answered. Montenegro's personal assistant told him that he had an appointment with the president the next day at five in the afternoon, and then hung up. He remembers how he left his desk, both nervous and elated, and approached his secretary to ask her immediately to book him on a flight to La Paz the following day.