Turing's Delirium (6 page)

Cardona suspected that in 1976, either Albert or Turing had deciphered the code that the group of conspirators to which Mirtha belonged had established for their top-secret communications. Young army officials, allied with a group of civilians, were planning to overthrow Montenegro. Over a period of two days, all of the conspirators, one by one, were killed.

The years had not been able to erase Cardona's trip to the morgue to identify Mirtha's body, found in a garbage dump under a bridge. Signs of torture on her back, her breasts, her face. Mirtha, who had taken him by the hand to the matinee to watch cartoons. Mirtha, who never wore makeup and tamed her unruly black hair in two long pigtails, who organized parties where guitars were played and songs were sung until the wee hours. Mirtha, who admired Allende, read Che's diary and Martha Harnecker, and sang songs that spoke of a new dawn for the people.

Cardona does not remember a thing about Ruth's speech, which was too technical, plagued with the arcane language of cryptology. He approached her afterward to introduce himself. She was a mature woman with a dull face, no makeup, short, unpainted nails, and a shy gaze, wearing a black, asexual dress like a kindergarten teacher's, fake pearl earrings her only adornment. She greeted him as if she knew him, surprising in her effusiveness.

"I can't understand what a judge is doing among historians," she said as the few attendees were leaving the room, which was adorned with oil portraits of wrinkled patricians.

"The law and history go hand in hand," he said. "Now more than ever before."

"So why did honest judges at one time agree to work for dictators?"

"So why did honest historians do the very same thing?"

"The historians were young and inexperienced, and quickly corrected their mistake."

"The husbands of historians did not."

"And the young people really weren't so young and had enough experience to say no."

The lights in the room were gradually being turned off. It was time to leave. They continued talking in the semidarkness, set phrases that hid the communication that was taking place in silence. When saying goodbye, Cardona gave her his card. He was not at all surprised to receive her call the next morning from the airport. Her voice betrayed her nervousness. He pictured her constantly looking left and right, hesitant, uncomfortable, gripping a napkin in her long-fingered, restless, evasive hands. She wished to speak with him, but not in La Paz. Would he consider visiting her in Rio Fugitivo? Cardona hesitated. He told her he would think about it. She was about to hang up when he agreed to see her there in a couple of weeks. It was an opportunity he could not afford to miss.

He opens the file. He knows what he will ask her, has it all organized. The trick is to appear natural, as if everything were happening spontaneously. He has even prepared a few alternatives in case there is some sort of roadblock, as tends to happen—a witness decides not to testify and holds his tongue just when everything is ready. There won't be any obstacles. She seems very open to talking; he simply has to act the part of a friend who listens and consoles.

What could be leading her to take this step, to jump into the abyss, to surrender to the precipice? He shouldn't ask himself that. Despite everything, she is the enemy; he is not interested in understanding her. What he wants is to record her confession, the phrases that will incriminate Turing. By putting dictators on trial, lawyers have concentrated on bringing the visible heads of power to justice—the military who gave the orders, the paramilitary and soldiers who pulled the trigger. They have ignored the whole infrastructure that sustains and allows a dictatorship to exist, the bureaucrats whose hands are not stained with blood but who, by participating in the government, in some sense facilitated the crimes. They have overlooked those who, hiding behind their offices at the Black Chamber, deciphered the codes or interfered with the secret radio signals that led to some subversive source, politicians in hiding who came to their deaths, idealistic university students who disappeared without knowing how they had been found. Cardona isn't really interested in discovering the names of those who had tortured Mirtha, mere pawns in a great war. He is more concerned with beheading those who, by means of their silent work, allowed the torture and death to occur. His goal is to get to Turing and Albert, and through them to Montenegro.

He heads to the adjoining living room and places the mini-recorder in a vase, hidden from Ruth's view. She will know that she is being taped, but if the device is out of sight she won't be intimidated and, he hopes, will talk freely. Two glasses of water are on the table. He straightens an impressionist painting of a cockfight. One of the cocks is blind, with rivulets of blood streaming from his eyes. Extricate the pus and rise above so much mediocrity, transcend such corruption, hands that are stained, consciences that are bought. It's all so easy, the past doesn't exist, it is erased in one fell swoop when it isn't really past, it's alive, it pulses each second and we pretend to ignore it, circus acrobats, lost in our splendid promise, human failure, a half-open window onto the room of the self.

There is a knock at the door. He lifts his gaze toward a spider that is hanging from the ceiling in the middle of the room, rubs his sweaty hands together, lowers his gaze, and walks to open the door for Ruth.

N
ICOLÁS TESLA SCHOOL
was located near the main plaza in Rio Fugitivo, in a sprawling, decrepit house that dated back to colonial times. The rooms on either side of the rectangular patio—now a futsal and basketball court—had been turned into classrooms crowded with students. The walls were covered in political and scatological graffiti.

He was fifteen years old and did not remember anything about Oruro, where he had been born. He was four when the government closed the mines and his dad became one more of the "displaced" who had to look for work. His mother's cousin in Quillacollo had helped them for the first few years. Then came Rio Fugitivo. His dad was tempted to go to Chapare, to plant coca as so many other ex-miners had, but a friend of the cousin's had offered them a house in tenure, cheap, in Rio; his dad had some savings, and so that is where they ended up. A mechanic, his dad repaired cars and bicycles. At least they had enough to eat.

He was the best student in the class and especially quick at mathematics. When the teacher put complex exercises on the board, he would often correct him without a trace of ridicule or arrogance, as if knowing more than everyone else were part of the natural order of things. He had been chastised for going forward in the lessons, for studying on his own ahead of the class. It had been that way since the first grade, when, thanks to a neighbor who had also taught him how to play soccer, he arrived at school already knowing his multiplication tables. He was generous with his homework: classmates would line up to copy from him before the bell rang. He was a tall boy of few words, and this attracted the girls, as did his sparkling coffee-colored eyes. He had lost his baby fat, become an awkward adolescent, and had a long, thin neck upon which his head seemed to turn independently of the rest of his body.

 

Tesla was a state school. He wished it had a computer lab like the one at San Ignacio, a block from his house, near a park dotted with graceful jacaranda trees. The San Ignacio students would come to his house so his dad could fix their bicycle tires or put air in their soccer balls. They would joke around, speak disdainfully about girls, and have money in their wallets. Behind the door, through a cracked window, he watched these well-dressed boys, who would sometimes drive to school, insolent in their belief that the world belonged to them. He hated it that his dad had to serve them.

He had also gone with his mom to wash clothes or clean immense houses with porcelain-adorned living rooms and backyard pools. He will never forget the house of a particular doctor: the children's bright rooms, the Macintosh computer, posters on the walls of Maradona, Nirvana, and Xuxa. It was from the "good classmate" awards on the walls that he discovered that the children went to San Ignacio. He did not want to divide the world so simply, but he was hardly a child anymore and was beginning to learn about injustice.

He used to play pool with his friends, until one afternoon he passed a video arcade and curiosity propelled him inside. The sounds of explosions, the intense, flickering colors ... There he spent the few coins that he earned by occasionally helping his dad. He was extremely adept at pinball and Super Mario. He was obsessive; entire afternoons would go by as he tried to beat a record.

But the money disappeared quickly. What was he to do? One sunny morning when he had skipped school, he approached the entrance to San Ignacio. A Brasilia was parked outside with the window half open. He turned his head left and right; he was alone. He reached his hand in through the window, opened the door, and found a twenty-dollar bill in a compartment next to the gearshift.

That was his first robbery. There would be others. At first his victims were San Ignacio students. Later he expanded his area of operations. When he went with his mom to the houses she cleaned, it was easy to slip away from her and put anything that might be worth a few pesos at the pawn shop into his pockets: earrings, a ring, a fine ceramic ashtray that he hoped the owners wouldn't even miss.

He earned a reputation at the video arcade as the pinball king. When asked what his name was, he told them it was Kandinsky. He had liked the name ever since he saw a poster for an exhibit at one of the houses his mother cleaned. It was a sonorous name, there was rhythm and harmony in the combination of vowels and consonants; it was a name he liked to repeat as he walked the streets of Rio Fugitivo alone, the first and third syllables explosive, the second a bridge that is stressed, the tone rising.

Soon he switched to the Internet cafés that began to pop up all over the city. For the equivalent of fifty cents he could play on the computer for an hour, war and strategy games in which he would compete with other players in the same café, or others on computers in the same city or in other cities, even on other continents. He soon learned the stratagems that made him a fearsome opponent. He was quick with his hands, and his mind was quicker still. He seemed, on a certain level, to understand the games or, more accurately, to understand the programmers who made the games. Asheron's Call was his specialty. The hours would fly by and he continued to miss classes, lost in the medieval scenery of fantasy.

At the Internet café he frequented most regularly, near Suicide Bridge, he was admired by several teenagers. One of them, older than he, called himself Phiber Outkast: freckled, full lips, well dressed, never without his Ray-Bans. One night Phiber Outkast was waiting for him at the café door and walked home with him in silence. As they neared his house, under the glow of a streetlight in the small square, Phiber said that his ability shouldn't be wasted on games. He said that a lot of money was to be made on the Internet.

Kandinsky looked at him without saying a word. Insects buzzed around the streetlight. He asked Phiber to explain. Exactly that, said Phiber Outkast. A lot of money can be made on the Web. It's a question of focusing your knowledge appropriately. If he wanted to develop his talent, he could take classes at the same computer institute that Phiber attended.

Kandinsky would have liked to resist temptation. By this time he was seventeen years old, in his last year of high school. Shouldn't he graduate first?

He thought of his dad's clothes, always stained with grease. Years had passed and he still hadn't gotten ahead. He would inflate soccer balls and repair tires for the rest of his life. He would take refuge in his house, light a few candles to the Virgin of Urkupiña—there was an altar with a plaster effigy of her in the kitchen—crossing his fingers that his luck would improve. He would be content with the victories of San José, soccer triumphs that were seen as necessary, just redemptions.

Kandinsky's mom would continue to work for a pittance at homes so big they were obscene. In such a poor country, there were those who lived as if they were Americans. Or like the vision they had of life in the United States: the land of plenty, of glorious materialism.

Esteban, his younger brother, no longer went to school. Instead, he helped his dad repair tires and sometimes went to the Boulevard, where he would earn a few pesos watching over cars parked outside an empanada shop.

At home the cold seeped in through the broken windows each night.

"Let's talk tomorrow," Kandinsky said under the streetlight. Phiber Outkast sighed, relieved. He knew what that meant.

 

Located in the Enclave, the institute was a shabby three-story building that at one time housed the
El Posmo
newspaper offices (when it was called
Tiempos Modernos
); there were cracks in the walls and rubble on the stairs. You had to be one of the first to arrive in order to get one of the few computers, all assembled locally. In an atmosphere like that, Kandinsky learned more from his classmates than from his teachers: several computer languages, a little about programming, dozens of tricks for Microsoft software and online games. His classes, paid for by Phiber Outkast, were at night; he always went home as soon as they ended.

His classmates were hackers who specialized in minor jobs—free phone service for a month, access to an Internet porn site, illegal copies of software, the occasional credit card scam. They would tell him their secrets freely and then look at him suspiciously when he showed them, without trying, that he knew more than they did. It didn't matter. He wasn't interested in making friends; he had decided to leave the institute at the end of the semester. His final project consisted of a program to acquire the passwords to private accounts on the Net illegally. He justified it by writing in his final essay that the flow of information on the Internet should be free and there shouldn't be any secrets. Passwords infringed on this free flow of information and should therefore be attacked. The director called him into his office and, returning his work, said, "This is not an institute for hackers, young man." They expelled him the next day. Phiber Outkast didn't need to console him; Kandinsky was elated.