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Edmundo Paz Soldán is the author of six novels and two short story collections. He was awarded the 2002 Bolivian National Book Award for Turing’s Delirium and a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship. He has won the National Book Award in Bolivia, the prestigious Juan Rulfo Award, and was a finalist for the Romulo Gállegos Award. He is an associate professor at Cornell University. One of the few McOndo writers who live in the United States, he is frequently called upon as the movement’s spokesperson by the American media.

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Turing's Delirium

By Edmundo Paz Soldan

Houghton Mifflin Company

Copyright © 2007 Edmundo Paz Soldan
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780618872596
As soon as you turn your back on the uncertain sunrise and enter your office
building, you cease to be Miguel Sáenz, the civil servant discernible behind
the wrinkled gray suit, round, wire-rimmed glasses, and fearful gaze, and
become Turing, decipherer of secrets, relentless pursuer of encoded
messages, the pride of the Black Chamber.
You insert your electronic ID card into a slot. You are prompted
for your password and type ruth1. The metal door opens and the world you
unknowingly dreamed of as a child awaits you. Slowly, with measured steps,
you enter a vaulted glass enclosure. Two policemen greet you formally. They
see the color of your card — green, meaning Beyond Top Secret — without
looking at it. It was all so much easier during Albert's time, when there were
only two colors, yellow (Secret) and green. Then that smug Ramírez-Graham
arrived (you had once called him "Mr. Ramírez" and he had corrected
you: "Ramírez-Graham, please"), and card colors soon began to multiply. In
less than a year, red (Top Secret), white (Not at All Secret), blue (Ultra), and
orange (Ultra Priority) cards appeared. The color of your card indicates which
parts of the building you have access to. Ramírez-Graham has the only
purple card in existence, Ultra High Priority. In theory, there is only one area
in the seven-story building for which the purple card is required: the Archive of
Archives, a small section in the heart of the archives. Such proliferation is
laughable. But you are not laughing; you are still offended that some of your
colleagues have Ultra and Ultra Priority cards and can go where you cannot.
"Always so early, Mr. Sáenz."
"For as long as the old body holds out, captain."
The policemen know who you are; they have heard the stories
about you. They don't understand what you do or how you do it, but still they
respect you. Or perhaps they respect you because they don't understand
what you do or how you do it.
You walk next to the wall where the great emblem of the Black
Chamber hangs. It is a resplendent aluminum disk encircling a man bent over
a desk, trying to decipher a message, and a condor holding a ribbon in its
claws that bears the motto "Logic and Intuition"
in Morse code. True, both are needed to penetrate the crypt of
secret codes, but they aren't used in equal proportions. For you, at least,
intuition is what lights the way, but the hard work is done by reason.
They don't understand what you do or how you do it, but still they
respect you. What you do? Is it correct still to speak in the present tense?
Your glory days, you have to admit, begin to fade in the expanse of time. For
example, December 6, 1974, when you detected a cell of leftists who used
phrases from Che Guevara's diary to encode messages; or September 17,
1976, when you were able to warn President Montenegro that an insurrection
was brewing in the Cochabamba and Santa Cruz regiments; or December 25,
1981, when you deciphered messages from the Chilean government to its
chargé d'affaires regarding water that was being diverted from a river along the
border. There are many, many more, but since then your successes have
been sporadic. Ramírez- Graham reassigned you, and although at first it
seemed that your new job was a promotion, it actually distanced you from
the action. As head of the Black Chamber's general archives, you have
become a cryptanalyst who no longer analyzes codes.
Your steps echo down the hallway. You rub your hands together,
trying to warm them. The country's return to democracy in the early 1980s
didn't end the work that was done in this building, but it did minimize it. At
first messages between unionists were intercepted, and then later on
between drug traffickers, careless people who spoke on easily traceable
radio frequencies and didn't even bother to code their messages. The 1990s
brought sporadic work listening to opposition politicians on bugged
telephones.
You were happy when Montenegro returned to power through
democratic means; you thought that everything would change under his rule
and your work would again become urgent. What a disappointment. There
was no significant threat to national security as there had been during his
dictatorship. You were forced to admit that times had changed. Even worse,
during the last stretch of Montenegro's administration, the vice president, a
charismatic technocrat — pardon the contradiction — with wide eyes and
dimpled cheeks, had decided to reorganize the Black Chamber and turn it
into the focal point of the fight against cyberterrorism. "This will pose one of
the key challenges to the twenty- first century," he had said when he came to
announce his initiative. "We must be prepared for what is to come."
Immediately thereafter the vice president introduced Ramírez-Graham, the
new director of the Black Chamber: "One of our countrymen who has
succeeded abroad, a man who has left a promising career in the north to
come and serve his country." A round of applause. He had annoyed you from
the very start: the impeccable black suit, the well-polished loafers and neat
haircut — he looked like some sleek businessman. Then he had opened his
mouth and the bad impression only worsened. True, he might have had
slightly darker skin than most, and somewhat Andean features, but he spoke
Spanish with an American accent. It certainly didn't help when you
discovered that he wasn't even born in Bolivia but was from Arlington, Virginia.
You search the walls for a sign of salvation. Around you are only
silent structures, muted by the vigilance of a supervisor who believed it
prudent that employees of the Black Chamber not be distracted. Aside from
the aluminum emblem at the entrance, there are no signs or notices, no
noise that might distract you in the endless search for the text that resides
behind all texts. But you can find messages even on immaculate walls. It's
simply a matter of looking for them. Your glasses are dirty — fingerprints,
coffee stains — and the frame is twisted. There is a slight pain in your left
eye caused by the lens bending at the wrong angle. For weeks you've been
intending to make an appointment with the ophthalmologist.
Ramírez-Graham has been director of the Black Chamber for
almost a year. He has fired a number of your colleagues and replaced them
with young computer experts. Since you obviously don't fit in with his plans
for a generational change, why haven't you been fi red? You put yourself in
his shoes: you can't be fired. After all, you are a living archive, a repository of
information regarding the profession. When you go, a whole millennium of
knowledge will go with you, an entire encyclopedia of codes. Your colleagues
who haven't yet turned thirty don't come to ask you practical questions.
Rather, they come to hear your stories: of Étienne Bazeries, the French
cryptanalyst who in the nineteenth century spent three years trying to
decipher Louis XIV's code (so full of twists and turns that it took more than
two centuries to decode it), or of Marian Rejewski, the Polish cryptanalyst
who helped to defeat Enigma in World War II....