Laura Restrepo

Hot Sur

1

They didn’t know what would happen to them once they were inside, but they had gone there alone and on foot along Route 285, something absurd in and of itself, this having to walk through southern Colorado at this point in their lives. The older of the two, Greg, was twenty-six, the younger one barely thirteen, a child really, known as Sleepy Joe in school because he fell asleep in class.

“I’m not sleeping, I’m praying,” he’d protest to his teacher, who shook him whenever she caught him with his eyes closed.

Wendy Mellons thinks they must have looked more like father and son than brothers walking along the shoulder of that long highway that traverses three states. No one spends almost three hours like they did on a trip they could have easily made using their father’s pickup truck.

“They were following orders,” Wendy Mellons explains. “They’d been told that they should arrive alone and on foot.”

After walking most of the way on 285, they took the old road leading from Purgatory to New Saddle Rock. Once they’d crossed the dry riverbed of Perdidas Creek and trudged through a field of weeds, they climbed through the barren terrain until they saw the small white adobe house, separate from any other structure and hidden by a billboard for Coors Golden Beer.

“I’m thirsty,” the younger one said, standing in front of the billboard. “We should have at least brought some water…”

“Maybe we just shouldn’t have come,” the older one responded.

Neither of them said much more, each trapped in his own thoughts, wondering what it would be like to walk into that house, what awaited them inside. About fifty yards from the door was a stone cross, which they knelt before, although they were worried about getting their already dirty pants even dirtier; after all, they were wearing their Sunday best — linen suit, shirt and tie, and black socks and shoes. No one in the adobe house opened the door or cracked a window. Perhaps no one had noticed their arrival, but they had been told to wait by the cross and so they did. More than a few minutes passed before an old man came out of the house. He walked toward them so slowly that the younger boy almost lost his patience and told him to hurry up. The old man told them a few things they did not understand, and then returned to the house with the same deliberateness as before. Then the real wait began for the boys. Just when their knees could no longer tolerate the rocky ground, the door opened again and three men came out and approached them.

They wore black robes, their faces half-hidden by the hoods, but even then the boys could recognize two of them: Will, the gas-station attendant, and Beltrán, the one who sold souvenirs at the UFO Gift Shop. Both were lifelong neighbors of theirs, but there was something off, something weird; the eccentric getups and the exaggerated mannerisms made those neighbors into strangers — strangers who announced that they’d now be their godfathers and who blindfolded them.

“Mine’s too tight, Will,” Greg said.

“Don’t call him Will,” Beltrán cut in. “If you want to address us you should call us the Penitent Brothers.”

“So, can you loosen my blindfold, Penitent Brother?”

They were guided to the door of the Morada, which is what the Penitent Brothers, who it seemed were renaming everything, informed them they should call the adobe house. Blindfolded, the two boys stumbled forward until they were told that they should knock for permission to enter. The password was a string of words they had learned. They’d spent days repeating it and trying to memorize it, though with great difficulty, according to Wendy, because Spanish wasn’t their first language, and English really wasn’t either; more likely it was the Slovak spoken by their parents, who came from the Banská Bystrica region, a pair of immigrants, who even though they were white were as poor and as Catholic as the gente, which is what the longtime Hispanic inhabitants of San Luis Valley in southern Colorado call themselves.

“Who knocks on the door of the Morada?” a male voice demanded from within.

“It’s not the door of the Morada, it’s the door of my conscience, and we come full of remorse and begging for mercy,” the boys half muttered, tripping on the words and getting through it only with the help of the godfathers, who whispered in their ears those words that for them meant nothing.

“Ask for penance then,” the response came through the closed door.

“Penance! Penance! We come looking for salvation,” they said.

“Who lights my house?”

“My father Jesus.”

“Who fills it with joy?”

“My mother Mary.”

“Who keeps my faith?”

“The carpenter Joseph.”

Their mistakes were overlooked, and they were allowed to enter. Even though they were blindfolded, they knew they had walked into a small room because of the heaviness of the air and the smell of enclosure. They were ordered to shed their clothes, and since they seemed reticent, various hands did it for them. In exchange, they were each handed a long coarse blanket with a hole in the middle to put their heads through, and a rope that they were to tie around their waists. They felt totally helpless, blind, and naked amid the invisible people surrounding them; and Sleepy Joe remembered the hatred he’d recently felt when a nurse at the Samaritana Medical Center had forced him to take off his clothes and put on a green robe to take X-rays. Now too he felt he was wearing a ridiculous costume and wanted to laugh, but such an urge was quickly dispelled by the gust of fear overtaking him. They were handed various lit candles and told to prepare body and soul, for they were about to enter the quarters of the Penitent Brothers of the Sangre de Cristo. The moment had come.

“What happens here stays here.” They were made to repeat this three times, with the warning that if the secret were to be revealed, the price was death. Nevertheless, all of this eventually came from the mouth of Wendy Mellons.

“Maybe I should just be quiet from now on,” she admits.

When the two boys crossed the threshold, they removed the blindfolds and found themselves in a large room poorly lit by candles and saturated with the thick smell of copal. There were men in brown robes — the Illuminated, or Brothers of the Light, according to the godfathers — and others in black cloaks, the Blood Brothers, or the Brothers of Passion, also known as the Penitent Brothers. In the middle of the room was a table on which were four or five of what the gente call “the figures,” wooden carvings of saints and other sacred images.

Greg regretted that they had taken his wristwatch in the previous room. He wished he could glance at it now, because maybe he could then get the hours moving again, or at least confirm that all this would end soon. The copal smoke stuck in his throat, and he began to choke for lack of air.

They put the two of them, the only ones with fair skin, right in the middle of the crowded congregation of mostly dark-skinned folk and ordered them to lean their heads back and focus on the cross hanging from the ceiling. Meanwhile the group formed two semicircles around them, brown robes on their right, black cloaks on their left, chanting hymns that reached the two boys from afar, as if through mounds of cotton, drowned out by the banging of their own hearts resounding in their ears.

“Repeat after me these words of forgiveness to Brother Picador,” one of the Brothers of the Passion said.

“Brother Picador, I forgive you, I give you thanks and at the same time beg of you that your hand doesn’t move with a vengeful or resentful spirit,” the boys tried to repeat.

By that point, Greg was trembling so violently that the melted wax from the candle he was holding rained in thick drops on his bare feet. In contrast, the younger one kept his composure. Another Brother approached them holding an open metal box, and they could see that inside there was an embroidered cloth wrapped around what seemed to be some gem or other valuable object. They might be precious stones, Sleepy Joe thought. Picador, the only one with his face entirely covered, removed the cloth and pulled out of the box a dark amber object sharpened like a shaving blade. Some of the other Brothers pulled the boys’ robes down from their shoulders so that the cloth hung from the ropes around their waists.

“We are going to break the Seal,” one of the Illuminated announced, and they ordered the two to lean forward and hold their breath.

Greg felt how the blade sliced into the skin of his back, three cuts on each side of his spine near the shoulder blades, and then turned his head to see what they were doing to his little brother. When he noticed the amount of blood coming from the cuts and soaking the robe, he tried to stop Picador by grabbing the blade, but the three godfathers held him back by force.

“I’m fine,” Sleepy Joe said, his eyes closed tight as he withstood the punishment.

Afterward, the Brothers gave each of the boys a whip soaked in water to make it heavier, and ordered them to lash their backs over the area of the incisions — one side first, then the other. On a horn and drum, two of the Brothers played a funeral dirge, slow at first, then increasingly faster.

“Keep the beat! Keep the beat!” they ordered, so that the thrashings would accompany the banging of the drum. As the boys complied, the whips became soaked with blood, growing heavier, and tore at the skin, until Greg fell to the floor, unable to withstand it any longer.

Sleepy Joe, however, seemed transported. After a certain point he became something outside of himself, committed to the task of ripping open his back with an unusual vigor, or perhaps conviction, or a kind of brutality. And when the music began to slow down, indicating that he should do the same with the whip, he seemed not to hear it anymore, so lost in the savagery of this self-flagellation that he paid no mind to one of the Illuminated Brothers who was ordering him to stop immediately.

“The child was in such a frenzy, whipping himself like that!” Wendy Mellons recalls.

Meanwhile, the others were standing there, not knowing what to do — Illuminated and Penitents equally frozen, seeing how the little demon had made the situation his own, beating the shit out of his back, assuming a dominant role, so enraptured that not even his own brother dared stop him, fearing he’d get a lashing if he crossed the perimeter of the whip, which snapped and hissed like a mad serpent.

A week later, each of the boys was given a small stone wrapped in a tightly bound handkerchief, with directions to open it in private. If the stone had a white cross painted on its face it would mean he was admitted. If there was no cross, it was a categorical rejection and there would be no second chance. Greg wasn’t surprised when he untied his handkerchief and found that there was no cross on his stone. He had been expecting this and deep down he was relieved.

Sleepy Joe had been acting strange all that week, reclusive, not eating, and not allowing anyone to change the bandages on his back or tend to the wounds, not even his older brother, whom he cut off when he tried to talk to him about what had happened in that place. Even between them, the episode was never mentioned again, as if it had never happened. With his stone still bound and held tightly in his hand, Sleepy Joe climbed a steep hill to a point named Eye of the Horse. He moved with the resolute step of someone who understood that from that point on he had an obligation, something to live for, a mission to accomplish: he’d be the most devout and selfless of the Penitent Brothers of the Sangre de Cristo. He didn’t undo his handkerchief until he had reached the top, when night had begun to fall. He was puzzled not to see a cross on the stone, and anxiously scrutinized it one side and the other, convinced that there had to be one somewhere. Perhaps it was a very small cross that he had missed, or maybe the excitement of the moment or the meager twilight was preventing him from making it out. But no. There was no cross on his stone either.

2. Interview with Ian Rose

Thirty years later, in a hardwood forest in the heart of the Catskills Mountains in southern New York State, a man named John Eagles, a dog-food deliveryman, was murdered, his face torn off and exhibited in what seemed to be a ritual crime. The person who discovered the body was the young Cleve Rose, a neighbor who was the author of a serial graphic novel, The Suicide Poet and His Girlfriend Dorita, and the teacher of a writing workshop for the inmates of Manninpox State Prison. Cleve was riding his motorcycle home when he discovered Mr. Eagles’s pickup on the side of the road in the middle of the forest. He stopped to investigate and noticed a red cloth attached to what he at first took for a mask. After several moments he realized that the awful visage, with its vacant eyes and hair matted with blood, might well have belonged to a human being. And if it was Mr. Eagles’s pickup, perhaps the face was his as well.

“Cleve told me that he felt so sick at that point that he puked in the ditch,” says Ian Rose, Cleve’s father, a hydraulic engineer specializing in irrigation systems, the owner of a house not far from the scene of the crime. “Afterward, when he had composed himself and dared to look directly at the hideous mask, he thought that despite everything it still bore a resemblance to poor Mr. Eagles. It was the Halloween version of Eagles’s face, Cleve told me, or the apocalyptic zombie version. That’s exactly what he said. I remember perfectly. My son wrote graphic novels, and if you ask me, the Suicide Poet series is very clever and entertaining, but of course I’m biased. I was the number one fan of almost everything my son did, almost everything, I say, not all: certain things made my hair stand on end. But, in general, I was very proud of him that he dared to go far where I had always fallen short. Without a doubt, his graphic novels were very good, a bit gory, sure, full of stories of the walking dead and such things, you know. But the day he found Eagles in such a state, he was very affected. And so was I. I felt that it was an omen, a kind of warning. In the end, that was what the murderer had intended with the staging of such a scene: to warn us. Forecasting a horror that began that day and has yet to end.

“Cleve called the police, and some hours later they identified the body they had found a few steps away in the brush, and confirmed that it was Mr. Eagles. He was a good man, I can assure you, with no enemies to speak of. That’s what the widow said when they questioned her: Eagles did not have any enemies, and she didn’t know of anyone who would want to exact vengeance in such a savage manner. He was on his way back from my house, where he had dropped off a pair of packages from Eukanuba that I had asked him to bring over when I spoke to him on the phone the day before. Although he was a strong man, they said he didn’t seem to have put up a fight against his murderer, or murderers. He was alone when he came to my house. Emperatriz, the woman who helps me around the house, assured the police that she had seen no one else inside the pickup when he got out to give her the packages. Apparently, on the way back, Eagles had stopped, possibly to pick up the murderer, who perhaps had been hitchhiking. There is no other way to explain how the person, or persons, got inside the truck. People around here are not suspicious, you know, there’s no reason to be. If Eagles saw someone on the side of the road, he’d simply pick him up and give him a ride at least to the highway. That’s not unusual around here. Once inside the pickup, the murderer garroted him from behind so that Eagles could not defend himself, and then he did what he did, that horrifying stuff with the face.”

Although Ian Rose doesn’t tell me at first, I know that he had not lived with his son, Cleve, since he had separated from the boy’s mother many years before. And now that they were finally alone, their spaces were clearly delineated in their mountain home, an old, large house with two floors and an attic, where they had established an independence from each other as if they lived in an apartment building: the two floors for the father; the attic, sacred space for the son. The truth was they didn’t spend much time together and hardly spoke to each other; they had just begun to get to know each other more in depth, and it still wasn’t easy for them to communicate. Not that it much bothered either of them. Living together had been easier than they’d imagined. They shared their fondness for the woods and isolation, but Ian was pragmatic and grounded, while Cleve had a bit of the artist from his mother. So they had little in common except for one fundamental trait Cleve had clearly inherited from his father: both were dog lovers. The three dogs, Otto, Dix, and Skunko, were the central figures in the house. The humans came and went, and big parts of their lives transpired outside the house, so they were no more than transitional elements there. On the other hand, the dogs were always there, filling the place with their antics, running back and forth, and when they lay by the fire, they seemed to be there just to protect the humans. So much warmth and affection came from those dogs that knew everything about the house and protected it with their sharp sense of smell and their barking. Of course, great balls of dog hair had to be swept out of the house, the furniture smelled like dogs, the upholstery was frayed from their teeth, and the yard was crisscrossed with tunnels dug by the animals. In return, the dogs made the property practically impenetrable; with that trio on guard like Cerberus night and day it wasn’t easy for anyone to trespass. In a word, the dogs were the house, and for Cleve and his father, coming home meant reintegrating into the pack.

Ian Rose couldn’t help but regard his son with a contained admiration that came from the realization that the boy, his only son, was turning into an outstanding man. As for Cleve, when he felt suffocated by the paternal presence, he escaped to New York City, less than three hours away by motorcycle, and stayed in the studio he rented in the East Village near St. Mark’s Place, returning to the mountain house only when he started to miss the bustle of the dogs and the silence of the woods, and the company of that father he was just getting to know. So they adapted to each other’s company without much ado and largely in silence, confident that their communication would improve in time.

Consequently, they had exchanged few words that night, which had turned surreal by the savagery of the afternoon. Father, son, and dogs gathered in a tight semicircle in front of the blazing fireplace, while at their backs, the windows that faced the woods imposed a blackness that seemed absolute.

“Perhaps we should put up curtains,” Rose the father said, measuring his words so as not to admit to his son the feeling that what had happened would somehow rupture the equilibrium, damaging the previous order.

He didn’t know how to express it in words; it was just a premonition. He had not been a friend of Mr. Eagles; his relationship with the deceased had been limited to greeting him when he delivered the cartons of dog food, paying him, and chatting about a few trivial matters and nothing else. Nevertheless, he felt that the murder had torn the delicate fabric of a natural law that for years had remained intact in the mountain.

“Or put lights out in the garden,” Cleve said, tired after several hours of questioning by the police and investigators now swarming the area.

“A good man, Mr. Eagles,” Ian Rose said, putting another log on the fire.

“Who could have hated him like that? Poor guy, always with his Eukanuba. Euk-an-uba, weird name for dog food, sounds more like a Cirque du Soleil show.”

They were silent for a long while as they ate spoonfuls of leek and potato soup and watched out for any reactions from the dogs, who slept peacefully, not sensing any cause for agitation.

“Good boy, good boy,” Cleve said, tapping one of them on the head, making his voice higher to imitate Mr. Eagles. “That’s what he always said to the dogs, remember, Pa? Good boy, good boy, with that squeaky voice of his. So strange, that voice in such a huge guy. He tapped them on the head like that, not petting them, just little taps on the head, as if fulfilling his duty with the client, or because he didn’t want his hands smelling like dogs. Do you think deep down he didn’t really like them?”

“Dogs? Maybe. He made a living off neighbors like us who overfed their pets treats and canned food and such. He was a mountain boy, I’m sure he didn’t approve of pampered animals like ours, us city people.”

“To kill him, to rip off his face. Fuck, only a miserable rat would do something like that. A calculating psychopath.”

“Whoever did it is still out there. Although who knows, with so many cops around…”

“We could use some bars on the windows. Or at least some curtains for now, Pa. I’m holed up in the attic, but down here you’re on display…”

“We’ve never needed curtains. There’s no one around here. Maybe we should put lights out in the garden. I’ll do it tomorrow. He has to be a big guy. I mean to overcome Eagles, who was pretty strong, and to drag his body… Maybe there were a few of them, at least two, one in the front seat and one in the back. The one who killed him was in the back; he strangled him from behind. But why did they rip off his face?” Ian Rose said, looking for his flashlight before taking out the dogs for a walk on the grounds.

“I’ll come with you,” Cleve said, putting on his shoes and running after his father.

Days later, Cleve would recount the details of Eagles’s murder in a note written in longhand with a fountain pen.

Something brutal and inexplicable happened ten minutes from my father’s house in this peaceful corner of the world where nothing ever happens. But it was precisely here that it did happen, on the side of the road, a few steps from the dark waters of Silver Coin Pond. Somebody carried Mr. Eagles’s body from his pickup, and not in the darkness of a cloudy night, no, because it must have been no later than four in the afternoon, in the plain light of a fall day. And it didn’t happen on a Sunday either, when this place is abandoned, but during the week, with some traffic on the road because at that hour some people go down into town to pick up their kids from school. Nothing was stolen, not the pickup, the wallet, nothing. And yet, to see the shape they left him in. A sadistic act hard to fathom. One of the four great skinnings in Western history along with the flaying of the fawn Marsyas by Apollo, the martyrdom of St. Bartholomew, whose skin was depicted by Michelangelo in The Last Judgment, and Burt Reynolds’s portrayal of Navajo Joe, the Indian who twirled scalps at the end of his spear. I’m saying this because Mr. Eagles’s face was torn off. That’s right. They took the face off that decent man as if it were a mask. And in fact the face is a mask over the skull; I just had never thought of it like that until I saw such a thing. It was impossible not to see it because the murderer had glued it to a rag, a red rag — the kind people have in a car to clean the windows and such. They found the Rhino Glue bottle on the bottom of Silver Coin Pond the following day, although there were no fingerprints on it. The red rag with the face glued on was in turn attached to a tree trunk by side of the road, like a banner or a poster; this act was deliberate and premeditated, and it’s clear that if whoever did it had wanted to hide the crime all they had to do was dump the body in the pond. But instead, they set up everything so whoever passed by on the road could see it, perhaps even so that we, my dad and I, couldn’t miss it, since not many people live around here. Who knows what their motivation was? Generally, you disfigure a victim when you don’t want the authorities to identify him. You take someone’s face off, or cover it, when you want to make them vanish from life. Someone without a face is no one, anonymous, a zero. Like the disappeared during the dictatorships in the Southern Cone: a black hood prevented them from being identified or identifying others as they were taken away and left in limbo. Pro wrestling stars in Mexico hide their identities behind masks, making them into mythic creatures before the eyes of the fans as has happened with Silver Masked Man, Blue Demon, and Son of the Saint. The worst damage a rival can inflict is to rip off the mask and expose his opponent’s true identity to the crowd, because this robs the wrestler of the aura of a hero and makes him mortal again. Subcomandante Marcos does the same thing with his ski mask and more or less for the same reasons, given the occupational hazards that necessitate his clandestine business. The Man in the Iron Mask, a twin of the king of France, was forced to wear it all his life so that no one would find out that the king, by nature the only one, had a double who eventually could replace him. And so on, to take off a face, to become someone else, or become oneself, invisible or nonexistent. Although it is also true that the consequences could be exactly the opposite, because the issue brings with it its own contradictions. Eagles’s murderer knows this well; instead of hiding what he did, his action made it evident. Subcomandante Marcos, in the jungles of Chiapas, became famous and visible in Mexico and the world mostly thanks to the stocking with holes that hid his face. Not to mention the case of V, my idol, the super anarchist in V for Vendetta: the mask that hides his face today has become the visible face of millions of young people around the world. Mr. Eagles’s face, always modest and inconspicuous, was never more visible than when it was ripped off and displayed. It brings to mind a photograph, like that famous one of Einstein, with the white hair floating around his head, or another one, also very well known, in which Picasso looks at the viewer with his eagle eyes. Or one of Marilyn Monroe, radiating seduction as she plunges into a stupor, as if she were on the brink of an orgasm, or of sleep, or death. Or Che — what about the face of Che Guevara? — the most significant scapegoat of modern times with a black beret as a crown of thorns and a trancelike expression as he offers himself as sacrifice. What are those pictures, those icons, but faces taken from their owners? Faces detached from their bodies. Saved from the physical and the circumstantial in a way that they’re worthy as themselves, they become eternal, their symbolic weight so powerful that decade after decade they reappear on walls and on the T-shirts we wear. And so is the case with the good Mr. Eagles. There is a rumor spreading that it was an isolated case of brutality by kids on drugs, strangers to this place who must have been passing by and who became deranged because of some chemical. I think that version is just another mask, so that the residents can feel at peace and the authorities can begin washing their hands. As for me, I can’t stop thinking about it, turning the questions over. I’m intrigued by the theatricality of the murderer, gluing the face to a rag, making sure the rag was red, and putting it on display for passersby on a tree trunk: a quest with purposeful theatrical effects. This was a ritual, my friend. Like in ancient times, like the great sacramental acts of the Old Testament. That’s what I call deep play; or I should say that’s what Sloterdijk calls it, and defines it as all-encompassing ritual actions done for the greatest effect. I’m under the impression that Eagles’s murderer is someone who detests the demystified mediocrity in which we live now, this tame and castrated everydayness that according to Slavoj Žižek is made up of decaffeinated coffee, near beer, food without calories, cigarettes without nicotine, wars without death (for the right side), and sex without contact. And sacrifice without blood, I’d add. Kids on drugs? I have another version, but as of yet have no way to prove it.

Cleve Rose was never able to talk to his father about his suspicions about the identity of the murderer, because days later Cleve himself was killed in a motorcycle accident, far from the Catskill Mountains, near Chicago. Different circumstances, different setting. Nevertheless, Ian Rose, devastated by the loss, could not help but think that his son’s fate had been sealed beforehand, when Mr. Eagles’s unsolved murder had left a dark cloud floating over these mountains.

“Well, you can’t help but be suspicious,” Ian Rose tells me. “Such a brutal act in such a peaceful place. It was a terrifying mystery, breaking the natural rhythm of the day-to-day, and more so if they suggest that something is lying in wait. It wasn’t just us; all the neighbors had trouble. Some left for a while, others put up bars or alarms, something unheard of before. And right in the middle of that period of fear and uncertainty, Cleve just happens to die. I’m sorry; I’d rather not speak about that. I don’t feel well, it’s something too personal to talk about,” Ian Rose says, but he keeps on talking. “Look, no one is prepared for the death of a son. There’s no recovering from that and nothing to be said about it, so I won’t say anything else, what’s implied is understood.”

Sometime after Cleve’s death, a package arrived at the house in the Catskills, a package that disturbed his father from the moment he received it, partly because he didn’t recognize the name of the sender, but particularly because it wasn’t addressed to him but to his son, Cleve. And Cleve was no longer. For Ian that death was something he could not handle, a wound that did not heal. He blamed himself and was drowning in guilt because he had sensed something was wrong, that some ambush was waiting for them, and yet he had done nothing to stop the threat from closing in on Cleve.

“That same night on the day Eagles was murdered we should have left the house, at least for a while,” he acknowledges now. “I thought about it, but there were the dogs — it’s not easy to find a place to stay with three dogs. Naturally, we weren’t going to fit in Cleve’s studio in the East Village. But we should have done it. It was one of those times when you hear a voice inside you telling you to do it again and again, but you ignore it.”

In his dreams after Cleve’s death, Ian Rose confused the boy who had not grown up with him with the young man who had wanted to get closer to him but was with him for so short a time. He mixed up the younger Cleve and the older Cleve. He woke up asking himself why he had allowed his ex-wife, Cleve’s mother, to take him so far away, why he hadn’t been paying attention, how was it possible that the years had passed by so fast, why hadn’t he understood that in the blink of an eye a child grows up and is free, and if you are not vigilant he gets on a motorcycle and kills himself.

“I couldn’t take it,” he says. “My failure. And the passing months weren’t helping. Nothing shattered the silence or shortened the distance that separated me from my son. And all of a sudden he gets this package in the mail.”

A package that someone sent Cleve as if he were still alive, and as such brought him back to life for an instant, because there was a flash of confusion in his father’s head, for a moment the past was erased, and he was about to call out to his son: “There’s something for you down here, son.” But the spell broke immediately, the whole weight of Cleve’s death came down on him, and Ian Rose remained standing there for a while, not able to move, steadying himself against the blow of a sorrow that returned like a boomerang, and in the end he couldn’t think of anything else to do but go up to the attic where his son had slept. He put the package on the bed without opening it and said, “This is for you, Cleve. It’s from a woman in Staten Island.”

“Maybe there wasn’t anything important in that package,” he tells me, “almost definitely nothing important, something delayed in the mail, that’s all. But I couldn’t help but think that it was some type of sign. A message from Cleve, you know. Something that belonged to him and that rose up out of the void for me, as if he had sent it. Look, I’ve never been superstitious or religious; I don’t even believe in heaven, or ghosts, none of those things. But Cleve’s death left me grasping in the dark, looking out for signs. He also left me with a head of gray hair and nervous tics, and I think I’m even more stupid. Grief kills neurons, you know. That’s a fact; otherwise, we wouldn’t be able to live through it. Maybe the hunch about the package was superstition, if you want to call it that. But in the face of the death of a loved one there’s no other choice: either you give in to it, which is impossible, or you begin to believe things, to be guided by signs that are beyond reason. Who knows? Maybe everything was much simpler: that package could contain some information about Cleve, some detail that would help me understand. Something like finding someone else’s love letter, or reading through a stranger’s e-mail.”

The day the package arrived had begun like any other, and Ian Rose had already gone through his daily dawn routine, standing by the window of his bedroom and taking in the whole of the landscape, except for a corner in which a stretch of road appeared; ever since Cleve’s death the sight of the highway upset him, disrupting his fantasy that he lived in a place where no one could enter and no one could leave. He had begun his day dressing without bathing and putting on his Taylor & Son boots that he had worn for years. He was fond of those boots; the leather had become almost like a second skin with wear. Later, he’d taken the dogs out for a walk in the woods. He liked that. In fact, it’s what he liked best, what still gave meaning to his days. Strolling through the woods with Otto, Dix, and Skunko allowed him to forget everything for a few hours, and he let go, becoming like a dog among his dogs for a couple of hours and sometimes longer, actually each time longer; lately, he worked less each day and the walks became longer. Nothing serious, he was retired anyway, living off a pension, and if he clung to work, it was because he liked it more than anything. He no longer took on large projects, satisfied with craft work and helping out a neighbor if the septic tank got clogged, the dishwasher was leaking, or the irrigation system in the garden needed fixing.

Because it was cold, when he got back home Rose split a big pile of wood, took a hot shower, and put on what he always wore: a pair of baggy pants, a white T-shirt with an unbuttoned lumberjack shirt over it. Then he had breakfast, tea with toast and some fruit. That first tea of the day was always Earl Grey with a cloud — what his English mother called a drop of milk poured into the middle of the golden liquid.

After that he fed the dogs their Eukanuba — Eagles’s widow delivered it these days, with treats and a Scheiner’s sausage for each of them — and had gone to the front room to start a fire. It never ceased to amaze him, seeing that fire domesticated in a corner of the house, peaceful and purring like a good cat, when it could rear up if it wanted, madly turning everything into a useless pile of charred bones and ash. Sometimes Ian Rose thought it wouldn’t be a bad thing, to be turned into nothing. But the dogs would have no one, so he persisted with the tasks of the day.

Every once in a while, he’d reminisce about Edith, his ex-wife, Cleve’s mother. As a bachelor, Ian Rose had been no playboy, not good with the ladies at all, so he felt lucky when Edith had been willing to go out with him. From his perspective, she was a marvelous and inaccessible creature who played the cello in a university group called the Emmanuel String Quartet, while he saw himself as a handyman, some novice technician who helped with the Friday concerts in the school auditorium and sat in the audience to listen to her. And to look at her, because he couldn’t take his eyes off her. She was a true sight, that woman with a strong large body, with that curtain of dark hair that fell theatrically over the fairness of the face as her knees pressed the sides of the cello. It was big, that cello, no junior model, but the official full-size, on which the incomparable Edith produced a mewling that was almost human and that set him on edge, and not metaphorically. Edith could give him erections with her cello. But he didn’t dare approach her. He found the very thought of going to her dressing room with a bouquet of roses or some such other ridiculous gesture absurd.

Once, during one of those concerts, in the darkness of the audience, Ian kept his hands busy playing with the silver lining of a pack of cigarettes as he concentrated on the music, or more specifically on Edith. His hands moved on their own, folding the paper until they had created a tiny star. And as it happened, after the performance, Ian went into a bar near the auditorium and almost fell over backward when he saw the magnificent Edith come in. She was alone, her beautiful mane of hair in a ponytail. She had removed her makeup, making her fairness look even more spectral, and had exchanged her evening dress for a pair of jeans and a leather vest. Edith sat on a stool at the bar and ordered a dry martini. Ian, who still had the silver star in his pocket, chugged down a whiskey to work up the nerve, walked up, and handed it to her.

“Who are you?” she asked. And in a burst of showboating that she’d still chided him for years later, he responded: “I’m the star giver.” He blushed immediately afterward, hating himself for speaking like such a fool, and to make matters worse, Edith, from her superior position seated on the tall bar stool, regarded the insignificant object in her hands and said, her head tilting to one side, “Come on, now you’ve put me in a spot; now I don’t know where to toss this thing you’ve given me.”

So for Ian Rose it was a miracle that in the middle of that fiasco with the paper star, when he had wanted the earth to open up and swallow him, Edith had asked him to have a drink with her. And not only that, but she had agreed to go out with him the following week; and not just that she had gone out with him, but in less than a month, she had fallen in love with him. So when they married and swore eternal fidelity to each other, Rose was a hundred percent sure of what he was doing and committed to keeping his vows. During the honeymoon, he performed admirably from a sexual perspective, even Edith was well aware of this, and from then on he devoted himself, body and soul, to the role of a married man. He kept his commitment and passion the entire length of the nineteen years of his marriage. Every morning, his eyes still closed, he stretched out his arms to touch Edith’s body, happy to confirm that she was still there by his side. Because Rose was the kind of man who was born to be married, and married specifically to this wife and none other. Although Edith had long before stopped playing the cello, Rose felt that he was first Edith’s husband, and second everything else: Cleve’s father, hydraulic engineer, employee of the British company that had transferred him with his family to Colombia, where he got paid double the salary for working in a location classified as extremely dangerous. Not once during his worst sleepless nights, nor on occasions when they had to be apart because of travel, nor during their domestic squabbles, did it ever cross Rose’s mind that Edith could conceive of their relationship any differently than he did. For Rose it was evident that if he was before anything Edith’s husband, Edith was before anything his wife. That is why he failed to make any sense at all of that night in Bogotá when he came home from work. She had stayed in bed all day suffering from one of those colds she got so often in that cold rainy city, ten thousand feet up in the Andes Mountains.

“Did you get the cough syrup and Vicks VapoRub?” she asked him, but he had to admit he’d forgotten.

Around midnight, he was awakened by a noise. There was Edith, with her red sweater over her pajamas, coughing into tissues and admonishing him in a nasal voice that he wasn’t anything but a star giver — that was all he had ever been for her, a sad little star giver who had brought her to live in this horrendous place where she’d not remain one day longer. If he wanted to stay that was up to him; if he cared more about the company than his family, then so be it, but neither she nor the boy would stay one more day in this catastrophic place in which any day tragedy could befall them.

“You’re delirious from the fever. Calm down, Edith; get back in bed. You have a fever, and you can’t leave me just because I forgot the Vicks VapoRub.”

Rose had insisted, and even had looked for a twenty-four-hour pharmacy in the phone book and ordered cough syrup and cold tablets to be delivered. But she did not stop packing until she had filled four suitcases and two carry-ons.

The next day, he found himself taking her and the boy, who would have been ten then, to the airport. They said good-bye in front of the Avianca jet for what Ian Rose thought would be a few months while he finished out his contract commitment with the company before returning to Chicago to join them. But it turned out to be forever, because shortly after their parting, Edith had begun seeing an anthropologist named Ned and had gone with him and the boy to live in Sri Lanka.

“Sri Lanka, if you can believe it,” Rose tells me. “She left me because she felt unsafe in Colombia, and she moved to Sri Lanka…”

His initial reaction had been one of surprise and disbelief. To a large extent that had not changed. During those same years Edith and Cleve had lived with Ned in Sri Lanka while Rose moved into the house in the Catskills with the three dogs; during the summers Edith and Ned had brought him the boy and they too had spent their summer vacations at his house, with Rose’s approval. They’d all lived together amicably, Rose suppressing his jealousy or any sign that he wasn’t having a good time. As a token of gratitude for his hospitality, Edith and Ned had sent him a magnifying glass with an ebony handle from Sri Lanka, which he put atop his desk, where it remained as a testament that his marriage had in fact ended and there was no going back.

Rose had always believed that he’d be married to Edith until the day of his death, or her death. And yet, something happened at some point, he wasn’t exactly sure when, and things turned out differently. Rose had been thinking about Edith that morning when the package arrived in the mail, and he left it unopened in the attic.

He’d rarely gone up to the attic when Cleve was alive, because he wanted to respect the boy’s need for solitude. Although truth be told, Rose wasn’t even sure how alone his son had been up there; perhaps not that much, according to Empera, the Dominican who came to clean twice a week, who had tried to insinuate that Cleve shut himself up there with a girlfriend whom he didn’t want to introduce to his father. But Rose had stopped Empera midsentence.

“That’s the last thing I need to hear,” he had said. “Cleve’s private life is his business and no one else’s. In this house, no one meddles into the affairs of others, and you should follow suit.”

“It’s true, neither of you meddle into my private life,” Empera, not one to mince words, had responded. “Not out of respect, but because you couldn’t care less.”

“And she was right,” Rose tells me. “Empera knew everything about me, down to the color of my underwear, and yet I knew little or nothing about her, except that she was Dominican, that she didn’t have her papers, and that she’d entered the United States illegally not once or twice but seventeen times, basically any time she felt like it. I never had the heart to ask her how she had accomplished that feat worthy of The Guinness Book of World Records.”

After Cleve’s death, Rose began to suffer horribly, not knowing more about his son, not having been closer to him when he had been alive, not having supported him or met his lovers; eventually, he asked Empera about what he had not wanted to hear before.

“Tell me, Empera,” he asked her. “Did you get to meet that woman who, according to you, visited Cleve secretly?”

But Empera, who had learned her lesson, wasn’t about to let that door slam in her face twice.

“What woman, sir?” she responded dryly as she walked toward the kitchen, her sandals snapping loudly.

On the day the package arrived, Rose spent the rest of the day out of the house doing errands, but he had not stopped thinking about the package he’d left unopened on his son’s bed. When he returned, he had the urge to go up and examine it, but some scruple about meddling in his son’s private matters stopped him. If there was something his son detested it was for anyone to invade his space, so Rose resisted the urge to open the package and went into the kitchen to make a sandwich. But immediately he was hounded by a completely opposite sensation. Would he not be betraying his son by ignoring such a sign? As he downed his sandwich with a glass of lactose-free milk by the fireplace, he began to think that it would not be so absurd or disrespectful to open the package, which perhaps would be the last sign Cleve sent.

“Alright, Cleve,” he said aloud, “just let me finish eating this and we’ll open it, see what this is about. You want me to do it, right? You’re giving me permission to open your private correspondence? Of course you do; at this point why would you care?”

The package contained 140 pages of rose-colored stationery of the kind that adolescent girls used for letters. The manuscript was handwritten, in what Rose was fairly certain was feminine script. The pages had writing on both sides, tighter as it went on, as if the author had calculated that she might run out of paper.

“Well, Cleve,” Rose said, “it seems as if a girl has sent you a very long love letter.”

The person who had written it wasn’t the one on the return address, a Mrs. Socorro Arias de Salmon, from Staten Island, but a young woman who wanted to remain anonymous and who declared that she’d use the pseudonym María Paz. This María Paz wrote in the first person to confess something to Cleve, referring to him as Mr. Rose. The following dawn, Ian Rose was still awake reading the one hundred forty rose-colored pages in the attic, sitting up on Cleve’s bed under the blanket, still dressed, the two big dogs lying on the floor, and the small one, Skunko, beside him.

“It’s his thing, that dog,” Ian Rose tells me, “I don’t allow him to go up on my bed, always been very strict about that, but not Cleve. And now without Cleve, his bed has basically become Skunko’s bed, so I didn’t tell him to get down. After all, if there was an intruder, it was me.”

Whoever the real author was, she had placed all her hopes on Cleve, had entrusted him with the story of her life. Rose asks me if I agree, because maybe these are just his own speculations, he doesn’t know much about these things, but he can’t get out of his head the feeling that the story of a life is that life, precisely that life, which in the long run can only exist to the extent that there is someone who tells its tale and someone who listens to it.

“Alexander the Great, who brought historians along to all his missions and battles, knew this well: what is not narrated might as well not have occurred,” Rose tells me, adding that the fact that he is an engineer doesn’t mean that he doesn’t like to read. “I’d say that the recipient of a testimony of a life becomes a kind of conscience before which the other unravels his deeds so that he may be condemned or acquitted. Or at least that’s what happens to me when I read a novel or an autobiography, fiction or something based on fact. A strange thing happened as I was reading it. I felt as if the life of that young woman, María Paz, was literally in my hands. She had chosen my son, Cleve, for that task, or I should say Mr. Rose. And it so happens that I too am a Mr. Rose, and as I read the manuscript I fell under the impression that this woman was also addressing me, and that by telling me her troubles, she was putting herself in my hands, because of the two Mr. Roses, I was the only one still alive. It should have been the other way around, me dead in the accident, while my son lived out what was left of his life. But that’s not how it happened. And at that moment, I was the only Mr. Rose who could read what that woman had written, revealing to me things not only about herself, but also about her son.”

Parts of the manuscript were written in blue ink, parts in black ink, and sometimes in pencil. The parts that looked most scrawled had been written in the dark, as she herself recounted, or after nine in the evening, lights out in the prison. This had happened to Rose before, while he still lived with Edith, when in the middle of the night, he thought of something he had to add to a report he had been writing, some technical thing for the office, and so as not to wake her by turning on the light, he wrote a couple of paragraphs in bed, in the dark. The following morning he found a bunch of gibberish similar to what María Paz had written, scribbles and scratches climbing one upon another.

The young woman expressed herself in an English splattered with Spanish, and Rose tried reading two paragraphs aloud to hear how it would sound. It was good, natural and good. The two languages blended together in a playful manner, like two young lovers with little experience in bed. Rose didn’t have any trouble with the Spanish, which he had learned to speak in Colombia, although not very well. Edith had learned almost none, her displeasure with Colombia fueling her unwillingness to learn the language. Cleve had learned it perfectly, the way children do, without being forced or making an effort.

From Cleve’s Notebook

For my mother, our stay in Colombia was marked by recurrent nightmares from which she’d awaken screaming things, and which persisted even after we had left. Things like the guerrillas were going to kidnap us, thieves were stealing the rearview mirrors from our cars, the volcanoes in the Andes were spitting rivers of lava, I had swallowed some red, poisonous seeds and they had to rush me to the hospital.

I, on other hand, have felt a sense of nostalgia ever since we left, but I’m not exactly sure for what. I miss some indefinable thing, maybe that powerful damp smell of the color green that had stirred the senses of that repressed child I’d been, or the streams of adrenaline that shot through me when I’d witnessed a machete fight between two men, or the dangers of the mountain roads: trucks that sped suicidally through tight curves above an abyss of fog, and the fruit stands clinging by their nails to the roadside, so that travelers could buy the fruit from their cars, although that last memory is more my father’s than mine, that one about the exotic fruits, because I actually never wanted to taste any of them, and have to admit that since that time, to this very day, I’m still afraid to put strange foods in my mouth. Yet I remember the names of those fruits, names with a lot of a’s and y’s, and I pronounce them all in a row, one time and two as if it were a spell: cherimoya, cherimoya, papaya, papaya, maracuya. Memories. In Spanish, recuerdos, re-cordar, from the Latin, cor, cordis, the heart, that is, a return to the heart, so that memories of childhood would have to be pulled from the heart in which they’re kept.

I’m convinced that certain childhood memories can begin to take over, ensconcing themselves in the niches of the mind like ancient saints in a dim church, and from there they emit a strange light, something mythical that little by little begins to take precedence over other matters until they become our primary and perhaps only religion. I think that deep within me many of those fruits glimmer with such a light, and I regret never having had the gall to sink my teeth into them, because perhaps it would have been for me like Communion for Christians, who consume God with each wafer. The names of those fruits were fascinating and difficult to pronounce, and of course all myths arise from what cannot be known, what we perceive as mysterious and fills us with panic and marvel. It’s not that today I secretly pray to a god called Guanabana or that I offer sacrifices to Cherimoya, not something as ridiculous as that, but that I refuse to end up as a simple Westerner and reject the more prodigious fruits for a diet of oranges and apples.

Perhaps that is why I yearn for those years in the Andes, where life took place at such an astounding height above sea level and was a hazardous endeavor. Maybe that’s why I can again taste the arequipe in my mouth, the smoky, ambrosial candy the Colombian servants used to give me out of sight from my mother, who had forbidden me to eat anything sugary. But of all these memories, the best by far is of María Aleida, a beautiful black woman who had been crowned regional Queen of the Currulao in her hometown, and who was the nanny who cared for me in Bogotá. I never learned how to dance the currulao, but there was no doubt in my mind that María Aleida was the most beautiful woman in the world, and not only that, but she had the habit of calling others “my love,” which deeply unsettled me. My love this, my love that. Could this mean that María Aleida was in love with me? Was such a thing possible — that my shy skinny ass could attract the Queen of the Currulao, who was ten years older than me and more strikingly beautiful than I could have imagined?

The situation was confusing, hard to interpret, because I wasn’t the only one María Aleida called “my love.” She called everyone in the Rose family that. And what was already complicated became even more so when I heard María Aleida gossiping about my father in the kitchen. I was spying on her — I was always spying on her — and she was telling the other employees that my father must have worked for the CIA, because all gringos who lived in Colombia worked for the CIA even though they might masquerade as diplomatic engineers. I was hidden behind a cabinet, and the news surprised me. Not that it made me lose respect for my father; on the contrary, my admiration for him grew, or at least it made him more interesting. I liked thinking of him as a spy and not an engineer. It wasn’t true, of course, all that CIA stuff, just gossip that María Aleida only dared whisper behind my father’s back, while to his face she called him “my love,” the same way she did everyone else. Álvaro Salvídar, the chauffeur, was for María Aleida “my love,” or “my precious,” and also “doll,” terms she also used with me. She called Anselma, the cook, “my love” and “my darling,” like she did my mother, who was her principal darling.

I think I miss being someone’s love and precious and doll. And how beautiful María Aleida looked when she went barefoot to teach me how to dance salsa or merengue, mocking my clumsiness and my lack of rhythm, not like that, doll, look, like this, like this, my dear, she showed me, swaying her hips, and me, paralyzed with love, incapable of following her lead. Aside from all the other names María Aleida also called me “mi negro,” which in Colombia is a term of endearment that could apply to anyone regardless of skin color. Maybe she called everyone else “my love,” but I was the only one she called “mi negro,” despite the fact that my skin was so white that it’s almost transparent. My mother would have panic attacks any time I went out to play in the garden without a shirt or sunscreen, because you’re going to fry alive, she said. Thinking about it later, such a horrible threat, frying alive, maybe that’s where my fear of burning to death comes from. “Come put your shirt on, Cleve, you’re going to fry alive,” my mother screamed at me from the window, and I went back into the house feeling vulnerable, ridiculously underage. On the other hand, I felt a sense of triumph and strength when María Aleida called me “mi negro.” Me, the Great Mi Negro, King of the Jungle and the Currulao, whom the beautiful María Aleida secretly loved. And soon my mother and I returned to Chicago, and there were no more suicidal trucks in the chasms of fog, no penetrating smell of green, no shots of adrenaline from machete duels, no “my love” learning to dance the salsa, no maracuya either, or guanabana or arequipe, and most importantly never, never again the spectacular María Aleida calling me “mi negro.”

One of the students in my writing classes in Manninpox is a striking young woman. The truth is that I started paying more attention to her when I realized she was Colombian. I think she immediately brought to mind María Aleida. It occurred to me that her pretty face must be similar to María Aleida’s, her smile and her hair like María Aleida’s, and above all the color of her skin. I couldn’t help imagine the prisoner free, far from Manninpox, back home in Colombia, dancing salsa and whipping up arequipe in a copper pot with a big wooden spoon.

Interview with Ian Rose

Aside from the scrawls composed in the dark, the manuscript from the person who wanted to be known as María Paz was written in very clear handwriting, as if from a printer, the type of handwriting of someone who wants to be understood, and yet Ian Rose had trouble figuring out the additions compressed into the margins and the arrows that pointed to where the passages belonged. There were also pages missing, seventeen in all; the page numbers on the upper right hand corner every so often skipped a number. Where had the manuscript been during its journey looking for its match? How many hands had it passed through before reaching Ian Rose’s? Why had there been such delays? And why did Socorro finally decide to send it? What had become of the seventeen missing pages, perhaps lost but probably confiscated? Rose didn’t know. What he did know was that the pink paper, the type adolescents use to write notes, brutally contrasted with what was written on it. It wasn’t a love letter at all, although at times it appeared to be. The author was apparently a young Latina, Colombian it seemed. And Ian Rose did not have to read long to understand that she was a prisoner in Manninpox, from where she wrote the story of her life to send it to the teacher of the writing workshop that had been offered for the inmates. That person was no other than his son, Cleve, and it just so happened that Manninpox was only ten minutes away from the house in the mountains. Which wasn’t a coincidence, after all — the reason Cleve had volunteered to teach there and not at some other state prison was because it was so close. There is no such thing as coincidence — just as it wasn’t coincidence that of all the prisoners with whom Cleve dealt, he became close with one who was Colombian. Apparently, the Andes had left more of a mark on him than his father had imagined.

Tearing into that package had been like opening Pandora’s box: hordes of phantoms escaped and perched on Ian Rose’s shoulder to stay. Each one of the lines written by that young woman directly or indirectly spoke to him of Cleve, and reading and rereading those lines offered an opportunity to discover things about his son’s life that he had never known. About his life and about his death. Here and there, Ian Rose thought he found signs, real or imagined, that the author had some connection to Cleve’s death. Some link, although Rose wasn’t exactly sure what. But she had to know something, even if she had written this before Cleve died, even if she had written it thinking that he was still alive, although in fact he may have already been dead without her knowing it. She must have known something, and Ian Rose sifted through those pages like an archaeologist looking for some clue.

The young woman even mentioned an incident that he was familiar with: Cleve had struck a bear on his motorcycle one moonless night when he was returning from the prison through the woods. Nothing had happened to him that time, miraculously, and apparently nothing serious had happened to the bear. Back home, when he had settled down a bit, he told his father what had happened. He said it had been very dark and after a forceful blow he ended up laid out on the road, stunned, confused, not sure what invisible and supernatural force had come over him and made him roll on the ground. Until he saw the black mass a few feet away. It was the bear, getting up, apparently unhurt as well and going into the woods. The following morning, during breakfast, the two Roses took up an old discussion. As he had done many times, the father insisted that the son buy a car. He’d give him the money. He wouldn’t take it? Fine, then he could have his mother’s Toyota. Every time Edith stayed in her ex’s house, she’d leave some item behind before departing, as if to assert ownership over that place although she had never lived there. Among the things that she had bequeathed, there were the dog Otto, the cello, and a red Toyota, all of which Rose had taken in lovingly and cared for with special deference, as if they were a promise that one day their owner would come back to stay.

The Toyota was in good shape, and the day after the accident with the bear, Ian offered it to Cleve in exchange for the bike. But Cleve wasn’t in the least bit willing to make such a swap. He said he’d prefer to ride out his life on his motorcycle, that’s exactly what he said, and on it he’d ride to his death some time later, not in the Catskills but in the outskirts of Chicago, after losing control, crashing violently against the metal railing, and flying through the air, bike and all. He broke his back in various places from the fall, and rolled more than 130 feet in the ditch bordering the highway, and his body was pummeled by stones and his skin torn by branches before ending up among some bushes. The road had little traffic; there were no witnesses to record what had happened. Because it was considered an accident, only the highway patrol and the paramedics attended to the body. But Ian Rose could not get out of his head that his son’s death had been less an accident and more the fulfillment of some doomed destiny.

“I think it was in the cards,” he tells me. “For me it was something expected, which could have been prevented. You understand. Something that I could have stopped.”

Before the package had arrived, Rose had always tried to ignore Manninpox prison, which hadn’t been easy. Like he told me, you need to do a lot of yoga and take very long walks in the woods to go on with your life when the agony of strangers is just around the corner.

“It’s not the most pleasant thing in the world to have a women’s maximum security prison up the road from where you sleep,” Ian Rose tells me. “If the concept of men locked up is perverse, women caged up is outright monstrous.”

He had bought the house not knowing what was nearby. The real estate agent hadn’t told him anything, perhaps knowing he’d lose his client. And indeed he would have. But Rose had fallen in love at first sight with the house; everything about it had seemed a fulfillment of his dreams: the beauty of the surroundings, stone chimneys, high ceilings, spacious rooms, oak floors, the silence and splendid views. And while he was looking at it, his dogs had taken over the surrounding woods and did not want to leave. Besides, the price was unbeatable, so Rose took the offer on the fly without investigating the reason it was such a bargain.

“I’m a liberal guy,” he asserts, “not sure I like the idea of locking up people as punishment so society can function. I find it appalling that two-thirds of the population of the United States trembles at what the other third can inflict on us, or that one-tenth of the population spends their lives in cages so the other nine-tenths can live in peace. And yet, if someone gave me the keys of all the cells of all the jails in the country and told me, ‘The freedom of the criminals is in your hands,’ I’d return the keys without using them.”

He felt for the girls in Manninpox, but the truth was that he wouldn’t have liked to come upon one of them hiding in his garage, or rummaging through his kitchen. If Ian Rose didn’t want to think about Manninpox, it was because he did not know what to think. So he sidestepped the issue. The prison was some nine or ten miles from his house, up the road that blocked the view of the landscape those early mornings when he watched by the window. Even the name Manninpox sickened him. He hadn’t seen all of the prison’s structures up close, but he could imagine them; like all humans, he had a vivid impression of what a prison was. Where did such an impression come from? Maybe the movies or television, or some book or painting, or even some photograph… but he had the feeling that things went beyond this, that the issue was more complicated than he imagined.

“The concept of prison is so clearly engraved in our minds,” he tells me, “it’s almost as if we were born with it. Same thing with the grave. That sensation of being buried under the earth, with all the terror it implies, must also be innate. It’s not philosophy; it’s just common sense. We know what it is to take a deep breath, and we know how much space we need to move around. Thus, we deduce negatively what it would be like not being able to do either; we can imagine what it would be like to suffocate for lack of air, or to suffer a heart attack from the claustrophobia of being squeezed into a narrow cave. The grave, prison: different versions of the same thing.”

In Ian Rose’s mind, Manninpox was a series of stark, immense interior spaces, six or seven floors of cages pressed on top of each other like a vertical zoo where the animals were only allowed the minimum living space. The outside was probably a great bulk of dark concrete with sharp angles, surrounded by barbed wire and electrified fences. A simple, impenetrable, abject monument in the middle of that idyllic greenery of pine, maple, and birch. Compared to such an imposing structure, the natural inhabitants of those woods — the black bear, the red fox, or the white-tailed deer — were dwarfed. That corner of the universe had fallen under the shadow of that fortress of cement, in which who knows how many women were packed in, making the air heavy with their distress and overwhelming nature itself with their invisible but unavoidable presence.

“It used to be that every time I thought about the place I’d get goose bumps,” he says, “as if its caged women were breathing down my neck. Knowing that they were locked up used to make me claustrophobic. That’s why I didn’t think about Manninpox.”

Sometimes he couldn’t help but think about the prison, like when his dogs barked at night. During the day, he simply avoided looking in that direction and forgot it was there. He was successful at this for half of the year, but when the trees grew bare, its blackish silhouette loomed in the distance like a scorched field in the middle of the white landscape. Ian Rose knew this was an optical illusion, but it disturbed him anyway. And he was unlike Cleve, who wasn’t the kind to run away from things or stick his head in the sand. During their first winter after moving in, Cleve had tried to talk to his father about Manninpox.

“He was obsessed,” Ian Rose tells me, “to the extent that I had to ask him to stop. I told him, ‘Forget about it, Cleve. It’s bad enough that it’s there; you don’t have to make it worse by reminding me.’”

But Cleve seemed hypnotized by the place. He rode out on his bike, each time getting closer to the edge of the restricted zone; he started frequenting a dive called Mis Errores Café-Bar, right on the border between the free world and the fortress of the inmates. Rose the father knew that Rose the son had begun to spend odd hours of the day there, in that café with a Spanish name.

“It had to be in Spanish,” he says. “My Errors Café—such guilt and remorse only work in Spanish, or in Catholic.”

After Cleve’s accident, and especially because of the arrival of the package, Rose the father began picturing his son at Mis Errores with his cup of coffee, probably overwhelmed or dazzled by the nearness of the prison. He tells me that growing up Cleve was a shy kid, and he felt more at ease around dogs than around people. In that they were very much alike, but only in that. Rose the father had always felt that he was a rather average individual, but in his son he’d noticed a burgeoning sensitivity that allowed him to detect things that for others went unnoticed, and even beware of them before they happened. Like an earthquake, for example. Once, when they were living in Bogotá, Ian had heard his son say that there was going to be an earthquake, and sure enough a few hours later the earth shook dramatically, not in Colombia but in Chile. This left the father befuddled. He wasn’t sure if this meant that the child’s antennae of premonition were faulty or if in fact they were so sensitive that they could transcend borders. In any case, it was clear that a vibration as intense as the one emitting from Manninpox could not be ignored by Cleve, who had found at Mis Errores the passageway into that other dimension of reality, of women living in the shadows. It pulled him in like a magnet. He had set his mind on penetrating the walls and barbed wire and tried it a few times until he was hired as the head of a writing workshop for the inmates. How? Rose the father wasn’t sure how Cleve had done it. But he knew that’s where his son was headed each time that his son turned left into the road on his motorcycle.

“You smell like cold soup,” he told Cleve when he returned. “No doubt you were sticking your nose into that place.”

From Cleve’s Notebook

I find the idea that salvation can be found through writing trite. I get annoyed when literature is treated as a cult, or culture a religion, or museums temples, or novels bibles and writers prophets. And I can’t stand those lefties who pretend to speak for “those who have no voice,” or those well-known, more “right-minded” writers who descend from their towers for a few hours every month so that America sleeps a little better thinking that in fact things are not so bad for prisoners in this country, that they have stopped being so bad and have become a little better because someone has had the charity of teaching them how to write. In the past, prisoners looking for a miracle recited an Our Father, studied the Talmud, or paid a good lawyer. Now they write memoirs. And that’s fine, as long as no one tries to sell them the fact that by doing so they’re going to be happy or rich or forgiven by a society that will take them in like black sheep washed clean by the sacrament of literature. The only truth is that being a prisoner is a fucking misery. And yet, I have great hopes now that they have hired me to teach a writing workshop for the prisoners at Manninpox. There has to be an honest way to do it, a simple way to serve as a bridge so that they can do it for themselves, tell their stories, forgive themselves for whatever they have done or failed to do. Walter Benjamin said that narrative is the language of forgiveness. I want to believe that. And I’d like to make it possible for them to at least try.

Interview with Ian Rose

When he finished reading the manuscript, that very morning Ian Rose went into town, made a few photocopies and sent one to Samuel Ming, the editor of Cleve’s graphic novels. Aside from being the boy’s best friend, Ming was striking in his indecipherable mixed-race looks; he looked Asian but had dreadlocks, with a pair of tiny slanted eyes alongside an imposing Arab nose and large square teeth behind lips of a feminine delicacy. Rose the father sent him the manuscript with a note asking if he thought it was publishable, perhaps as an eyewitness account, or a denunciation, or maybe even as a novel. A few days later, when Ming let him know that he had looked at it, Ian Rose got in his Ford Fiesta and drove to New York City to talk with him personally.

“I don’t know what to tell you, Mr. Rose,” Ming told him honestly. He felt bad to see how, since Cleve’s death, the father seemed to have aged ten years, poor old man. Why add to the pain by telling him more of this dark story, and how could he warn him not to dig around too much, lest he find skeletons in the closet, so he decided to feign ignorance and not tell the old man that he was already familiar with this story. “Let’s see, Mr. Rose, how do I put it? Look, I don’t think it’s worth it to dwell on this too much. Take a trip, go to a beach and get some sun, give yourself the gift of two weeks in Paris, treat yourself to that. As for the manuscript you sent, I suggest that we leave well enough alone. Look, it’s clear that this young woman wants the details of, let’s say, her autobiography, known. And it seems that Cleve would have liked to help her. But the truth is that I don’t see how it’s possible. The text is unfinished. She’s unknown, not to mention getting her permission, which we haven’t considered. Besides, it’s not my genre…”

Ming, whom I have had the chance to interview also, assures me that in that moment he wanted to tell Mr. Rose about the dangers, lethal ones, that would come with publishing so much material, but decided not to burden him with more drama and simply said he couldn’t publish it.

“I’m sorry; I’ve put you in a spot,” Rose said to the editor.

“Not at all, Mr. Rose,” Ming replied, tapping him on the shoulder, which felt very bony, and thinking how true it was that there are sorrows that end up killing you.

Back at the house in the mountains, Ian Rose placed the package with the manuscript back on the bed in the attic.

3. From María Paz’s Manuscript

America doesn’t really exist, Mr. Rose. America is only in the dreams of those of us who dream of America. I know that now, but it took me years to figure it out. And to tell you the truth, it wasn’t me who discovered it but Holly, you know, Holly Golightly, my heroine, from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, although I’m nothing like her, or maybe just because of this, because it was you who taught me that not even Holly was like Holly, because Holly was in fact Lula Mae. After arriving in Manhattan she became chic and sophisticated, came up with the idea of the little black dress, the sunglasses to hide the all-nighter, and the cigarette case, all that. But the truth was that she had been born in Tulip, the shittiest little town in Texas, where she was known as Lula Mae. So Holly was a hick like me, which I didn’t like so much when I found out, I couldn’t see admiring a girl who was so much like me. Of course, that’s according to the book that you made us read, Mr. Rose, not according to the movie. If you remember, I made quite a scene in class because I was so disappointed with the ending of the novel. I thought it was a trick. I had seen the movie with Audrey Hepburn at least eight times, and it has a happy ending, one in which you feel as if you’re on air, dreaming, and then you come along telling us this is not the original story, because Truman Capote had not wanted for Holly to marry at the end, but to leave. Go far from there and continue looking for America, not finding it anywhere. And you also said that in the movie Audrey Hepburn opened her eyes too wide, as if they weren’t big enough already.

“But she’s very pretty.” I stood up for her.

“Yes, but she doesn’t have to keep her eyes so wide open. She seems to want to convince us that she’s a bit dumb, and is quite good at it.”

“Holly is more sad than she is dumb.”

“The one in the book. The one in the movie is dumber than she’s sad. Capote didn’t like her. He thought she wasn’t anything like the Holly of his novel,” you said, and that’s as far we got in our talk because the bell rang and I had to return to my cell.

But now I have to ask you a favor, don’t reveal my true identity. That is, if this thing I’m sending you is ever published. And I’m sorry if it seems presumptuous to imagine such things, but it’s your fault. You told us in class that the story of anyone’s life deserves to be told, and the protagonists of novels are common everyday people like us. That’s what you told us, and of course it sets things off in our heads, fills us with ideas. Illusions. Anyway, please don’t use my real name, or any other people’s, or places, nothing that could be used to identify me. Give me another name; do me that favor. Not for me, for my sister, who is the sensible one and gets upset when she hears things she’d rather not hear. After all, Holly has others call her Holly when her real name is Lula Mae, and if changing her name works for her, it works for me too. I don’t know if you remember my name, it has been a while, or maybe not so long, although it seems like years, as if a huge chunk of time has passed since then, you out there on one side and me in here on the other. You don’t know how much you are still with me, though. Here in Manninpox, memory is our only plaything. But it’s better if you have forgotten my real name, and whatever the case, it’s better if I don’t remind you. I’ll only say this, I was christened with the name of a country. Is that weird? It’s a Hispanic thing, you know, as the Americans say, naming people after countries, or animals, or virgins and saints. But you might understand, because although you are a gringo you weren’t spared, with that last name of a flower. So call me whatever you want, as long as it is still a country, or a city, like Roma or Filadelfia, or Samarcanda, say. The fact is that it is a tradition in our family. I don’t have to go any further than my great-grandmother, poor woman, who was named America María. But she revenged herself by christening her five children with names also pulled from an atlas: the oldest Germania María; then Argentina María; Libia María and Italia María, who were twins; and the youngest, a wretched woman who in time would become my grandmother, was to be called Africa María, a name that apparently sealed her destiny. The tradition continued with my mother, Bolivia María, and reached me. Not even my sister, who is younger, was saved. The boys were given real names, like everyone else, such as Carlos José, my uncle; Luis Antonio, my other uncle; Aurelito, my aunt Niza’s husband; my cousin Juan de Dios. But all us girls were saddled with geographic names, as if instead of a family we were a map. A whimsical tradition, from people who never traveled, all of them solid country folk, until my mother, Bolivia María, decided to take off. She was the first one to discover the world. The rest of them, forget it. It was so bad that my aunt Libia didn’t even know on what side of the planet the place she was named after was, and you should have seen how enraged she was when she found out that Libya was a Muslim country, and a communist one to boot. They’re lying, they just want to shock me, she said, making the sign of the cross. She was so Catholic she’d rather have been named Fátima, or Belén, or at least Roma, but not the pagan Roma of Nero, but the apostolic Roma of Peter. As you will have noted, Mr. Rose, all of us ended up with the middle name María so that the Virgin would protect us, as they said. A Hispanic thing, I’m telling you, saddling people with this trail of names, all so weird, or the same name repeated for each member of the family, or a combination of both, as was our lot. I know it’s a provincial thing, ridiculous. You don’t have to tell me. But for some reason I’d rather not abandon it, maybe because behind each María with a geographic name there has been a strong woman not to be messed with.

If you want, call me Francia. Francia María. Although I don’t actually look much like a Francia, a bit too sophisticated for me since I am more at home washing and ironing. Not Paris either, don’t want to be Paris Hilton’s namesake, what a disaster of a girl with a hotel’s name. Maybe something tropical, such as Cuba or Caracas, something that’s not my real name but that resembles it. As far as my little sister, let’s do something else, let’s exempt her from the family tradition because she hates to travel, venturing into the unknown spooks her. She gets a little lost if she has to move, or even switch rooms, or change her place at the table. If you move her bed a few feet one way or the other, she gets pissed off and throws a tantrum. And she was precisely the one who my mother named for the country that was farthest away. Don’t ask me which one because I can’t tell you, but imagine the most mocked and constantly remade of nations. Sometimes I wonder if the name marked her destiny as it had for my grandmother Africa, or if it was in honor of the country that my little sister behaved so strangely. Name her after a flower; she likes them: flowers, stones, trees, anything that’s bound to the earth, anything that remains in its place and doesn’t move or go. Call her Violeta, an aloof and temperamental flower. That’s what she’s like, my little sister, shy but tough. They might seem like opposites, shy and tough, but they’re not. I think the name Violeta will fit her well because it is a sweet name, silent almost, and yet it is only an n away from violenta. And the fact is, my sister Violeta can be violent. She bites. I have her teeth marks in my arm, a scar from one of her bites. My mother, let’s just leave her with Bolivia. I always thought the name fit her well, because Bolivia is a hardy country without any airs, a survivor. And that’s my mother, a survivor. She has passed away, of course. But when she was alive, she dealt with life without breaking down or complaining, until the day she died.

But let’s see what we have so far, like you used to say in class. My sister, Violeta; my mother, Bolivia; and that leaves me. You can call me… Canadá? No, too cold. No Holanda either, not for me; I don’t know any Dutch people. Siria? Too much trouble, with all that’s going on in the Middle East. Not California — too long, and it doesn’t go with María. What if you call me Paz? Or Paz María? Or better yet, María Paz. I like María Paz. La Paz, capital of Bolivia, daughter of my mother. In the novel you write I can be María Paz, named after a city in the clouds, sixteen thousand feet high. I like it because no one talks about La Paz and no one goes there.

You and I will not see each other again, Mr. Rose, so you won’t be able to record my testimony as you said you would once. It’s better this way, I don’t like tape recorders; the cassettes always remain and end up who knows where. Anyhow, I’m asking you to care well for these pages I’m sending you so they don’t end up in the wrong hands. It’s ironic that I’m writing you these things on rose-colored paper, but I couldn’t get white. I wanted a more formal kind of paper, not one for children, but this is what they gave me and I shouldn’t complain because at least they gave me something. Anyway, it would be best if you burn all this after you rewrite it, I mean, change it as you see fit, you’re the pro here. Burn the papers so there are no traces of my handwriting, which is like my signature. The truth is that I’ve been dreaming of telling you my story for a while, Mr. Rose, the whole thing, because you know parts of it already.

I don’t know if you remember the day they took away our shelves. It was two shelves for each inmate, four inmates per cell. Small shelves twenty inches long and eight inches deep, that’s it; and yet, we were never as demoralized as the day they took them from us. They called it PRSS: the Policy for the Renovation and Strengthening of Security. They pulled out that highfalutin name any time they wanted to fuck with us. Can you imagine? Just to take away our shelves, where we placed whatever little belongings we had: family pictures, hand lotions, a change of clothes, a bundle of letters, a little radio, a pack of chips or crackers, the small things any inmate was allowed to have. They took off the shelves and left the walls bare, as if to remind us that this is not a fucking home for anyone, not even a shadow of a home, nothing but a hole where we were locked up. While they were doing this, they had forced us to stay away from our cells all day long. When they allowed us to return, we realized all the shelves were gone. All our things were thrown on the bunk beds. They had torn apart the walls, confiscated most of our stuff, and whatever was left was just scattered there covered with dust. Like garbage. They needed us to feel we were garbage, that what belonged to us was garbage because we were no longer human. They were human, we were scum; those were the rules of the game. The day after that, we had the writing workshop with you, Mr. Rose, but our spirits were dragging. No one was paying attention, although you were trying, coaxing us from the blackboard, but we weren’t listening. We were furious and defeated, our minds poisoned and miles away from there. Until you stopped the class and asked what was wrong. And as if you had opened a dam, we let loose, cursing our fate and grumbling about our shelves and all the knockdowns we suffered every day in this deathtrap called Manninpox prison.

You said you were sorry about what had happened with such feeling that we knew you meant it. Then you said that you could offer us a consolation prize, a very simple one: language. Language! We looked up at you as we did sometimes, as if you were a child who says outrageous things, and you blushed on that scar right in the middle of your forehead, really something peculiar, that pallid scar shaped like a lightning bolt that sometimes comes alive flashing in rabid red, no doubt your oddest feature. And because your skin is so white, you can’t hide it, and blush often, like that time you tried to dig yourself out of the hole by saying that language made up the shelves where we put the things of our lives, so that our lives would make sense. You told us that we had to think seriously about everything that happened to us so that we could translate it, and place it there, in some order, within sight and reach, because language is the shelving and without language everything is a mess, confusing, tossed anywhere as if it were garbage. Those were your words.

I’m not going to lie and tell you that your words put us at ease, Mr. Rose, on the contrary, my hairs stood on end each time you started preaching, when you reminded me of a priest, sorry to say. Who did you think you were with your lightning-bolt scar, your precious little nose, and yellow shirts? It angered us when you tried to tell us what we had to do to pretend you were on our side, because when it came down to it, neither you nor anyone else was on our side; the rest of the world was out there, and we were in here, alone with our solitude.

On top of that, that day we were like lionesses because of the shelves. Real shelves made of concrete, that’s right, hard concrete, you know, twenty inches long and eight inches deep, and all you could come up with was your philosophy. But I’ve always remembered what you told us that day about the shelves of language, Mr. Rose. And that’s where the good part starts, and the bad part, because what you put on shelves is there to be seen but some things I’d rather not have seen. Nobody can imagine what I have gone through, and it’s best if they don’t imagine.

I’m always hoping that someday I’ll see you again, Mr. Rose. Imagine running into you and telling you my story so that you can turn it into a novel. You know some of it already from the exercises I turned in for the creative-writing workshop. I like to dream that your novel about me becomes a bestseller and they make a movie from it that wins an Oscar. It’s not that I want to be famous. For what? If you want a famous Colombian you have Shakira; I, on the other hand, am inmate number 77601-012. That’s the hard truth. I’m also not after money, and it seems you are even less so — if you wanted to become a millionaire you wouldn’t be sticking your nose in these deathtraps. That’s why I’m telling you, if they pay you a fortune for my story, which could happen, Mr. Rose, donate to a foundation for the preservation of the white-tailed deer, which is a god to the Tarahumara Indians and is in danger of extinction. It was you who told us about that, remember? You almost made us cry with the melodrama about the white-tailed deer. By then I was beginning to like your class, really starting to get the hang of it. There were only two things that I enjoyed about Manninpox those days: your class and the TV show House M.D., which was also on Thursday. From two to four in the afternoon your class, and at seven, reruns of House M.D. on TV. I spent all week waiting for Thursday.

The reason I’m writing you, Mr. Rose, is to unburden myself of everything I know, a confession of sorts that will bring me forgiveness and peace. I remember your first classes, when you had us do exercises so we would learn simple things, like how to tell a verb from a noun; and once you had us make a list of ten verbs that were important to us. We had to do it quickly, jotting down the first ones that came into our head, and among my ten, I wrote “phobia.” You said that you couldn’t accept it because phobia wasn’t a verb, but I defended my choice, I insisted it was a verb, in a way, because a phobia couldn’t exist if someone wasn’t there to feel it.

“Fine”—you were polite—“let’s say it’s somewhat a verb, but only somewhat.”

“No, Mr. Rose.” I laughed. “You don’t have to give it to me. I get how phobia is no verb.”

The next class you made us do another list, this time adjectives, writing the definition on the board. One of mine was “phobiaized” and I wrote beside it “consumed by phobias.” You asked if to be phobiaized wasn’t the same as to feel a phobia. And I responded that a person like you might feel a phobia, but one like me is fucked and phobiaized. That means that fear has gotten inside you, never to be released; it means that a person and her fears have become the same thing.

“Touché,” you said, and explained that it was a fencing term, touché, and it meant that I had won.

But in the following class, you struck back; you weren’t going to fall behind in the competition we had started. You came out with this thing about a philosopher who was called Heidegger, and this Heidegger talked about the difference between fear and anxiety. He said that fear was a feeling about something or someone, let’s say a barking dog or a cop who could arrest us, while anxiety was a state of mind about everything and nothing in particular, simply about the fact that we were in this world.

“According to that then,” you asked, “what do you feel here in Manninpox, fear or anxiety?”

“Fear about what we face in here?” I was the first to pipe up, “and anxiety over what we’ve left out there.”

You smiled, and I knew we were beginning to hit it off, to understand each other. Sorry to be so blunt, but the whole thing seemed as if you were just flirting with me, with this is this, and that is that, and this Heidegger, and that my mother’s ass, and if this means that and that means this… I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong, but I think if we had met in a club instead of in a prison, we would have begun to get it on, like they say, or to “feel each other out,” which is the same thing; I got that expression from Marbel, a girl who just got here a little while ago. But maybe we better drop this, could be a slippery slope.

I like thinking that everything I have gone through will be kept inside an envelope, and that they will put that envelope in the mail so that it flies where you are so that I remain clean and light, like a blank page, ready for whatever may come. Me on one end and on the other end, far away, in that tightly sealed envelope, my panic and fear and phobias and anxiety. That’s why in my dreams, I imagine how you will recount each chapter, each detail. I’d like to think of everything that has happened to me as a novel, and not life that’s been lived. As such, it is loaded with pain, but as a novel it is a great adventure. I asked for your address to send you this package. I’d have liked to have given it to you in person, but they took us away from you before I had a chance to. And, of course, they didn’t give me your address. Who the hell are we, the inmates, to be given personal information about normal people, what right do we have, why else would I want your address if not to extort money or threaten you? I told them that it was to send you the novel about my life, and they cracked up. A novel — you gotta be kidding — and life? What life did inmates have?

“You, what do you tell everyone one in your… novel? You tell them how you get up at six, eat at seven, and take a shit at eight?” Jennings, the most sarcastic, rotten guard asked me.

So they didn’t give me your address, Mr. Rose. I’ll have to come up with another way to get this to you; it will be like sending a message in a bottle.

Another little thing before starting, I’ll tell the story and you believe everything I tell. That’s something Dr. House doesn’t understand. He’s my favorite, that limp bastard, my favorite of all time. We hear inside that he has gone out of fashion in the rest of the world, that audiences grew sick of his insufferable pedantries, and it’s true the guy does think he’s hot shit. But in Manninpox, his fame is eternal, always the king, maybe because time stands still in here and what comes in never leaves. According to House, everyone lies. That’s why he doesn’t believe what his patients tell him or what other doctors recommend. He won’t trust anyone so he goes around suspicious, spying out deceptions, because he is absolutely convinced everyone lies, all the time and about everything. And although he’s wrong, he’s still my favorite; fucking House, he’s wrong. No one is better than he is at diagnosing an illness, nothing gets by him, but about the lying he’s way off. I know, because for many years I worked as a market investigator for a company that made cleaning products. That was before my life burst into a hundred pieces. I liked the job and I was good at it, one of the things I most regret was losing it. I had to go door to door asking things such as How many times a week do you clean the bathroom? or, Do you wash your lingerie in the machine or by hand? or, Do you think your house is cleaner or less clean than your parents’ house? Those types of things. Maybe it sounds dull to you, Mr. Rose, but it wasn’t. People are crazy at heart, as you know, and the topic of cleaning sets off their weirdness. They come up with some surprising responses, sometimes very funny. I was happy with what I was doing, till that dreadful thing took place. It happens sometimes: everything is going well and lightning strikes and tears you apart. I’m not even thirty yet and I’ve been to hell, there and back and there again.

But as I said, in that job I found out a few things. For instance, I discovered that when people respond to a survey, generally, they more or less tell the truth. Maybe they exaggerate or play down things, but only up to point. A middle-class woman may tell you that she takes two trips a year when she only takes one. But if she goes to her mother’s house in South Carolina, she’s not going to tell you that she goes to the Ritz in Paris. That’s why, Mr. Rose, if you get inspired to write my story, it has to be as you hear it from me: I’ll tell it and you believe me. I might lie to you a little bit, exaggerate, so feel free to rein things in or delve a little deeper when you see that I skip over something. But in general you have to believe what I say. That’s our deal.

There’s a novel called The Distant World of Christina, based on the painting Christina’s World by Andrew Wyeth, the American painter whom you know better than I do. Well, I found out about the painter and that portrait here in prison when I read the novel not just once, but three times. One, two, three. Three whole times from beginning to end before I met you. The author’s name is Jordan Hess and there was a picture of him on the back cover, big head with a ridiculous comb-over, all long on the sides and bald up top, should have just buzzed it all off like Andre Agassi, the divine bald. Who cares if he admitted to snorting heroin; to me he is still a god in sneakers. While I was reading that novel I told you about, The Distant World of Christina, I liked to think of Jordan Hess as Andre Agassi, even fell in love with him, I think. With Jordan Hess, not Agassi, or I should say, Hess as Agassi. I have that issue, sometimes I can’t separate fantasy from reality, maybe that’s why all this crap has happened to me. Anyway, I read that novel three times because it is one of the few that they have in the prison library. Of course, it wasn’t just because of that, but more because of what that paralyzed girl’s story meant to me, Christina, who in Wyeth’s painting drags herself on the dry meadow struggling to get to the home that glints in the distance where she can’t reach it. The artist painted the deadened legs lovingly, her hair long and black fluttering in the wind, her arms skinny. I don’t know if you remember this but my hair is long and black as well, and although you knew me when I was chubby, I’m skinny as a lizard now, like Christina or even skinnier. Her face is not completely visible in the painting because she’s mostly turned away, seated on the dry meadow in her pale pink dress. I imagined my own face on that disabled body, she paralyzed and me imprisoned, and I imagined that everything that happened to Christina was happening to me. I kept telling myself, if she could do it why can’t I, if she can get to that house glinting in the distance, why couldn’t I be free one day.

It was because of that book that I decided to take your class. I signed up right away when they announced that a writer was going to teach a class in the inmate rehabilitation program and that enrollment was open. I did it not because I imagined I could learn how to write — that seemed like an impossible dream, a dream I hadn’t even dreamed — the truth is that I signed up because I wanted to meet a writer in person, just to see what a writer was in real life. Maybe you’d look like Jordan Hess, or better yet, like Andre Agassi. I have to tell you I was quite surprised when I did meet you, so tall, so scrawny, so pale, with the little lightning bolt on your forehead, your cute freckles, and those short-sleeved Lacoste shirts and canvas sneakers you wore, those light-colored pants that would have fallen off if not for the tight belt. It looked like you had been dressed by your momma or come directly from the campus of a very expensive university, or from an old-fashioned tennis court. I grew concerned because this was no place for you, buried in this dark world, breathing this rotten air. It seemed as if you had come from very far away, and you looked clean and innocent, always freshly showered, but as if someone had sent you here by mistake. You even told us yourself, not that first class but the fourth or fifth class, that white prisoners had three to four times the suicide rate of blacks or Latinos, because the whites weren’t used to such harsh conditions. Of course, you could come and go as you pleased, you’d be in the prison for your classes a few hours every night; but even so, coming into this place is not something everyone can take. Soon after, I began to look forward to your classes, and it was much easier to put up with that face of a seminarian freshly shaved and shirts the color of baby chicks, although sometimes baby blue, and sometimes white, but always the alligator brand. It had even become a running joke among us, taking bets before class on the color of your shirt that day. I always bet yellow, and almost always won. But the most intriguing thing was that lightning-bolt scar; you must have taken some motherfucking whack on the head to get such a scar, which I thought was a mark of intelligence. Someone with a lightning-bolt scar is one of two things: Harry Potter or some brainiac, which is what I thought when I first saw you, even though another inmate, old Ismaela Ayé, a superstitious witch, had spread the rumor that the scar meant you had the gift of prophecy. And it might be so, who knows, it doesn’t seem like such an off-the-wall theory, but I still prefer mine because I just don’t get along with Ayé the witch. Others said it wasn’t a lightning bolt but the letter Z, like the mark of El Zorro. As you will see, everyone had a theory.

The marketing investigation company gave me a job right away. It was my first interview after having become free. That wasn’t so long ago, but it feels like prehistoric times or some earlier life. They noticed my good disposition and strong work ethic right away. Also, I was bilingual and the consumer survey business was made up of both Latinos and gringos. In the actual field, I had to deal with all types of people: blacks, Latinos, whites, Quakers, Protestants, evangelicals, Jews, hippies. Even Catholic priests. They probably hired me just because I was bilingual, but I made it a point to prove to them I was a good worker and that everything I did was done right, door-to-door surveys, focus groups, pantry checks. And don’t think it was easy; forcing your way into people’s houses and asking them questions about their personal habits required both talent and guts. It’s always risky because you’re out on the streets and the streets are the streets. In the bad neighborhoods, you get robbed, and in the good neighborhoods, doors get slammed in your face. You rely on your coworkers for everything, the only ones who defend you and stand up for you. Anyone who goes off on her own is as good as dead, vulnerable to any kind of assault. My coworkers pretended to be the musketeers, all for one and one for all, and as I said before, it’s a job for warriors, in which you have to earn the respect of others. You have to be forceful to break down the resistance and then quick and wily as a fox to find the psychological give-and-take that will grant you access. You also learn to be tolerant and take everything as it comes and respond properly to all those who say I can’t, or to come back later, or right now I don’t have any time, or not really in the mood, or get the hell out of here.

Mr. Rose, one time you said that I was intelligent. We were coming out of class when you said it. It was quite a surprise. No one had ever said that to me. I had been told that I was a good worker, that I was sharp, that I was pretty. But intelligent, never. I kept hearing the word all that afternoon, all that week, and to this very day. I like knowing that inside of me I have this little machine called intelligence, and that mine is working well, that it’s well oiled. I tell you things about my job as a market surveyor so that you know that this job was like the schooling that awoke an intelligence in me that perhaps had been dormant. Others begin their careers after they finish college, but I didn’t even graduate from high school. I was schooled as a market surveyor, house by house. And I was the best one on the team — well, one of the best. But what I did so well at work, I did not know how to do in the rest of my life. I haven’t been quite as smart about living as I have been about working. At work, everything was about precision and efficiency, while in my life everything has been about daydreaming, longing, and confusion.

You have to have a pretty strong stomach to be a market surveyor, I can assure you, because sometimes the inside of a house is a disgusting mess, and you also have develop a talent for looking away, because there are some weird things hidden in some houses that could cause you quite a shock. One time, I was at a front door talking with the man who had opened it, and after a few words I realized a woman was moving around in the house behind him. At first glance, I didn’t notice anything, but the second time the woman crossed my field of vision, I saw that her hands were bound in wire. Wire tight on her flesh. Can you imagine? I backed away terrified and went to the nearest police station, where they said that this wasn’t their problem and that they couldn’t do anything. At that time, I had just begun at the job and wasn’t aware of the rules, so my coworkers took me aside and read me the riot act: “Look, María Paz, sear this into your brain, rule number one, never ever for any reason call the police. No matter what happens.” My job was not to make accusations, they told me, or to be a snoop for the authorities. “If you ever have a problem you call us, but don’t even think about the police.” Anyways, that was an unusual case; you’re not usually going to be seeing poor women bound with wire.

What you do see everywhere is loneliness. An immense loneliness that can’t be fixed Sometimes when people let you in, it’s as if you are sinking into a well. It’s almost a physical sensation. Loneliness is like humidity: you can smell it; it sticks to your bones. There are times when you think, my God, I must be the first human being this person has spoken to in who knows how long. And they won’t let you leave, Mr. Rose. The survey is done, but they offer you more coffee, take out photo albums, anything to keep you there a few more minutes. One day, an old woman told me, “I’m so glad you came; early this morning I thought, I’m going to go crazy if I go one more day without saying good morning to someone.”

And don’t think it’s just the poor. The rich are also alone. Before working as a market surveyor, before I had ever set foot in a rich person’s house, I passed every now and then through their neighborhoods, and saw them from outside, from the dark street, surrounded by their very green gardens and recently mowed lawns, the figures inside with their lights on, floating in those bright and inaccessible rooms, like in a fantasy, like in Good Housekeeping, as if those people had died and gone to heaven. This is what America is, I used to think. Finally I’m seeing it. America is in there, in those houses. I imagined they were truly blessed, but the truth is that this is not always the case, Mr. Rose, not so blessed after all. One of things I found out is that in the end the telenovela that fascinated us so much when I lived with the Navas, which we wouldn’t miss an episode for anything in the world, had it right: The Rich Also Cry.

The unusual cases are just that, unusual; loneliness, on the other hand, is everywhere. And I learned another important lesson the time I saw the girl bound with wire. I learned to keep what I saw to myself, because my job wasn’t to be a Good Samaritan or to save souls. I never called the police or stuck my nose in people’s business, except when I noticed that children or animals were being mistreated: that’s where I drew the line. Children covered in filth because of parental neglect, dogs locked up in a patio howling from abandonment, those kinds of things. Those I did report, at least. Because if there is something I can’t stand it’s the smell of sadness in children and animals.

Anything that has to do with cleanliness I’m interested in. I didn’t spend all those years investigating people’s hygienic habits for no reason. Hygiene and filth, two sides of the same coin. You might think that it’s nonsense to go around asking people whether they use OxiClean or Shout to wash out stains on their clothes, or if they buy toothpaste with fluoride or baking soda. Maybe you think it’s silly, not very interesting, but it actually was. One time I was questioning a graphic designer. It was unusual for men to agree to be interviewed, but you could get them by offering coupons as motivation. Coupons for food at a certain market or for gasoline at a certain station. Anyhow, this guy was around forty, divorced. His name was Paul, I still remember, his name is seared in my mind. We were in the kitchen of his apartment and I was asking him questions, nothing special, same as always. “Do you use anything to whiten your clothes?” Things like that, and the guy comes out with the following: he tells me that when he was a teenager he discovered that his mother would remove the pillowcases from his and his brother’s pillows and wash them. He and his brother snorted a lot of coke and their noses bled. At night, the blood would stain the pillowcases and every morning the mother would get up to wash them. He imagined that his mother did it so her husband wouldn’t see the stains, or maybe even so that he and his brother wouldn’t see them.

On another occasion, I was right in the middle of the bit with the six undershirts, and the woman I was interviewing all of a sudden begins to weep buckets. The bit with the six undershirts entails arriving at a house with a bag that contains six undershirts of different grades of white. They’re numbered so that the person classifies them from the cleanest to the dirtiest. So there I was with this woman, young, very white features, comfortably middle class. I took out the undershirts, and as she inspected them one by one she told me, “This one is filthy, this one smells funny, this looks yellow under the arms, number three is not bad. In fact, I’d say number three is the cleanest, or wait, maybe not, when you look at it closely there’s a small stain here. Let me look again, perhaps the cleanest one is four.” And so on. I thought that she even looked like she was enjoying the whole game thing when she started crying and crying and crying, and there wasn’t anything I could do to console her. I asked her what was wrong, patted her on the back. “Please don’t cry; it can’t be so bad.” But she didn’t stop. So I called Corina, my colleague, who was surveying another resident in the same block. “Cori, girl,” I told her on the cell, “come help me deal with this case of major depression.” I stayed with the weeping woman while Cori went to the grocery store around the corner to get an apple treat, saying it would calm her down. As we prepared the tea after Cori returned, the woman I was interviewing strips off the turtleneck she’s wearing, unclasps her bra and takes it off… and she shows us. There was a bright red stain that started at her neck, covered the left side of her chest completely, and continued downward toward her waist. But it wasn’t a plain smooth red mark, no, not that at all. It was a fucking thing in and of itself, truly monstrous, the skin thickened and solid — think of the mark of Cain but a grotesque version. It was a severely malformed growth, to put it plainly, of such a nature that Cori and I grew pale when we saw it.

“And this stain? How do I get it off? You know so much about stains, can you tell me how to get this off?” the woman asked Cori and me, continuing to cry. Now it was her asking the questions, so painful and fucked up that Cori and I had no idea how to answer.

Those were the kinds of things we would see, not every day, but often enough. Cori told me she once interviewed a woman who told her that her boyfriend liked for her to urinate in his mouth, and that it wasn’t dirty for her but exciting.

“You see?” Cori, who had been at the job longer than I had, told me. “See? Each human being has a way of deciding what’s dirty and what’s not, in that matter there are no rules.”

And I’ll say it again, the best thing about that job was the friendships with my coworkers, especially the six closest: Jessica — although she worked somewhere else — Juanita, Sandra, Sofia, Cori, and Margo. And me, of course, I was the seventh, and the seven of us were inseparable, think of the days of the week or of Snow White’s dwarves. But my favorite one without a doubt was Cori. She wasn’t pretty but she was brave, sharp, supportive, a good worker, a good friend, and with a sense of humor. That was the best thing about Cori; she knew how to laugh. I’m talking about a big woman here, that’s what Cori was. Her full name was Corina Armenteros, and that’s still her name today, although she has returned to Chalatenango, in El Salvador. She had an Achilles’ heel, my friend, my friend Cori, a single weakness: she wasn’t pretty. Don’t get me wrong, she wasn’t ugly or unpleasant either, she simply wasn’t pretty, and this made her life harder. A hard life like the rest of us. She had been raped when she was fifteen, back in Chalatenango, and a child had been born of that situation, Adelita, who stayed with her grandmother when Cori decided to try her luck in America. Adelita was everything to Cori: her daughter, her life, her eyes, and her ears and only love. “Look out!” we’d say. “Run while you can. Cori’s at it again with Adelita’s pictures.” Because she’d pull them out at the slightest pretext to show them to whoever was there. Cori wasn’t my friend; she was my sister, even more so than my blood sister, whom I loved more than anything in the world. But you couldn’t count on Violeta, and I’m not condemning her, that’s just how she was, maybe because of her illness. On the other hand, I trusted Cori with my life and she trusted me with hers. But as bad luck would have it, I wasn’t there for her when she really needed me and that soured our friendship, and was ultimately, or at least I think this is so, what made her return to El Salvador.

I wasn’t with her, and did not behave my best under the circumstances. She had been thinking for a long time about returning; from the day I met her, she had dreamed of going back because she couldn’t stand being so far from away from her daughter, the thought of not seeing her grow, not being by her side to protect her in case of need. What happened that night pushed her to take action. And it was my fault. What happened that night. But I’ll tell you one thing, Mr. Rose. Cori didn’t deserve it. Nobody deserves things like that, least of all her. You’ll see. It’s not as if Cori had an explosive sex life. I imagine a lot of factors could have influenced what happened: the rape at such a young age, the lack of confidence in her body, a life dedicated to work, all of this combined to make her a rather demure girl, not a lot of parties, drank very little, no sex. Greg, my husband, liked her; he, who watched over even my female friends, was always glad to see Cori because she knew how to talk to him. She asked him about his time as a policeman, talked to him about politics, Vietnam, and Korea. Like I said, Cori was bright and well informed. One day, I decided to introduce her to Sleepy Joe, my brother-in-law, Greg’s younger brother. She was single and so was he, although you never could tell with him, his civil status has always been uncertain and fluid. But at that time he wasn’t seeing anyone on a steady basis, at least not publicly. So I had the brilliant idea to introduce them and I began to devise a plan to bring them together. Greg had no opinion either way; it was all the same to him, although he did warn me that these things don’t usually work. “He’s a peach,” I told Cori about Sleepy Joe, and told Joe the same thing about Cori. And I wasn’t lying, at least about Joe I wasn’t lying, damn, if that boy wasn’t fine, a tasty papi by any measure. A white boy, but yummy, looked like Viggo Mortensen, one of those who arrived from the poor side of Europe, a country named Slovakia, where his parents were from, although he had been born in Colorado, just like my Greg. That’s the picture I painted for Cori when I proposed the blind date, but she didn’t know who Viggo Mortensen was, had never seen one of his films or heard of Slovakia. We would go to the movies at four, Greg and me, her and Joe.

I had my reasons for setting up Joe with someone, and they were pretty important reasons. Maybe later on, I’ll explain. For now, Mr. Rose, be content in knowing this: it’s not easy to have a brother-in-law like that, especially if your husband is thirty years older than you. Cori was very hesitant about the whole thing; first she’d say yes, then no, then this, then that, making one excuse after another, but I’d spur her on and slowly she began to get excited about the whole thing. Because she was always so disheveled, I took her to the beauty parlor to get highlights and a cut. The hairdresser was a Portuguese woman who brandished her scissors asking, “Scaladinho? Scaladinho?”

And we responded, “Yes, yes, scaladinho.”

So the hairdresser dug in her scissors in with gusto and the locks of Cori’s hair fell to the floor. “Scaladinho?”

“Yes, go, woman, don’t be afraid, scaladinho! Don’t be afraid to give that hair some life. Make it rise!” But after all of this, the cut did not come out as well as expected. This haircut was awful, no style. Her head looked like freshly sucked-on mango seed, the tufts of fiber standing on end, and my poor Cori looked uglier than before. But there wasn’t anything we could do then, aside from laugh about the catastrophe. I told my friend that to make up for it I’d buy her some black pants with a tight stylish cut and very sexy high-heeled sandals, because she was one of those girls who buys her getups in the Salvation Army, and if I left it to her she might show up in a coffee-colored suit, with white nurse’s shoes, and a black purse. She didn’t know a thing about updating her wardrobe, not my Cori, nor about the latest fashion trends, because every fucking dollar she made, she’d send directly to Adelita in Chalatenango.

We chose a Friday for the big date, and that afternoon we left work together for my house and made her undergo a session of “extreme makeover.” Eye shadow on the lids, eyeliner, mascara, rice powder, perfume, lip gloss, the works. I pulled out whatever I had in my kit in the drawer and threw it all on, and to top it off, I lent her a pair of earrings and tried to rearrange as well as I could that nightmare on her head.

“So?” I asked, when I finally let her look at the mirror.

“Unrecognizable” was all she said.

And what was the result of our little conspiracy? Let’s just say Greg was right. Sleepy Joe didn’t make it to the movie theater. He called to get out of it with whatever excuse and to say he’d catch up with us at the restaurant. He made it alright, but he might as well not have, the jerk went off and started talking to Greg in Slovak, because that’s how they were, with everyone else, they spoke English, but between them always Slovak. And rude Greg, instead of calling him out for it, instead of making things easier, began to play along with his little brother, and the two of them got lost in their own private exchange, completely forgetting us. We got even by loading ourselves up with gin on the rocks. Corina made me laugh that night. Because of her awful pronunciation in English, the waiter could not understand her when she asked for a gin, which came out the way she said it as “tzin.”

“Please, one tzin.”

And the waiter: “What?”

“Please, one tzin.”

“What?”

Until Cori got pissed off and ordered in a defeated tone: “One tzin and tonic without tonic.”

I will never get over her absence. I have not turned to any of my friends during this jam I’m in right now, fucked and locked up in this hole, but Corina, I’d have called right away, and I know she’d have done anything to get me out of here even if it meant kicking down these walls. I comfort myself with memories of her, going over the days of our friendship, so playful, so joyful, so true, regretting what happened that night, which was partly my fault. You have to understand, anybody else may not have been affected as much, but Cori was heartbroken. Her soul was shattered, as they say, and bruises appeared over all her body. That Friday in the restaurant, Sleepy Joe and Greg threw back their beers. No interactions with us at all. Think of the Tower of Babel but as a table, the Table of Babel, with the two of them on one end chatting in their hellish language, and the two of us facing them, going at it in Spanish and having a good time at our end, above all because we were using our language, which always makes things easier. Until it grows late and the time comes for everyone to go home, and my rude-ass brother-in-law, who all this time hasn’t even turned to look at Cori or spoken a single word to her, throws his arms over her shoulders and takes her away. They left the restaurant together, Sleepy Joe half shoved her into a car and took her. I didn’t even get a chance to say good-bye, or to ask her what she thought about the unexpected turn the blind date had taken at the end. Like I said, she’d had a few drinks, but nothing outrageous. She was a little buzzed, but walking fine, although granted, with that good bit of tzin still in her. Greg and I walked back to the apartment, which was a few blocks away, and that weekend we didn’t hear from Cori and Sleepy Joe again.

“Should I call her?” I wanted Greg’s advice.

“Leave her alone, woman!” he responded. “Let her be, she’s not a child.”

On Monday, Cori didn’t show up to work, so when I got out, I went to her house. She opens the door and makes me come in, but something’s wrong. I don’t know; she’s acting weird, different. Quiet and evasive, she who was always so cheery. It took some effort to get her to tell me what had happened Friday night; actually at that moment, she did not tell me anything, some time had to pass before she told me that Sleepy Joe had raped her.

“The strange thing is that he didn’t have to,” she told me, “because I’d have let him have sex with me anyway, I was ready. I had made up my mind not to let all that makeup and the tight pants be for nothing. It was me who suggested he come to my place. That was the purpose of the date, no? That’s why I put on heels and drank all that gin. That’s what it was about, no? It was all about getting laid, wasn’t it? And yet, your brother-in-law raped me and abused me, not once but various times, very brutal, you know. I begged him to stop, begged him no more, but it was as if he was possessed. There came a point when I thought he was going to kill me.”

That’s what Corina told me, and I have to tell you, Mr. Rose, I didn’t know how much of it to believe. It’s a fact that she was no sex expert, that she didn’t have much experience in the field, and the little that she had had been precisely the rape back in Chalatenango when she was barely fifteen. That’s why I had my doubts. It did seem as if she had been beaten, that’s true: with bruises here and there, but not wounds or anything. The biggest damage seemed to be psychological, and she seemed so hurt, so depressed that I took her to the doctor, and it was there how I found out how Sleepy Joe had violated her, hurting her in the front and tearing her a bit in the back. He penetrated her in whatever hole he could find and left her with her breasts, mouth, and genitals swollen. “But what can you do, that’s the way passionate sex is,” or so I tried to explain to my friend Corina.

“Look, chica,” I said to her. “Sometimes after a good fuck you feel as if you’ve been crucified, barely able to sit down, walking like a duck, your jaw a bit unhinged from so much sucking dick. And maybe your man is in bad shape too, bruised from top to bottom, holding his balls in his hands, his cock turned to compote, his back all scratched, his tongue scalded, his neck with bite marks. That can happen. But sex doesn’t stop being pleasurable because of that. You get what I’m saying, chica? You understand?”

“This was different,” she said.

“Haven’t I heard you yourself say that some things that are clean for some people are dirty for others? Maybe some things that seem terrible to you might seem normal to someone else.”

“This was something else,” she repeated.

I had read somewhere that a woman who has been raped relives the rape every time she has sex. That’s the picture I had in my head about Cori, and that’s why I was talking to her as if she were a little girl. Me, the know-it-all, the experienced one, and she, innocent, ignorant, and psychologically damaged.

“He used a stick,” Cori told me. “A broken-off broomstick. He shoved a stick in me.”

“A stick? He shoved a stick in you?”

“A broken-off broomstick.”

Mother of God. Then it was possible that she had gone through her own Golgotha. But what kind of monster commits rape with a broken-off broomstick? What pleasure can he get out of that? I didn’t understand. Sleepy Joe, a sexual maniac? An impotent one? It didn’t make sense; I couldn’t see such a masculine guy as someone who was impotent or who had to replace his natural equipment for something artificial. I couldn’t let it go and finally decided to ask him directly, and of course, he denied everything.

“Your friend is a prude,” he told me. “Doesn’t know how to have fun. She’s a tight-ass.”

I didn’t know what to believe. Everything could have been the product of your fears, I repeated to Cori, and she ended up admitting it was possible. Maybe she said it so I’d leave her alone about the issue, because she didn’t like discussing it. Who knows in what cubbyhole of her mind she archived it, because even so she let out a few words about it now and then.

“I think he was praying,” she told me one of those days.

“Praying? Who was praying?”

“Your brother-in-law.”

“You mean he prayed that night in your house? Before he did what he did, or after?”

“During… like in a ceremony.”

“Of course, those Slovaks are worse Holy Rollers than us Latin Americans. For them religion is like a mania, they bless themselves, they kneel, they carry rosaries in their pocket, and the children dream about becoming pope and as adults use their savings for pilgrimages to the Virgin of Medjugorje. They’re fanatics; there’s no other word. Each nationality comes with its defects.”

“No, María Paz, it wasn’t that. What he did with me was an ugly ceremony.”

“An ugly ceremony?”

“What he was doing to me. Ugly, very ugly. I mean the fear more than anything.”

“Oh, I know, you must have been so afraid. Poor girl, it was all my fault, for letting you go with such a brute.”

“That man knows how to make you feel fear. He delights in watching you tremble with fear, María Paz, for hours. He takes you to the limit, little by little, systematically. An expert at it.”

I insisted on comforting and indulging her as if she were a frightened little girl, and after that, Corina did not want to or could not tell me any more, probably disgusted that I was never actually listening, and after that I didn’t see her again because she quit her job and returned to Chalatenango, El Salvador. Just like that, all of a sudden and without the slightest warning, without giving me a chance to beg her to stay, not to leave me, because we were like sisters. Because she was my biggest support, and I’d have wanted to explain to her that an incident could not invalidate such a strong and hardy friendship, because these things pass and are forgotten but the friendship remains. But she didn’t even give me a chance. Corina made the decision out of nowhere and afterward there was no going back. She did offer a word of warning. When she called me to say good-bye from the airport, minutes before she got on her plane.

“Open your eyes, María Paz,” she said. “Open your eyes and be careful. That boy is sick; I know what I’m talking about.”

Sick, my little brother-in-law? Back then, recently married, I’d have said exactly the opposite; he looked very healthy. True, he was strange, off his rocker, fierce, and a gangster, but what child from a poor neighborhood doesn’t grow up to be somewhat like that? Corina had been my teacher, Mr. Rose, to deny that would be absurd and ungraceful. Just as you showed me how to write, she showed me how to live. At work, in the streets, how to deal with people and behave in America so that you were accepted by the Americans, how to be a friend: she was the teacher and I was the apprentice. But in this particular and delicate case, the episode with Sleepy Joe, I was convinced, or, better yet, I knew that I was the one who was right. She was the novice and I was the veteran.

Cori never forgave me for not believing her, not supporting her, not telling her: You’re right, my friend. I’m with you, one hundred percent, I understand the horror you must have lived through that night, and it pains me as if it had happened to me. My brother-in-law is an asshole, garbage, a sad lump of dog shit. I’ll ask my husband to forbid him from ever entering our house again. Because that’s what Cori expected of me, and I knew it. But I had my own opinions on the matter. The truth was that I was fascinated by Sleepy Joe despite his weirdness and his rudeness. Worse yet, frequently I dreamed that we made love. And in those dreams what need was there for a broomstick? With what he was naturally endowed, the man performed extremely well.

What can I do? I’ll never get Cori back, but I do have to drag along with my own life. So I might as well make an effort with this writing thing, because telling you offers some relief and clears my mind, and you might as well know that these days it is my only support along with the Virgin of Agarradero. So I go on with my task, and listen to another story, something that I heard from a widow I interviewed, who lets out that she doesn’t wash her bedsheets because her husband, who had been dead for seven months, slept in them, and that at night she wants to reencounter his smell, his presence in the bed. Hearing this, I managed not to say anything; such drama needs to be infiltrated slowly, so I began asking tactfully: “How do you do it, señora? Aren’t the sheets a little bit filthy after so much time?” And she says that they aren’t, that they’re just as he left them, because she’s the one who washes herself every night before she goes to bed. Every night she washes every part of her body, even her hair, and puts on a fresh clean nightgown, so that she won’t have to wash the sheets. Isn’t that crazy? Cori was right that everyone draws their own line between the clean and the disgusting. You know what the Arabs think of someone like you or me who uses toilet paper? They wash themselves well after number two and they consider toilet paper a dirty Western habit. They may be right.

I’m wondering if you’ll be able to see me as character material after finding out all these ordinary things about my life. You introduced us to Lizzie from Pride and Prejudice and Poe’s Eleonora. These are protagonists; I’m just one other woman from the bunch, or worse than that, I’m merely 77601-012 in the last hole on earth. Well, I’m also one who has lived through a tremendous drama, but I’m not so sure that is enough to make a character in a book. I also wonder if someone at some point will be able to read about me with the same passion that I read about Christina, you know, from The Distant World. When I told you once how much that book had fascinated me, you grimaced and told me it was a young adult book, that is, of minor literary value. I responded that it was the first novel I had read and therefore of major value to me, incomparable, even. To this day, I still believe that I’d be content to simply be the protagonist of a minor little novel, someone like Christina. I’d like to tell Jordan Hess that I read his book in a trance, feeling great tension, as you would expect from a prisoner devouring a book in her cell, well, a prisoner who enjoys books, like me, because there are others who despise books, fear them even. In any case, I suspect a writer has no idea how close he can become with a reader. I think it would frighten the writer if he really knew. Because a book is not just a story and words, it is something physical that you possess. The Distant World of Christina was locked up in the cell with me, and lying on the bunk with me, and when they allowed us to go to the courtyard, it sat beside me in the sun. It absorbed my tears, was splattered with my drool and stained with my blood; that’s not a metaphor, it was literally stained with my blood, you’ll see why later. I often caressed the book. Jordan Hess would probably be upset to learn all this, and maybe you are also, because writers think of readers as ghosts. Shadows out there, far away, nameless, blurry, of whom they will never know anything about. A writer goes to a bookstore and asks, “How many copies of my books have sold?” And maybe the writer is told, “Two hundred and fifty thousand.” There it is, two hundred and fifty thousand readers. But that’s not how it is. Each reader is a person, and each person a knot of anxieties. While I read The Distant World of Christina, I put my nose to the pages to smell the paper, but also to try to smell him, Jordan Hess himself. I’d have liked to tell him how much I liked the book and protest that the ending wasn’t very convincing. This one too, I’m always dissatisfied with endings, I’m always expecting something more, a kind of revelation that never comes. When I finish a book, I feel a kind of unease, that there was something important there I missed, but not knowing quite what. It must be very difficult to finish a novel. I wonder how you will end mine, and I hope it’s nothing tragic. In any case, I’d rather it be a weak ending than a tragic one; I should just tell you once and for all.

One day you made me laugh in class and I always laugh again when I remember the episode. We had gone through several classes working on a story you had assigned and I just wanted to finish it, no matter what. But my story had too many characters and each of them had too many things happening to them, so there was no way.

“Read it, Mr. Rose,” I asked you, “and advise me on how to finish it.”

“I don’t know, María Paz, I really don’t know,” you said after you had read it. “This thing you’ve written is too tangled up.”

“Just dictate an ending to me,” I insisted, “because I can’t take it anymore.”

“Alright, I’m going to give the advice that my friend Xavier Velasco offers for such cases. You have a pencil? Then write: ‘And everyone died.’”

So I was telling you about how I wanted to complain to Jordan Hess. But how would I get in touch with him if I didn’t know him and didn’t have his phone number or e-mail address? When it came down to it, all I had were the words that he had written. No matter how many questions I asked him he was never going to respond, and that was as disappointing as praying to God. The real miracle was you, Mr. Rose. A women’s state prison is the last place in the world you’d expect to find a writer. That’s why I’m giving you this story that I wrote for you. So you revise it if you like it, and publish it under your name if you think it’s good enough. Or at least that you read it, just that you have read it will make me happy. Pretend that it is one of the exercises that you assigned for class, just somewhat longer than usual.

And now, let me tell you a little bit about my sister, Violeta. Pretty and strange, given her appearance. Different. Sometimes unbearable and sometimes likeable, shy at times and at times wild. I was almost a teenager and she was a little girl when we were finally able to meet, or I should say meet again, on the plane to America. Five years before, my mother, Bolivia, had left for America to fulfill her dream and to make some money, because there wasn’t enough to support us. She wanted us to have a good life, that’s what she said, and the good life was only over there, in America. Or I should say here, but, back then, for us America was very distant and unreachable. Violeta was my only sister, she with one last name and me with another, but both of us with map names, like all the females in our family. It was on that plane that I began to know my sister. I had met her just a few hours before, at the airport, and she clutched her stuffed giraffe as if her life depended on it. But she didn’t want to hug me, not even to turn around and look at me, although her godmother told her, “Go on, say hi; it’s your sister, María Paz.” But she seemed to need nothing but that giraffe and wasn’t paying attention when I showed her the chain around my neck.

“Look, Violeta,” I said, gesturing for her to look at it, “you’re wearing the same one.” I reached out my hand to grab her chain, that was all I did, tried to touch the chain to show her it was like mine, and that’s when she, who up to that moment had seemed angelical and lost in thought, turned into a lightning bolt and scratched my cheek. You should have seen it; she drew blood with her nails, like a cat with rabies. I found out then, that’s what my little sister was, a pretty cat who was almost always indifferent, but could turn fierce in a flash.

That was our first encounter after waiting five years for a reunion. Bolivia had not been able to take us with her to the United States because she had gone there tempting fate as an undocumented worker, leaving us with the promise that in a few months she’d send for us, as soon as she had a visa, a place to live, and a job. Some of the girls in my school, back in our native country, would go out to flaunt their stuff in tight Lycra pants, Nike shoes, and Bebe brand shirts with brilliant hearts and silver sequins. There was no need to ask where such treasures came from. “This is American,” they said, “they brought it to me from Miami.” I didn’t have anyone who could bring me anything from Miami, not even Barbies. On the other hand, we knew that Bolivia was there and that one day she’d bring us there, me and my sister, and she’d fill our closets with American clothes. Sometimes, I saved enough money to buy a Milky Way. They sold them as contraband near the school exit and I’d taste them with my eyes closed, not daring to actually ever bite into one, thinking, this is what America tastes like, and the first thing I’m going to do when I get there is to go on a Milky Way binge. I’m going to buy a whole bag of the minis just for myself, my favorite, because I could stick the whole thing in my mouth and dream about my mother in America.

Bolivia had left Violeta and me in different houses, cared for by different families in separate cities. She couldn’t find anyone to take both girls at once. As I’ve said, when she left I was seven and Violeta only a few months old. I was one man’s daughter, Violeta another man’s, and my mother had broken things off with both of them. Who were these men, what kind of creatures were they, what color were their eyes, their hair, were they good people or not? Only our mother knew. See how things are, I’ve never known anything about the man who gave me life, and now I don’t know much about you, who is going to write my biography. I know that once you hit a bear riding a motorcycle on a mountain road. I know it because you told the story in class. I’m trying to remember what your hands looked like. Big? White? That would be the obvious choice, but the truth is I don’t know. Maybe I’ve forgotten, or perhaps never really looked at them, although I doubt it, I like masculine hands and in Manninpox there weren’t many. Your face also has been erased, so I have given you Andre Agassi’s face. I hope that’s okay.

Oh, Bolivia, at what point did you become obsessed with America? The fact was that we too lived in America, Latin America. But that wasn’t America: the North had even taken the name. Bolivia would say on the phone, “Here the streets are safe, honey; the trucks pick up the garbage every day and there is no one without a car.” That’s what Bolivia said, and she assured me that America smelled clean and I believed her, and I dreamed of that smell, and of the taste of Milky Ways, and took it for a fact that Bolivia had a car. If everyone else did, why not my mom? She called every month religiously, once a month, and she sent money for our upkeep. She also called Violeta, although at first she was too young, but even when she was older, she never wanted to speak on the phone. She had her issues, Violeta, so pretty and so locked up in her silences. Unless she gets the urge to talk or scream, and then no one talks as much or screams as loud.

Once, when we were already in the States and Violeta must have been around thirteen, she started to scream in a museum where I had taken her one Sunday. All of a sudden she let out a prolonged shriek because of a portrait she had seen. Of a saint. I don’t remember the painter, but an old, dark canvas. There was something terrifying about it, for sure. It was St. Agatha and she was carrying her breasts on a platter, white, very round, and tender, one on each side of what seemed to be a silver platter. They had severed them to torture her and she exhibited them so that humanity took note of her unshakable faith. It was my fault; I shouldn’t have explained it to Violeta. She asked me, “What is that woman carrying on that plate?” And I told her the truth when I could have lied, I could have told her, It’s a pair of coconut pudding cakes. Of course, she’d have started to ask, Who are the pudding cakes for, why is she carrying them in that platter, why doesn’t she eat them? It’s always some story with no end with her: when something bothers her, she doesn’t stop asking questions. Sometimes it seems that she has finally forgotten a matter, and a month passes, two months, without her mentioning it, but not a chance. At some point out of nowhere she’d start again, And why was she carrying those pudding cakes? You don’t even remember what you had been talking about, but for her it’s as if the old conversation had never been interrupted: And why are they coconut, why doesn’t she eat them, and why two and not one? That’s how she is, Violeta. She’s either quiet for weeks on end, or she’s such a chatterbox asking endless questions that she drives even the sanest person mad. But now that I think about it, she who always asks so many questions never asked why they had cut St. Agatha’s breasts off. She just started to scream.

Bolivia said that America smelled clean but what really smelled clean was her, my mother. She was always pretty and fresh, as if she had just stepped out of the shower. Even during the dog days of summer, Bolivia smelled clean and young. She smelled like breakfast on a checkered tablecloth in the courtyard, although we never had a courtyard, or come to think of it a checkered tablecloth, and as I’ve said before my mother’s own body was foreign to us; there was something about it that wasn’t domestic, that opened outward, like a window that remains open at night and leaves the house exposed. That was Bolivia, she killed herself to provide four walls and a roof to shelter us, and at the same time made the space vulnerable by leaving the door open. This seems like a mess, all this I’m writing you; but deep down I just want to say something simple, let’s say it was on a weekday, on a Wednesday morning, already in America, the three of us finally together, my mother, my sister, and I, pretending we knew each other well, that in spite of everything we were a family, let’s say that seated at the breakfast table, our dream had been fulfilled, because although we didn’t have a checkered tablecloth, we did have orange juice and cornflakes and chocolate milk, those things that make up the well-being of a mother and two daughters, hurrying to get to school. Then suddenly, from Bolivia’s darkened room some guy emerges, his hair all on end, half-naked, after just waking up, his eyes still heavy with sleep. And at that moment in a festive voice, Bolivia would say something like, Girls, this is Andres, or This is Nate, or This is Jonathan, come here, please, splash some water on your face, I’m going to introduce you to my daughters, this is María Paz and Violeta, a pair of adorable girls, now that we’re finally all together, I want to assure you that from now on things are going to be fine for the four us, a real close family. Come, sit with us, Andres, or Nate, or Jonathan, let’s have breakfast together, you’ll see how dandy it will be for us as a family. A week later, Bolivia would be already married, or living together, but in six or seven months, Nate’s or Jonathan’s shirts and underwear would not be on the shelves, instead those of Andres or Mike would be there, which in turn would also disappear, and the shelves would remain empty so some other man could put his clothes there. And so on, successively. Do you know what I’m talking about now?

She liked to dress in white, Bolivia did, when we were poverty-stricken and later, when that wasn’t so much the case. If she wasn’t in white, she wore light colors: lilac, sky blue, pink. In America, she worked fourteen-hour days every day until the day she died, and she was still able to smell like a garden. She indulged in an extravagant luxury for a woman of her means, Heno de Pravia soap, which according to her whitened the skin and made it silky. Heno de Pravia could never be missing from the house; there would be no sugar in the sugar bowl or bread in the basket first. When Bolivia left us in Colombia, I imagined America smelled like Heno de Pravia. I yearned desperately for her and thought America would smell like her. Of course, when we got to America, I realized that there were things about Bolivia that as a teenager embarrassed me. For example, well dressed as she was, she was never able to get the American casual look right. Imagine if your mother ever showed up at a parent-teacher conference with an orchid corsage pinned to her lapel, tell me if you wouldn’t want the earth to open and swallow you. That’s what I’m talking about, that type of thing. Suffice it to say that Bolivia never bought a single item of clothing at an American store, no, not her, God forbid. Until the end of her days, she remained loyal to a neighborhood store where the clothes were custom sewn. It was named Las Camelias, Prendas y Accesorios para Damas, just like that in Spanish, so you get my drift about her.

I’m curious about how you are going to depict me in the novel. Physically, I mean, how you are going to portray me in that sense. We are now too far away from each other and you cannot see me, and I doubt that back then you looked at me closely, or that you even looked at me. You did notice the skewed ways I had of looking at things, you were surprised by my way of thinking, sometimes my writing exercises made you laugh. And I was the know-it-all who responded first to all your questions. But did you ever pay attention to the way I looked, my physical aspects? Could you tell I was ill? This hemorrhaging that doesn’t stop had already started then. One time I almost fainted in class, right in front of you, and I think the loss of blood made me hallucinate. But I faked it, I played it off as if it wasn’t anything and put up a front, which wasn’t too hard in this place in which the women look either sick or mad. And I wasn’t going to let my ailments stop me from going to class; I wouldn’t have missed one of your classes or an episode of House for anything in the world. So take note, Mr. Rose, the main thing about my appearance is that the hemorrhaging has left me baggy-eyed as a vampire’s girlfriend and gaunt as a punk rocker. The second important element about my appearance is my Latino air. I was one of six Latinas who took your class, and maybe some others had wanted to sign up as well but didn’t know enough English. This had become an issue ever since the warden had prohibited the use of Spanish, the guards intimidating us when they heard us speaking our own tongue. “This is America,” they shouted. “Here you speak English, or you shut the fuck up.” And even the Latino guards, bastards, traitors, played along and didn’t respond if you asked them something in Spanish. We screamed at them that they were sellouts and they screamed, “Go get fucked, you motherfuckers.” Although the fact is that there are not many Latino guards here. The prisoners are almost all dark-skinned and the guards are almost all white. And the shits in the warden’s office have decided that even visiting hours had to be conducted in English. Here visiting hours are from behind a glass partition with a microphone, so the authorities can monitor everything you are saying and of course, they can’t understand Spanish. Who do they think we are anyway? What do they want us to speak in, Greek? The glass prevents touching: no hugs, kisses, not even the graze of a hand. And now, on top of this, they violate you by forcing you to speak in a language that’s not yours, a language that your people don’t even know how to speak.

Visiting day has always been a delicate matter. At 5:00 p.m. the families leave, taking with them any illusion of warmth and affection, and the inmates return alone, freed into our cold reality. Some minutes later, around 5:15 or 5:20, begins the worst part of life in jail, because the prisoners tend to commit acts of desperation. It’s as if they had been emptied inside, grown even more desolate than before, as if their hearts, softened by the visit from loved ones, become more vulnerable to solitude. Sometimes it’s stabbings. Or beatings, rapes, that sort of thing. But not just that, which doesn’t happen every day; I’m talking more about gratuitous acts of intimidation. Imagine that apropos of nothing someone I haven’t even noticed, who has no relation to me, passes by and shoves me, or knocks my tray from below so all the food goes flying in the air, or grabs my ass, or lets out some obscene insult. It’s not as serious as a stabbing, and it likely isn’t serious at all, physically, I mean, but it strikes a chord, sets my nerves on edge, and triggers alarms in my head because it is clearly letting me know that a person detests me, doesn’t support me, and would feel better if I weren’t around. Why? Just because that person feels I’m stealing her air. The feeling of suffocation is constant in here. Air doesn’t circulate in these closed spaces, and you have to fight for every drop of oxygen against the others. Let’s say that person has pushed you or bit your lips. In the struggles between prisoners, it could be that one rips off another’s lips with her teeth, what they call a Swiss kiss here. That person is letting you know that you are reducing her space, that you exacerbate the desperation that is already inside her. That’s why on Saturdays, after the visitors leave, the best thing to do is to take cover, make yourself invisible in some corner, don’t mess with anybody or try to fix anything that ain’t broke. And to make the shit even worse, the authorities have decided that the visits need to be in English, no Spanish, and those who don’t obey get their microphones turned off. And there are the poor families, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Colombians, that often come from afar, that don’t speak a word of English and begin to cry helplessly when they’re forbidden from speaking Spanish with daughters they can only see through bulletproof glass. Words are forbidden, and so are hugs: they destroy all form of communication, so that fierce frustration and anxiety are all that lingers in those looks crossing from side to side, those hands that want to reach through the glass between them. I know what a visit means for a prisoner even though no one has visited me here. For some in here, the encounter with a loved one is reason for living, sustenance hour after hour, the only hope of the entire week. If they take that away from you, the only thing you want to do is die or kill someone. The banning of Spanish has been the worst, Mr. Rose, the most difficult thing of all, an injustice that rips away at the guts. People outside have become aware, and human rights groups have filed complaints. Mandra X, who is our inmate representative, has made sure the matter is being shouted from the rooftops, and the scandal is making the rounds in newspapers. That’s why the warden of this dump has begun to make accusations. She has said that we Latinas use our native language to traffic and make illegal pacts with family members, unnoticed by authorities. Or as Jennings said the other day, “Who’s to say that when you speak Spanish you’re not ordering a hit from the outside?” One of us responded, “Your mother might be a killer, but mine is an honorable little old woman.” Jennings, that garbage-digging rat, I don’t know why I have a feeling her days are numbered. The authorities also claim that we use Spanish to insult the guards without them knowing it. Imagine, coming up with such things, although they have a point because it’s true that in English, all of us respond, “Yes, ma’am, no problem, ma’am, I’m sorry, ma’am, I won’t do it again, ma’am.” But in the next line we mutter under our breath in Spanish to “stick it up your ass, you old bitch” or “eat shit, you filthy whore.” That is, there is no doubt that the guards are assaulted with a good motherfucker, or gross insult, or low blow, depending on whether the inmate is Mexican, Argentine, or Colombian, because here Spanish is defended in all its versions: in Argentine che, in Salvadoran guanaco, Guatemalan chapin, and Honduran catracho, in Nicaraguan nica, and Costa Rican tico, in all the Colombian versions of paisa, rolo, costeño, and veneco, in boricuan, in newyorkrican, chicano, and the Mexican chilango.

In the middle of this mayhem, Mr. Rose, it so happened that because your workshop was in English, to attend became an act of betrayal in the eyes of our Latina sisters who accused us of selling out, and they began to block the hallways to the classroom. The six of us tried hard to explain things to them. The little gringo was teaching us to write, the language it was done in didn’t matter. We are not siding with anyone, but they thought it was all bullshit.

“Well, from now on, I will conduct half the class in English and half the class in Spanish,” you announced when you heard what was happening.

“What do you mean in Spanish?” the students who only spoke English, who were the majority, piped up. “You don’t speak Spanish and neither do we.”

“But I do speak it.” You stood your ground defiantly and let out an impeccable Spanish that left us Latinas flabbergasted. Where the hell did this gringuito learn Cervantes’s language? And from that moment on, you conducted the rest of the class in our language, while the white girls stewed.

After the hour was done, you said good-bye and left, so you didn’t see how the Latinas all gathered on one side of the class with our backs to the wall, our hairs standing on end like fighting cocks: the vengeance of the North was about to come down upon us. We had been waiting for it since before you left, and who knows what would have happened there if not for the intervention of an inmate known as Lady Gugu, a radical white activist who led a gang that preached it was a waste of time for the races to be pulling each other’s hair. And because she’s quite charming and knows when to play the clown, Lady Gugu announced that she too was going to conduct half the class in Spanish and began a demented and nonsensical monologue that broke the tension and made both sides break out in laughter. Who knows what that madwoman was saying in a Spanish with the worst American accent, that your ass is a great hat, and good morning, enchiladas, Antonio Banderas eats my cunt, and anything she could come up with, my little señorita whore, good mosquito tacos, anything at all, I’m very Mexicana, I’m a pretty little coco. And the rest of us were disarmed, safe on first, because it was impossible to figure out who Lady Gugu was insulting, the white folks and the way they speak Spanish, or the Latinas by mocking our language.

The bad thing was that after that we never saw you again. That happened on a Thursday and the following Tuesday they told us that the course had been canceled. That’s all they said, canceled, that’s how they tell us things around here, just like that, without saying why or who, canceled, by God or a ghost, canceled, that’s it. That’s the way things are around here, they like to make us think that misfortunes occur on their own, and they can then wash their hands. But there was no need for them to say anything else, for us the reason you were fired was very clear.

Ever since they started fucking with us about the Spanish, the Latina inmates have been going around like lionesses, ready to scratch anyone’s face off, our halls always on the verge of exploding. They’re going to have to stitch our lips together if they want us not to speak our own language, which, as you yourself said, is the only thing they can’t take away from us. And so the game continues, sometimes they’re stricter and sometimes they relax the rules because they just give up, but they keep fucking with us, and if on Saturday they turn off someone’s microphone during visiting hours, the blood rises again and rage builds up. And what could not be reversed, Mr. Rose, was the thing with your class. They just canceled it, but I’ll never forget that Thursday when Lady Gugu decided to speak Spanish, talking about asses and hats and other nonsense. It was a euphoric moment, Mr. Rose. You should have been there, a kind of small victory, a few minutes of fun and games between the Latinas and the white girls, something very rare around here. It was as if the prisoners of all colors got together and decided to smack the faces of all those who hated us.

By night, that feeling had vanished. When you’re a prisoner you have to be skeptical about those moments of hope because they turn quickly, and the higher you jump the harder you fall. You go around with moods like a yo-yo, up and down, up and down, one moment you think you are saved and in the next you realize you are damned. That’s what happened to me that night, after that class that would be your last, although we didn’t know it yet. Alone in my cot I was struck by the reckoning, the name we have for the kind of depression that drains the blood, and what had seemed marvelous a few hours before now seemed tomfoolery, what hat or not hat, what enchiladas, I had never eaten enchiladas in my life, didn’t even know how they were made, probably something gross and spicy as hell. And Banderas was a bad actor. So much pride in his Spanish, which he didn’t even speak well because he was forgetting it. And me, so proud of being a Latina, and months before I’d have given anything to be married to an American? I’m telling you, everything seemed very forced. Which got me to thinking: while I was free, my goal was to wipe the Latina off me as if it were a stain, and in prison I’m becoming a fundamentalist of Latinohood. But what I’m going to do, on the one hand it’s something that’s spontaneous, it’s the face of my rage, on the other hand, I need it to survive, that simple. Here, you have to take sides not to get sandwiched in the eternal war between the races.

I mentioned that the Latina prisoners had a name for that blood-draining depression, that plummeting of the spirit; we called it the reckoning. The reckoning comes upon you like a bucket of cold water, soaking your bones and drowning you in despair. “The reckoning hit me,” we say around here, or “I have the reckoning in the brain,” or “Don’t talk to me, I have the reckoning.” The reckoning is the worst, you want to die, nothing interests you; you just want to be still, to isolate, as if locked up in yourself, a dead woman living. The reckoning is introversion, despondency, pessimism — all mixed into a deadly cocktail. In the second section I was in, 12-GPU, there was a black Cuban woman, under the full weight of the reckoning, always huddled up on her cot. An enormous woman abandoned in the narrow cot in which she hardly fit, like a mountain that had crumbled. Her name was Tere Sosa, but because she never moved, we called her Pere Sosa, which means the lazy one. The reckoning comes and goes for the rest of us, but it had swallowed her whole. She didn’t even get up to go eat, and after a while not even to go to the bathroom. She soiled herself and gave off a smell that wasn’t even human, as if she had decided to transform herself into a pile of shit, a heap of garbage. The guards couldn’t make her get up, not even by force, because there is no force as powerful as the reckoning. So they hosed her down with water and left her there, soaked and trembling from the cold. But even then, soaked and soiled and starving, the woman couldn’t care less. Recently arrived in that section, still inexperienced and ignorant of its laws, I passed by Pere Sosa and asked what she had done to be in such a state, why they had arrested her. Why did I open my mouth? I felt a shove behind me right away; someone was throwing me up against the wall with all her strength. Later, I was to discover that it was no other than Mandra X, one of the capos of the prison, a lesbian thug who was one of the leaders of a powerful gang, according to what I was told then.

“Listen to me good,” Mandra X told me that time, flattening my nose against her chest. “We don’t know what Pere Sosa might have done. And you know why we don’t know? Because we don’t ask. We don’t ask those things here, princess. So the next time I hear you asking them, I’ll break your face.”

The cure for the reckoning is work. Nonstop work, in handicraft, in whatever you can get, leather embossing, crocheting, knitting, making wooden objects, whatever, so you can rock to the whir of the routine of your hands and let them think for you, so that there is no other thought in you besides that trivial thought free of anguish that the hands think. It’s the best antidote. But it’s hard to get work in the prison. It they don’t trust you, you can’t have access to tools that can be turned into weapons, you know, so they only give them to you, if they give them to you at all, for a couple of hours and under surveillance. Only a small percentage of prisoners enjoys the privilege of manual labor, and most of them are white, because the black and Latino prisoners are always under suspicion. They let me make knapsacks from polyester fiber, tying the yarn by hand. That soothes my mind, and it is easy to get permission for because no tools are necessary. Making knots hour after hour is a compulsion that may save you if the reckoning has befallen you; at least it works for me, and I have become almost addicted to it, I could tie polyester yarn from here to eternity, thinking about nothing. The other recourse against the reckoning is to sign up to mop floors. They always need volunteers because never in my life have I seen such shiny floors. At all hours, there’s someone mopping the concrete, somebody cleaning what cannot be cleaned. No matter how much bleach they use the smell still lingers there, floating in the darkness, the stink of the urine and sweat and shit of the thousands of prisoners that for more than a century have inhabited this place, the miasma of the great sewer that runs under these floors that each day they mop and mop until they’re dazzling.

I at least remained in high spirits with the polyester knapsacks and the mopping, but the hemorrhaging has dwindled my strength and each day brings me down even further. There I go off on a tangent again. I begin to tell you something, but I’m dragged by a gust that blows and end up who knows where. I was asking you, Mr. Rose, how you would describe me physically in the novel, because in class it didn’t seem that you looked at us or were interested in me or any of the others, not in that way; you didn’t even seem to flinch when we sat in the front row and crossed our legs provocatively. We were about to give you up as a homosexual when you spoke to us about a girlfriend who was a teacher of deaf children. After you left, we gossiped about such a little saintly pair, her dealing with the deaf and you with prisoners. I think you never properly inspected us visually, undressed us with your eyes, as they say, out of good manners, and perhaps because you knew how persnickety the gringos are about harassment. So I’ll have to tell you what I look like myself, describe what I look like, in case you don’t remember.

I’m sorry if this seems conceited, but I consider myself a rather pretty woman. Not beautiful or gorgeous, but definitely pretty. My hair is coffee-colored, long and thick. A thick head of hair, a crown of hair I should say. My hair is my best feature. The only thing that hasn’t deteriorated with the hemorrhaging and with this life in jail. As for the rest, I have acceptable features, a seductive smile although not perfect because I never wore braces, tanned skin, cinnamon they call it, and a pleasing little body. That’s what a boyfriend told me once the first time he saw me naked; he told me that I had a pleasing little body. I found the comment a little off-putting, especially in the middle of what was supposed to be a torrid sex scene. But maybe the man didn’t want to offend and was only making “an objective description with restrictive use of adjectives” as you would have advised in your creative-writing class. Anyways, I’m no babe, but I’m also not lacking in female graces. Well, I have a pleasing body when I’m thin, although not as thin as now, now I’m thin as a rake, and besides I’ll confess that for a long time I was fat, chubby fat with a big ass, especially after I got married, married life accumulated in my thighs and in my butt. Now I’m very skinny, and that makes me look anorexic, with the prominent cheekbones and the eyes grown so large I look like a nocturnal bug. Because of the anemia, my hands are transparent. If I put them against the light I imagine I can see the bones, like in an X-ray. And although my current appearance shocks me, I think Kate Moss would be envious.

One time, after I had arrived in America, I had to fill out an application for a job. I was with my friend Jessica Ojeda, who was born in New Jersey and spoke English better than I did. Although just because she was born here was no guarantee she spoke better English. I learned it as a girl in Colombia, at the Colegio Bilingue Corazon de María of the Mothers Clarisas, which I attended with the Navas and in which Mother Milagros provided intensive lessons on grammar, pronunciation, and English literature five days a week. Then I got to America and from the time I was twelve to the time I was eighteen I hung out in Latino neighborhoods in which English was hardly heard. My first great disappointment upon arriving in America was that Bolivia had no car, the second that it was so hot, and the third was that in America everyone spoke only Spanish. You want to know what the business signs were of my first neighborhood in America? La Lechonería, Pasteles Nelly, Rincón Musical, Pollos a la Brasa, Tejidos el Porvernir, Pandi y Panda Ropa a Mano para Bebe, Papasito Restaurante, Cuchifrito, Sabor de Patria, Fútbol en Directo, Cigarrillos Pielroja, Consultorio Pediatrico para Niños y Niñas. And so on. But back to the job application that I filled out with Jessica Ojeda. She noticed that where they asked for the color of your eyes and hair, I wrote coffee. Hair color: coffee. Eyes: coffee. Skin: coffee with milk. That’s what I wrote because that’s what we call that color, coffee — or rather it is one of three terms: wheat, cinnamon, or coffee.

“Those are names of food,” Jessica reprimanded me. “Don’t say that here, because people get offended. Here you say Latino when they ask you for your ethnic group and dark brown when they ask you about your hair and eyes.”

“You don’t understand,” I explained. “Those of us born in the coffee zone have coffee eyes, and hair that is the same color as brilliant dark coffee in a cup, of coffee when it is magnificently coffee-colored. And our skin is the color of coffee with milk and sugar when you drink it really hot.”

“Alright then,” she said, offering a compromise, “put dark brown.”

“Not dark brown.” I held my ground. “Coffee. I’m proud of that, end of story.”

Let’s see, Mr. Rose, what else can I tell you about me? Do you want to know if I have any special features? A few scars, which here in prison they call embroidery. One on my cheek from a scratch from Violeta that I told you about. Another one from an appendix operation, one on the eyebrow from a bicycle fall, a mole an inch from the corner of my mouth on the right side. Normal all in all, so far, but I have a few other things that are somewhat embarrassing. For example, stretch marks on my thighs from all the weight I gained and lost, too much hair on my legs, and a coffee-colored bramble of pubic hair; one of my nostrils is a bit higher than the other, and although I’d like to tell you that my breasts are full, like in the novels, the truth is I barely fill an A cup. Aside from that, I’m five feet five inches tall, wear size seven and a half shoes, have transparent hands from anemia, which I told you already, and have a pair of ears that are “full,” but which I can fortunately hide under my long hair.

I’d like it if in your book you recounted Bolivia’s departure for America as sad but also joyful, because before she left we took a hot shower together, something we had never done. She washed my hair with an herb shampoo that she herself made in the kitchen, and since my body was small and dark, hers seemed a wonder, so round and full, so white and generous, which always made me uneasy. I was a little girl, Mr. Rose, and didn’t know much about life. But I did know one thing, that my mother did things with her body. Though I wouldn’t be able to tell you exactly what. I felt as if her body wasn’t guarded, wasn’t private, but rather exhibited outside the house; there was something about Bolivia’s body that fascinated me and frightened me at the same time. That afternoon she had ironed my halter top and favorite dress, a yellow jumper, my favorite color then. Bolivia knew how to iron with starch beautifully, by which I mean that the clothes came out fragrant and fresh, as if new. It seems it was a family thing, because her mother also ironed, my poor wretched grandmother Africa María, may she rest in peace. And my mother had shown me; I think it was one of the few things she got to show me before she left. Although come to think of it, I must have made that up. No one shows a seven-year-old girl how to iron; that would be an atrocity. A girl would burn herself with an iron. Anyway, I’d have liked for such a memory to be real, and maybe it is and it is good to think that Bolivia taught me something, that she left me something before leaving for America, something besides the coscoja, the broken-off coin piece that hangs from the chain around my neck, well, that used to hang around my neck before they confiscated it when I was brought to Manninpox.

Do you know what a coscoja is? Don’t worry, I didn’t either, and when I found out, I didn’t like it at all. I immediately dipped the pendant in rubbing alcohol and left it there all week, me, who, before knowing what it was, put it in my mouth all the time, disgusting. Only my mother, with the coscoja; you always had to be careful with my mother. But be patient. Little by little, I’ll explain everything.

In any case, the day she was leaving, Bolivia dressed in jeans, plain shoes with laces, and a plaid shirt, as if she were going on an excursion to the countryside. I saw her put makeup on her eyes, which were coffee-colored like mine, with long lashes. Many years later, I’d glance on her in a similar manner on the day of her death, with her head on the satin pillow in her coffin of dark wood. She had been made beautiful again, seemed rejuvenated, because near the end fatigue and worry had beaten her; yet on that day she seemed peaceful again, as if the Heno de Pravia had once again restored the resplendence of her skin. I remember watching the shadows of her eyelashes caused by the flames from the altar candles dance softly on her cheeks, creating the sensation that death was treating her lovingly. I’d seen other corpses, and although they did not let me attend the funeral of my husband, I had been to others, and I had never seen a dead person as beautiful as her. Señora Socorro and the other friends roasted a turkey and prepared a Russian salad for the mourners, and we all ate. All of us except Bolivia, she who had always made sure that we never lacked turkey during the winters in America. A few days before Thanksgiving and Christmas, we always went to the parish where they gave out free turkeys so that everyone would have a good meal during those days. So we lined up and got our turkey, and the following day we did it again, and the day after, morning and afternoon, claiming our turkey as if they had not already given us one, and another turkey, and one more, and the best we made out with this scheme is when we got six turkeys one Christmas.

The day she left for America, I looked at Bolivia and thought, I’m so lucky to have such a pretty mother, and at the same time, I grew disheartened because that marvelous radiance who was my mother was going to be so far away from me. Afterward, we bathed the baby Violeta, who had inherited a fair complexion and had the greenest eyes anyone had seen in our neighborhood, where such things were not common, so that strangers stopped us on the street to admire them. Mami, where did Violeta get those huge green eyes? Did her father have green eyes? Bolivia did not respond. She went silent when I asked her about her men. The day she left, we dried Violeta with a towel our mother had put over the heater to warm up; we put Johnson’s powder on her, a diaper, and a onesie made of baby alpaca wool. The whole time, Violeta never cried, she lived as if lost in a dream. I wondered if everything she saw would be green with those eyes of hers. I tried to play with her by shaking a rattle of plastic keys in front of her, but she didn’t notice it.

“Mami,” I told Bolivia, “what good are those eyes on Violeta if she can’t see?”

“She can see. The doctor assured me there’s nothing wrong with her eyes. The thing is that they’re too green,” she responded, and was satisfied with the explanation.

Bolivia’s bags were ready and so were the cardboard boxes with our clothes, but before going out she announced, “Now we’re going to have a little good-bye, soon-to-be-reunited ceremony.”

I, who did not know what a ceremony was, was surprised and delighted when she opened three little blue-velvet boxes and pulled out three metal pendants on gold chains.

“What are they?” I murmured, knowing that we were doing something solemn, that the moment would not be repeated, and that those pendants, whatever they were, represented something. I didn’t really like the dark metal pendants all that much; what was truly beautiful was the gold chain, but regardless, I knew the pendants were important.

“They’re three pieces of the same coin,” she replied, and showed me how they made a whole. On one side of the coin there wasn’t anything, just scratches on the worn metal. On the other side, there was an eight-point cross with the word “lazareto” written in the middle. Around and above the cross, it read “two and a half cents,” and below, “Colombia, 1928.” Bolivia put one of the necklaces on me, lifting my hair to fasten the chain behind. She put the second pendant on the baby Violeta and kept the third for herself. Of course, I didn’t know what a lazareto was, and I didn’t even think to ask; I must have thought of it as something magical that made the pendant a protective amulet. Years later, in America, Bolivia would tell me that such coins had been minted in the first decades of the twentieth century for restricted circulation in leper colonies, to avoid contagion in the rest of the country. They were called coscojas, and the engraved octagonal figure was the cross of the Order of St. Lazarus of Jerusalem, also known as the Templar cross or the cross of the eight beatitudes. That’s when I came to know the horror of leprosy and learned of the great family secret. I found out that my grandmother Africa María had spent her last days being eaten away by the illness in isolation at the leper colony Agua de Dios. Her husband and children never saw her during the nine years she spent there, until they heard about her death and then went looking for her, but only to be there for her burial. Apparently, the husband, my grandfather, had been sending her personal necessities all along — although he never went to visit her, each month he’d send her a suitcase full of food and other goods, with a note that the suitcase wasn’t to be returned. According to what Bolivia told me later, my grandfather preferred to buy a new suitcase every month and deal with the loss rather than get back such a thing impregnated with miasmic airs. Among the contents of the suitcase, there once was an electric iron, which apparently my leprous grandmother never used because she preferred one of those old-fashioned heavy iron ones, one of those you fill with hot coals. That’s what Grannie Africa ironed with, there in her colony for the sick; her flesh may have been falling off in pieces, but she painstakingly cared for her clothes.

My mother was a teenager when her mother died, and she told me that they arrived at Agua de Dios for the burial exhausted after two days of travel, dazed by the heat and the buzzing of insects because the place was in the middle of a swamp. They were not allowed near the lepers who attended the burial but stayed on the other side of the fence. My mother remembered she could see them in the distance, but not their faces, which were covered with rags, and that she had been shaken by the thought that these creatures were the only company her mother had had for such a long time.

The authorities had made the members of the family cover their mouths and noses with handkerchiefs that had been soaked in alcohol. My grandmother’s body was incinerated along with her mattress and other belongings. Bolivia stood there, scratching the swollen mosquito bites on her legs and watching the flames consume someone who was supposedly her mother, but who had been buried alive for so long that she had been almost erased from her children’s memory.

“How can I explain it?” Bolivia told me. “For us, her children, she had always been present, but not as a person, as fear, a shadow.”

When the flames had died out and the embers extinguished, Bolivia saw a metallic glitter in the ashes. She shook herself loose from her father, ran to the place where the pyre had burned, and in spite of the screams of warning, picked up a dried branch and scraped out that little gleaming thing that had caught her attention. It was the coscoja, probably from one of the pockets of my grandmother’s incinerated clothes.

“Funny how the mind works, María Paz,” Bolivia told me when we were in America. “The day of my mother’s burial, I thought of her surrounded by sick people, but healthy herself. Healthy and with her old-fashioned hairdo and with the knitted shawl over her shoulders that she wore in the photograph in our living room.”

It was only little by little that Bolivia and her brothers began to understand the truth that had been kept from them for so long. After the burial, which in fact had not been a burial at all but a cremation, permitted by the church for deaths from contagious diseases, the family had to stay overnight, three to a cot, at an inn at the halfway point of the journey back. It was only there, in the insomniac mugginess of that night, that Bolivia finally figured out that during all those years of her absence, her mother must have been just like those sick folk who hid their putrefied flesh with rags.

Why did my mother choose that specific object, my grandmother Africa’s coscoja, for our farewell ceremony so many years later? She never told me, and when I asked her, she’d use any pretext to change topics: “Do you want more chocolate milk?” Or “Turn on the TV, María Paz, the telenovela is on.” So I had to go digging for answers on my own. And I can assure you, Mr. Rose, that the things I began to discover did not put my mind at ease. My mother had told me about what she called the great secret of the family, the unnamable illness of my grandmother Africa. But that was just the beginning. The real secret, the secret behind the secret, I had to figure out myself. It had to do with a dark well without memories, the years in which my mother and her brothers grew up in the absence of their own mother, that woman who had been denied and made to disappear, that mother whose name the father never again spoke aloud, that living corpse whose children could not ask questions about, that undeclared orphanhood, that absence of maternal love that was never explained, the horror of that muted nightmare. That blind point of panic and darkness in the hearts and heads of those children who no one thought it necessary to make things evident for. I can’t help but think of my mother at sixteen years old, the willowy pretty girl she must have been, saving from those ashes of disgrace that coin that contained some vestige of memory, or perhaps healing or redemption. I also can’t help but think of my mother, already a woman in her own right, having my abandoned grandmother’s coin broken into three parts so she’d leave a legacy for her daughters whom she was about to abandon.

Bolivia paid a jeweler to cut the coin and on each piece place a ring through which the chain would pass. That’s what she had decided, but the rest of it, what I’m going to tell you about now, was fate, like everything else that has happened to me. And you, who are a professor and more importantly a writer, know that fate means chance, luck, coincidence — something that happens to you not because you want it to happen but because it is destiny. Don’t think that I haven’t looked up such things in dictionaries. Because that’s exactly what happened, that the word “lazareto” engraved in the coscoja happened to be divided like this: L-AZAR-ETO, and because the middle piece was mine, mine said and still says, AZAR, Spanish for fate. You figure out the consequences. Imagine, in particular, everything that can happen to you from the moment that your own mother brands you with such a word by hanging it around your neck.

After our ceremony, each of us with her medallion, we went out on the street, clean and freshly ironed on the outside and full of foreboding on the inside. We left Violeta and her cardboard box at the house of her godmother, Doña Herminia, who would care for her. Violeta passed peacefully from the arms of her mother to those of her godmother, which did not surprise us because we had already began to sense that Violeta was Violeta. But what did Bolivia feel on leaving her baby, so pretty and so innocent, in the hands of someone else? That I never found out. Many things cannot be known. Was Violeta really strange from the time before Bolivia left for America, or did she become strange because who knows what could have happened at Doña Herminia’s house, where no one was there to defend her or give her proper company. That was one of those mysteries that Bolivia refused even to acknowledge, always finding some excuse to avoid the heart of those truths. Chocolate milk, the telenovela, anything to pretend she didn’t know what you were talking about. The past, our past, her own past, what may have happened during the years of separation, none of those were topics she ever agreed to discuss. She made us believe the page was blank: zero memories, zero regrets. As if our lives had begun at the moment of that second ceremony we had five years later, at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York, when, worn out by the heat and fatigue, we finally brought together the three pieces of the coscoja again.

Sorrows do not exist if they’re not named, that was Bolivia’s philosophy. Her native country had been left behind. And the past forgotten. She wasn’t a woman who dwelled on nostalgia, my mother, or bet against impossible odds. She prided herself on being practical, remaking herself endlessly. “Don’t look back,” she’d say, and was committed to moving us forward without too many complications. She had to feed us, so she provided food; we needed a roof over our heads, and she arranged for that. “Pulling us forward,” she always said, and I suspect she never noticed how twisted we were coming out — really more sideways than forward. There were so many things we never knew or talked about, and that burn inside us with a dark resplendence. Coins rescued from the ashes — I’m telling you about this side of my mother, Mr. Rose, because I know that there shouldn’t be any secrets when I write. You need to know that because of this, Bolivia’s silences, it was difficult to grow up with her, to be secure, to become an adult, and remember that after five years apart, we got there only to live together like strangers. You can’t blot out the sun with your thumb, and the three pieces of a coin brought back together didn’t change the fact that none of us really knew who the other two were. Remember that when you write about all this. The things we dared not talk about forced us to live in constant fear, confined in a narrow box. I sometimes wonder if it wasn’t that web of big and small lies that tangled up Violeta’s mind.

“It’s only for a few months,” Bolivia told Doña Herminia when she handed her Violeta. “Take care of her as if she were your own; you’ll be well compensated.” Then the two of us headed for the bus terminal. In one of the many yellow buses with red stripes, I journeyed to the city where Leonor de Nava, kin to my mother, lived with her daughter Camila, who was two years older than I was, and Patricia, who was my age. They called them Cami and Pati, and because their last name was Nava, they were nicknamed Caminaba, which means walked, and Patinaba, or skated. I’d live with them until my reunion in America with my mother and sister. Pressing the piece of the coscoja in my hand, I looked at Bolivia one last time from the window of the bus. I thought that she looked awfully young with her backpack, her plaid shirt, and without daughters, and for a moment I got the feeling that she was getting rid of us. “It’s only a few months,” her mouth said, enunciating the words exaggeratedly so that I could see them through the glass that prevented me from hearing them. Only a few months, and then America!

Only a few months. But five years passed before I saw Bolivia and Violeta again.

4. Interview with Ian Rose

“The only thing I have left now is to wander with my pack of dogs, animal among animals,” Ian Rose tells me. He agreed to have breakfast with me at the dining room of the Washington Square Hotel, where I’m staying now that I have come to New York to interview him for this book.

He assures me that ever since the dogs noticed his sorrow, they live attentive to his every move, as if they are there to remind him that in spite of everything life is worth it. Almost every day at the house up in the Catskills, Rose takes them out for walks in the woods, single file until a squirrel or rabbit crosses their path or a field mouse flashes by, and the dogs go crazy. Rose likes to watch them out in the wild; they become doggedly doglike, their instincts liberated and their noses trained to the ground to follow the traces of whatever sexual effluvia or droppings they may find along the way. The excrement of other creatures is crucial for them, he tells me; from it they get more information about a subject than the CIA could with a whole legion of infiltrators. When their caravan regroups, it proceeds behind Skunko, the most ordinary and unkempt of the three, who has earned his spot as leader because of his infallible instinct to find the way back no matter how far off they’ve gone or lost they are. Even if it takes a few times going around in circles, Skunko’s instinct always manages to get them back home. Behind Skunko is invariably Otto, the oversized do-gooder that Rose inherited from his ex-wife, and at the rear, the bitch Dix, all four of them, Rose included, lifting their snouts in the air when they sense something burning or water nearby, urinating on the rocks or tree trunks. They superstitiously avoid the bend in the path where Eagles’s mutilated body was discovered, remain expectantly silent before the trail of a bear or a fox, mark with their own trail the bright, fresh snow blanketing the fields, distinguish the edible mushrooms from the poisonous ones, or lay down to rest on the moss in a clearing, warmed by the pale sunlight filtered through the leaves. That’s how it was that morning, Rose tells me as we have our tea and toast.

“Do you understand?” he asks me. “When Cleve died, I knew that all I had left were my dogs. My dogs and the woods.”

Sometimes his dogs crossed the line and got him in trouble, especially the beautiful Dix, a spirited and explosive female with jet-black hair, the daughter of a Labrador and a German shepherd, crazy by nature and out of control, like all mutts that are a cross between two noble lines. Old fights had left her covered in scars, and her main thing was breaking into chicken coops and contributing to the extinction of the mallard ducks and other semi-endangered species. On those occasions Rose rebuked her, but did not really mean it because deep down he was proud when she brought the prize in her mouth to him. Until one day Dix brought him Lili, the neighbor Mrs. Galeazzi’s cat. Lili was a soft puff of white cotton who never did anyone any harm, not even mice, and seeing her in such a shitty state, Rose hoped at first that it was just a pigeon or something, but he knew for sure it was Lili, Mrs. Galeazzi’s great love, when he noticed the collar. Poor, wide, loving Mrs. Galeazzi, another soft puff of white cotton who never did anyone any harm. Indeed, that tattered thing clenched in Dix’s mouth was Lili, and Dix placed it ceremoniously at Rose’s feet, looking up with sweet and pleading eyes seeking praise.

“Goddamn it, Dix!” he said, his eyes watering with rage and compassion. He was thinking how to punish her when Cleve intervened, because at that time he was still alive and accompanied them on their walks.

“Don’t punish her, Pa,” he said.

For Cleve, it was clear that there was something sacred and primitive in that act of the dog, in that ritualistic behavior inherited from her canine predecessors but nonetheless extremely human, this choosing of a victim, hunting her down and sacrificing her, but not eating her. According to him, the splendid aspect of the whole thing was the lack of a practical finality; it was something more complex, the confirmation of an order of things dependent on this gesture of bringing an offering to the master. What motivated Dix? Cleve didn’t know for sure. But Dix seemed sure that in this manner she sealed a pact with a superior being, in this case Rose, who in the eyes of others may have passed as a hydraulic engineer, but who in the eyes of the bitch was a sort of god.

“Shit, Cleve,” Rose said, “I know what the goddamned dog meant, but fuck, she could have brought me a rabbit or something.”

“She feels that the rarer the prize offered, the greater the honor rendered,” Cleve said.

“Fine, fine. Since you seem to be so in tune with the animal kingdom, can you tell Dix that her god only accepts rabbits? And figure a way out of this jam. If we bury Lili without saying anything, we’re going to have to watch poor desperate Galeazzi looking for her cat everywhere. And if we confess the truth, the neighborhood junta is going to insist we put Dix to sleep. They’re going to claim that the next victim will be a child, so your theories will be useless in defending her.”

Cleve calmed him down, convincing him there was a third way, and proceeded to pick up what was left of Lili, barely a few tufts of hair. Stealthily, he put the remains with the collar and everything on the road in front of Mrs. Galeazzi’s house and smashed it down with a rock that he tossed far away later, so she’d think Lili had been run over by a car.

“You should have seen Cleve that night, carrying out his sinister plot,” Rose tells me with a mournful smile. “The only thing he was missing was a mask. But I felt bad about the deception. I really felt like shit. Not Cleve. He was different about things. Look, I’m a simple person, someone who likes to observe and not much else; my son, on the other hand, had a lot of things seething inside. I don’t know anything about ceremonies and symbolism; suffice it to say that my most complicated ritual is this white cloud I put in my tea in honor of my mother. What can I say, that’s as deep as I get? Fortunately, Mrs. Galeazzi got another cat; she watches it night and day and doesn’t let it out of the house.”

Ian Rose is well aware that under certain circumstances his dogs can be horrendous, and not just Dix, but all three of them. Always playful and well trained, they become like fiends if they sense a threat or detect that someone has trespassed into their domain. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, he tells me it’s astonishing to watch them, something admirable even, to see how they crouch and their fur stands on end, how their eyes grow brilliant and their looks askance, how their every joint becomes flexible and their whole anatomy molds itself to the ruthless agility of the hunt. They regress, turning into the wolves they once were in a matter of seconds and begin to behave like a pack, now in attack mode, so the hierarchy changes, with Dix leading the way, an Amazon; the great Otto behind her, a military tank; and Skunko, the little one, a killer expert at going for the jugular. More than once Rose has had to save some careless trespasser, or even some friend who is visiting and makes a sudden gesture or laughs too loud, from his canine guerrillas. Of course, all Rose has to do is pet them on their backs and say “That’s it, that’s it, everything’s fine, toy hounds,” for them to calm down and begin wagging their tails, becoming again as harmless as puppies, exonerating the victim they were just about to tear to pieces. “Let that be a warning,” Rose tells the intruder, or if it’s a friend, he tells him to take a deep breath, brings him a glass of water, and begs a thousand pardons for the fright.

On the morning after the manuscript arrived, Rose and the three dogs went out into the woods afterward, following Skunko as they always did when in search-and-discover mode, heading in no particular direction. They had been walking for more than two hours when they came across abandoned railroad tracks, half camouflaged by foliage, and they instinctively obeyed that sort of mandate that rails impose, to follow them from nowhere to nowhere else. They allowed themselves to be led, as if hypnotized by the ties slippery with moss, and Rose tried to think of nothing else but how the distance between railroad ties was half a stride.

“Or maybe I was thinking a bit about my childhood, or Cleve’s,” he tells me. “You see how it goes, old rails bring back memories of childhood, even if we haven’t seen any as children or been on a train.”

The first sign that the spell was about to break was the fur standing on his dogs, who then pricked up their ears and began to act nervous, as if they smelled something in the air they couldn’t figure out. A bit later, they came upon signs that said, “No Trespassing, Violators Will Be Prosecuted,” and then powerful floodlights that cut into the shadows of the woods with stabs of light. Rose called back his dogs with a loud whistle, and when they abandoned the rails to take up the path again, they came upon a silent patrol car watching from a bend, its windows foggy. Five minutes later, he saw another patrol car, and farther on a third one. “Let’s get home! Home!” Rose yelled at his dogs, to quicken their pace and move away from that guarded zone.

They tried taking a shortcut that didn’t work and soon were lost for a good quarter of an hour until they came out to a paved road on which there was a squad of police cars. Officers on foot were blocking the way, and they were under the surveillance of a dozen cyborg-looking guards, dressed in black like Darth Vader but with Mausers instead of light sabers. Above the squad, a huge sign spread from one side of the road to the other, and on reading it, Rose felt a chill: “MANNINPOX STATE PRISON.”

Unwittingly, he had been walking toward the prison after spending years evading it, avoiding even the mention of it. It was as if a magnet had drawn him to its very doors, or as if that inmate’s manuscript had already begun to assert its spell.

Downhill from the police cars was a disparate collection of commercial enterprises, clearly geared to the visiting families of prisoners: a generic Best Value Inn, a greasy spoon that served Thai fusion cuisine, a Best Burger, a Mario’s Pizza, a Laundromat, and a faded beauty parlor called The Goddess that featured haircuts, depilation, and massages. A strange name, Rose thought, given that it was so close to hell on earth. There was, aside from this, a stand where photographs could be developed, advertised by a large picture washed out by the sun of a bride wearing yards and yards of tulle. Rose headed into the nearby gas station’s mini-mart, where something caught his attention.

Aside from the ice cream, soda, magazines, gum, snacks, greeting cards, phone cards, condoms, and other such commonplace items was a group of peculiar objects for sale. Handmade and overwrought, they seemed to come from an underworld that lacked any kind of aesthetic notion or practicality and were displayed separately in their own somewhat dusty cabinet, each one painfully useless. There were embossed leather Bible covers, carved wooden circles that were supposed to be mandalas, beaded medallions with the signs of peace and love, embroidered cell-phone covers, key chains with the signs of the zodiac, grocery bags made of woven polyester. The price tags identified them as craft pieces made by the inmates of Manninpox. Rose examined the objects carefully, one by one, a bit shaken by the fact that those things came from in there, emissaries from that hermetic world that had climbed over fences and walls to reach this side of reality. He was overcome with curiosity about whether any of those objects had been warmed by the hands of María Paz. One of the medallions perhaps? The mandala? Or one of the polyester bags? That blue one with white and red? Could she have made it? Maybe María Paz had soothed the anguish of her days behind bars keeping her hands busy with that series of knots that would calm her nerves and kill some time. That exact bag? It was a one-in-a-million chance, but Rose bought it, paying $8.50 plus tax. He can’t quite tell me why he bought that one and not something else; it could have been the Aquarius key chain, which was his astrological sign, or a cover for the cell phone he had never wanted to own. But he chose that bag to leave on top of Cleve’s bed.

“It sounds creepy when I say it this way,” he tells me, “but after the death of my son, everything had become some sort of sign for me. Or amulet, or whatever. It was as if everything had a hidden meaning that I was urged to discover. I clung to whatever it was, as long as it allowed me to get closer to Cleve. Do you know what I mean? I can’t quite explain it. In any case, I bought the bag to bring it to him. Of course, in the end I couldn’t quite bring it up to the attic — like I said, too creepy. I just put it away in my sock drawer. I guess I put it there because I started thinking what my son would have said if he saw me come in with such a thing. Are you crazy, Pa? And yeah, I was a bit crazy. More than a bit. After his death, what could you expect?”

From Cleve’s Notebook

The Colombian prisoner surprises me. She’s annoyingly intelligent, a mixture of common sense and street smarts that unnerves me. She’s determined to learn how to write, according to her, so she can tell the story of her life. I don’t know what crime she could have committed, and it’s difficult to see her in those terms. Of course, around here you don’t ask that; you don’t pry into why any of them are here. Sometimes they’ll volunteer the information; they get a longing to confess and just let loose. But others are very reserved. So it’s a matter of principle not to meddle; each inmate is simply paying an outstanding debt to justice, and aside from this, each is a human being. Not just innocent or guilty, but a human being, period. But the more I like this María Paz, the more the possibility that she’s a true criminal disturbs me, although it’s more a probability than a possibility. When it comes down to it, I met her in a prison, not in a damned convent. Of course, her crime, if she did commit a crime, could have had something to do with drugs. Colombia and cocaine, cocaine and Colombia, they practically go together. And that would certainly be an extenuating circumstance. Clearly a big capo, a cartel assassin, a corrupt DEA agent, or a banker who has laundered millions would be incompatible with my moral parameters, but a girl who gets three or four years in prison for bringing a few grams of cocaine into the country hidden in her bra? That’s a forgivable sin. Who am I to judge her? Me, who smoked all the dope in the world when I was a teenager, specifically the Santa Marta Gold that came, yes, from Colombia. I’m going to dismiss her for drug smuggling, me, who every once in a while does a few lines myself that I buy in Washington Square Park right under the arch and the noses of the police? But that’s if she indeed was caught smuggling. I don’t know. Maybe it wasn’t because of that, and her case is more serious. But damn, she’s so gorgeous, that morena has such a pretty face… I pretend, do my best to fake it; it would be gross to use my job to pick up an inmate; forget it, that would be a big mistake, a cosmic fuckup. I think no one’s yet noticed how much I like her, not even her, but who knows? They’re little fiends, her and her friends, their looks full of innuendos; and I feel that they want to devour me with their eyes during class. They’re dangerous seductresses, like Circe, all of them, young or old, skinny or fat, white or black. Me, a momma’s boy, and each of them, hundred-year-old totems. Homer described Circe’s dwelling place as a mansion of stone in the middle of a dense forest, a perfect description of Manninpox. I feel as if the Colombian inmate places a lot of hope in me and it pisses me off knowing I’m going to let her down, but there’s nothing I can do about that. I enjoy reading the exercises she does in class. I feel good sitting here alone in my attic, reading her stories; the crazy things she writes about help me endure the silence of these mountains. I’d like to tell her that she’s the powerful one, that I drink from her strength, that she’s the one who helps me, there from her cell, and not the other way around. Between the two of us, she’s the real survivor. Her stories are somewhat gloomy, but she gives them a human grace that illuminates them, and her Scheherazade voice carries me from night to night. So funny, I write “Scheherazade” and the autocorrect on my word processor changes it to “schemer.” I write “Scheherazade” once more and again “schemer” appears, in which case, I give up, the thing’s right: it is trying to call my attention to the ridiculousness of my choice of words. Let’s just say then that the Colombian girl has become my nocturnal schemer.

Interview with Ian Rose

Not far from the prominent, white, well-lit sign that announced “MANNINPOX STATE PRISON,” Ian Rose saw another more modest sign that said in Spanish, in faded letters, “Mis Errores Café-Bar.” Cleve and his dogs had ended up right in front of the café frequented by Cleve. Shit, Rose thought, it’s as if everything is predetermined. He walked toward the entrance and went in like a detective walking into the scene of a crime, as if he were afraid to disturb any fingerprints that his son might have left floating there. The place was deserted and desolate, and did not reveal much. On top of the Formica table hung semicircles of plastic red lamps befouled with flies, and the blue oilcloth covering on the benches was coming apart at the seams, exposing the foam rubber guts. Rose asked for a Diet Coke at the bar and water for his dogs, and felt the urge to order an espresso for Cleve. That’s what his son always ordered, an espresso, to which he added a pinch of sugar.

“Look at them,” the bartender said, signaling with his chin to the women in the beauty parlor across the street from Mis Errores. “You see them. They don’t only do your hair, brother; they give you a cut too. Take a look at the tall one. Before she worked there, she did time at Manninpox. And she’s not the only one, you know. There have been several of them who didn’t know where to go once they were granted their freedom, or why to go; they didn’t have a job or a home, or family that loved them, or dogs that barked for them. So they stayed around here, right where they were released, getting together to share a room with a monthly rate at the Best Value Inn, and if they’re not too worn down, they latch onto The Goddess to work as manicurists or masseuses. And I don’t have to explain the kind of massages they offer, you know what I’m talking about?”

“I really couldn’t care less,” Rose said, fixing his eyes on his glass and swirling it to make the ice click, to signal that he had no interest in chatting.

“Do you want to see the prison?” The guy did not drop the subject. “You can’t see it from the road, but you can see it from the roof here. It’s quite a sight, I assure you.”

Rose told him he wasn’t interested, but the bartender persisted, trying make Rose feel at ease by telling him it wouldn’t cost anything, that he used to charge, when he had the binoculars for clients to use, but not anymore.

“I used to charge the tourists,” the guy kept saying, although Rose avoided eye contact. “Many people drive up here just to see the prison, and I’m not just talking about the family members of the prisoners. I’m talking about normal people, tourists who feel cheated when they realize that Manninpox is hidden behind all those trees. Installing the binoculars on the roof was my friend Roco’s idea, a great idea, I tell you, and we made some extra money from it. We charged one buck for three minutes of viewing. I’m the owner of the bar, the very person you see here, so I supervised everything and bartended while Roco took care of the fees and timing the customers with the binoculars. This new feature put my place on the map, it filled up, and people bought more drinks and food. A great show. And if you were lucky, you could even see the prisoners when they took them out to the bus to go to court. The human side, you see. They were led out single file, each one of them cuffed at the wrists, ankles, and waist as well as chained to each other. Quite the scene, I tell you, not even Houdini could have escaped such a thing. They could barely walk, looked like ducks advancing with little hops. They call it a fish line, and from the roof you could see everything as if from a box seat. Not anymore, that’s when we had the binoculars. I remember one prisoner in particular, a young woman, very good-looking, who cried and whose nose ran and she tried to wipe it with a hankie she had in her hand, but of course, she couldn’t because of the chain. I swear, I’d have released her if I could, at least to let her blow her nose. The binoculars were German, very good ones, I had bought them secondhand, but they were in perfect shape and came with a pigskin leather case and everything. But the authorities forced us to stop, threatening to arrest me if I kept peeping at what was happening in the prison, and they fucked the business. But if you want to go up on the roof, go right ahead. You can see the building with the naked eye. You lose the human angle but can appreciate the architecture. Manninpox was built between 1842 and 1847 under the guidance of Edward Branly, a genius of his time; you won’t see anything compared to what this man could dream up, at least not on this side of the Atlantic.”

“In the end, I relented and I went up,” Rose tells me. “Maybe because I needed to do it, although I’d have never admitted that. I had to see all that with my son’s eyes. I wasn’t being morbid; I can assure you of that. I imagine the tourists wasted a dollar for three minutes of voyeurism. But that wasn’t why I did it. I went up to see the place that had captured the attention and stirred the passion of my son in the months before his death. That’s why I went up, because that place spoke to me of Cleve, and on top of that, the girl María Paz was still locked up there, and I had been trying to figure out her story, thinking over what I’d read in the manuscript and asking myself questions about its author.”

When Rose went up to the roof of Mis Errores to look, he had to admit that the owner had been right. The thing wasn’t just a gray uniform block; it was an architectural spectacle in the middle of the woods, in the shape of a European castle of an indeterminate style, somewhere between the medieval and Renaissance periods. Before his eyes there appeared an ostentatious stone castle with massive walls, round arched doorways, narrow windows with iron bars crowned with spear tips, shuttered balconies, a chapel, and a dry moat all around. He wanted to compare it to something that would be familiar to him, and he found that the structure was sort of an American replica of the fortress of Pinerolo, where they had locked up the luckless Man in the Iron Mask, or a New World version of the Tower of London. The whole thing, created with a morbid attention to detail, looked something like a Disney World of horror. Rose thought that the only thing missing was a chorus line, with the prisoners kicking up their legs in unison, like the Radio City Rockettes, but wearing black-and-white striped miniskirts. To finish the sick, hyperrealistic scenario, the only thing missing was a tour of the torture chamber, or a light and sound show from the public gallows for a fascinated crowd. The whole thing could have been a new kind of wax museum, one in which they’d charge twenty-five dollars for admission for adults, fifteen for children, and free for seniors over seventy and kids under four. “Come see a cavernous prison from the Middle Ages, a one-of-a-kind experience. Don’t miss it!” With the added attraction that it would not be inhabited by wax figures but by flesh-and-blood prisoners. As seen from the outside, Manninpox prison was an ersatz, a trompe l’oeil, conceived and built to attract attention, to cause an impression, and finally to entertain.

Rose didn’t know how to explain the raison d’être of that amazing display of judicial power and coercive force, that manifestation of the greatness of authority, judges, district attorneys, wardens, guards, honest neighbors, and other good citizens before the alleged insignificance and baseness of the prisoners. The American state had spent a fortune building that monster to make an impression and teach a lesson. But to whom? Hard to say, if you took into account that the portentous structure wasn’t visible to anyone unless you went up on the roof of Mis Errores, certainly not to the prisoners themselves, for whom the punishment was meant, because once inside they could not see the exterior. They’d see it perhaps once, briefly, on the day they were brought in, and with any luck a second time, on the day they were released, when Manninpox would appear in the rearview mirror of the bus that would take them away from there.

From Cleve’s Notebook

“Why do we kill people who kill people to show that killing people is wrong?” Norman Mailer is said to have asked. It’s a good question. Not to even mention making a public display of the punishment of some as a show for others. That’s how we are — until very recently civilized humankind made a show of hangings in the public plazas, the last such case well into the twentieth century. In the end, how much more advanced is the lethal injection, that aseptic hypocrisy in which the condemned is put on exhibit behind glass before the carefully chosen audience that gets comfy in the little theater to witness death. How far have we really come from the ancient sacrifice nailed to the cross, today’s condemned tied down with leather straps, arms spread crosslike? The grotesque senselessness of Manninpox disgusts me, even the structure itself; I loathe its bizarre and pretentiously aristocratic architecture. And for what? Who are we? How fake can we get? How much buffoonery and cruelty are we willing to tolerate to anchor ourselves in a prestigious past that is not ours?

Interview with Ian Rose

Compared to the breadth and scope of the strange fortress of Manninpox, Rose found that the Best Value Inn and the nearby buildings looked like tiny cardboard houses, and that Mis Errores seemed small and ramshackle, a truly miserable joint, as if all the desolation of the world were condensed around the few tables, or as if all the flies of the world had agreed to shit on the red plastic lamps that produced such a measly light it wearied the soul.

“We’re empty now because it’s not visiting time. That’s on Saturday, at two in the afternoon, and the place gets packed then with family members coming to see the girls. They used to come by train, but now there’s no more train, so they come in buses or cars. Or they take taxis.” The owner of the bar, with his back to Rose, recited the string of events as if he were a tourist guide. “Many come by taxi, spend the night in the Best Value, and wait till one, when the white minivans from the prison come to pick them up and take them in. It’s sad watching them. The guards treat them as if they too are delinquent, no patience, insulting them when they don’t follow instructions. It’s just that the majority of the prisoners are Spics. Or African-Americans. Most of them are black or Latinas; you won’t find too many white girls. Some families come from far away, particularly from Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico. And Colombia. Every day there are more Colombians, snatched because of drugs — you know, Pablo Escobar, the cartels, that whole story. By six the families are back, because visiting hours end at five. It’s a tragedy having a loved one in prison. People feel pity for the prisoners, but they don’t think about those in the family, who almost always are old folk and children. Many of the prisoners’ children end up with the grandparents. And remember, they have to pay the fare to get here and back. The taxi drivers are my best customers, the ones who consume the most. They stay here watching a soccer game on TV or playing cards, and with the fares they have just made they can afford anything on the menu. The families, on the other hand, are often the worst, I hate to say it. They arrive broke after having paying for the journey, which sometimes includes a plane ticket. So guess who takes the hit. Me, of course. Because they set up camp inside the bar, take over tables for hours, use the bathroom, shave and groom in the bathroom sinks, fall asleep on the benches, and pay for just coffee and soda, because they don’t have much else. The worst are the poblanos, you know, the ones from Puebla in Mexico. They come by the dozens and bring food from their homes, chili peppers and other spicy things and tortillas, they’re nuts about tortillas. I had to forbid them to come in with food and even hung a sign outside warning them: ‘Prohibido entrar con comidas y alimentos.’ Just like that, in Spanish, because I put it up mostly for them, the poblanos. Roco wrote it out for me and I copied the letters on the wooden sign; you can say he did the brainwork and I did the handiwork, but it was no use when it came down to it. ‘Oye, señor,’ I try telling the poblanos. ‘Yo vender comida, tu comprarlo.’ Ever since Roco left, it’s hard to get them to listen. They pretend not to understand and order a single dish: ‘Give to us a spaghetti with meatballs.’ One dish for all of them. You can understand how I can’t run a business like that. And the worst of it is that they push the pasta to the side of the plate, take out the bag of tortillas and fried beans, and make tacos with my meatballs, they just can’t help it. That’s why I get along better with the taxi drivers, yes sir, much better. You can even have a conversation with them, so much better to deal with people who speak your own language and behave properly, folks you can trust, knowing that if they order spaghetti and meatballs, they’re going to eat the meatballs and the spaghetti.”

“What about the name of the place?” Rose asked, remembering he had seen the name mentioned in one of Cleve’s graphic novels.

“I didn’t name the place, Roco did. His parents are from Costa Rica. It was his idea.”

When he got back home, Rose hid the polyester pouch in his sock drawer and immediately went up to the attic to look through Cleve’s papers. He had never done that before, had never even thought about doing it, believing it to be a violation of privacy, but now he needed to know more. He wanted to know more about the world in which his son had become entangled where women prisoners engraved leather mandalas in the towers of their medieval castle. Cleve was an organized young man who had kept his things in order; Rose imagined it wouldn’t be difficult to find the papers relating to the time Cleve taught the workshop at Manninpox.

The task took Rose less than an hour. María Paz’s real name was there, as were her surnames, her astrological sign, her age, her nationality, and even the exercises and homework she did for the class, pages and pages with new autobiographical fragments that amplified what Rose had already read. There were even copies of her admission papers to the prison, the mug shots with the prison ID number held over her chest, which revealed a rather striking young woman, with a gloomy look, big lips, and brow so furrowed that the eyebrows touched. So this was María Paz. He could finally have a close look at her: defiant, contrary, and wild haired — possessed by some demon. This little fireball must give them hell, he thought. But at the same time Rose had to admit she was attractive, seductive, which Cleve must have certainly noticed. She was dark-skinned, with evident Latin features and untamed hair that refused to remain pinned behind her, as they must have ordered her to do so that her ears were visible in the picture. But hers wasn’t a mane of hair that would remain still or that would obey orders from those who would presume to identify individuals by their ears. This was hair that would escape in rebel tresses like creeping vines, or serpents that could strike if you got too close. Hair like Edith’s, Rose thought.

“Good Lord, Cleve, what a creature,” he said aloud, looking at the picture. “What a don’t-mess-with-me look your little friend has. This is a caged animal that has just realized that the fight is to the death.”

Rose had found out the true identity of the girl, had seen her picture, knew what she looked like, and now he needed to know more. He had to learn what her crime had been. He found nothing on the Internet under her real name, but he kept looking.

“I’m not saying that I was looking to blame her for Cleve’s death,” he tells me. “That couldn’t be, since she was in prison at the time of the bike accident. No, that couldn’t be. I was simply being guided by a scent, and everything seemed to indicate I was on to something.

“You want to know the only thing that I found on the Internet about María Paz’s crime?” he asks me. “It appeared months earlier in the NY Daily News; I Googled it. I printed it here if you want to read it; it refers to her as ‘the wife of the deceased,’ and she’s directly accused of the murder of her husband. Here you go. Make a copy if you want. I only ask that if you make it public, change the names. I know they’re on the Internet already, but I just don’t want them to become public because of me. Cleve would never have forgiven me. Just replace the names with XXXX.”

Retired Ex-Cop Murdered, Victim of a Hate Crime

On Wednesday night, at the corner of XXXX and XXXX, the lifeless body of retired police officer XXXX was found, apparently gunned down by gang members in a hate crime. According to forensic reports the victim, who was white, was struck by seven bullets, one of which fatally pierced his left ventricle. Upon the removal of the body, five other wounds were discovered, apparently inflicted postmortem with a blade instrument, one in the belly, on each hand, and on each foot. The ex-police officer, 57, had been retired from public service for eight years and been recently employed as a manager in a market polling organization. He was unarmed and wearing slippers on the night of the murder. Before fleeing, the assailants scrawled the phrase “Racist pig” on a wall at the crime scene.

XXXX, wife of the deceased, was arrested hours later in the apartment the couple shared a few blocks away, where a Blackhawk Garra II knife with which the deceased had been wounded was found and is now being held as physical evidence by the authorities. The knife had been wrapped in gift paper and was accompanied by a birthday card addressed to the deceased. The woman, 24, is Colombian-born, and worked as a pollster in the same company in which the victim was a manager. They had met there years before, and almost immediately afterward had been married in a Catholic ceremony. It has been confirmed that because XXXX was undocumented, she had obtained her job at the market research company using false papers and that she had afterward gained citizenship through her marriage with the retired police officer, who was an American citizen.

Shit, slippers, Rose had thought on reading the article the first time. What most stayed with him was that “human detail,” as the owner of Mis Errores would have put it. An old cop who goes out in slippers to meet death. Rose asked himself if Cleve had known, or at least suspected, that his little kitten was a cold-blooded murderer. Because at the least, the victim should have been afforded the dignity of being dressed properly and wearing a pair of shoes. That human detail. Not to mention the spine-chilling gesture of gift-wrapping the murder weapon for the victim on the very day of his birthday. What kind of a monster was this María Paz?

“My, my, your Colombian was a deranged knife-wielder. What did you get into, boy? Who were you dealing with?” Rose asked the memory of his son, before going back to Googling the Blackhawk Garra II knives, like the one they had found gift-wrapped in María Paz’s house. As always, Googling revealed something, and according to the pictures in a catalog, it was a loathsome thing with a curved blade, a folding knife that was shaped like a claw as its name indicated, a claw to claw, a nail that pricks and penetrates. Made of black steel, the disgusting thing, sharpened so fine it was almost blue, with dips in the handle for the perfect grip, was a sadistic little toy that in the blink of an eye must have sliced through the cop’s flesh, as if through butter.

It was quite conceivable how a pretty girl would have grown bored of her old husband, how she’d have used him to make her situation legal and grown to hate the price she had to pay for it, such as the need for Viagra and other such limitations. Up to that point, there was a certain logic to the whole thing. But to go from that to knifing him when he was in his slippers? To get together with her friends, dark-skinned and young like her, salsa dancers all, to stab the fat husband to death with a Blackhawk Garra II? Rose began to feel uneasy in his own room, that friendly cavern in which he sought refuge since Edith had abandoned him, and where he wasn’t always disappointed, if the truth be told, because sleeping alone had its advantages. He was the kind of person who snored, hacked, and farted at night; and it was much easier to do it without anyone else there. But that night, not even his bedroom could bring him peace of mind, and he fell asleep troubled by that sinister story of a cop massacred by his own wife; he was distressed by the horror that his son, Cleve, could have had anything to do with that, even if indirectly.

He awoke at midnight thinking that Emperatriz, the Dominican cleaning lady, could hate him the way that Colombian woman had hated her ex-husband, the white ex-cop, that Emperatriz was friendly and helpful only to his face, that she brought him his slippers hiding nefarious intentions, that behind his back she muttered all the reasons for her contempt, that white man who treated her as a slave for a fistful of dollars, or something like that. And then a graver doubt struck him. Had Edith been right, all that time ago, to flee with the child from Bogotá? Had all the servants there hated them, the little white rich folks for whom they had to drive the car and mop the floor and go to the market and cook and clean the bathrooms and make flower arrangements? Had Rose and his family provoked in them a hidden anger, a shameful urge for violence, just as Edith had suspected? One thing was certain, guerrillas had infiltrated the group of workers in his company, and they were more than willing to kidnap the first gringo boss who got careless. It had not been easy for the Roses to live with that sword of Damocles hanging over them, and that is why Ian had not tried to dissuade Edith when she announced that she had had enough. And now, so many years later, in the Catskills Mountains around two in the morning, amid the sleeplessness and the jumble of sheets, the Latino conspiracy was growing at an exponential rate in Rose’s feverish brain. María Paz, Emperatriz, and the servants from Bogotá conspired with workers and guerrillas to attack the Anglos, whom they planned to assault and stab to death as soon as they were careless and put on their slippers or whenever they fell asleep.

There was no defending oneself, Western civilization was being overcome by the whole of the Sur, the volatile and backward Sur, the wild and awful Sur, with its thousands of gringo haters who were rising in hordes following María Paz and Emperatriz, the leaders of the great invasion that surged up from Panama, crossed Nicaragua, grew into a tsunami in Guatemala and Mexico, and the Sur was unstoppable as it poured through the holes in the vulnerable American border. The North was already flooded by the black tide of the Sur; it was within, cleaning its houses, serving food in restaurants, filling cars with gasoline, harvesting pumpkins in Virginia and strawberries in Michigan, day after day repeating “have a nice day” with a terrible accent and a sly smile… hiding Blackhawk Garra IIs in their pockets, envious of the gringos’ democratic systems and ready to seize their property. The good guys, who had already lost Texas, California, and Florida, now would lose Arizona and Colorado. New Mexico and Nevada were already strongholds of the enemy, and one by one, the other states would fall into the hands of the bad guys. Unless, of course, Ian Rose managed to react and hold back the onslaught of this anxiety crisis. That’s what the doctor had told him he was going through, an anxiety crisis that had its origins in the death of his son, and to control it, he was prescribed Effexor XR, which Rose didn’t like because it made him dopey and because he held on to the hope that with time things would get better on their own.

I’m so hot, he thought, as he changed his pajamas drenched in sweat. He needed to calm down, find his point of balance again. Best if he left the bedroom, the scene of his nightmare, and went into the kitchen, which was always cooler, with bare feet on the cold tiles, open some windows, refill the dogs’ water dishes, have a nice glass of apple juice with lots of ice. By the time he went back to bed, he was afraid to fall asleep lest the hallucinations begin again, so he put on the television and for the thousandth time watched An American in Paris with Gene Kelly. He fought sleep for another reason as well: he feared that if he fell asleep he’d return to Manninpox, that place that he despised but that was beginning to ensnare him as it had ensnared Cleve. Awake, he could escape its influence, but if he fell asleep, who knows? He’d run the risk of being transported there, as if sleepwalking through the woods, hypnotized, betrayed by his own steps that led toward those porous walls and forced him through them against his will, past the secluded courtyards and through the gloomy hallways that smelled like the circus, a bad combination of urine and disinfectant, as his until recently loyal Taylor & Son boots, in a sudden display of insolence, led him to the very entrails of the place, to its feverish heart, the tight rows of cells, where the feminine breath stuck to the walls like water stains, and where the pride of caged lionesses would be waiting for him, him, Ian Rose, to lick his face and destroy it with one blow. In spite of the apple juice, the nightmares continued, and Rose had no choice but to take the Effexor he had avoided taking that day. He began dozing off around dawn and was sound asleep halfway through Some Like It Hot, another movie he knew by heart. In the end, he did not know how he had been able to defend himself, or what masthead he had held onto to withstand the siren songs of the inmates of Manninpox; but as it was, he awoke late that morning safe in his own bed, or rather he was awakened by the hounding of his dogs, who did not understand why at that hour of the day they had not gone out or been fed breakfast.

Later, while taking a shower, Rose got an idea. Although “idea” isn’t exactly the word, more like the flash of an image that assaulted him along with renewed uneasiness about his years in South America, the solitary figure of a man nailed to a cross. That was it: he knew it immediately. The murder of the policeman had not been a hate crime as the press had asserted. That phrase “racist pig” could have well been on the wall before the murder; such graffiti was likely common in a multiracial and troubled neighborhood like the one in which María Paz lived. It was no wonder the neighbors had been complaining. But the thing with the ex-cop was about something else. It had been a crucifixion without a cross. The wounds on the body were the same as the ones on the crucified Jesus, one on each hand, one on each foot, and one on the side of the torso. Rose knew what the stigmata was because he had learned about it in Bogotá. Rose wasn’t a religious man and had never been interested in such things, but the issue had become a priority the moment that his son, Cleve, then seven years old and likely because of the influence of school lessons in Bogotá, announced that he wasn’t only going to become a Catholic but also a priest. Edith was horrified, one more reason for her to hate Bogotá. But Ian had taken it as a joke. “Do it if you want, son,” he had told Cleve. “It’s your choice. You can be a Catholic if that’s what you want, as long as you don’t become pope.” But when the boy began to swear that he saw the Sacred Heart of Jesus in the bark of trees, Ian Rose realized that the issue was serious and decided to look into it seriously. The Christ that he came to know in the Baroque churches of the colonial center of Bogotá had nothing to do with the fair and incorporeal bourgeois of his Protestant family. This South American Christ was a man of the people, a working-class hero who attracted crowds with his melodramatic confrontations, a poor man who suffered and bled with them, a Lord of the Wounds, a Master of Sorrow, who fascinated crowds with his masochistic displays. Rose grew frightened that his son had been influenced by such mentality, which according to him was extremely twisted, and that was another reason that he did not prevent Edith from taking the child out of Colombia. And now, there in the shower of his house in the Catskills, Ian Rose thought he understood all of a sudden that Greg, the ex-cop, had been murdered by crucifixion, or something like it. The crime had been a ritual murder, that was the essence of it, and not a hate crime as the papers asserted. Why should Rose believe the newspapers anyway? Since when did they know anything? María Paz offered a different version of events, so in a towel and still soaking wet, Rose went to his desk, took out the manuscript, and reread that part a few times. She maintained she was innocent, and her argument was quite convincing. But if that was the case, who the hell had crucified her husband? A gang of wrathful white haters, as the NY Daily News assumed, or some religious fanatics? And what about that gift-wrapped Blackhawk they found in her apartment?

From Cleve’s Notebook

Paz — that’s what María Paz wants to be called. Paz. “Mi Paz,” I wrote the other day. I don’t know why I used the possessive when referring to her, given she’s her own person and no one else’s. “Mi paz os dejo, mi paz os doy,” recited the Colombian priest, and I thought he was saying, “Mis pasos dejo, mis pasos doy,” confusing “peace” with “steps,” but so I repeated at the top of my voice along with the others, feeling as Catholic as any of them. And then there was a very meaningful liturgical chant that was my favorite, dealing with the anxiety of souls, and that in its high notes exclaimed, “Yo tengo sed ardiente, yo tengo sed de Dios.” And the neo-Catholic I was becoming, a zealot like any convert, sang, “Yo tengo seda ardiente.” So I had burning silk instead of a burning thirst, that’s what it sounded like to me, and that’s how I repeated it, kneeling with my eyes closed, racked with emotion, in a complete mystical state, so much so that one day I confronted my parents, who are Protestants, I think, I’m not sure, maybe they’re nothing, but in any case I told them I personally would be a full-fledged Catholic. My mother grew very concerned, but my father simply laughed. And although I never became a Catholic — or, for that matter, a Protestant — I’m still somewhat possessed by the burning thirst and I struggle against the universal tendency to replace the gods of Olympus with the stars of Hollywood. A bad habit, that tendency to demystify. A bad habit for me, I mean, who is a novelist and convinced that the heart of any good novel is nothing more than a camouflaged ritual whose only great concern is forgiveness or condemnation. And all you have to do is dig a little to find the victim and victimizer, the crucified and the crucifier. I also think that its central theme, however varied it may be, always deals more or less with the same thing: guilt and expiation. Just ask Fyodor.

Interview with Ian Rose

Once he was a bit more calm, Ian Rose decided that the only option to overcoming his torment of doubts and shooing away the ghosts was to screw his courage to the sticking place, deal with the irreversible fact of his son’s death, and begin to investigate the not very clear circumstances surrounding it. I’m going to go crazy if I don’t do it, he thought, and they’ll put me in an asylum — and who’ll take care of the dogs then? That’s why at eight o’clock in the morning the following Wednesday, he was ordering orange juice, a cappuccino, pancakes with maple syrup, and fried eggs with sausage at the Lyric Diner, Cleve’s favorite breakfast spot in New York, a fifties-style bar and grill on Third Avenue and Twenty-Second Street.

“You’ll see, Pa,” Cleve had assured him the first time he took him there. “Here they only take six minutes to serve all the bad cholesterol you want.”

It was true: service did not take a second longer, six minutes exactly to bring everything to the table. Cleve timed them to show his father, and on top of that they were as efficient as they were sullen, something Ian Rose appreciated, because he disliked nothing more than that self-interested, syrupy kindness prevalent throughout the city. But not at the Lyric; there no one greeted you with a phony smile or said good-bye with a gelid “have a nice day.” The boys of the Lyric screamed from your table to the kitchen: “Blind eyes!” for poached eggs, “Drop them!” for eggs over easy, or “Shatter them!” for scrambled.

This time Rose was alone and not very hungry, so he only ate a quarter of the mountain of food they brought him, then pushed his plates aside and brought out pen and paper to make notes about what he’d have to ask Pro Bono, María Paz’s attorney, in a few hours. Right away he felt as if the rude wait staff of the Lyric were sending disproving glances his way, not happy that he had turned the table into a desk. Because just as speedily as they served you, they rushed you out, with the last bite still in your mouth, so the next diner could be accommodated. Rose gathered his belongings without having written anything, because aside from the obvious he really didn’t know what to ask the lawyer; and besides, how much could he ask in ten minutes, which is what he had been granted for the meeting, not a lot of time, enough for a hello and good-bye and that’s it. After leaving the Lyric, he walked to the Strand, where they often had Cleve’s graphic novels, and he went in to see if they had any. He found a bunch of them in a remote corner of the store, marked down from $12.00 to $3.50, and he felt a stab in his chest. He put them all in his cart and walked to the cashier. There were fifteen of them and he was going to buy them all. He’d take them and keep them in the house because it had pained him to see them so marked down, almost given away. He felt it was an unmerited degradation, a premature push toward oblivion.

“Excellent!” the cashier told Rose when he saw all the copies of the same book. He was young and slight as a tadpole, with a red-and-black hankie tied around his neck and a small dragon tattooed on his arm. “I see you too are a fan of the Suicide Poet…”

“Are you?” Rose murmured, and his eyes watered.

“Of course. Bedside reading! And believe me, I’m not the only one. They’re going to be disappointed when they see we’re out of copies.”

“Then I’ll take only two,” Rose said. “Keep the rest; I don’t want to be a hog.”

He walked up Broadway with the two books under his arm and headed to Union Square, where he got on the subway that would take him to the lawyer’s office in Brooklyn Heights. In María Paz’s manuscript the man’s first and last name had been mentioned, although here he appears only by his pseudonym, Pro Bono, because as far as I can tell, everyone in this story has something to hide and I’d rather not reveal their true names. María Paz alluded to the fact that her defense attorney was retired, and judging by the fascination bordering on love with which she referred to him, at first Ian Rose had imagined the lawyer to be the old legalistic type with Don Juan airs, with a toupee to hide his baldness, a pair of shiny black shoes à la Fred Astaire, and strong men’s cologne to hide the acrid smell of old age.

“Not even close, Mr. Rose,” Ming, Cleve’s editor and friend, who had done Ian Rose the favor of setting up the meeting, had corrected him. “This lawyer is famous. World famous even. He’s not some schmuck.”

Ming, who had known about Pro Bono before all of this, had added to his knowledge by digging a little deeper here and there. Through Ming, Rose found out that in his glory days, Pro Bono had been the Sardinian heavyweight in global litigation over water rights, acting as defender of local communities against the multinational corporations that sought to commercialize natural resources. He had successfully blocked several multimillion mega-projects to privatize water supplies in places such as Bolivia, Australia, and Pakistan, and also at home, in California and Ohio. And it hadn’t been a little quarrel: Pro Bono had made a specialty of kicking some serious thugs in the ass, so much so that once, in Cochabamba, Bolivia, there had been an attempt on his life for going around as a spokesperson of a huge mobilization of indigenous women who would not let the water be taken from their ancient wells because the multinational banks felt like privatizing them as a condition of debt renegotiations.

“Well, well,” Rose said to Ming, “so I’m going to meet with the champion of the world’s hungry.”

As might be expected, not everything about the lawyer had been altruistic, because the fights he had won had also brought him significant wealth. So he had retired at seventy-five; tired of his philanthropic adventures and his pockets full, and facing a life of rose gardening, he had opted to take on lesser cases pro bono, that is, to defend people such as María Paz, who could not afford a private attorney, for nothing.

“That’s your man,” Ming said. “Unmistakable, as you will see, because of his physical appearance.”

“Why?”

“A little issue. Well, a particularity, but rather obvious.”

“Is he blind? Because he deserves a medal of merit if on top of everything he’s blind.”

“No, not that.”

“Deaf-mute? Lame? Cleft lip?”

“Hunchback.”

Hunchback. The word itself was taboo and therefore unmentionable. An only child, pampered and protected by his parents, Pro Bono himself had not been aware of the implications of his deformity until he was six, when he started school and others began to point at him. But even at that age he showed resources with which to defend himself. One day, he grew sick of another kid who pushed him to the end of his rope calling him a camel.

“Don’t call me a camel, you moron, don’t you know a camel has two humps, not one?” Pro Bono screamed at him, pushing him to the ground.

The fact that he was intelligent and came from a traditional rich East Coast family shielded him against any complex he may have developed about being lesser than. As a teenager, the fact that his defect was taboo became a motivation to openly flaunt it. He never avoided looking at himself in the mirror; on the contrary, he stood before a double mirror to make his peace with that strange, almost mythological body that had been his lot. He repeated the word “hunchback” to himself until owning it and knowing it was human, and also all the degrading insults — hunchbacked, camel, retard, hunchy, dromedary, humpbacked, humpy — and in removing their thorns, he neutralized the degradation they carried. He also repeated the euphemisms that were meant to sidestep his true condition — invalid, special, disabled — because he knew that if anything could harm him more than the deformity itself it was the misleading silence and the pious metaphors. Through books, he had developed a certain pride in the uniqueness of being a part of the family that included Victor Hugo’s hunchback Quasimodo, Hawthorne’s Aminadab, and Dickens’s Daniel Quilp. He was pleased that Homer had singled out Tiresias, endowing him with a hump, as did Shakespeare with Caliban from The Tempest and with Richard III. Literature had wanted to present all of these first cousins, his brothers, as hunchbacked and deviant, making their physical condition a manifestation of their spiritual defects. But this wasn’t the case. Pro Bono knew them very well and saw them otherwise, feeling affection for all of them, understanding their motivations, and from the time he was an adolescent he had set his mind to come to their defense and those of their like, clearing their names, making it evident once and for all that a hunchback need not be one of the miserable ones.

For María Paz, who didn’t yet have a defense attorney, Pro Bono’s physical appearance hadn’t been a big deal. Not having a defense attorney under the critical circumstances in which she found herself was like going to war without an army or arms, not knowing who her enemy was, or what she was accused of, and worse yet, not quite knowing exactly what she had become involved in. Caught up in the hubbub of the courtroom’s waiting room, María Paz hadn’t even heard her name when they called her over the loudspeaker to appear at the bench, and she was alerted only because another detainee, who had heard it, ran over to her to tell her it was her turn. Once before the judge, she could not understand what they were asking her; in her head the words sounded hollow, as if all her English had been forgotten in one swoop, and she answered whatever came into her head. Her nerves were killing her; she mumbled, contradicted herself. And slowly dug a deeper and deeper hole, incriminating herself until there was no way out. And just at that moment, as if fallen from the sky, Pro Bono, the renowned veteran attorney, an expert in the arts and tricks of the trade, appeared and took over the messy case that seemed lost from the start: the Colombian woman accused of seducing and then murdering the American ex-cop.

“Take it easy, baby, I’ll take care of you” was the first thing Pro Bono had told María Paz that day, putting his arm around her and giving her a brief squeeze on the shoulder, just long enough so that she felt the warmth of another human being; she took that spontaneous gesture as a blessing, letting her know that she wasn’t alone. Amid the noise and confusion of the courtroom, those few words, the words everyone wants to hear in the middle of one’s troubles, miraculously reached her ears: “I’ll take care of you.” A generous and powerful offer, especially under these circumstances, coming from a stranger who was asking for nothing in return, a man of odd appearance but decidedly respectable, very elegant in his own peculiar way, someone who smelled clean and refined amid the thick stench of chaos. He was one of those skinny men with big bones and an angular face, an old-fashioned aristocrat with traces of vices long abandoned and a certain attractiveness battered by the years, and enormous, intense yellow-hazel eyes like a heron. A hunchback, yes, that too, an old gentleman bent over by the burden of his hunch, an individual painfully reduced in stature. But what María Paz noticed on that first meeting was that he came to her aid like a gentleman, conveying a sense of calm and self-confidence that inspired in her a rare sensation of relief, as if suddenly the weight that she also bore on her back was lifted.

Ian Rose had wanted to make it to Pro Bono’s on time, so as not to waste any part of his quota of minutes, and at 12:20 p.m. he was seated on a fine Chippendale chair upholstered in bottle-green velour in the middle of a waiting room of the office that took up a whole floor of a flawlessly remodeled Brooklyn Heights doorman building. The office had been furnished with heavy mahogany furniture, Persian rugs on the parquet floor, a vase of fresh roses at the entrance, and a ruling equestrian motif, evident in ashtrays, curtains, pillows, and various other objects. It was one of those places made up to appear British and that seemed to smell of wood and leather, but in reality didn’t smell of anything. More aptly, it was an old-school den of scheming lawyers through and through, with over sixty years of experience litigating criminal cases in New York and other cities around the world, very high profile, “assertive and aggressive,” known for its ethical and professional conduct, with a confirmed reputation for knowing the law backward and forward, fully understanding the penal system, and promising little but delivering much. The firm was known by three names, the first of which was Pro Bono, the principal and oldest partner. Although he had retired, his younger partners were still making use of his prestigious name and had allowed him to continue to use his old office, the most spacious one and the only one with a full view of the Brooklyn Bridge. Ming had told Rose that Pro Bono had an apartment in the same building on the lower floor, where he stayed when it got too late to drive back to his house in Greenwich, Connecticut, where he lived with his wife. It’s really something, Rose thought, that there are people like that.

While he waited, Rose began to read one of the copies of The Suicide Poet and His Girlfriend Dorita. Damn, my boy was talented, he thought, and once more big tears welled up in his eyes that he quickly dried with the sleeve of his coat.

“I’ve become an old crybaby, Cleve,” he said aloud, but he was alone in the waiting room and no one heard him.

He waited for twenty minutes, twice as long as he had been promised for the meeting, and he imagined that this lawyer must be a phony, who would’ve thought? As if Rose didn’t know that he was retired with nothing to do but cross his arms and sit on his ass in the office.

“I’m Ian Rose,” he introduced himself when he finally met the man.

“I know, Mr. Rose,” Pro Bono replied, impressing on his words a certain tone that Rose didn’t quite get. “You’ve come to see me about María Paz, the Colombian girl. Look, my friend, don’t waste your time with this. She’s fine. As fine as can be, if you get my drift; and in any case there’s not much you can do for her.”

“I just want to know if it’s true that she killed her husband,” Rose asked.

“I’m sorry,” Pro Bono said, but Rose sensed that he wasn’t. “But I can’t divulge that information.”

Apparently, the charm of that lawyer who had been so kind to María Paz would not be on display for Rose. Ming had warned him that it was very likely that the lawyer would not be willing to break attorney-client confidentiality for a stranger. That was understandable, but there was an aggressive streak about him that Rose couldn’t quite figure out.

“If that’s all, Mr. Rose, let me show you out,” Pro Bono said, gesturing toward the door.

“You promised me ten minutes, sir, and not even two have passed.”

“You’re right. We can just remain in silence for the other eight minutes. Or talk about the weather. You choose.”

It seemed that this would be it. For Rose, a failure, a waste of time, in some ways an insult. The silence was tense and the air heavy. Pro Bono stood by the window, and facing the light he checked the Cartier Panthere on his wrist for the minutes left that would put an end to this impasse. Rose commanded himself to come up with something, but his mind remained blank. He had thought he’d get some solace from the lawyer, or at least some direction for his investigation, but instead he had been treated like a nuisance. Who was this Pro Bono after all, and what role did he play in the story? He may well have been a champion for the hungry of the world, but something was rotten in Denmark. Rose could not understand at all why he was being kicked out. María Paz said such flattering things about him and showed him so much respect and gratitude that Rose began to suspect that something had happened between them, something outside of the attorney-client relationship. Something in her tone alluded to the type of intimacy that those who have shared a bed cannot hide. Is that what it was then? A tussle in the sheets? Maybe that’s what it came to. But on seeing the hunchback’s figure silhouetted by the window and then taking into account that the difference in age between this guy and his client must be enormous, Rose wondered if the secret they shared wasn’t about a sexual tryst at all, but was a secret nonetheless. He decided that Pro Bono looked honorable enough not to be sneaking quickies behind the guards’ backs. But there was something between those two, perhaps some intrigue more subtle than sex, although he knew anything was possible. It was likely that María had been won over by the attorney’s masculine vibes, with his fine wardrobe, and the keys to the Ferrari or Aston Martin that he had parked outside, but more than anything by the dignified solemnity that the protuberance on his back lent him.

As the clock wound down, Rose was able to gather himself enough to play one last card. If this guy has secrets, he thought, he’s not going to want them revealed. So he mentioned that he had María Paz’s manuscript of confessions about her life.

“You are in it,” Rose asserted, thinking it would be taken either as flattery or as a threat.

“What?”

“Her manuscript. Very long and detailed. And you’re mentioned in it. A few times. I have it here.”

“May I see it?”

“Only if you tell me what she was accused of.”

Pro Bono sighed, took a couple of sips of coffee, of which he had not offered Rose any, and made a gesture like a rabbit, wrinkling his nose and showing his teeth before responding.

“Alright, Mr. Rose. You win. What you’ll hear is off the record,” he warned, after he had the manuscript in hand and had browsed through it quickly. “I’m going to tell you what happened only once. Don’t ask me to elaborate upon or repeat anything. If you are not familiar with the legal terms that I use, don’t bother asking me about them because I won’t explain them. Understand as best you can and commit it to memory, because I will not allow you to record this or take notes. Is this understood?”

Bingo! Rose congratulated himself. Pro Bono had taken the bait.

Rose was indeed unfamiliar with many of the legal terms, so much of the lawyer’s yarn went over his head, but he nevertheless felt that he got a clear sense of the big picture. María Paz, an illegal, undocumented Colombian immigrant, marries Greg, a white American ex-cop, thereby acquires US permanent residency and employment rights. Behind her back, the guy is involved in dealing arms, complicit with other officers and ex-officers. In reality, this Greg is just a link in what little by little becomes clear is a huge net of arms trafficking within the police department. On the night of his birthday, Greg walks out of his house and is shot and stabbed to death. The knife, one of the murder weapons apparently, is found in the couple’s apartment and the Colombian wife is arrested, questioned, and beaten by FBI agents, who ignore due process and human rights guidelines and keep her locked up for a few days, without reading her her rights, contacting the Colombian consulate, or providing her with an interpreter. And they don’t allow her to contact a lawyer or her family. They literally disappear her as they question and torture her. And then they officially charge her with the murder of her husband. At first, they assume that the motive was racially motivated, and afterward they claim it was a crime of passion. Pro Bono calls four of the neighbors to take the stand and testify to having seen the murderers — three tall men, all of them African-American — commit the crime. He thus invalidates the prosecution’s version, according to which the ex-cop was killed by the short Latino woman. But there is the issue of the knife found in the apartment, and this becomes the showpiece and central evidence for the prosecution. But it is a flimsy piece of evidence. On the one hand, there are no fingerprints on it, or even blood, as if it had been meticulously cleaned, and the card accompanying it says, “To Greg from your brother Joe.” It doesn’t incriminate María Paz directly. On the other hand, it’s not the murder weapon. The stabs are not deep and they were inflicted after the bullets had killed the victim instantaneously. So the knife goes from being the main piece of evidence in the entire investigation to being relegated to the background.

“It happens quite often,” Pro Bono told Rose, “that when some proof is offered, everyone gets all excited, but it’s soon disallowed and forgotten because it leads nowhere.”

Thanks to the testimony of the neighbors, the Colombian woman is declared innocent of first-degree murder. Although the authorities succeed in preventing the revelation of internal corruption and arms trafficking within the police department for a while, it is eventually revealed, and Pro Bono cannot prevent María Paz from being found guilty of complicity, although there is not a whole lot of evidence for it, except for answering the phone in the apartment and that sort of thing. They also charge her for past crimes such as forging work permits. Once the trial is over, she returns to jail. Pro Bono then asks the judge to redo the entire proceedings to honor the fundamental rights of the defendant for a competent and fair defense. In other words, Pro Bono asks the judge to declare a mistrial and begin the whole thing again from square one. The judge agrees; he has no choice given that it is difficult to imagine more crooked methods than the ones used on this woman. So the whole thing is a do-over. There’s hope again for María Paz. But until the new trial, she must remain in prison.

“So she didn’t kill her husband,” Rose said, trying hard to take in everything the lawyer told him.

“She’s a beautiful woman. Admirable also, in a way. And no, I don’t think that she killed anyone.”

“Who did it then?”

“No one knows.”

“The murdered man’s brother?”

“He’s white, like the dead man. He was cleared right away.”

“But what about the knife?”

“Again with the knife.”

“Then it wasn’t a crime of passion?”

“You think what you want and keep those thoughts to yourself.”

“A crime related to the arms trafficking?”

“It could be, but they wanted to make it out to be a hate crime, at first, and then a crime of passion. To cover up things, my friend. They’d have done anything to cover it up. The police would rather no one knows how much they’re drowning in shit.”

“And she’s still in Manninpox?”

“You should know.”

“Me? Why would I know?”

“You messing with me?”

“I’m just asking.”

“No, she’s not in Manninpox.”

“They let her out?”

“Didn’t say that.”

“They transferred her to another prison?”

“Look, my friend, I’m guessing you already know the answer to all these questions, and if you don’t know, go figure it out,” Pro Bono said, glancing at his Cartier Panthere to signal that the time had long run out.

“It was a crucifixion,” Rose managed to say, “a crucifixion without a cross. The husband was crucified.”

“What makes you think such nonsense?”

“A wound on each hand, one on each foot, and one on the side. The five wounds of Christ…”

“The thing with the knife was just some grisly detail meant to distract.”

“I think it was just the opposite, it was a very important detail. Did the witnesses not see this? The stabbings I’m talking about, did they see that?”

“It was four members of the same family. They come out of the building just at that time, see the murder, and go back in; they’re not going to stay there like idiots so that the murderers do them in as well. They call the police from their apartment, which doesn’t face the street but a courtyard in the back, and for obvious reasons do not poke their noses out again. They don’t see anything that happens afterward. Is that good enough? A pleasure to meet you then,” Pro Bono said, ending the meeting.

“Remember, I still have the original,” Rose told him, not knowing where he got the gall at the last minute to continue to put pressure on the lawyer, fanning himself with a manila envelope that contained an identical manuscript to the one Pro Bono had in his hands.

“Are you blackmailing me?” Pro Bono asked, a flash of rage in his eyes.

“Let’s say I’m asking you a favor. I just want to know where she is.”

“Very well, you win again,” Pro Bono said. “Look for her at the Olcott Hotel, 27 West 72nd Street.”

Rose jotted down the information and was on his way out, muttering his thanks, when he heard a burst of Pro Bono’s laughter behind him.

“The Olcott Hotel isn’t there anymore,” he yelled. “It shut down years ago. Go, look for her there; see if you find her.”

From Cleve’s Notebook

Paz says that her work is what she most misses from her life before Manninpox. She worked taking surveys about people’s cleaning habits, and the stories she tells are very interesting, and in the end they’re about a social, ethical, and aesthetic hierarchy of the world according to the standards of cleanliness and dirt. I have been pushing her to write about work, about the kind of people she met, but she’s hesitant. At first she completely refused, saying this wasn’t a good topic. I asked her which topic was a good topic, and she said love was, that any novel that wasn’t a love story was boring. That’s what she told me, and in the end she’s probably right. In any case, little by little I’ve gotten her to write about her work. And I see how she’s transformed when she does it. It’s as if the whole human being that she once was, before she was chewed up by authority and justice, rises to the surface. For a time she was taking surveys on Staten Island, and the other day she told this horrific story in class that made us laugh nonetheless. She said she had been knocking on doors in West New Brighton, one of the most foul-smelling neighborhoods on the island because it is right next to what used to be the Fresh Kills Landfill.

Fresh Kills was not only the largest landfill in the history of mankind — it was also the cyclopean monument that outdid all of them, more massive than the Great Wall of China and taller than the Statue of Liberty. This feat was accomplished by dumping thirteen thousand tons of daily garbage on the site for half a century. There is a grisly symbolism that humankind’s most expansive handiwork was this immeasurable mountain of filth, which in the end remains as our American trademark, as a seal that legitimizes our ownership over this entire section of the planet, because the great paradox is that the more we soil things the more we own, and the more we own the more we soil things, and as Michel Serres says, that which is clean belongs to no one. Take an empty hotel room between guests, all cleaned up and disinfected by housekeeping and that will only become Mr. Doe’s Room 1503, or Mrs. Smith’s Room 711, when Doe and Smith leave the mark of their sweat on the bedsheets, the fungi from their feet on the bathtub, their hair in the drain, their cigarette butts in the ashtrays, the packaging and receipts from their purchases in the garbage can, and their drool on the pillowcases. Because that’s the way it is, we only own what we soil, and what is clean belongs to no one. Pushing this logic to its extreme, one can conclude that a great portion of the earth, sky, and water we call America is buried to the hilt with our garbage, our shit, our smells, and waste. That’s why it is ours, more so than because of land titles, and invasions, and aggressive defenses or the actions of border guards. Here we have deposited the filth that generation after generation has come out of or passed through our bodies; I’m referring to industrial amounts of semen, rivers of blood, tons of used Kotex and tissues and condoms, discarded diapers, obsolete televisions and computers, paper napkins, old cars, plastic bags, and rolls of toilet paper. And, above all, shit. I get dizzy thinking of the inconceivable amount of shit, because just as tigers and dogs mark their territory with their urine, so we have conquered an entire country through shit. With garbage and shit. It is not just us, of course; all the other people in the world do the same, but none of them at our level of magnificence and abundance. Our dead are buried in this earth on whose surface there hardens in geological layers the mountain ranges of crap that our civilization has left behind. Ergo, this land is ours. My reasoning has just proved it. Then there is the name, Fresh Kills. That mega garbage dump was called just that, Fresh Kills, because before it was a landfill it must have been a slaughterhouse, that is, a place bathed in and impregnated by the blood of thousands of animals sacrificed for mankind. Like any ancient sanctuary, from the Temple of Jerusalem to the pyramids of Teotihuacan, dyed crimson and stinking of blood. All of which shows — and what a discovery — that for all intents and purposes, inherently, Fresh Kills must have been a sacred spot, sanctified by sacrificial blood, and on that sacred land we built our temple, our huge dump, an ultimate cathedral of garbage, the tallest and widest by any measure that mankind has built upon the earth, a Notre Dame of filth, a Sagrada Família of waste. And there’s T. S. Eliot, of course, with his most apt quote: “What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow / Out of this stony rubbish?”

Side note: Yesterday I decided to try out my theory about Fresh Kills on my father, and he tore it to pieces. According to him, Kills doesn’t have anything to do with slaughtering; he says the term comes from the Dutch occupation of NYC and it simply means water or stream. Fresh water or something like that. Too bad, my version made more sense.

Interview with Ian Rose

Upon leaving Pro Bono’s office, Rose decided to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge to Manhattan instead of taking the subway. Very nice, the whole thing. A splendid view, impressive feat of engineering, gentle sunlight, and pretty girls who jogged past him and made it difficult for him to concentrate. “Look, Cleve,” he said, “look at all the lovely girls, and all about your age.” The warm breeze and the bright day partly mitigated the bad taste left by the hostile encounter, and, replaying it, Rose realized that the most difficult thing had not been to put up with the irritability or lack of understanding from the guy — after all, he had been able to draw out a good part of the information he needed. The hardest thing had been finding out María Paz was no longer in Manninpox. Up until that time he had not even considered going to visit her, at least not seriously, but the news made him feel as if he suddenly was losing her, that her trail was vanishing. In the manuscript, she had mentioned that despite everything it had been a relief to be taken into Manninpox with a number and a photograph, because it allowed her to exist anew on the face of the earth, have an identity once again, even as a prisoner, and a direction, even if in prison. Would leaving Manninpox then mean she was returning to the limbo of the disappeared? For Rose, losing her trail meant losing Cleve definitively.

He had a second appointment and the time was growing near. In the upper left-hand corner of the manila envelope from Mrs. Socorro Arias de Salmon was her address, 237 Castleton, Staten Island, NY 10031. Rose had sent her a brief note asking her if he could visit. A few days later, he received the response: Mrs. Salmon would receive him at her house. After the unpleasant experience with Pro Bono, Rose had to push himself to board the bright-orange Staten Island ferry on Whitehall Street in Lower Manhattan.

María Paz mentioned the landfill in her manuscript, recounting how she had been on Staten Island taking her surveys about cleaning habits. It was Mrs. Socorro Arias de Salmon who had agreed to introduce her to her neighbors, serving as a contact in the area, because someone who lived in the area and served as an introduction was priceless; otherwise, doors would be slammed in your face and it was impossible to accomplish anything.

Socorro’s home, built in the twenties, was made of weathered wood, with two stories and a gabled roof, a yellow canvas awning over the porch, and a small front garden with two bushes shaped like swans. Socorro, a short woman with a face hard to describe because it was so innocuous, wore a shiny beige polyester outfit with a white embroidered blouse. She reached out a small cold hand toward Rose, placing on a nearby table a can of floral room deodorizer she had just sprayed to try to hide the stench that still came from the Fresh Kills area. The inside was very clean, like a dollhouse that an industrious girl keeps neat and spotless, and it made Rose think about the contrast between the neatness inside, of the private, and the ubiquity of the former garbage dump, as if the opposing elements clean and dirty were just another expression of the tension between the public and the private.

“Did you see the Statue of Liberty?” she asked him.

Of course he had seen it, impossible not to, given that the ferry passed right in front of it. Huge, Miss Liberty, with her stiff tunic that was a green the color of time or a salt coating or whatever. Rose thought that one need not bother too much describing that color because there was probably no one in the world who had not seen it, whether in television or in postcards. Watching the profile of the huge monument as the ferry approached it, he found it sad and surreal amid the undulations of that slow-moving haze that surrounded it and at moments made it disappear. María Paz too, Rose imagined, had seen it, and maybe even visited it, buying souvenirs and perhaps paying the extra fee to go up to the crown. He asked himself what kind of symbols the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island and even the Twin Towers would have been for an immigrant who came to America only to end up being locked in a place such as Manninpox.

“Bolivia and I made an offering to Libita,” he heard Socorro say.

“I’m sorry, who?”

“Libita, that’s who, the Statue of Liberty; in my country we call women named Libertad Libita. Anyway, we made our offering to her during the first weeks of spring, tossing a pretty bouquet of Peruvian lilies into the water, because when it came down to it, Libita had treated us like daughters and opened the doors of America. But I never did it again after Bolivia and I grew apart; those things don’t make sense if you don’t share them with someone, depressing otherwise, don’t you think? That’s why you came to see me, right? To talk about Bolivia? That’s what I figured from the note you sent. Welcome to my home, Mr. Rose. Bolivia was a soul sister, my only sister, because I had no other. My family was all boys and one girl. Like sisters, yes sir, we were like sisters, Bolivia and I… till we grew apart, as things happen in life, what can you do? But come in, please, make yourself at home and sit in the living room. It’s a long story and you must be tired.”

“Well, the truth is that I came to talk to you about María Paz, Bolivia’s daughter…”

“Of course, María Paz… don’t tell me that they’re going to publish the book. I knew it! How exciting! I’m so glad I sent you all those pages. I had some reservations and that’s why I hesitated. The girl reveals things that are better left unknown. I imagined that Bolivia would turn over in her grave if she knew her family’s dirty laundry was being aired like that, especially in a book that everyone can read, because some of those bestsellers sell millions. Right? What if the girl hits that lottery? Who would have thought she could write? So they’re going to publish it? I’m so glad I finally decided to send it. She admired you very much. She said that your classes had opened her eyes, that you were marvelous not just as a teacher but as a writer.”

“Oh no, it wasn’t me she admired, it was my son, Cleve,” Rose managed to say. “Cleve died a few months ago. I’m his father. He was a writer, not me, and you sent the manuscript to him, but, well, it came to my house.”

“So you’re not the author of those famous novels?”

“Like I said, that was my son, Cleve, but he passed away.”

“Oh, I’m very sorry, I’ve never had children. Maybe it’s for the best. I could not have withstood the pain of seeing them die. I’m so sorry, please excuse me. But then you didn’t know María Paz?”

“My son is the one who met her, and unfortunately, I’m the one who is alive.”

“Those things happen, Mr. Rose, so sorry. But if you are here, it is because you intend to help her with the book. Or am I mistaken?”

“Not sure I can. I’m actually interested in—”

“Of course, of course,” Socorro said, “you have the right to think it over. How rude of me, you just told me your son died, and I hardly offered my condolences. You must be heartbroken, poor man. I know what the death of a loved one does to you. You should have seen how much I cried at Bolivia’s passing, may she rest in peace, and I’m not supposed to cry because my eyes get very swollen and red. Come, let me truly express my condolences, for a man to die so young. Don’t get me wrong, you’re young yourself, it’s just that…”

“Hold on one second, Mrs. Salmon, hold on. First tell me why you had the manuscript.”

“Because María Paz gave it to me, naturally. I visited her in jail once, with my husband’s approval, of course. He had warned me not to get involved in such things. So what if Bolivia’s oldest daughter wanted to live the life of an outlaw, that was her decision, this was a free country. But my husband insisted that I shouldn’t go sticking my nose into such things. Besides, as a foreigner, it didn’t make sense because they could nab me. ‘Who knows what could happen if they associate you with such scum?’ he grumbled. Anyway, she gave me the packet the one time I visited her; or I should say, they gave it to me on the way out, after closely inspecting it. I should also tell you that she was sad because she could no longer see you, Mr. Rose, she told me so outright, that she was very sad about it. Something had happened in the jail and they had suspended the classes.”

“Not my classes, my son’s, Cleve. I am Ian Rose.”

“Yes, of course, you’re not him, his father. I understand, and I’m very sorry. Please accept my full condolences. And the thing is that María Paz had written all the stuff in the manuscript to give to your son, who was her writing professor, but since she wasn’t ever going to see him again, she gave me the papers in an envelope asking me to send them to your son.”

“How long ago was this that she gave you the papers?”

“Oh, heavens, a few months ago, definitely a while, I’m not exactly sure how long… She urged me to get it to him as soon as possible. But you know, I had my doubts about passing off packages from a convict, because who knows what you’re getting into. Besides, what a filthy, dirty mouth that girl has, cursing on every page; she should be ashamed of herself. Fortunately, I overcame all that and finally did as she asked. I spent a good chunk of change on stamps, but what was really important about it from my end was my decision to send it in spite of everything. I hope she remembers me when money starts pouring in from the book.”

“Well,” Rose said, trying to correct her misconception, “it hasn’t been published yet, ma’am. I’m going to keep on trying, I know my son would have liked that, and of course she would too, but I still haven’t been able to do anything. I think that…”

“There’s no hurry, Mr. Rose. If it’s in your hands, things are as they should be. I sense you have a knack for these things,” Socorro said, winking. “My neighbor Odile has read every book in the world, probably your son’s also. I haven’t yet; I’m not a book person. But now that I have had the honor of meeting the father of the man in question, I’m definitely going to read them. I’m going to tell Odile to lend them to me. She probably has them because she buys every book, and as she herself says, if I haven’t read it, it hasn’t been written. And when you come back to this place you should consider your home, I’ll have them here for you so you can sign them. It doesn’t matter that you’re not the author, but the father of the author, which is also very important.”

“Cleve didn’t write books, ma’am, they’re graphic novels,” Rose said, but he went unheard.

“Oh, how exciting,” she continued. “I can imagine María Paz recovered from all her troubles and legal problems and signing books like a star. I’d see her picture under a headline that says, ‘From Convict to Successful Author.’ Too bad Bolivia isn’t here to see the triumph of her daughter. Who would have imagined it by looking at her, a writer, she who always seemed so lost?”

It was impossible to shut the woman up. Rose had thought of passing by her house for ten or fifteen minutes, just long enough to get a sense of Cleve’s activities before his death. But this pass-by on Staten Island threatened to go long, an eternal visit, because there was no holding back the tongue of this woman once let loose. And there was Rose, bound hands and feet, although even before he had been asked to come inside he had regretted making the visit. He began to feel ill. He felt as uneasy there as he had in Pro Bono’s office, even becoming nauseated, as if suddenly particles from the old landfill had gone down his throat. What the hell am I doing here, he asked himself, when all I want is to be home with the dogs? Then he answered his own question: I’m doing this for Cleve, or rather for me, to find out what happened to Cleve.

“Bolivia and I liked to watch as the waves took our Peruvian lilies and swallowed them,” Socorro continued. “They were simple flowers, nothing more. But the important part was the gesture, our way of expressing gratitude for being in this country.”

While she chattered away, Rose asked himself how old this woman could be. Sixty? A well-preserved seventy? She made him sit in one of the couches in the tiny living room, upholstered in white jacquard and covered in see-through vinyl, and explained with tears in her eyes that Bolivia had been the most industrious and motivated woman you could imagine, and that she had not deserved the fate that befell both her daughters, both of them so pretty, the image and likeness of her, the mother. Then she sang something softly in Spanish, taking both of Rose’s hands in her tiny cold ones with long red nails, because as Rose knew, Latinos like to touch, they touch other people, even those they don’t know, they hug them, they kiss them, because they’re not afraid of a stranger’s flesh. Socorro finally let go of his hands after a while, but Rose thought it excessive, because although he admired that nice custom of touching, he never really practiced it — let’s just say that he wasn’t a militant member of the group Free Hugs, those loving young men and women giving out hugs and human warmth on the streets to people who are not necessarily interested. And then Socorro asked him if he wanted a tinto, explaining that’s what they called coffee in her country, something he already knew.

“Bolivia’s two daughters, so beautiful and so unfortunate. The first one pursued by the law, the second one sick in the head,” Socorro said as she disappeared through the kitchen door to make the tinto, while Rose brought his hands to his nose to inhale the strong scent of the moisturizing cream that Socorro used on her hands.

He looked around, somewhat dazed by the countless pieces of porcelain, not one portion of a wall without a shelf and not one shelf that wasn’t packed with figurines, those nostalgic tributes to an unimaginable pastoral era: girls wearing wide-brimmed straw hats and holding geese in their arms; couples in love and gazing into each other’s eyes on park benches; tiny chocolate houses; barefoot shepherd boys, poor yet wholesome; shepherd girls, poor yet pretty, in wooden clogs. It was a strange sensation to be amid that porcelain world, but Rose grew accustomed to it, and before long he and his host were talking as if they had known each other for ages, two old women drinking tintico in their respective white jacquard chairs protected from grime by plastic.

“Parallel fates,” Socorro declared, “Bolivia’s and mine. But at the same time not so much, don’t believe it, Mr. Rose. More like crossed fates. You be the judge.”

Bolivia and Socorro had both been born in Colombia in the same town and in the same year. They went to the same grade school run by Salesian nuns and were friends from the very first. A bit later, Socorro’s family, which was better off, moved to the capital, and this left Bolivia trapped in her little provincial sinkhole. Socorro graduated from grade school and the family celebrated with a black-tie affair at the local social club.

“I had a silk shantung dress in the imperial style custom-made,” she said, “and my hair was put up in a loop bun, that was the style then, the loop bun, very big ones, and I complemented it with aquamarine earrings I was given for the occasion. By this point, Bolivia had decided to start working, you see, she had decided to forsake her studies before the third year of high school. She became a stylist, manicurist, and a beautician and was hired to work mornings at the D’Luxe Salon and during the afternoons as an assistant at a dress shop.”

But they spent the Christmas vacations together, like when they were girls, and they couldn’t wait to meet up in their old neighborhood and go to festivals or attend services, always sharing their dreams of one day leaving the country, looking for their destinies elsewhere. They’d fly off very far away. And their dream came true. They both ended up in New York, Socorro first and Bolivia seven years later. In New York, they soon reunited, didn’t even have to search each other out, because Socorro had already made herself a home in America, how could she not help the other, who was a sister recently arrived. She assured her: “Mi casa es tu casa, stay with me until you can get settled” and “This is the land of open paths, just walk the paths and all paths lead to Rome; it’s not about getting there, it’s about getting on the path.” She repeated these motivational maxims and others as she emptied three of her drawers and helped her unpack. Everything was fine up to that point, two friends who loved each other and a dream realized. But later the divergences began, the little misunderstandings in spite of their great partnership, and Socorro began carelessly unleashing other sayings such as “To each his own home” and even this other one, “Guests are like fish; they stink after three days.”

“I’m telling you step-by-step,” Socorro clarified, “so you understand. Bolivia had always been a beautiful woman, short but lively, with dreamy eyes and eyelashes like a doll, but not me so much, my beauty was more inside, like my husband said. You will judge on your own; I have never been a beauty. I’m what is known as a woman of intellect.”

And yet Socorro had married a man who was well off, or at least established. He was a plumber, did his work professionally, made good money, wanted to have a family, and immediately fell in love with the Colombian woman he met at Coney Island, on line for the Wonder Wheel, then the tallest Ferris wheel in the world. It happened that they shared the same coach — how frightened Socorro had grown with such heights, how she covered her eyes and screamed — and that was enough for him to know that this woman was destined to become his wife. On the second date, he brought her a leather-bound copy of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, which Socorro pulled out of a box to show Rose, proud of the dedication that said in green ink, “To Socorro who loves me so much,” and signed Marcus Clancy Salmon. Rose found the dedication strange, thinking that perhaps it should have said, “To Socorro, whom I love so much,” but Salmon had his own methods, and it was evident they worked for him, for on their third date, during a stroll in the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, by the Japanese pond, he triumphantly proposed marriage to Socorro, who delightedly accepted the two-carat diamond that would seal their union.

“He was Jamaican and I was Colombian, and God knows how we communicated because he didn’t speak Spanish and I didn’t understand his English. Maybe that’s why the whole thing worked; you know how it is,” Socorro winked again. “The language of caressing and spoiling is more beautiful than the one of reason and logic, am I not right?”

At that level of intimacy, Rose dared to ask her why Bolivia who was so pretty never married.

“She did try at least three times,” Socorro responded. “But she always ran away from it. Maybe her own beauty did her in. Look, I was always satisfied with my little Jamaican, always satisfied and proud to be Mrs. Salmon, although as you can tell it’s not the best last name, in English or Spanish, a fish. But Bolivia? Bolivia was always looking for something different, another thing, someone else. I was never able to understand the sense of dissatisfaction that made her chase illusions, whatever they may have been.”

And so went the story of those two destinies that at times met only to bifurcate again, Socorro happily married, and Bolivia not, although Bolivia had been a mother and Socorro had not.

“Bolivia had her two daughters,” Socorro said, “and I’m not going to deny that I envied her that, and in turn loved them as if they were mine, especially Violeta, the younger one. They’d come here to visit and that girl loved my porcelain collection, could spend hours looking at them, liked cleaning them with a wet rag, and I allowed it, as long as she was careful. Of course, she had her psychological issues, my girl Violeta, maybe bipolar, they’d say now, or anxiety-ridden, they didn’t know for sure; but she was a doll regardless, with that blondish hair and green eyes that lit the way like two lanterns. And really, it was just knowing how to deal with her, how to interact with her on her level. To calm her down, you know.

“On the other hand, with María Paz things have always been complicated. If the younger one was rebellious and difficult, the older one was worse. Let’s just say that she’s a temperamental girl and leave it there not to judge. My husband warned me from the beginning: ‘Watch that older daughter, she’s trouble, you’ll see, she’ll go from bad to worse, it’s a bad week coming if they hang you on Monday.’ Maybe it was just his paranoia, you know how we immigrants live in this country, so frightened to do something wrong, to behave improperly, to have the neighbors or the law come after us, that we panic when someone looks at us funny. Maybe it’s just a mental thing, up here, you know? An issue with the noggin. But we get psyched out anyway, can’t be helped. The lawn looks a little patchy and we think they can deport us for that. But, Mr. Rose, don’t judge my Marcus, he’s been good to me. Although he does impose certain conditions, and in that he is unequivocal and there’s no room for argument.”

Salmon had been pleased when María Paz decided to marry an American cop. He told Socorro that maybe the girl was rehabilitating herself and agreed to spend a large sum on the wedding present, a set of Czech glassware. When she went to jail, Salmon ordered that Bolivia’s oldest daughter could not set foot in their house again. “What if she’s not guilty?” Socorro had dared to ask. “She must have done something” was Salmon’s final answer.

“But tell me, when they were younger, did the girls ever live in this house in Staten Island?” Rose asked.

“No. It was a long time before Bolivia could send for her girls. And when they finally came, she was no longer living here. But they came to visit now and then, and sometimes would stay for the weekend, and we tried to spend Thanksgiving and Christmas together. You have to understand, Bolivia and I continued to be friends. But something invisible and sharp inside, like an icicle, had cooled what had been our sisterhood. And then later she died, and perhaps I haven’t behaved very well with the older daughter, I admit that. I just hope that Bolivia doesn’t hold it against me from the beyond.” Socorro glanced down in a gesture of confession, fixing her eyes on her leather sandals. “But don’t blame me entirely; you have to understand my husband’s convictions.”

“I imagine that this visit, the fact that I’m here, is something you are hiding from your husband,” Rose said.

“Well, you have come to revive phantoms that annoy my husband. I’m sorry, but it would not be good to shake the dust of certain events that put my marriage in jeopardy. Marcus is a man who does things by the book, and in spite of his generosity doesn’t forgive delinquency or bad conduct, or anything that is a threat to order and security, not to mention morality.”

“But you yourself admitted that it was possible María Paz wasn’t guilty.”

“But you try to explain it to Marcus, whose principles are unshakable. He’d never forgive me something like that.”

“Something like what?

Socorro began to trip over her words, said she regretted her lack of character, her submission to her husband, felt as if she had to justify her behavior to this stranger who had come to question her. She had always been weak, she said, with high blood pressure and frail health. What ills had she not been afflicted with, at least a dozen of the ones listed in Medical Care, and she went on to list all of them for Rose, counting them on her skinny fingers with the long fingernails: breast cancer, sinusitis, allergies, skin breakouts, hiccups that sometimes lasted for weeks. With all the visits to the doctor, all the hospital stays, the chronic fatigue, she had not been able to work or bear children. On the other hand, Bolivia was tireless when it came to work and strong as an ox, never taking a single day off, and not once in her life did she even have a cold. But Socorro was still alive and Bolivia was dead and buried before she turned fifty-two. Socorro had never had to work, but was never short of money. Bolivia, who never stopped working, was the type who never had enough for the rent. In the intensive care unit at Queens Hospital Center, a few hours after a sudden stroke had fried Bolivia’s brain, Socorro stood by the bed of her friend who was unconscious but still alive, and swore to her on the Most Holy Virgin that from that moment on she, Socorro Arias de Salmon, would take care of Bolivia’s daughters. “You can die in peace, my friend, I will watch over your daughters.” And up to now she had kept her promise, not entirely but well enough, or let’s say well enough when it came to Violeta and not so well with respect to María Paz. She confessed to Rose that she had set up a special trust fund so that she could continue to keep her promise to Bolivia concerning Violeta when she and Mr. Salmon were no longer alive.

“Almost all these porcelain pieces are Royal Doulton,” she said. “They’re worth a fortune. Look, this one is one of a kind. It will be worth almost seven thousand dollars when it is sold for Violeta.”

Under lock and key, behind glass, she had another half dozen Capodimonte pieces, and she asked Rose if he knew what they were worth, if he could tell they were originals, with seals of authenticity and everything, and in perfect condition.

“Look, with just this one here, Bolivia’s sick daughter has enough to live on for the rest of her life. I’ll show you,” Socorro said.

Rose examined it. It was a good-sized piece, made up of two figures on a sort of cloud, a man and a woman, the woman with an imperial air, a Marie Antoinette or Madame de Pompadour, wearing a tulle flounce dress and leaning down over a beggar at her feet. The beggar, or character down on his luck, gazed with an almost mystical rapture at the sumptuous cleavage of the lady. It could be said that he was gorging on that pair of porcelain breasts with his eyes, and Rose was annoyed with him, that beggar, because there was something base about him.

“Pretty piece,” he said, because he didn’t know what else to say.

“Since Marcus and I don’t have kids,” Socorro explained with a hint of frustration, “Violeta will be the sole heir of all these treasures. It’s a debt I owe to Bolivia, my dear Bolivia, because I didn’t always do right by her, didn’t always do right. Perhaps because I was jealous, or envious, and no one is perfect, we know, certainly not me. And neither was Bolivia; she was no pot of honey, my friend Bolivia, you can be sure of that.”

Although Socorro had not admitted it, Rose had come to the conclusion that this woman had not been able to stand the way her husband looked at Bolivia, that Bolivia was fertile and she wasn’t, and that it was painful to compare her sickly lean figure with the brimming roundness and spectacular smile of her rival. No doubt Bolivia had noticed, sensed something was wrong, that the tension as the months passed had become way too evident, almost tangible, as Socorro had mentioned.

Socorro told him that one night, when she and her husband returned from a party, they noticed that Bolivia had packed up her suitcase and gone, leaving a note that said, “Love you, thank you very much for everything, thank you and see you soon and may God give you many years of wedded happiness.” From then on, Socorro only saw her once in a while, and of her life and adventures only learned fragments. “She was a survivor, that’s what Bolivia was, a survivor,” Socorro repeated various times to Rose, and he remembered reading the same phrase in María Paz’s manuscript, and asked himself what it meant exactly, and if perhaps it had to do with the seventeen pages that were missing from the manuscript.

“There’s seventeen pages missing?”

Socorro pretended she didn’t know, but she turned red and drops of sweat moistened the bleached fuzz under her nose.

“Do you know by any chance what happened to those seventeen pages?”

“Sometimes things get lost, you know…”

“Mrs. Salmon, I’d appreciate it if you told me the truth.”

“You have to understand, Mr. Rose, those pages were the most compromising part of the story. I was afraid that… in the end… Look, the truth is I burned them, Mr. Rose.”

“You burned them.”

“Yes. I admit it. There were revelations about things that were too personal and serious and that affect me directly. Painful things for me. And others that I don’t remember. Things that would damage the memory of my best friend, you know what I mean. Let’s drop this topic, please, Mr. Rose.”

“Of course, we’ll leave it there. Just one more question before I say good-bye. What made you decide to finally send off the manuscript?”

“That’s an easy question. I did it because María Paz asked me to, and I didn’t feel I could deny her request.”

“But it took you a few weeks to mail it.”

“I suppose remorse, which bites like a dog, got the best of me, and I had no choice but to look for your address, Mr. Rose. Odile, my neighbor who reads a lot and knows her way around, helped me with that. She has a computer and found you on that goggle thing, is that what it’s called? And then I sent off the manuscript right away. Better late than never, right?”

“Do you think you did it because you were afraid that María Paz may have found out if you hadn’t?”

“What makes you think that? It has been a while since I’ve seen her. Haven’t seen her since the last time I visited her in prison. You do favors. If you can, you do favors. I once gave María Paz a mink coat so she could keep warm in the winter, or so that she could sell it if she needed the money. Doesn’t that count? I’m not going to say that the mink was in the best of shape. But in any case it was a nice gesture on my part. Like I said, we do what we can. And do you know who got Bolivia her first job in the United States after she got here without papers? Yes sir, it was me. It was a humble job, but a job still, cleaning the apartment of an old woman who lived on West Fifty-Fifth Street. But I’m boring you, or do you want me to keep going?”

“As long as you don’t lose your way, Mrs. Salmon.”

“The woman’s name was Hannah and she was Jewish. And it took Bolivia a while to realize that when she got to the apartment everything was clean and organized. Bolivia asked her one day, ‘Ma’am, how do you expect me to do my job if you do it for me beforehand?’ The old woman responded that she could not stand the thought of someone coming into her home and finding it dirty. So Bolivia came to understand that her boss was just looking for company, because there’s nothing worse than loneliness, as you know, Mr. Rose. So Bolivia never asked again and learned how to quickly clean what had already been cleaned and organize what had already been organized. Afterward, they went for a stroll in Central Park, always talking about trees or the color of the leaves according to the season.

“‘I’d say that is a poplar leaf and it is viridian in color,’ Hannah ventured.

“‘I don’t know what viridian is, I’d say it’s emerald green,’ Bolivia countered.

“‘Same thing, Bolivia, viridian and emerald are the same green. And this leaf from a weeping willow — isn’t it chrome green?’

“‘More like a lime green.’

“‘What about a swamp green?’

“‘Agreed, Señora Hannah, a swamp green.’

“And so it went, with sycamores, maples, elms, exchanging opinions on the range of greens, lemon green, mint green, malachite. Further on in the year they tackled the possibilities of the ochres and golds of fall, and in the winter the only things left were gray and white.

“‘Do you know that Eskimos can distinguish nine shades of white and have a name for each of them?’

“‘That’s over the top, nine shades of white!’”

After their daily walk in Central Park, having worked up a hunger, the two women, the illegal Colombian and the lonely American, walked arm in arm to the Carnegie Deli, where they had pastrami with dill pickles or matzo balls, often finishing everything off with a strawberry cheesecake. Señora Hannah always paid, of course, and since neither of them ate very much, there were mountains of food left over, which the waiter wrapped in aluminum foil so that Bolivia could take it with her on the 7 train from Times Square, which left her off almost at the door of her place, a room in Jackson Heights that she shared with a Dominican woman and her niece, who often had temporary guests or family members and friends who stayed longer. The interesting thing was the food chain that formed from that point on, because in that room in Jackson Heights an average of five people dined nightly for four and a half months without any of them once setting foot in a supermarket; they had enough with the water from the tap and the doggy bags Bolivia brought from Carnegie Deli.

“A terrible influence on Bolivia,” Socorro told Rose. “Trust me when I tell you. A horrible influence, those two Dominican women. They were called Chelo and Hectorita. They came here a couple of times with Bolivia. Chelo was the aunt, Hectorita the niece.”

Bolivia sent almost all of the salary from Fifty-Fifth Street to Colombia to support her two daughters. She lived on what was left, and tried to put some aside for savings. But very little remained, and there was never enough left for the main purpose: to pay the visas and plane tickets for her daughters. To that end, she had opened a savings account that remained meager, an anorexic account that emptied any time one of the girls got sick or had a birthday.

“‘There isn’t going to be a year in which your girls won’t get sick or have a birthday,’ the Dominicans insisted. ‘As long as you are a servant, you’ll never save. Drop that, girl, get up off your ass and look for something better.’

“‘And poor Señora Hannah?’ Bolivia protested.

“‘Poor Señora Hannah is rich. You’re the one who’s poor.’

“‘And what are we going to eat without the pastrami and matzo balls?’

“‘We’ll figure out something.’

“‘But Señora Hannah and I are friends…’

“‘Friends, my ass. Let’s call things as they are. Señora Hannah is the señora and you are the maid. But from now on you are going to be a factory worker.’

“‘A factory worker?’

“‘We’re going to take you to the supervisor where we work. You’re going to work at the factory. And we’re going to get drunk to celebrate.’

“It was a blue-jeans factory, one of those sweatshops where the workers are reduced to semi-slavery and which supposedly had been closed down in New York and fined, but that in reality was still operating full force. So Bolivia would be ready for the interview, the Dominican women prepared her psychologically, calmed her nerves with homeopathic drops, and instructed her on the questions she’d have to answer. ‘Take it nice and easy,’ they advised her, so that she wouldn’t be intimidated by the bitter character of the supervisor, who was named Olvenis and was one of those dry, hard-edged guys, with quills like whiskers who would scratch you if he grazed you; an origami made out of sandpaper, that was Olvenis.

“‘When he asks you if you know how to operate industrial machinery, you say yes.’

“‘But I don’t have a clue,’ Bolivia grumbled, ‘never in my life—’

“‘You listen to us and say yes.’

“‘And how am I supposed to respond with my shitty English?’

“‘No problem. His is worse because he’s not American. The owner of the place is Martha Camps herself. You know her, right? You don’t? What world do you live in? Martha Camps, the TV star. But she’s never there. That’s why she has the supervisor who speaks almost no English. Here in New York, English is not necessary, so don’t stress out, there’s always someone who speaks it worse than you. Don’t you know how to say yes? Anything he asks, just say yes. Or is it too hard to say yes? “Yes, of course, Mr. Olvenis, thank you, Mr. Olvenis, thank you very much.”’

“‘How much do I ask for pay?’

“‘Don’t ask for anything. Just take what he gives you, and then it gets better, and if doesn’t get better you quit and go look for another place. That’s how these black-market jobs work here.’

“‘What if he asks if I have papers?’

“‘He’s not going to ask. He knows none of us do and that’s the thing, that’s how they run the business. Without papers they can pay us bad, or not pay us, depending on the mood that month.’

“They took her to a building closed off and crisscrossed with yellow tape that said ‘Police Line, Do Not Cross.’ On the front, official notices reported default for tax delinquency, and there was a heap of garbage out by the building. The windows were all broken and boarded up, and if you didn’t know better, you’d swear there were only rats and dirt inside.

“‘It’s here,’ they told her.

“‘Here?’

“‘Yeah, we go in through the back.’

“They passed through a dark wooden structure attached to the building, Chelo and Hectorita leading, Bolivia behind them, and then groped their way step-by-step up a creaky stairway.

“‘Jesus Christ! How many more floors?’

“‘Cheer up, girl, we’ve gone up five and have four more.’

“And when Bolivia was all but out of breath, she heard the rumble of machinery coming from the back. And no human voices, as if the machines ran themselves. ‘We made it, we’re here.’ They opened a metal door and the burst of light blinded them, and once the images began to take form, Bolivia was able to note the silent presence of some twenty women, all young, huddled together around large tables, each one focused on her sewing machine as if the rest of the world did not exist. She thought they looked like zombies, and she had barely taken off her coat when they seated her between two of them, in front of her own machine. For each pair of jeans they had to make they were given twelve pieces of denim, six rivets, five buttons, four labels, one zipper, and her only instruction, which the boss said once and did not repeat, was that they had thirty minutes to finish each pair of jeans. The Dominicans had made the calculations, thirty minutes a pair of jeans, twenty jeans per worker for each ten-hour shift, minus mechanical failures, human errors, lunch break, eventual power failures, and breaks to go pee for a total of three hundred to three hundred and twenty jeans made and packed every day of the year.

“‘God Almighty.’ Bolivia sighed. ‘Who is wearing all these jeans?’

“She tried to remember the directions that her friends had given her about how things worked theoretically, made a sign of the cross, said this is for my daughters, and with her right foot pressed on the pedal, only to confirm that the industrial apparatus in front of her was a living monster, a stampeding horse that swallowed cloth and tangled the threads before she could even take her foot off the pedal. Sometimes the needle caught her fingers, but it did it so quickly that when she saw the bloodstains on the denim she didn’t even know where they came from. On the third day, Olvenis had called her into the office to give her a stern talking-to, shouting, cursing at her in that English of his that sounded too much like her native tongue, and although she couldn’t understand him, she could guess what it was about. They were firing her because she was a fake, a liar, because she had never operated any industrial machinery. The blood rose to her face but then dropped in an instant. She grew pale and her vision became cloudy; there was a ringing in her ears and she thought she was going to soil herself before she dropped to the floor unconscious, right there on the cement floor of the supervisor’s office.

“‘What a ridiculous scene I put on,’ she cried to her friends that night, laid out on the mattresses and with alcohol compresses on her forehead.

“In the morning, she went back to the old woman on West Fifty-Fifth to ask forgiveness for having left her without notice and to beg her for a second chance. But the old woman had already hired an Asian woman. And in any case, that night the Dominicans had good news back in the room in Jackson Heights.

“‘That fainting worked well, Bolivia,’ they told her. ‘Olvenis felt bad, and he wants you to know you can come back, but only if you are willing to do the ironing.’

“The ironing was the worst-paid job and the hardest, especially because of all the steam and heat. She had to iron blue jeans for the whole shift in a tiny room, hot as an oven, no windows, and very little ventilation. The blind windows were no accident, the owners wanted to make sure the factory couldn’t be detected from the outside. It was summertime and Bolivia suffocated amid the mountains of jeans. After a week, she thought she’d die; after two weeks, she came back to life; after a month, she faltered again. But the memory of her two daughters kept her standing. She couldn’t take it and decided to quit, but then didn’t. She had to hold on so that she could bring her daughters as soon as possible, whatever it cost. She was bringing them; even if she dropped dead, she was going to bring them. Once a month, she’d go by the Telecom Queens on Roosevelt Avenue, where dozens of Colombians lined up for the phone booths to call home. From there she’d talk to her older daughter and cry with her. Then she’d punch in another number to try to get in touch with her younger daughter, but she was never able to. The lady who cared for the girl made some excuse. Violeta wasn’t there, or she was sleeping, or was feeling shy. She told Bolivia, ‘You have to understand, it has been a long time since she has seen her mama. Getting her trust back isn’t going to be easy; it’s not going to happen overnight. Have patience with the girl. She’s confused, her head all messed up. Have patience, it will pass.’

“And the next day, Bolivia would return to the sweatshop, and the iron, and the oppressive heat, from seven in the morning, with half an hour lunch break, just café con leche and donuts that a messenger brought and they had to eat right there, because they weren’t allowed to go down to the streets, and on top of that they had to pay for them from their own pockets, the same menu every day, café con leche and donuts, café con leche and donuts for all twenty workers every day of the week. Then in the afternoon Bolivia continued to work until five fifteen. And what was she doing there fifteen minutes later than everybody else?”

Socorro told Rose that this was the subject of some of the seventeen pages that she had to burn.

There in the factory, after five in the afternoon, when her friends the Dominicans had left, as had all the others, and Bolivia was done with her ironing, the poor thing had to take care of another kind of manual labor.

“Olvenis?” Rose asked.

“Something like that.”

“A work slave and a sexual slave.”

“This was her misfortune.”

“And did she ever have fun, your friend Bolivia?” Rose asked. “Did she ever go to the movies? She must have gone dancing sometimes.”

“Well, she needed all the money she could bring in.”

“To bring her daughters.”

“Yes, and please swear you won’t repeat this, but the truth is that at a crucial junction, Bolivia was even a teibolera.”

“A what?”

“Teibolera. I didn’t know the term either. Teibolera, a woman who dances on teibols, or tables. Topless, they call it, you know how it goes”—Socorro lowered her voice, as if she were whispering a secret—“with her tits in the air. Bolivia’s were very full and could well be exploited. And all for bringing her daughters.”

“There’s something that doesn’t seem right,” Rose said. “Too much abnegation. Why had she left them in the first place?”

“It wasn’t really because they were hungry. It wasn’t really one of those cases where the mother can’t feed her kids. Not that bad. Back in Colombia her life was alright, with a family that helped her, all those aunts and cousins with map names, plus two jobs, several boyfriends, including the anonymous fathers of her daughters, and, modesty aside, she didn’t really miss me. I had my resources and once in a while sent something.”

“I see,” Rose said. “It wasn’t really an extreme case of hunger and misery.”

“Look, Mr. Rose, what she wanted was a dream life. She chased that dream. You know people like that?”

“But even to the point of leaving her daughters behind for five years?”

“It happens.”

“Could she have left her daughters behind because they were a nuisance?”

“Please, Mr. Rose, how can you say such a thing? Bolivia killed herself all those years trying to bring them over.”

“Abandoning your children could produce pangs of conscience in anyone. I know what I’m talking about. Bolivia punished herself working day and night, and so she banished the guilt of having left them. There are things one understands because one has lived them. But, not to be rude, I’m sure those missing seventeen pages said other things.”

“They did say something else. The most horrible thing for me. Those pages mentioned my husband.”

“Let me guess… Bolivia and Mr. Salmon? That’s where your fight with your friend stems from.”

“Bolivia was a meddler. And the older daughter is… like mother, like daughter, and I’m not making anything up. Before finishing off the poor cop, María Paz had skinned a few others.”

“Are you sure of that, Mrs. Salmon?”

“Well, not certain, can’t be certain, but it’s not hard to imagine. If she did it once, why not another time? Like I said, I have no proof, but that girl is something.”

“You’re letting your anger get the best of you. I understand you’re still smarting. Bolivia hurt you, and you are taking it out on her daughter. Isn’t that it? It’s very important that I know the truth. Think it over, do you have any basis for what you are insinuating?”

“Basis for what you are insinuating, good Lord, you sound like a detective. You’re scaring me.”

“I’m sorry, that wasn’t my intention. I just need to be clear about what happened, but don’t worry, it’s for personal reasons.”

“How about another tintico?”

“Yes, another tintico, perfect.”

“A little poison with it?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Do you want me to boost the tinto with a little aguardiente?”

“That’s fine, Mrs. Salmon, poison the tintico, but listen, María Paz’s lawyer says she’s innocent.”

“Oh, Mother of God, that lawyer. He brought her here one day in that red sports car of his. If I were you, I wouldn’t put too much trust in that lawyer, who is not very professional to say the least.”

“María Paz was riding around with the lawyer in a red sports car?”

“Like I said, a red sports car.

“While she worked in the sweatshop, Bolivia realized that no one ever came to the door of the ironing room. Nobody went back there. So one morning when the heat was terrible, she decided to take off her shirt while she worked. The next day she took off her shirt and her skirt, and each time she grew more audacious, until she was ironing in just her brassiere and undies, and soon she was ironing wearing nothing, her body soaked in sweat and her hair dripping.

“Teibolera after all,” Socorro moralized. “My husband says you don’t play with that. Breasts are like mean dogs, you only let them loose in the house at night.

“With the spray for the jeans, Bolivia misted herself on her face and back, and in the days when she was most suffocating, she even stood in a tub of cold water. She made herself at home in the little ironing room, the only place where she could feel fresh in the summer, and warm in the winter, while the others shivered in the hall without heat. And she had always liked ironing and had done it well since she was a child. Her grandmother America had taught her to moisten the cloth with starch, perfume it with lavender water, and go over it with one of those heavy irons filled with hot coals, because the grandmother insisted on using it even though someone had given her an electric one, and it was with that iron that she taught her granddaughter, who years later would use the skill to survive in that country of dreams, which happened to have the same name as her grandmother. So Bolivia, while she took care of the mountains of jeans in the tiny ironing room, remembered her grandmother and took pains that each pair of jeans came out perfect. ‘Look, abuela,’ she said aloud, ‘this one came out nice, only fifty more, abuela, and now forty.’ And the grandmother seemed to respond from the beyond, Way to go, mi niña, don’t fade, there’s only thirty now, twenty, ten, you’re almost done. Alone there, in that small and enclosed space, miraculously private, Bolivia could even afford to dream and think of her daughters, imagine a reunion, once and again and again, a thousand times envisioning each detail of the moment when they’d reunite and become a family anew.

“But I’m testing your patience, sir. These women’s things must bore you — starch, ironing, lavender water, sewing machine. How can you be interested in all that?”

“They’re important, it’s work, life. I’m not bored. It’s what a person does to survive. They’re not women’s things; they’re human things. Go on, Mrs. Salmon. How long did Bolivia work in that factory?”

“Until she died, señor, until she died. My poor friend, Bolivia. I hope she has been able to rest in peace.”

“One last thing. The most important thing. The main reason for this visit. Can you tell me where she is?”

“Of course, she’s buried in St. John’s Cemetery. If you want to go visit, I’ll go with you. It’s been a—”

“María Paz is dead?”

“Not María Paz! God forbid! Bolivia. Bolivia died a while ago, and she is buried in St. John’s, St. John’s Cemetery in Queens.”

“But María Paz is alive?”

“Yes, as far as I know.”

“Please tell me where I can find her. It’s very important for me, for reasons that are difficult to explain.”

“You want to talk to her about the book, right?”

“Not exactly, but if it were about the book, would you tell me where she is?”

“Oh, my dear, if I only knew… I really have no idea, I swear. Didn’t I tell you that the last time I saw her was when I visited her in prison?”

“Didn’t you say that the lawyer brought her here one day in a red sports car?”

“Mr. Rose, pardon me, but perhaps it’s best if you go. I don’t mean to offend you. If it were up to me, I’d love to continue our pleasant chat. But my husband is about to arrive, you know…”

On the return trip on the ferry from Staten Island, Rose went off on his own, away from the other passengers, his eyes fixed on the wide foamy wake the color of tar trailing the ferry. He had bought an extra-large bag of popcorn and was tossing it in the water piece by piece without eating a single one and when he was finished threw the bag as well and watched it get caught and swallowed by the whirlpool. That night, he stayed in the studio that his son had rented, a room with a bathroom, a closet, and a mini kitchen packed into an area of less than eighty square feet in a battered building on St. Mark’s Place. It had not been more than twelve hours since he had said good-bye to Socorro Arias de Salmon, or rather since she threw him out. The phone rang. It wasn’t yet dawn. Rose answered half-asleep, not knowing who the man’s voice could belong to at such an hour.

“Are you asleep?” the voice asked.

“Not anymore.”

“Forgive me, my friend, but this is urgent. We have to leave in one hour,” someone, whom Rose finally recognized, ordered. It was Pro Bono.

From Cleve’s Notebook

Paz has become a disturbing creature with two heads. A kind of bicephalous monster that I need to figure out, just to understand the tangle of feelings that she sets off in me. The Paz of the first head comes from a distant world that once, over there in Colombia, opened its doors for me, someone who I feel is a lot like me, my equal or even my superior, a hardy and tough woman who lives life with more intensity than I do, who is skillful at dealing with the other side of the tapestry, and at the same time more vulnerable and joyous, someone with whom I’d love to have the liberty to sit and talk for a few hours. Or go to the movies with and then to dinner. Or share a bed, that above all. Why not, what’s so strange about madly desiring a pretty girl, even if she’s your student, or is a prisoner and a delinquent? Of María Paz of the first head, I can say she’s dark-skinned and dark-haired without fear of offending, dark-complexioned and dark within because she’s impenetrable and because of that she’s disquieting. She’s someone who tears me away from my usual weariness of struggling against the obvious, what’s clear and pure and cryptic. My friend Alan, who lives in Prague, invited me to visit him. “Come quick,” he hastened to say in the letter, “before capitalism polishes off everything.” Maybe that’s what I’m searching for in Paz, someone who has not been polished off by capitalism. I want to touch her skin, which is different, feel her dark skin on my fair skin, confront the threats and promises of such contact, submit myself to the dreadful and almost sacred initiation it implies. Cross the threshold. The Song of Songs talks about the union with a woman as “dark and beautiful… as the tents of Qedar.” That’s how I see this first Paz, dark like the tents of Qedar, dark like Othello, whom Iago calls the Moor (from which comes morena). I once read in a sports magazine a quote by Boris Becker, the tennis player who is white as milk and married a black woman, in which he astonishingly confessed that he had not realized how dark his wife’s skin was till the morning after their first night of love when he saw her naked on the white sheets.

The matter of the second head is more complicated because it is rooted in old fears and prejudices from which I cannot honestly say I’m exempt. This Paz of the second head is the same as the other one but seen from a different perspective, and so there’s an abyss between us. She’s someone who comes from a distant and incomprehensible universe comprising impoverished, famished, violent lands that were never properly liberated. And she also belongs to another race, and there’s the key, someone with a sign on her forehead indicating her race, which is not the same as mine, and of a color different than mine. Someone whom I’d be afraid to take to bed because in private she might behave differently and would have other sexual customs, and perhaps would emit a strong and foreign odor. Someone who is nourished by things I don’t even dare put in my mouth. Someone with a pending debt to justice, capable of committing misdeeds I can’t even imagine. Another kind of human being altogether, like those who walk barefoot in the stone-paved streets of their towns in religious processions, who farm corn in tiny parcels to feed their countless children, who become guerrillas and are tortured by some military dictator. And if that were not enough, this María Paz of the second head has an intense gaze that goes right through me. Deep down for us folks with light-colored eyes, those black eyes can hold a wickedness, something perhaps beautiful but also wicked. Think of a trap; all you have to do is watch Penelope Cruz in a mascara commercial to understand that those types of eyes can hypnotize you then molest you, or at least steal your cell phone or wallet. You would think that someone with blue eyes like mine would think twice about trusting a child, or a credit card, to someone with eyes as dark as my Paz’s. Before I could think of her as a person, this second María Paz would be a foreigner, an extrañero, with all the implications of suspicion and neglect the word connotes, coming from the Latin extraneo, disinherited, and extraneus, external, from the outside, strange, unusual, something that is not familiar. She’s a foreigner, from the Latin foras, outside, from beyond, someone who has come a long way, someone who has come from far off, the exterior. Or forastera, from fouris, door, entrance, someone who remains on the other side of my closed door, who doesn’t cross my entrance. And forastera again, from the Latin foresta, forest, jungle, someone from the forest, a savage, a jungle beast, and as such a threat to the peace and security of my house and what is mine. Someone, in the end, who we keep in a prison like Manninpox, like thousands of other Latinos and Latinas and blacks, simply because they fit the type I have just described.

5. From María Paz’s Manuscript

You had a distinct smell, Mr. Rose. I tried to get close to you, not to touch you, I wouldn’t have dared, but to smell you. You’re a good person, so you put on this face as if everything was normal. But you were so tense that an alarm zone formed all around you. I think there would have been sparks if any of us inmates had as much as grazed you. You seemed electrified, sir, at least at the beginning. During those first classes you were so tense you were almost trembling under your Lacoste shirts. It was understandable. It could happen to anyone who goes unprotected into that den of thieves. But we’re not all dangerous here; I want to make that clear. That’s only a small minority. There are some scoundrels, why deny it, bad women who would strike their own mothers. And I’m not talking figuratively. There was this inmate named Melissa who was serving life for killing her old lady by smashing her on the head with a toaster, she toasted her, she toasted her own mother. How much more evil can you get than that? So I don’t blame you for half shitting your pants while you were here, don’t think I don’t understand. I’m the first one to watch my back so I don’t get jumped. Anyway, I was drawn to the fact that you smelled like the outside world. The guards also come and go, they do it every day, but they don’t carry with them that whiff of fresh air. They’re as permeated with confinement as we are. For when it comes down to it, they too are prisoners, or almost, or worse than prisoners, ours at least is by force but theirs is of their own choosing. Your smell, Mr. Rose, brought me news of things so far out of my reach that I had begun to believe they did not even exist, that I was making them up, that they only lived in my longing for them. There are no windows in this restricted area to which I have been confined for a week, not one window. But in 12-GPU, where I was before and where I hope to return soon, there is a window that looks outside. You see, there are numerous windows in the compound, but they all face the inner yards. This is the only one that faces the street. High up on the wall, near the bathrooms, like an eye peering out on the world, or a little ship heading out onto it. Small, the window, nothing really much, and almost shuttered with bars. But you can get up on a bench so you’re at eye level with it and look out to the street, a portion only, in the distance, nothing special. There are no passersby, and not even a tree or a street sign, just a stretch of asphalt and the portion of a wall. Imagine a black-and-white photograph, one of those ones taken by mistake, where nothing or no one is in the frame. That’s all you can see; still, there is always an inmate up on the bench looking out, the eyes escaping to that place known as the outside world, the mind fleeing toward a son, a mother, a house, whatever it may be, any pleasant thing from her past life, like a garden, say, a plant that was watered every day and that has by now withered. Or a lover, there are many in here fingering themselves thinking of some guy on the other side. For even the lowliest among us has left something behind, something that is waiting for her and that glimmers in the glass of that window in 12-GPU near the bathroom. There’s always an inmate upon the bench, and five or six others in line waiting their turn. If one of them gets impatient, she screams at the one standing on the bench, “Get down, you bitch, you think that window is yours?” But the others immediately shut her up. They respect that moment and you have to know how to wait for it calmly, to be able to look out and breathe a little. Watching that stretch of road, I ask myself, Is that America? Or I should say I ask Bolivia, the deceased, because lately I have taken to chatting with her. What do you think, Mother, you know better, is it just a dream after all? Or is America really in here?

You may ask yourself if I thought about escaping. Yes, I did. These days, it is the only question that matters. But it bounces back; I can’t complete the thought before it turns on itself. It’s trapped inside my head, booming and echoing off the walls of my skull but futile. There’s no way to escape from Manninpox, that’s the truth. As much as I turn it over in my head, I can’t figure it out. Although, sure, I imagine it, my cells and neurons scheme, plotting somehow and some way they can make it real. It’s a given that I won’t be able to escape in body, that is, whole, with my eyes, my hair, my bones, my flesh. The only part of me that can leave is my blood, which runs free and can be found again some place far off. And there it goes, there goes the trail of my blood, dripping, slipping, draining, drop by drop searching for the light of day, finding little holes in which to seep, slipping between the rocks, passing through bars and cracks, filtering through walls, sliding past the feet of guards, without excusing itself or drawing attention, not setting off the alarms. This is the only way I can return to the world of the free. A thin stream of blood crossing the field, I run softly on the highways and traverse the woods until I reach the home for special-needs adolescents where Violeta is. From a distance, I see her seated under those ancient trees that soothe her mind, and I watch her, looking at her while she’s looking within. Then I approach her to ask for forgiveness. It’s all my fault. Violeta, I’m going to come for you, little sis. I’m going to take you with me; from now on, we will be together forever. No one or anything will disrupt our plans; I swear by Bolivia that I will keep my promise if you forgive me. I will keep it. I will survive only to keep that promise to her. I tell her that, and that she has to wait for me a little while longer, to have patience while I pass through the place planted with crosses and covered in snow where my mother rests, pretty mamacita. I tell her as well. I’ve come to ask forgiveness for what? I don’t know. Because I haven’t done anything to you, Mami. I’m innocent of what I have been accused. But you know how the mind works. The sense of guilt can be strong even if one is not guilty. So I’ve come to ask for your forgiveness and leave you roses and that’s it, I suppose, because in the end, with you being dead and all, there’s not much you can contribute at the moment. So what can I expect from you? Or maybe, this is funny, I’ll scratch on your gravestone, “Mother, I don’t deserve you, but I need you.” That’s the phrase that Margarita has tattooed on her arm, a Peruvian inmate who is as sentimental as you were, and everyone here mocks her for it. And then I run, a trail of blood now a little more lively, a little lighter, until I get to my house to open the windows to let the sun and air in, and I stay awhile looking at my things, my high-school diploma, the letters from Cami and Pati, pictures of when we were girls, my white crocheted cushions, my bedroom decorated in mint green, my farmed pearls, the box of Swiss chocolates my friends at work just gave me. And I ask my dog Hero to forgive me, that above all, to forgive me, because I’m not sure if he survived after I abandoned him. I ask him who fed him after I left. Come here, little doggy, I’ll never leave again, I assure him, scratching his belly. He believes me and peacefully goes to sleep on my bed. That’s what I’d do out there, Mr. Rose, when they let me go, if they let me go one day, or when I escape: I will take Violeta and Hero, and the three of us will live our day-to-day life, the good life, that is. That’s what I’d do, the same as ever. Because here inside, it is those normal things, the most routine ones, that kill you with nostalgia. But it won’t be easy. When I get out of here it will not be easy at all to deal with the world. The men who broke into my apartment destroyed everything. Everything they touched, they soiled. They pissed on the mattress and the sofa, put my things in black plastic bags, and handled them as if they were removing dead bodies. They ripped up the carpet, pulled down the curtains, and tore open the upholstery, broke bottles, emptied boxes, and broke apart my house and left the door open as if it were a bar, so anyone could just go in. But I don’t remember much of that, and if I don’t remember it, it’s because it didn’t happen. I like to imagine that my house is waiting for me as it always was when I left in the mornings, the bed made, everything in its place, clothes ironed, the floors mopped, the rug vacuumed, the bathroom impeccable, and the first thing I’ll do when I get back — well, the second thing, after taking care of Hero — is to make myself a hearty breakfast to soothe the hunger that has built up. Fresh-squeezed orange juice, café con leche, pancakes, Aunt Jemima syrup, and fruit, a lot of fruit, strawberries and peaches and apples and papaya and mango and cherimoya, and also some perico scrambled eggs Colombian-style, with diced tomatoes and green onions, and a bagel with cream cheese, and also toast with butter and peanut butter. And a big glass of Diet Coke with a lot of ice. All that? Yes, all that. I’m going to put all that on a tray with one of the embroidered linings that I inherited from Bolivia, and I’m going to have breakfast in bed, no hassle, in my pajamas watching reruns of Friends. And another thing. When I get out of here, will I go looking for Greg? Sleepy Joe? Would I like to see them again? Good questions. But to tell you the truth, I think the answer is no. Neither of them. I don’t even think about reuniting with Greg or with Joe. I barely remember them, perhaps because I blame them for a lot of things. My memory has become whimsical, Mr. Rose, it keeps what is clear and discards what is blurry, it sticks to the past and rejects the present, and seemingly, it liberates itself from what it finds intolerable or incomprehensible. Maybe it would be best to leave Greg and Sleepy Joe where they are, swallowed by oblivion. The entire current of my thoughts, or almost all of it, flows toward Violeta; she takes up all of my memories, the past and what is to come. I have a debt with her. You understand? With Violeta. A huge, crushing debt. I have to take her out of that home for autistic adolescents where I left her against her will. I have to get out of Manninpox to fulfill my promise to her. You’ll see, Mr. Rose, all this is not impossible, my escape plan, I mean. I have started to execute it as we speak. Becoming a stream of blood is already happening.

It’s as if I unplugged something and I’ve begun to empty. As if because I could not escape past the walls, I’ve begun to escape from myself. But don’t think I’m attracted to the idea of dying. I’ve tried to stop the hemorrhaging with compresses, drugs, spells, yoga, prayers, and even cotton balls coated in arnica and ginger. All for nothing. I started with this whole drama right after I arrived in Manninpox, in the dining room during lunch. They had assigned me a permanent spot at one of the tables, which are long, for eight or ten prisoners with adjoining benches. That day I finished eating, picked up my tray, and headed for one of the corners, where we have to turn them in before the bell rings, and as I was doing this I noticed that the others opened a path before me. They had already warned me that one of the most dangerous moments in here is when you are walking with both of your hands busy carrying the tray, which is when they can jump you. If somebody wants to fuck you, that’s when they can do it, stab you in the side and disappear into the mayhem that ensues. I don’t know if they ever told you, but Piporro (do you remember Piporro, who came to your workshop a couple of times?), she was carrying her tray, and they pierced her with the long sharpened handle of a plastic spoon. Nothing like that was happening to me. I panicked because of the opposite, when I noticed that everyone was moving aside to let me pass. I felt as if they were watching me with disgust and thought they were going to hit me. That’s the sensation I had. In jail, intuitions like that come all of a sudden, like getting sucker-punched. The certainty of danger is physical, the warning from the body, not the mind. I was always aware of the eyes of the others, terrified to be looked upon with hatred or to be looked at too much. I needed to know how they were looking at me to know what to expect. But the longer you’re here, the more you come to understand that the eyes are less important than the hands. What you must never grow careless about are the hands of others, because that’s how aggression is expressed. Keep a close eye on anyone with her hands behind her or in her pockets. The real danger is always in the hands.

I didn’t know that yet, and I hadn’t made friends who would defend me. I hadn’t formed alliances or joined any of the gangs, and my sisterhood with Mandra X had not yet begun, meaning I was alone and left to my own devices.

They had already warned me about her, Mandra X. “She’s the leader of those who spill milk,” they told me. I imagined a million things. Spill milk? It sounded sexual, but something a man would say. Later, I was able to see it with my own eyes. Fucking around, they’d spill cartons of milk on the floor of the dining room. Las Nolis: that’s what Mandra’s girls are called. They’re her clan, her buddies — the sect of the chosen. You would go get some food and there were puddles of milk everywhere, the tables, the benches, the trays. At first, I thought they did it just to fuck with people, but later I found out it was their way of demanding from those in charge that they replace the regular milk with lactose-free milk. Because of the farts, you know? Here, it’s two, three, or even four to a cell. Many of the inmates are lactose intolerant, and if they drink it, their stomach swells, and then come the torpedoes. Can you imagine what it’s like to spend a night locked up in a room eight by nine feet with three old broads farting away? A gas chamber, sorry, bad joke. They also said that Mandra X was a dyke, and that if she liked someone, she got her by hook or by crook. That’s what they said. I wasn’t sure. I had seen her, and she was a huge woman; in Manninpox, whoever commits to working out and is disciplined about it can become a bull without leaving her cell, with a daily routine of push-ups, pull-ups, sit-ups, and crunches. That was Mandra X, so muscular you would swear she had a pair of hanging balls. And she was weird, very weird. Weirder than a checkered dog. They also told me that she was the leader of the resistance inside. That she was a warrior, or what they call warrior in here, an inmate who’s not afraid of skirmishes. The one who goes to the authorities with demands when the prisoners get worked up about something. I had heard all this, but until that moment I had only run into her in the hallway when she had jumped on me for asking too many questions. They also said that her gang, Las Nolis, made blood pacts, that they had their own mythology and rituals, and even engaged in sacrificial practices. That’s what they said about her and her group, and I didn’t like it, although it seemed to have its benefits, given that I was vulnerable here, and I needed to associate with someone. Because here, if you’re alone you pay for it, and you can be forced to do some pretty ugly things, such as become somebody’s woman. Or a maid. “From now on you are mine,” one of the butch women would tell you, and if you don’t respond by pulling her eyes out you become her sexual slave. Or some cacique comes and says, “You, just so you know, from now on you are my servant.” Either you smash her teeth in, or you’ll be doing her laundry, making her bed, giving her money, finding her cigarettes, cleaning her cell, writing letters for her sons and boyfriends. They even make you cut their toenails and give them manicures. Or also to go down on them, which here they call cunni. That’s almost always the fate of the unaffiliated. But I still avoided Mandra X and her Nolis, so they wouldn’t rape me or force me to participate in their satanic rituals. As if there were other options to consider, such as the Children of Christ, who take a drug called angel dust and walk around having visions of Christ. Anyway, they were a black sisterhood and would never accept me. There were also the Netas, all Puerto Rican, the Sisters of Jarimat UI for the Muslims, and the Wontan Clan, the least likely to take me because they were white extremists.

I grew to understand that Mandra X had real pull in this place and it would be a good idea to belong to her group. That’s why I’m part of the group, more or less. Don’t think I’m one of the zealots. In any case, she has become my protector and adviser, my sister, my “brotha,” and me, her “sweet kid,” her protectee. When it comes to matters of love, she’s imposing, jealous, randy, unfaithful, Don Juana-ish, fucked in the head, calculating; that is, she has all the defects of a man and more. But with her friends she’s solid as a rock. There is not a more dangerous lover or a sounder buddy. I’m not gonna tell you she’s my friend, she’s friends with no one, she’s up on her high horse, and no one can touch her. How should I put it? Mandra X is a fortress inside the prison, a place of refuge for her protectees, a horror for her enemies, a boyfriend to her mistresses, and a leader for her followers.

One time I told her I felt alone. It was naiveté on my part.

“Alone?” she harangued me. “What the fuck do you mean you feel alone when you just joined the ranks of a huge part of the population of the United States, the ones behind bars, that is? So you’re alone, my depressive little fuck, my sad little cunt, my pillow biter? So snap out of it, bitch, because you are also part of a quarter of all the imprisoned people in the world, who are here in these United States.”

Now I know that you shouldn’t talk nonsense here, or be guided by sentimentalism. I have learned to report my days as bad and not so bad, sometimes more bad than others. Sometimes the hemorrhaging stops, it disappears completely for a week or so, as if a spigot in my veins has been closed. Then I feel as if my life comes back, I recover my energy, my joy, who would’ve have thought it, my joy in spite of everything. On those days, I try to recover, I feed myself well, I write pages and more pages, I even grow calmer thinking that at some point everything will become clear and I’m going to get out of here and go directly to Violeta. I give myself to this vision, dreaming that one day I’ll buy her a house with a garden for her, for Hero, and for me, who knows with what money, but who cares, money doesn’t exist in dreams. And Mandra X, who is Mandra X? Where does she come from? No one knows. She doesn’t utter a peep. She’s white but she speaks Spanish; she’s male but she has tits and a pussy; she’s a justice-seeker and a writer of legal writs and she knows everything there is to know about the law, but she mocks American justice, asserting it is the worst and most corrupt in the world. But she knows it inside out. Imagine decades locked up in here, studying the penal code, looking for a way around it, finding loopholes and resources. But all this knowledge is useless when it comes to her case, because she’s sentenced to life, and from that, no one, not even she, can save herself. She doesn’t allow questions to be asked about her and doesn’t gossip, yet she knows everything. She’s the living memory of this place. According to her, forgetfulness and ignorance are the worst two enemies of a prisoner. Look at my case, the most horrible things that happen to me are the ones I forget about the quickest. Since the night of my husband Greg’s birthday, I have lived through a chain of horrors, but there are blank spaces where the sequence of events should be, like you used to say, on display on its corresponding shelf. But not me, I hide pain and confusion when they’re still fresh in these nebulous zones. Mandra X won’t tolerate that one bit. She forces me to write about what has happened, to go over it, make it worth something, and learn from it. She stores away facts about you that your own memory has forgotten; then she gives them back to you, forcing you to confront them. That’s rare in here. Here, things are set up so that you grow apart from yourself, divide yourself in two, and mop both sides of the hallway at once.

A few weeks after you left, Mr. Rose, you were replaced by a lady with a lot of titles. We showed her what we had done in your workshop, not to betray you, but to provide a sense of continuity to the class. Well, she just went off, talking about goals, and motivations, and achievements, and gains. According to her the whole thing was a glorious race toward becoming better. It was more like she was directing graduate students at Harvard or something and not some fucked-up prisoners shit on by fortune, and no more gains than two or three steps in a circle and no more goals than pressing your cheeks to the bars. What a bunch of crap, this fucking self-help self-improvement, they want to make you drunk with that and expect you to believe it. But that doctor they brought to take your place, Mr. Rose, was the reigning queen of it all. And on top of it she gave us a warning: “Write about whatever you want, girls,” she told us, “any topic, you can write about anything that comes into your head, whatever, it’s all fine, everything is welcome, except what happens in this jail. That is strictly prohibited. I will not accept any writing about life in the prison, episodes in the prison, or criticism or complaints about what happens here.”

“Listen, ma’am,” we asked her. “Where do you think we live? You think we hang in the city and come to Manninpox to hand in our little homework assignments about life outside?”

What an idiot, that lady. She said there were a bunch of other topics. That we could write about our childhoods, about our lives before prison, our loved ones, our dreams — constructive things and positive memories. We told her that we made suppositories with the positive and the constructive, and we never went back to the workshop. At least I never went, and neither did a few others. For now, Mandra X is my reader. She forces me to think about things seriously, to learn new words, and to call things by their name. Maybe it’s true that every door closed opens a new one, because I have had the best teachers of my life here in Manninpox: you and Mandra X. She doesn’t have family that visits her, just human rights people and defense lawyers for other inmates who come to talk over things with her. I imagine that Mandra X is their contact in here. She works for them, I think, or maybe it’s the other way around.

Anyway, it was her, Mandra, who hooked me up with my amazing lawyer, my little saint of a lawyer, my talented and intelligent protector, my dear old man, what would I do in this life without him? I tell him that anytime I see him. “You are the man of my life.”

He laughs. “Get one your own age,” he responds. “One who stands up straight and not a humpbacked old man like me.”

“But you’re the one I like,” I say. “You and only you, always dancing to your own beat, always true to yourself, different from the others, more dignified and elegant than anyone.”

“Hi there, baby,” he told me the first time he saw me, right in the middle of that horde that gathers in the lobby of the courthouse. That’s what he told me, before we had even met, “Hi there, baby.” An affectionate greeting, kind, playful. I began to cry like the Magdalene. Because all of a sudden, I felt like a person again and not a criminal on the way to the gallows, just a person with problems who needed help. Since then, the old man has become my defender, my solace, my ally, my powerful lawyer. I’m pinning all my hopes on him. He says he’s going to get me out of here. Every time we see each other he tells me. And I believe him; I cling to his words as if they were the Our Father. In the end, what is the Our Father but a string of words?

Mandra X is not someone who ever talks about where she was born or where she lived, what kind of life she had, how she was hurt, or what ankle she twisted. When she was still free, did she have a husband or a wife? A mystery. Did she ever have kids? There is a story that was going around that I’d better not repeat. Mandra X. What kind of a name is that? Like a bug, or a robot, or medicine for a migraine. A clownish name for a clownish old lady. That’s what I thought at first, before I knew her. Her tattoos and weirdness alone could have you talking about her for hours, if you dared. Here everybody gets inked. And you see every kind of tattoo, broken hearts or hearts plunged with arrows, names of men and women, Christs, skulls, Baby Jesuses. A tattoo is the only luxury and the only jewelry allowed for inmates. So paint yourselves, eyes on shoulders, spiderwebs in the underarms, tears on the cheeks, butterflies, dragons, birds, pictures of loved ones, Mickey Mouses, Betty Boops, self-portraits. Anything you can think of, even initials on the soles of your feet and drawings on your ass. There are those who even call themselves artists and are expert inkers, setting up businesses with inks and needles. They are never short of customers; here everyone uses their bodies as sketchbooks. Some have poems on their thighs or revolutionary symbols. One named Panterilla had a whole stanza of “Imagine” by John Lennon inked on her back from top to bottom, and Margarita, the Peruvian girl I told you about has that written on her arm, “Mother, I don’t deserve you, but I need you.” The thing is, in Manninpox your body is the only thing that belongs to you and they can’t stop you from doing with it what you want. That’s why many also pierce themselves. There are those who even purposefully mutilate themselves, and Mandra X is the queen of them. That kind of thing makes me shudder, leaves me speechless. I can’t understand why someone would voluntarily amputate a finger, like it happened the other day in the ward where the white inmates are. But Mandra doesn’t disapprove. She thinks they’re gestures of freedom and independence, and that actions that might be wrong or even atrocious when you are free become the complete opposite when you are locked up in prison. That’s what she says, and I listen. She says that in our circumstances, orgies, blood pacts, and even suicide are acts of resistance.

“Then let me bleed,” I ask of her, when the fatigue of the anemia makes me melodramatic. “Come on, Mandra, it’s an act of resistance.”

But she forces me to stand up. She finds some medicine and makes me sign letters to the authorities demanding proper medical attention immediately.

“Let me do it,” I beg her. “I’m fine here. I want to rest.”

“You’ll be surrendering.” She shakes me. She brings a ball of snow from the courtyard, packs it tight, and puts it on my belly so the bleeding will stop.

Her gang, or I should say, our gang, is called Noli me tangere: that’s why they call us Las Nolis. It’s a Latin phrase that Jesus uttered to Mary Magdalene after he was resurrected. It means don’t touch me. Don’t get near me, leave me alone, don’t mess with me. See, you learn things. Even in Latin. Now that I’m a Noli, I know the meaning of words like skirmish, independence, liberty, rebellion, rights, resistance. Well, I also learned the meaning of the word clitoris; it embarrasses me to know what it is. Can you imagine? Years and years of tapping and tapping that little button without knowing what it was called. But going back to what we were talking about, I don’t have any tattoos, not even one. I write only on paper. Many sheets of paper because I have a lot to say. Maybe I don’t do it on my own skin because I’m terrified of needles. Sometimes I think I should do it, it would be braver on my part, more daring, more permanent. But what if I regret it later, what if something feels stupid that the day before seemed extraordinary? I imagine you have the same fear, Mr. Rose, when you publish your stuff. There’s an inmate who has “live valorously” tattooed on her shoulder, but both words are written with a b so she’s going to have to libe balorously until the day she dies. And then there’s Greg and Sleepy Joe, who are Slovaks, and who have tattoos on their chests that say, “Lightning over Tatras.” Lightning over Tatras? What the hell is that? Not me, thank you very much, I’ll stick to pencil and paper, at least I can erase it that way, or cross it out, throw it in the garbage, and start anew. Mandra X inspires me. She tells me that Miguel de Cervantes was locked up when he dreamed up Don Quixote. Aside from you, Mr. Rose, she’s the only one who knows that I write, and I ask her about spelling and other such issues. You were a teacher who liked to please us, you put up with anything, congratulated us about everything, but she doesn’t let me get away with anything. She tells me write down everything I lived and to describe things in detail, even if they burn, even if they sting. But I forget, maybe because of the anemia.

“I don’t remember, Mandra,” I apologize. “That little bit is not clear. I’m not sure what happened at that moment.”

“You’re a woman and you act like a girl,” she tells me and leaves.

Mandra X’s tattoos? They’re different. Imagine blue snakes slithering across her back till they hug her belly, going down her thighs and her calves, and twisting into each other like ropes. They go down to her feet and down her arms to her fingers. Her skin is like one of those laminated figures in anatomy books with veins and arteries, but some who know her say that it is not about veins or arteries, but about rivers. All the rivers of Germany with their respective names, so a map, of her native land. It’s difficult to believe that Mandra X belongs to another place that is not this one. She got here before all of the rest and she’ll be here when they’re all gone. According to these versions, her very white skin is a living map that illustrates the course of the rivers of her country. The Rhine, the Alster, many others that I don’t remember, and the biggest and fattest, the one that goes down on Mandra’s spinal column, the Danube.

“In Spanish, it is Danubio?”

“Ah yes, el Danubio. Greg spoke to me about that river, but for him, it is called the Dunaj.”

“Don’t listen to him. Your husband was a Slovak, that’s why he called it the Dunaj. The river is called the Danube and your husband is dead; they killed him.”

I change the topic immediately. They’re saying that Greg was killed on the night of his birthday, but I don’t believe it. If they also say that I did it, and I didn’t do it, how am I supposed to believe them?

Hey, Mandra, that Danubio, or Dunaj, or Danube, that runs down your back and goes all the way down there? Does it go up your asshole? Is that where it empties? And inside, do the waters of that river find beds in your veins? I’d like to ask her, but I don’t dare because if she gets angry she can flatten me with a single blow.

There I go on a tangent again. What I want to finish telling you, Mr. Rose, is what happened that day in the dining room. The others kept their distance, as if they had decided beforehand that they’d gather in a circle around me.

I was the reason for this possible melee, that was as clear as day, but I wasn’t sure why. I felt dizzy and things went blurry. Have you ever been about to faint? Well, those were my symptoms. That’s how I felt. I thought I was going to fall. I’m going to fall right here and they’re going to kick the shit out of me. No, don’t fall, goddamn it, I ordered myself, no matter what, don’t fall. As I advanced, the crowd of women opened the way before me. I put away my tray in that silence that precedes any great blow. But the blow didn’t come. As I passed by the bench where I had been sitting, I realized it was empty. My tablemates had disappeared and in the place where I had been there was a pool of blood. Fuck, they stabbed me and I didn’t even notice was the first thing I thought. They must have struck me with something, a makeshift knife, a blade, something so sharp I didn’t even feel it. I passed my hand behind me and realized my uniform was soaked in a warm liquid. I looked at my hand and it was red. The hemorrhaging. No one had stabbed me; the blood was coming out of me on its own.

Have you ever seen on TV how sharks go into an attack frenzy at the scent of blood? Well, here in prison, it’s the opposite. At the sight of blood, the instinct is to move away and remain as far away as possible. Me, alone with my blood and the others looking at me in disgust. And at that moment, who do you think shows up? The one they called Mandra X. At that time I thought of her as a kind of monster. She appears at my back and begins to walk behind me. And we left the dining room like that, me in front and her behind me, hiding my stained clothes from the others.

Maybe it’d be good to join her group, if they even accept me, or who knows what kind of favor I have to do in return, I thought when the fright had passed. Strange, my own blood made me a target and protected me. The reason? The horror most prisoners and guards feel at the blood of another. In this place that boils over with violence, where the inhuman rules, there’s nothing that causes so much dread as the sight of human blood. These women have lived through everything. There’s not a horror that’s unknown to them; the streets have initiated them under the worst circumstances, and what they haven’t learned about out there, they learn in here. They tolerate all sorts of filth, the vomit of drunks, the piss of the incontinent, the miserliness of beggars, prostitution inside the jail. Here, any disgusting thing is acceptable; filth is law. And rudeness, bad words, filthy talk, threats, insults, aggressions, lunacy, screams — everything is tolerable except blood. The blood of others is taboo. One single drop of blood is enough to become infected. But blood doesn’t appear drop by drop — it puddles in the middle of the yard or in hallways. Everyone has pints of possibly contaminated blood inside them, and it is the law to carry it protected inside the body. It is up to individuals if they’re consumed by their infections, their problem, nobody else’s business, as long as they don’t go around spreading infection. The plague is in the blood. In Manninpox, that’s what they call AIDS: the plague. They call it by its true name instead of disguising it in an acronym. So I inspire hatred but also fear; my blood is killing me, but it also protects me.

I realize that Mandra X has begun to sing a song called “Moonlight” with the voice of a man: “I want the moonlight for my sad nights.” Apparently it’s a sort of lesbian anthem, and since Mandra gives it a certain depth, everyone who listens to her sing it suddenly wants to be hugged. Some cry because the song reminds them there is a moon. We never see it here; by the time it comes out, we have long been locked in our cells.

Now I’m in solitary confinement again, with no way of knowing if it’s rainy or sunny out, if it’s day or night. Time only exists in the round clock that glares at me from the end of the hallway, and which may as well not be there, because nothing changes, everything is repeated, so what good is it to consult it? Better just to let it go around and around, because here time doesn’t exist, it’s no good for anything, time is only waiting for something that never comes. You might say that here time runs backward, toward the past, and that it is not the minutes that pass but memories.

All the memories pile in my cell, taking over my space, sucking in my air, stealing my peace. I either rid myself of them or get out and leave them there. Here in Manninpox, I have been forced to change, change so much that I have become another person. I’m not sure if better or worse, but certainly different. So what do I do with the hordes of memories of that other María Paz? In what corner of my mind do I keep them? Where do they fit? How should they be classified?

I’m referring, for example, to the memory of the day that Bolivia finally called for us to come to America. She had in her pocket that magic object we had yearned for, that passport to happiness called the green card, which when it comes down to it is not even green, but which these days is the Holy Grail. Years later, she told me how she had been able to get it, that greencita card of her soul. They gave her a Tuesday appointment and it took her hours to get ready. She bathed with her Heno de Pravia, put on her makeup more carefully than usual, dabbed perfume behind her ears and on the inside of her wrists where the pulse beats. She, who was full-figured and flashy, put on a tight V-neck sweater, letting her cleavage show a bit. Yes sir, my mother was short but voluptuous, something she always put to good use. Bolivia used her body to get ahead in America. She’d never admit that, but I knew it. Knew it and learned it from her, and I can tell you that I was an excellent student. She had a saying, “Necessity has the face of a dog.” I suppose that’s what I am, a dog who does what she can to survive, nothing more than that, or less. Why spin it? The truth is that whoever comes to America has to fight to the death and is good and fucked if she doesn’t use all the tools at her disposal. Bolivia did it. Holly Golightly did it. Why shouldn’t I do it? And speaking of, Mr. Rose, I have a question I never got to ask you about Holly. I’d like you to tell me plainly who she was. Sally Tomato’s lover, an escort, or simply a whore? Or maybe all three at once?

When Bolivia had a stable enough job, she put all her energies into legalizing her situation. She pulled together the thousand dollars she needed for the lawyer, and after a lot of paperwork and formalities, she finally had the letter to present herself. For months she had prepared herself mentally for this ultimate test, studying, reading, memorizing the list of US presidents and their first ladies, the ten amendments of the Bill of Rights, the fifty states of the Union and their capitals, the location and languages of the seven commonwealths and territories, and I don’t know how many other things that someone said they’d ask her. And in the end, they didn’t ask her. But there was one little detail about the meeting that should be mentioned. Before coming to America, Bolivia had been a fan and follower of Regina Once, a Colombian spiritual and political guide whom my mother found admirable, who had incredible powers, and was a master of many sciences. This Regina Once was a swindler in my opinion. She controlled people by the way she looked at them and made them vote for public causes she supported, using a strategy she called “running the lights.” Running the lights of a person consisted of looking at them intently, but not in the eyes, that was the key, because as she said to her students, looks cancel each other out. If you stare at someone and the other person stares back at you, the whole thing is a draw. That’s why the more effective technique is to fix your gaze right between their eyes, to overwhelm them with your power and make them do your will. From the moment Bolivia sat across from the immigration official, she fixed her eyes on the spot between his eyes, as Regina Once had taught her. She ran the lights on him, to nail him and win him over to her cause, because he had a folder with all her information in his hand, and on him depended the yes or no that would decide her fate and the fate of her daughters as well.

“How did you come into the United States?” was the first thing the guy asked.

“Illegally,” she responded directly, casting intense rays with her eyes.

“How have you lived all this time?”

“Illegally.”

“Have you worked?”

“Yes sir.”

“You do know that’s against the law?”

“Yes sir, I do know. But I had no other choice.”

The man asked these questions without any sense of commiseration, without showing any sympathy; rather, on the contrary, with the self-importance of someone who feels he has more rights in this land because he arrived earlier. But Bolivia held her own, not letting him intimidate her, conscious of her tight sweater and her pretty face, and of her inner force. She talked to the man in Spanglish. But you have to understand, Mr. Rose, we’re talking about Bolivia’s Spanglish, which when I was a girl made me blush with shame, and that wasn’t any more than Spanish with a few okays here and a few thank yous there, and ohs and wows, batting her eyes and gesturing with her hands. But look how Regina Once’s trick worked, this running of the lights. While my mother answered the questions from the man, she repeated one phrase, one phrase, my mother concentrating, resolved, gazing right between his eyes with the power of that single phrase, as if she were firing an arrow, so that he’d feel that he was receiving an order he had to obey. Gimme the green card, sonofabitch, gimme the green card. Gimme the green card, sonofabitch, gimme the green card. And the man gave it to her.

“From now on behave yourself,” he told her. “No more funny stuff or you’ll end up in jail.”

Bolivia left there to place flowers by a photograph of Regina Once, although I think more than any spell, what worked for her was the honesty with which she responded to the questions. Once her green card was official, she began to work more than she had worked without it. If you asked me why she died so young, I’d have to say that she imploded from working. Aside from the green card, she also had a somewhat stable job and a place to put us in, so she was able to buy the plane tickets and pay for the papers to get a visa. So much waiting for that moment that would never come, and suddenly Bolivia tells me that this is it. Finally, the moment had come to reunite with her in America.

“Right now?” I managed to respond.

She told me yes, right away, in a voice that sounded strange, I supposed overcome with emotion. “This coming Wednesday,” she said, whimpering. “This Wednesday I’ll be in the airport with open arms.” That’s what she said. “I’ll be waiting for you, my girls, my girls. Bless me, Lord, my two daughters at last. Can you believe it, María Paz, can you believe it?” And then she thanked God again.

“What about school?” I asked. “Can’t I finish the semester here?”

“Aren’t you happy with the news?” she said, noticing my lack of excitement.

“Yes, Bolivia, it makes me happy.”

“Bolivia? No more Mami?”

“Yes, Mami, it makes me happy.”

You have to believe me, Mr. Rose, up to that moment it had been the truth. Up to that moment what I wanted more than anything was to reunite with Bolivia. At any other time during the first four years, I’d have gone insane with happiness to hear such news, because I waited for it day after day, hour after hour, with that broken coin hanging on my neck, hiding in the garage of the Navas’ house to write endless letters to Bolivia while I cried. But lately, I’d grown more used to saying Mami to Leonor, the owner of the house where I lived; I hope Bolivia can forgive me for that, wherever she is. I also didn’t correct those in school who thought that Caminaba and Patinaba were my sisters; on the contrary, I encouraged the confusion. It’s just that there were things. Somebody came to me with the gossip that Bolivia worked cleaning houses in America, and I didn’t like that. Then they told me that she ironed other people’s clothes, and I thought that was shameful. I had imagined her driving her new car down a wide boulevard lined with palm trees, and now they were telling me that she was a servant. Meanwhile, Leonor de Nava was a woman who could hire a servant, or even two, one to cook and one to clean. Do you see the difference? She was also the widow of an army officer, had a pension for life, and on weekends, we could go to the military club, a reason for pride and prestige up there in Las Lomitas, the neighborhood where we lived. And then there was my mother working as a servant who ironed other people’s clothes. Humble jobs, but at least they were in America, you may say, but I’d respond: Better to be the head of a mouse than the tail of a lion. But that saying doesn’t paint the whole picture quite right, because the fact is that in America my mother was a tail, but a mouse’s tail. Maybe that’s why I felt more like a person calling Leonor de Nava my mother and Caminaba and Patinaba my sisters, and that’s why I was somewhere else when they handed me the airplane ticket to reunite with Bolivia in America. I had just turned twelve, gotten my period, was the best student in English class, had tons of friends, and although I still didn’t go to parties with boys, I practiced the steps to the merengue and salsa and was a fan of Celia Cruz, Fruko y sus Tesos, and Juan Luis Guerra y 440, and I spent all day straightening my hair with a dryer and a round brush and then setting it in big curlers. And I had fallen in love with Alex Toro, a boy from the neighborhood who paid for school by working at night as a messenger for a discount pharmacy. Leonor often screamed from the bathroom, Why do we need another bottle of alcohol? Or who takes so many aspirins? Who bought more Merthiolate? And it was me. I’d call the pharmacy and order stuff to be delivered just to see Alex Toro. He’d ride over on his bike and bring me Condorito comic books and I’d lend him Roberto Carlos LPs. And that was all we did, but I thought that was love, the love of my life, and that’s why I wasn’t overjoyed by the great news of going to America finally. That dream had slowly become just that, a dream, a distant dream. And Bolivia had become something like the Virgin Mary, and America something like heaven. But my solid ground was Caminaba and Patinaba, Alex Toro, English classes, the military club on weekends, and salsa and merengue on the radio afternoons after school.

Maybe having a dream and being disillusioned is the same thing, two sides of the same coin, the dream that comes first and the letdown that follows. That’s the way the wheel turns, one and then the other, from dreams to disillusions and disillusions to dreams. It seems silly, but it takes a while to admit that life doesn’t proceed in a straight line, but that you wear yourself out in circles. That’s the kind of thing I have had to learn in prison, because here everything’s more intense, like when you were a child and they gave you a coloring book and instead of just coloring things by pressing the pencil softly, you sometimes felt like re-dyeing the whole thing, which is what we called it, re-dyeing, which meant you wet the tip of the pencil with your tongue so that the color would come out more strikingly, brilliantly, and evenly. Re-dyeing. Here in prison, that’s how things seem, re-dyed. Here in Manninpox, I have come to realize that if my mother was a mouse’s tail, my role in this story has been even more pathetic, going down to the category of mouse droppings.

Every morning at seven, unless it’s raining or we’re in isolation, they take us out to an interior yard they call the OSRU, for open space recreation unit. I’m not sure you ever saw it. You have the sky above, cement floor under your feet, and it is forty-two by fifteen steps. A space a little fucking tight for the one hundred thirty to one hundred fifty prisoners that share it. But it doesn’t matter, because you can see the sky, a glorious rectangle of blue, and there’s fresh air that fills your lungs so you can breathe again. In the winter, the yard is covered in snow and it is like a miracle to walk on that intact blanket, so soft and white, so resplendent and fallen from the sky, and that I first came to know here in America. I have told you, Colombia is tropical and there is no winter there. Every time Bolivia called me when I was staying with the Navas, I asked her, “Tell me, Mami, what’s snow like?” “Like lemon ice cream,” she responded. But among other things, the first thing that caught my attention when I saw that yard were the inmates walking around in a circle. Walking fast and faster in a circle, hugging those walls that kept them locked up. You know how this is here, a ridiculous Dracula’s castle with walls of reinforced concrete, without even a little crack to foster dreams of escape. They’d all be there, one hundred thirty to one hundred fifty women going around in circles, one behind the other, two deep, three deep, counterclockwise, like sleepwalkers trapped in their own dreams. This didn’t look like a jail but an insane asylum. And yet, after a week, I was doing it too, possessed of that urge to go around in circles without even asking myself what I was doing. It’s as if you need to break the bonds of confinement, and what drives you to walk in circles is the need to get out of here. Observe a caged tiger. Or any animal in a zoo, have you seen them? They go around and around, staying close to the bars, circling the space of their entrapment. We will never be able to go over the walls of that yard unless they crumble by the grace of God and the trumpets of Jericho. Searchlights and sirens await the spider woman who manages to climb to the top, and rolls of barbed wire, a swarm of blades, and electrified fences that will cut her to pieces, slice her, electrocute her, and mash her until she’s pulp. That’s why we go around in circles, I think. Maybe we are looking to close in that which encloses us, confine what confines us. They say that she who arrives on an island, sooner or later begins to go around it in circles. It’s called “rock fever.” We suffer from it here in Manninpox, and so every day we do the same thing.

Maybe it’s time to tell you why they put me in here. Although it won’t really be possible to explain it because I don’t really understand it myself. All I can tell you is that my chain of missteps in America began when I fell in love with a cop. Or when I didn’t fall in love with him enough, because I’m not going to lie to you, Mr. Rose, I can’t say I fell in love, not that kind of love you’d die for, that didn’t happen. I wonder if you are madly in love with that girl who teaches the deaf. I imagine you are from the way you talked about her. But with Americans you never know. You have this habit of saying things as if you were on camera, so it doesn’t matter what you say, as long as you say it with a smile and “have a nice day.” How I hate that “have a nice day.” They may not even know you or give a shit about your life, or you can drop dead in front of them, and they’ll still blurt out “have a nice day” with that fake smile.

Let’s put it like this, so when you write about it in your novel things are clear: my ruin was marrying Greg, the American ex-cop too many years older than me. He worked for the same company as me as a daytime security guard. Or maybe my mistake was loving him, because I shouldn’t have loved Greg, but I did. In his glory days he must have been a son of a bitch, one of those assholes that stomps on blacks and Latinos with their boots. Or maybe not, I was never quite sure. Anyhow, he had mellowed out by the time fate set him on my path, grown old and crusty, with a half-smile that was his white flag, making it clear he had surrendered long before. And besides, he was a widower, that type of widower with the air of an orphan begging for a good woman to take care of him.

He had the stuff of a bull, but came around the corner seeming like a tired steer. A nice fellow, believe me, with a beer belly and shiny black shoes. But what really attracted me to him, I’ll tell you, although it sounds bad, was that he was tall, white, blond, and English speaking. Well, blond at some point, but by the time I met him he was bald. I was attracted to the fact that he wore his blue-and-white Colorado Rockies T-shirt when he sat down to eat, that he put half a bottle of ketchup on everything, and that he thought if you were Colombian, you surely must know a friend of his who lived in Buenos Aires. Someone like that was a dream come true, just what I had been looking for since the time I ate Milky Ways dreaming about America. I’d had various US Latino boyfriends, one Honduran and another Peruvian. But this would be the first time in all those years that a gringo-gringo expressed serious interest in me, as Bolivia would say, or interests other than sucky-fucky ones. Think about it, Mr. Rose, what it meant for a poor Latina to finally be part of life, not on the side of the violent minorities and the superpredators, but on the side of law and order and the special victims unit.

One Tuesday, I was on my way to the office with thirty-eight completed surveys when I needed forty. I was short two and that was a big drama, because they only paid us for completed jobs, a check for the paperwork for the entire job. Before going in, I was able to get in touch with a contact by phone, something that was prohibited because interviews had to be done in person and at the place of residence. But this time it was a real emergency; in general, I was very diligent about my work, none of these routine proceedings like the rest of the girls. Not me, I got into it in depth, pursuing the task with an investigative reporter’s brio, and asking more questions than I had to, for gossip’s sake, I think, because I got excited about the stories people told. I confess that sin, I like to stick my nose in other people’s business, find out what’s happening in the dormitories and kitchens, and well, now by necessity, inside the cells. Ever since I was a girl, I’ve always liked to butt into private conversations. I try to understand people’s dreams and miseries, and I am fascinated by real-life love stories and follow them as if they were telenovelas. The thing was that on that day I was able to get a survey done, but I still needed one more after that to get to forty. I went into a café to have breakfast, diagonally across from our office, very worried because for the first time I was going to turn in incomplete work. I ordered coffee and toast, and who do I see there but Greg, the security guard. The old man was standing there holding his coffee, feeding pieces of a ham-and-cheese sandwich to his dog Hero, a crippled little pet that was like a mascot for everyone in the company. Greg is my man, I told myself; he had been heaven sent. So I went up to him very demurely, questionnaire in hand. We had never talked before, that is, except for the “have a nice day” or to exchange a few words about how Hero was doing.

“I’ll buy another sandwich for Hero if you answer a few questions for me,” I proposed.

“About what?”

“About your cleaning habits, what do you think?”

“I don’t have many,” he said, but he responded to one question after the other honestly and sincerely. That’s how I first got to know him. He told me that before he joined the police force, he didn’t shower every day.

“How often? Weekly?”

“Let’s say a couple of times a week. But after joining the police I had to take a freezing shower every day.”

“Do you ever shower with hot water, or warm water?”

“That’s for sissies, for faggots,” he told me, and then admitted he didn’t know how to swim, that he had been terrified of water as a child because he grew up in Colorado, where his father worked at a barley farm owned by Coors.

“How is that pertinent?”

“Because there wasn’t a lot of water there, and whatever water there was they used to irrigate the barley fields.”

Moreover, his mother thought that water was dangerous because water opened the pores, and the open pores made the body vulnerable to infections and illnesses. She had only taken two full baths in her whole life and was proud of that, because for her cleanliness wasn’t about taking baths; on the contrary, she thought that if one wasn’t dirty, there was no reason to bathe, and that those who bathed a lot must be hiding some unspeakable sickness, because there was no other reason to explain such behavior.

“So according to your mother,” I told him, “the cleanest ones are the ones who wash the least.”

“Something like that.”

“You said your mother took two full-body baths. Do you remember the occasions?”

“The first on the day of her baptism when she was eleven years old. In her hometown, kids were baptized by plunging them into the Dunaj.”

“What’s the Dunaj?”

“The Dunaj, the Dunaj! Don’t you know it? The Dunaj is the biggest river on the planet.”

“The biggest river is the Amazon,” I said, sticking up for my own. “The Amazon that runs through where I come from. But no one thinks of plunging a girl into it to baptize her, because the piranhas would feast on her. But let’s leave it at that. Everyone has a right to think that their river is the biggest. But tell me about the second bath your blessed mother took.”

“I don’t know. I don’t think she ever told me, but there were only two, I’m sure of that, I heard her mention it a few times. She bathed my brothers and me body part by body part, feet and hands, face, ears, and neck, but she’d never put us in the bathtub, that was for lepers and the ill, according to her.”

“It’s okay, Greg,” I said, because I noticed distress in his voice, as if the memories weren’t pleasing.

It wasn’t long before I’d find out that the problem wasn’t just the mother. Greg as an adult also resisted bathing. My coworkers bragged how their husbands washed their things before doing it and then showered afterward. But that wasn’t going to be the case with me, neither before nor afterward. At that moment, of course, I couldn’t have fully known, so I just responded with the kind of consolation that entails offering someone who tells you a sad story about his life with an even sadder story about your own.

“We all have our issues,” I said, tapping him on the shoulder. “Take my Aunt Alba, Alba Nava, Leonor de Nava’s sister-in-law, aunt to my almost sisters, a rich woman with no kids who lived in an enormous house.”

“Who lived in an enormous house?”

“Alba Nava, the sister-in-law of… look, it doesn’t matter, a rich woman in my town. I’m from Colombia. Anyway, this Alba Nava kept her huge house very neat, with a tiled pool in between the living room and the dining room, a pool for fish, but there were no fish in it, not even water. It was empty the whole week except for Wednesdays, the day on which my half-sisters and I went with Leonor to visit Alba. Then the pool was filled, but with us three.”

“Wait, what three?” asked Greg, whose mind was always somewhere else.

“Well, us three, me and Cami and Pati Nava. Us three, the three girls, they’d put us in the pool on Wednesdays.”

“In the water, with the fish?”

“I told you, there was no water or fish. What I’m trying to tell you is that Aunt Alba made us get in there, in that empty pool, for the whole visit. So that we wouldn’t get her house dirty, capisce? When it was time to serve tea, she’d bring us hot chocolate and crackers with butter and marmalade that we had to eat there, inside the pool, being very careful that not a single crumb fell outside.”

“That’s pretty pathetic,” Greg said.

“What I’m trying to say is that it’s as awful to be too clean as it is to be dirty.”

My strategy for solace must have worked, because two weeks later, the man was proposing to me. I said yes, without even thinking about it twice, and said to myself, María Paz — only it wasn’t María Paz but my real name — you did it, and I congratulated myself with little taps on the back of my shoulder and told myself to have a nice day, pretty little María Paz, you hit the jackpot finally, you’re going to marry a gringo and become a real American, so from now on have a very nice day every fucking day of your life. The thing is that my mother had come to America but she had never become a real American. Violeta and I grew up in this country, but for us also it was as if we remained at the threshold without being able to step into that enormous and bright hall. We had arrived but we hadn’t gotten here yet. Because getting to America is not landing in Phoenix, Arizona, or Dallas, Texas, or finishing high school with honors, not even speaking English without an accent. America is hidden inside America, and to truly penetrate it, a visa is not enough and neither is a Visa card, nor a green card, nor a MasterCard. All that helps, but they don’t definitively make you a real American.

For me, Greg signified access through the big door. Finally, I’d be a hundred percent American. You know what that means as far as papers? Bolivia had been able to get a green card for herself, but they had denied them for us, her daughters. In time, she had been able to normalize Violeta’s situation with the help of the mental health institute that confirmed that the girl was autistic and could not be deported because she could not take care of herself. But I remained outside. Bolivia wanted to get me in by claiming me as a mental case also, but I refused. So I behaved normally during all the psychological exams and wasn’t diagnosed with anything. Bolivia had gotten her green card when she applied for it through proper channels, but times had changed by the time I applied, and I was denied. That’s why I had to use false papers when I began to work for the survey department of the cleaning products company. It’s easy to get papers. Maybe you’re not aware of this, but the business for false documentation is a multimillion-dollar industry in this country. The problem is if they catch you, you go straight to prison. But I was saved. My marriage to Greg would allow me to obtain the proper paperwork and give me the rights to residency and work. I was going to marry a gringo; what more could I ask for. I was going to marry all these legal rights and a white American.

Of course, later I’d discover that he was a Slovak. From Slovakia, a country that before then I did not know existed. And that, even today, I confuse with Estonia and Slovenia. Greg was born in America, of Slovak roots. His mother, the one who did not bathe, was a Slovak. Comical, if you think about it. After so much suffering about being considered a foreigner, I came to find out that if you dig a little, every American is something else, from another place, and feels nostalgia for some town in Japan, or Italy, or whatever mountain in Lebanon. Or Slovakia. As for Greg, he was most nostalgic for kapustnica, a traditional soup made from fermented cabbage, and he took great pride in making it as his mother had made it, and his grandmother and great-grandmother before that, and so on all the way back to Eve. Greg and his kapustnica, a nightmare for me, for I don’t like strange foods: scrambled eggs with surprises in them, or let’s see what the spoon scoops out on this miraculous fishing expedition, nothing worse than soups that are like the sea, turbid and full of critters. I don’t go for that. I need to know exactly what I’m eating. If it’s rice, rice, or beans, beans. My tongue is a cowardly creature that hides in its cave and is terrified of strong flavors or weird textures. All the fears that I don’t have as a person, my tongue has. I’ll do anything, except to taste something I don’t recognize. In that, we were very much alike, Greg and I. He too had a phobia of unknown and suspicious foods, but of course he didn’t think of kapustnica as such. For him, kapustnica was the thing, the queen of soups, the eighth wonder of the world. I once tried to prepare a typical Colombian dish so he’d try it, so he’d learn a little bit about where I’m from. I made him ajiaco, a traditional Bogotá-style stew with three types of potato. Well, I was able to find two of the potatoes in a market for Colombian products and substituted for the third. For our native potato, which is small, yellow, and very tasty, I used the pale and sweet Idaho, but it didn’t matter, Greg would never notice. And instead of the guascas, which is an herb we add to the stew, I put some marijuana leaves, also Colombian and easier to get here. The rest was all according to the recipe, corn from the cob, chicken, capers, heavy cream, and avocado. I got emotional cooking, tears almost welling up in my eyes; it’s a whole ceremony to cook native dishes in a foreign land, something patriotic, like singing the national anthem or raising the flag. You feel as if it is you, your ancestors, your identity that are simmering in the pot. I spent a whole Saturday getting the ingredients and all of Sunday morning making it, and even took the trouble to explain to Greg that it was a pre-Columbian dish and then had to tell him what pre-Columbian was.

“It’s something that comes from our indigenous ancestors,” I told him.

“I see,” he said. “So it’s Aztec.”

“Well, not Aztec, not really, you have to go down in the map a little further, from Central America to South America, you understand. Because although it might sound strange to you, there are three Americas: North, Central, and South — not just North, which is yours. The Aztecs are from Mexico. We Colombians are Chibchas. Me, I’m Chibcha, not Aztec. It’s not the same.”

“But almost the same,” he said.

In any case, my stew was a failure. Greg barely tasted it, a few spoonfuls and that’s it because he was overcome by a case of the hiccups. And he said offensive things that I wasn’t really expecting, me who always played along when it came to his kapustnica, which I think is atrocious but would never have said so to his face. But he, on the other hand, was the type that just blurted out any insult right in front of you, and told me that my stew was a very primitive dish. What do you think, Mr. Rose, Greg the peasant calling my things primitive.

“It’s not primitive,” I corrected him. “It’s ancestral, which is different. So have some respect. I already explained to you that this is a soup that they have been making since before Columbus, that is, from the pre-Columbian cultures, which in many ways were more advanced than the Europeans.”

“Oh yeah,” he challenged me, “tell me a single thing in which you are more advanced than the Europeans, one thing, and it’s definitely not soup. In Europe, this thing that you prepared is something very poor peasants would eat in the winter when all other foods have run out and there are only potatoes left in the cellar.”

I could have argued that potatoes are originally from the Americas, that without the Americas, his peasants could not have eaten any potatoes, but I bit my tongue so as not to get him riled up. Although I could have also asked him if he thought his crude scraps of fermented cabbage were a feast for a king. But I stopped myself. The truth was that I always stopped myself so I wouldn’t provoke him. My Greg was a calm guy, almost lethargic, but when he got worked up, he’d let loose with the biggest threat. He used it often and without much thought, as if drawing a gun: he said he’d make them take away my green card, because it was only thanks to him that they had given it to me. That kind of blackmail intimidated me. I grew meek, lowered my head, and even allowed him to say that my Colombian stew was disgusting, because in the end that’s what he really meant, that it disgusted him. I tell you, Mr. Rose, Greg was a calm person, but there were things that set him off, and the topic of food was one of them. I don’t know why food makes us so sensitive. Perhaps because it’s what we have inside, in our guts, and also what we shit, that is, what runs through us from our mouths to our assholes, what goes inside the top hole and comes out the bottom hole, what we are, to put it plainly.

Don’t worry, Mr. Rose, don’t think I’m going off on tangents again because I’m taking my time telling you these things; on the contrary, it’s a way of getting directly to the matter you are probably waiting to hear, the reason I ended up in prison in the USA. You might think that the kapustnica has nothing to do with that, but it does. It has everything to do with it; it is almost the heart of the matter. I know that you don’t know why I was imprisoned, I know because during the first class you asked us our names and nothing else; you said that what we had done or failed to do was exclusively a matter between us and the law. That’s what you said, and added that it was none of your beeswax and that we didn’t have to explain anything to you. And I’m almost getting to the matter. We’re on the right track, but let me talk about Hero a little bit first, the dog that went with us everywhere; when we were not at home, he was at work with my husband. He was crippled like Christina of that novel. His hind legs ruined like her legs, because apparently he had been used to detect plastic explosives in Alaska, where there are still independence fighters who set off bombs. And the independence fighters blew off Hero’s hind legs, so because of the accident, he got around on a little cart that Greg himself built for him, careful to make it as light as possible and attach to him so that it wouldn’t scratch off his hair anywhere. Hero’s martyred parts fit snugly in the cart that he pulled with his front legs as if nothing, and I never saw a dog more agile, more full of joy, or more excited fetching a ball, even if we threw it a hundred times. All in all, he was a dog like any other, normal size, I imagine, before they turned him into half a dog, with a coat that was black and yellow with a little white near his snout, and we adored him. The Association for the Protection of Retired Police Dogs had decorated him for canine services to the homeland and turned him over for adoption to good-guy Greg, who kept the name the dog had had in Alaska, although I always thought that we should change it. I wasn’t convinced that our Hero had fought on the side of the good guys. I suspected that the fighters for Alaskan independence had some just claims, like the brothers of my Puerto Rican friend Alissette who fought for the cause of Puerto Rico Libre. And anyway, I preferred a name without so much history for Hero, such as Tim or Jack, or maybe Lucero, the name of the Navas’ toy poodle.

For twelve hours every day, from eight in the morning till eight at night, Greg and Hero were stationed at the entrance of the building where we worked, checking bags, asking for documentation, giving passes, always very cordial and easygoing, Greg and his little dog. The little dog and the cart. And I, who had worn myself out with some tormented and unpleasant love affairs earlier, told myself, María Paz, muchacha, it’s time to think about things a little differently. This Slovak is no Adonis, nor is he a real American, but it would be enough that he is as loyal as his dog. Who was Greg really? For me, always an enigma. A good cop? But how good, I never knew. He swore that he wasn’t a racist, but he was. He’d see a white woman with a black man and claim that she must be a prostitute. And if he saw a black man driving an expensive car, he said it was likely stolen.

And yet, he married me, a dark-skinned Latina. In church, in a wedding that was lacking nothing. There was a priest and altar boys, Madonna lilies, white roses, a cake with three tiers, various canapés, a hot and cold buffet that included lobster, a bride’s dress and a veil with a crown of orange blossoms, and even a cubic zirconia ring that looked like a diamond. Because that’s how Greg had wanted it. I had never been very religious, but he was so Catholic that he even hung a crucifix over our marriage bed. He paid for everything with part of his pension funds, the church, the reception, the honeymoon in Hawaii, and even bought a royal-blue tuxedo with a bow tie and a tight-fitting, wine-colored cummerbund to hide his belly, if you know what I mean. The wedding dress also came out of Greg’s pocket, and my sister, Violeta, who was to be the maid of honor, her dress, and even the bridesmaids, four of my coworkers, their dresses. Because Bolivia didn’t live to see it, I had asked Violeta to be my maid of honor. But in the end she didn’t do it. At the last moment, she decided not to come to the wedding, and left us holding a long, almond-colored shantung dress that we had had made for her to pair with mine, which wasn’t shantung but embroidered and also almond-colored. But Violeta’s case is a whole other chapter and requires its own explanations, so it’d be best if I talk about her later; just keep in mind from this point that she’s the heart of the story. For now, I’ll only say that I’d have rather been married in a more simple ceremony, definitely a more private one. Don’t think that I was feeling like one of Charlie’s Angels strolling on the beaches of Hawaii with an old fatso like Greg.

Our relationship began according to the law because that’s the way he wanted it. And it suited me, after all, because after so much anguish and effort I was finally going to become an American citizen. Put yourself in my shoes. From the moment that my mother passed away, I was the only person who cared for Violeta, and they could deport me at any moment. Now do you understand why I almost fell to my knees the night Greg and I met at Applebee’s to go to the movies afterward, and he pulled a black velvet box out of his pocket, with white felt on the inside, like a miniature coffin, and in it was the cubic zirconia set in white gold? It wasn’t from Tiffany’s, Mr. Rose, as Holly Golightly would have wanted it, but for me it was as if it were. Always generous, my poor Greg, he had his savings. At home, we never lacked food or services, and after we were married, we always paid the rent ahead of time. Not that it was much. They’d have had some gall to charge us more, given the depressed neighborhood and the depressing building. We’re talking about one of those “white flight” zones. It had been a long time since anybody saw a white face around there. My Greg was like a museum piece amid so much brown and black, mestizo and mulatto. The truth was that even though Greg was the white one, he always felt like a fly in a puddle of milk, and he couldn’t wait for the day we would leave. He was just waiting for the rest of his pension to kick in so we could get the fuck out of there to that town of poor white folk where he had his house, where the fly in the milk would be me. What I’m trying to tell you was that my neighborhood was in a seriously bad state. A few years before, suffice it to say, the owner of our building had tried to burn it down to collect insurance and would have gotten his way had the firemen not put out the fire in time. To this day, no one lives on the first floor, the walls still blackened. But my apartment is different. Freshly painted, cozy, with all the necessary appliances, blinds in good condition, and a white rug. I always kept my apartment gleaming. Or as Bolivia would say, like a silver cup. And Greg lent a hand, with his toolbox always ready to fix anything. The last thing he had been able to do, my poor old man, was to widen the barbecue on the so-called roof terrace so that we could fit more burgers and corn on the cob on it, a nice detail on his part. A rather useless detail, though, because we never really invited anyone, except Sleepy Joe, who invited himself. But that we even had a roof terrace with a barbecue — tell me if that’s not the “American way”? The terrace also had a splendid view and with binoculars we could even see the Empire State Building. But what you saw with the naked eye was our neighborhood, not a great sight, as I said, a rather depressed area, but at least we had a barbecue. Although we never got to try the new larger version.

My husband had his things. Odd ticks of a cop, but a Catholic ex-cop. He belonged to an order of retired officers called the Most Holy Name of Jesus. He’d bring me there on the first Sunday of every month to take Holy Communion and then we’d have breakfast with his old coworkers, the Catholic cops. And I sat there quietly, listening to them talk about everything, but foremost about how to live your life so as to not offend the most holy name of Jesus. On top of that, three or four times a year we’d go to these nighttime ceremonies in which they’d give each other awards, for courage, devotion, or any other virtue. Greg would don his uniform on those occasions, which despite the alterations barely fit him. And I’d put my hair up in a bun and wear a long evening dress. The whole thing would end with a dance and fireworks. I looked like the daughter of even the youngest couple there, and Greg showed me off with pride. In the summer, we would meet with the same group for a commemorative picnic in one of the national parks, and that was about it. But these occasions were mandatory. My Greg would never skip out on the sacred host of those first Sundays, or the sandwiches in the national parks, or the cannellonis of the evening dances.

Why did he marry me and not a white girl? The first answer is the obvious one: I was young and pretty. And I doubt that a white girl who was young and pretty would ever want to marry the likes of him. But on top of that he thought that white girls were a bit too whorish. And he knew a thing or two about whores. He had been part of an anticrime unit in which he’d worked the streets undercover. This was the most unsupervised and fucked-up part of the police force, I’m telling you, but I’d have never said such a thing to Greg’s face. Greg was only rude to me once — he who was otherwise so gentle and delicate — only once, and for a very surprising reason. It must have been eight or nine at night, and I was stretched out on the sofa, watching a movie that I had just gotten at Blockbuster. He arrived home in a good mood, as always, asking me what I wanted to do with dinner, because, like I said, he was the only one who cooked. Everything was fine up to that point, but his face grew contorted when he saw the movie I was watching, one with Nick Nolte, playing a corrupt cop with his hair gelled and a thin mustache. Q & A it was called, remember? Nothing special, a convoluted plot I’d already lost track of and was just looking at the pictures, thinking about other things. Well, Greg dashed toward the TV to shut it off, pulled out the DVD, and went to return it to Blockbuster right away, screaming that he’d not allow this thing to be in his home one second longer. Which by the way wasn’t his home but mine. And all the furniture was mine, bought by me, beginning with the TV. The only thing that was his was the crucifix, which I could have done without. That little bloodied figure hanging from the cross wasn’t anything to get aroused about, if you know what I mean. And here you may ask yourself, Mr. Rose, why Greg didn’t have a house in spite of his police pension and salary as a security guard. But he did have one, a house with three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a studio, a garage, and a garden in a nearby town, where according to the plans we would go live in a couple of years. Not yet, we couldn’t leave the city yet, because there were no jobs in the town and it wasn’t enough with only the pension, especially because of the extremely expensive school that I paid for, for my sister Violeta, and because I didn’t want to stop working — I had made that quite clear to him. Anyway, that time with Q & A, Greg slammed the door on his way out and I was left confused. But then he came back and he was the same as ever, just Greg, with a pizza from Sbarro and a six-pack of Coors. While we were eating, he apologized and explained that he hated the morbidity of people who enjoy the stories of bad cops.

“They think a corrupt cop is something funny,” he said. “They like to play up cops who kill and get killed. They’re motherfuckers, those directors that line their pockets talking about spilled blood when they wouldn’t even know what it smells like.”

“What does it smell like?”

“It’s metallic. And sometimes it emits steam, because it still contains some of the heat of the life that has escaped the deceased’s body.”

But what I was telling you about, Mr. Rose, is that working for the anticrime unit made Greg value prostitutes. He told me they were his strongest allies, because they were the only ones who knew everything that was happening on the streets, the ones who knew the goings-on and snares of the underworld best. That’s why he valued them. But of course he’d not have wanted to fall into their clutches. Greg had too high a regard for the sacrament of marriage. He went the whole Catholic route with his first wife, and repeated the process with me. I guess he thought that because Latinas were so Catholic, we would be less likely to cheat on him. Something like that, or maybe he was affected by having grown up in a Latino neighborhood. Of course, with me he made a mistake, not because I cheated on him, although not from lack of wanting to.

Let me stop there, because I’m lying. I did cheat on Greg, Mr. Rose. I cheated on him in a bad way. Even though it hurts, I have to tell you the truth, because if I omit that fact, you’re not going to understand the mess that followed. I slept with my brother-in-law. And not once, but a thousand times. There you have it. It’s out. I’ve said it. Now you know why I doubted Corina’s story, that whole thing about the rape? Because I knew how the man handled himself when it came to sex, knew it by heart, and I didn’t have any complaints — just the opposite; that wasn’t a problem. But the whole situation was bad, sleeping with two brothers, terrible idea. And now you understand why I wanted Sleepy Joe and Cori to hit it off? I needed to rid myself of him, Mr. Rose. Get him off me, toss him from my bed forever, before the shit hit the fan. All this adultery mess was beginning to weigh on me. I lived terrified that my husband would catch us, and that was the least of it; the worst part was that the guilt was eating me alive. But I couldn’t do anything by myself, I went soft just seeing my good old brother-in-law, my will and my conviction vanished as soon as that boy walked through the doors of my house. I also didn’t dare tell anyone. The best thing I could come up with was to pawn off my lover on my friend, my best friend, as if asking her without saying anything, Cori, free me from this mess, you take him. But apparently that was a big mistake, a major screwup on my part, and as I should have known, it turned out bad for everyone. First, Corina comes with the rape story, the broomstick, all that horror. But how was I supposed to believe her when I knew Sleepy Joe’s sexual habits so well? Me and my brother-in-law. My brother-in-law and I. We were obviously not playing some kids’ game; it was full-fledged sex, hot stuff, twenty-one and older, full-frontal nudity, no-holds-barred pornography, whatever you want to call it, every position and transgression, anything you can imagine. But in spite of his tantrums and horrible temper, our sexual relations always remained within the bounds of human rights, so to speak, and whatever violence there was, it was consensual and moderate.

The blind date with Cori sent Sleepy Joe into a frenzy and let loose some lunacy that had been previously kept in check. Greg told me months later that this was exactly what they were talking about in Slovak at the restaurant. Joe was accusing his brother of disrespecting him, the insult, the indignity, and who knows what else. “What do you think I am?” he screamed at Greg, with me and Cori sitting right there having no idea what the quarrel was about. “What do you think I am? Your little whore?” he screamed at Greg. “You think you can just pawn me off on anyone? Huh? Tell me to my face, brother. Is that what you think of me?” He made quite a little scene. My poor Greg who had to put up with it. Fortunately, they were quarreling in Slovak; that left me and Cori with our gin and tonics out of the loop. It would be too late before I found that Joe had felt stung and humiliated by the whole episode. I imagine he didn’t feel it was right that I, his lover, would dispose of him by hawking him off on someone else. I’d have liked to have given Cori a heads-up about this, asked for forgiveness, talked about these things openly, confess my dirty little scheme. But she had already left for Chalatenango and hadn’t left an address. Maybe mistreating Cori was Sleepy Joe’s way of getting back at me, his revenge, which was much harsher than the offense, as could be expected from Sleepy Joe, who doesn’t believe in an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. If you knock out a single one of his teeth he will punch out all of yours and poke your eyes out with a pencil. But there’s still one more question. Why such an indirect way of letting me know that he was hurt? Pride probably, and probably because that’s just the way he is, Sleepy Joe, full of resentments and coded messages.

From the first day I got into this whole adultery mess, I was looking for a way to end it. Think of it, Mr. Rose, as if you shot two arrows in completely different directions. That was me, trapped in infidelity and at the same time detesting it. I wanted to cut loose but I couldn’t; the more I tried the tighter the bindings became. And my passion for my brother-in-law grew with my regret. At the beginning, I wanted to end the affair with Joe because of Greg, the fear that Greg would find out; Greg’s explosion, if he were ever to find out; the end of our marriage; the loss of the green card; the fight to the death between brothers; the final judgment. But after what happened with Corina, my main reason for ending it with Joe was because of Joe, who had always inspired a bit of fear in me; after Corina, that fear became panic. Because I knew well what my dear brother-in-law was like in the sack, and I could attest for that, but I also knew about his more perverse side. He was Catholic, after all.

If Greg made a mistake with me it was that in the end I wasn’t very Catholic, and even less faithful. The complete opposite of his first wife, who I know almost nothing about because he never talked about her. I only knew that she had worn the ring of white gold that had belonged to her mother-in-law, and that Greg gave to me, with the cubic zirconia, on the day of our engagement, the very same one that they confiscated from me when they put me in here, and they haven’t given it back. Not that I need it. That piece wasn’t all mine, it had passed through a lot of hands before it got to me.

What else can I tell you about, what other clues may have foretold the tragic outcome? Well, there were weapons in the house, but what ex-cop doesn’t have weapons in the house? A few pistols, or revolvers or whatever, I don’t know the difference, never touched them, never even noticed them. Greg kept them well oiled and they were his pride and joy, because according to him the department had granted them to him. He used to leaf through weapons catalogs and subscribed to various magazines that he read in the bathroom, but not Playboy or Penthouse or anything like that, my Greg became aroused by other things. He locked himself up in the bathroom with Soldier of Fortune, the bible of mercenaries, or with Corrections Today, the essential source for the discovery of prison-security innovations. I know because he showed them to me, he wanted to share his passion with me, because in the end that was his world, the souvenirs of his profession, remembrances of his youth. Everyone has his stuff. And I respected it because Greg was a good man. Let’s say a man whose love for me was insecure, over the top, the kind of love an older man has for a much younger woman. He spoiled me as if I were his daughter, and I let myself be spoiled, although the excessive affection was a bit suffocating. In previous relationships with men my own age I had come to know plenty of insolence, and Greg’s love felt like an oasis. After he died, if he is in fact dead, I came to realize that living with him had been a privilege, because he was the only man who truly loved me or who still loves me, if he happens to be alive. Except for that whole nonsense that I told you about with Q & A, his outburst about that movie, I never once fought with Greg. Things went well from the moment we married until the night of his fifty-seventh birthday.

And now I’ll get back to the kapustnica. One night in the middle of the fall, Greg and I were making dinner at home, a special dinner because it was his birthday. Or I should say, he was making dinner, because remember, he cooked, I didn’t. I also had to work on the other side of the city and was getting home late, a very formally attired dinner and I was all stocked up with a bouquet of roses in one hand and a six-pack of Coors in the other. I was out of breath after climbing the five flights, because we are on the top floor and there is no elevator. When I went into the apartment, Hero ran out to meet me and as always began to do circles around me. You don’t know, Mr. Rose, how much I miss my dog, Hero. If at least they’d let me keep him, things would be easier in here. I have to hold back tears every time I talk about Hero. But to get back to that night. As soon as I walked into the apartment I was surrounded by a cloud of steam, and the smell of the kapustnica, which had been simmering for hours; Greg had taken the day off to devote himself to it. The windows of the house were fogged over, a Turkish bath of fermented cabbage, and among a pile of dirty pots he stood in front of the stove, a big spoon in hand. He was wearing his apron for special meals and he looked comical, I swear, I felt a certain tenderness seeing him like that, his red cheeks and the little hair left on his head, all sweaty with his belly bulging over the apron, which had a print design of two circles up top and a little triangle below representing the tits and the pubic area of a curvy young woman. Greg was very proud of his apron; he thought it was quite the joke to wear it, a stroke of genius worthy of a select group of males obsessed with the culinary arts.

I like to think you cook, Mr. Rose, and that you make traditional dishes from your country for your girl, or from your parents’ country, or your grandparents’. We don’t have Internet access here, so I haven’t been able to find out anything about your last name, Rose, although I’d like to think it’s from an ancient country where roses grow wild, and where your grandparents made leek-and-potato soup, or roasted a goat with rosemary, a country they had to flee from by ship because war and hunger had made the leeks, potatoes, and kids disappear. Only the pure roses remained, and no one could live on that. That’s why I imagine that when you prepare the potato soup for your girl, or the roasted kid, you do it in remembrance of your grandparents and dress up the table with a vase of roses. I don’t know, that’s what I like to think; as you know, we have time to fiddle our diddles here.

“Hi, sweetheart, good to have you home,” Greg screamed at me from the kitchen on the night of his birthday, and it was clear he was glad to see me, always glad to see me, kind Greg. And that’s what he always called me, sweetheart, and to me it sounded like a Sandra Bullock movie. Every once in a while his voice would tremble and he’d sing me an oldie by Nelson Eddy, as he explained to me, which went “sweetheart, sweetheart, sweetheart,” like that, a threesome, because sometimes he tried to be romantic, my Greg.

“The kapustnica is almost ready and it is a masterpiece, best one yet,” he told me. “And I couldn’t even find the Cantimpalos chorizo, the best substitute I’ve found here, I had to use a more common brand, but you can’t even tell it’s missing the Cantimpalos, come here, sweetheart, try it. So? Is it better with the Cantimpalos or without? What does it need? Someday I’ll take you to my country so that you can taste the kapustnica with our sausage, the authentic smoked sausage from our country. Meanwhile, we have to make do with what we have. Go on, sweetheart, set the table. Did you remember to bring me beer? Good, then bring out the wineglasses to do honor to this magnificent kaputsnica.”

“Beer in wineglasses, Greg? What gives?”

“Why do we have those glasses then if we are never going to use them?”

Beer in wineglasses, Cantimpalos chorizo, smoked sausage, or his mother’s ass, it was all the same to me. And if you want me to tell you the truth, Mr. Rose, I preferred it without any chorizo, or any roasted goat, or cabbage, or pork ribs, or onions, or garlic; but, of course, that’s not what I told Greg that night. Fortunately, I didn’t tell him and he died convinced that I appreciated his culinary efforts.

“Is Sleepy Joe coming?” I asked. “Should I set a plate for him?”

“Just two settings,” Greg responded. “One for you and one for me, and Hero’s dish.”

“Don’t you dare give kapustnica to Hero, you know how it gives him the runs,” I warned him as I arranged the roses in a vase.

“I’ll give him just a little bit so he can try it. Don’t set a plate for Sleepy Joe. He always says he’s coming and then stands us up,” he told me as he washed his hands, wiping them on the painted tits of the apron.

That was the last image of Greg alive that I remember.

I gave a chunk of cheese to Hero and took him to the roof so he’d take his last pee of the day. I unhitched him from his cart, went back down the stairs carrying him, and dropped him on his favorite bed, which was of course our bed. I then went into the dining room/living room and was taking out the wineglasses from their boxes, a wedding gift from Socorro, my mother’s best friend, when I heard the phone ring and then Greg taking the call in the kitchen. A few minutes later, I heard him putting his jacket on behind me and opening the front door.

“Where are you going?” I asked, without turning around to look at him.

“Sleepy Joe just called.”

“Should I set a plate for him then?”

“No, he just wants me to come down for a moment.”

I imagined that Sleepy Joe wanted to give him a birthday present, or at least a hug. It didn’t seem odd that he didn’t want to come up. Lately, things were a little tense between them, and although usually they didn’t argue inside the house, not to do it in front of me, I knew that outside they’d get into arguments more frequently. Well, sometimes they’d do it inside the house also, but in Slovak, so don’t ask what it was about, because I couldn’t understand a thing. Greg would always end up annoyed and agitated after those squabbles, but I couldn’t get him to talk about them, so I never knew the reasons.

“Why were you fighting?” I’d asked him, half-fearing I was the reason.

“Don’t worry about it,” he’d tell me, “it’s an old fight, something about an inheritance in Slovakia. One day I’ll have to go to claim it and you’ll come with me, it’ll be our second honeymoon.”

I had no desire to go to Slovakia. I imagined it frozen and desolate and lost in the past. In any case, it was probably best if I stayed out of those types of brawls. These are passing things between brothers, I thought. In the end, they loved each other, they couldn’t live without each other, and they even prayed together often, also in Slovak, or maybe in a language even more ancient, because they sang what seemed to be ancient hymns from far away, more, how should I put it, more warlike than religious, or at least that’s how they sounded to me. They’d do it every morning at six sharp. The Angelus, as the devotion is called, commemorates the Incarnation. A hell of a mystery, terrifying to me, according to which God, regretful of the errors he committed in the Creation, is incarnated and becomes man, descends to earth to suffer like any other man, to come to know in the flesh the suffering that he had imposed on humans, and to be humiliated and whipped and tortured on a cross in the most atrocious manner, to bear a suffering worse than any human, and in the end God is God and his pains are infinite because he is divine. What a mystery. But why, if he is almighty, doesn’t God return to his creatures, sparing the whole world from suffering and sparing himself as well? That’s what I asked Greg, and he said to stop talking nonsense, girl, that without suffering there’s no religion and no religion without suffering. That’s it. A mystery is a mystery and it’s not meant to be solved. In any case the two brothers prayed on the roof, never inside the apartment, which was small with low ceilings, cozy but tight, and according to Greg, the roof was a cathedral with the sky as the dome. That’s how my Greg put it. Sometimes he came up with the prettiest expressions. I don’t know where he got them. A cathedral with the sky as the dome. And he was right. When you’re up there, on the roof of our building, it seems as if the wind blowing in your face comes from some other place. It’s as if you left this devastated neighborhood, looked at it from above, and although it is only five floors high, you could see everything really small, way down there, because you’re in some other world up here, and you dream of escaping to strange and distant cities, and you dream you see the stars although you don’t, and then you’re hit with the smell of the country and the noise of the sea, I mean, although it’s not real you can dream it, that your life becomes wide and free, without a roof to crush you or walls to constrict you. I think that it was Violeta’s favorite place because it was the only one that calmed her down and where Greg and Joe prayed their so-called Angelus each morning and then all the days of Holy Week, Greg leading with the singing part because of his rights as older brother and Joe responding. I was the only one not so sure about the whole thing. The neighbors are going to think Muslims live here and are going to become suspicious of us, I warned the brothers, because aside from their chants and prayers they rang a little bell like in school, and I thought it would wake up the whole neighborhood, and then the icing on the cake was the lighting of candles and incense. But they didn’t listen to me; my warnings went in one ear and out the other. They just kept doing their thing, loyal to their traditions above all, rain or shine, because they put a lot of passion into their prayers and rituals. Sleepy Joe was more committed than Greg, who had been somewhat tamed by the years, while Joe was a fanatic, or as they say in the news, a fundamentalist. When he argues a point, he seems ready to kill or die for what he believes, and when he prays… when he prays it’s even worse. I have always been suspicious of the pious who pray all the time, those who adore God above all things. I get chills watching those that kneel and kiss the ground, those that self-flagellate, those who drag and sacrifice themselves for the Lord and revere his saints and angels. Sleepy Joe is one of those, and when the mood strikes him, he metamorphoses, the fever chills spread through his body and he becomes another person. That’s what he is, a violent and mystical man who knows how to combine those two elements without straining; either one of them flows through him spontaneously, sometimes at once. Greg wasn’t like that. He shared his brother’s religious fanaticism, that’s for sure, and they made plans to visit the Virgin of Medjugorje together. I mean they were those types of old-time fanatics, but at least Greg didn’t make that face of a transfigured lunatic when he prayed. Joe does, and I know, because as I told you I’ve seen him do both things, fuck and pray, and sleep and start a fight, that too, because there’s no doubt that the man has some bipolar issues, but above all, he likes to sleep, from dawn till nightfall. The truth is that I don’t think he does much else with his life. I got scared when he was overcome by one of his mystical fits, I swear to you, Mr. Rose. Imagine some Russian-looking guy, with his crazy tattoos and T-shirts with the sleeves rolled up, legs like pillars of stone, tough-looking from top to bottom, like Viggo Mortensen in Eastern Promises, that sturdy and good-looking, as some would say frighteningly masculine, too much perhaps, and also too white, aggressively Caucasian. I’m not sure if you understand what I’m saying, but now imagine him in concentrated form, ecstatic, reciting rosaries in Slovak to the one he calls the Most Holy Virgin Mary, mother and lady, queen of heaven and earth, like his own mother but to the millionth power, even more frightening and powerful than his mother and huge like the universe. If she only saw Sleepy Joe in one of his trances, the veins in his neck bulging and his eyes going back in his head as if he were an epileptic. Maybe not so much, but something like it. Veins bulging, the whitened eyes, and a shuddering throughout his body — such was the strength of his faith. I’m telling you, that’s the face Joe makes when he fucks, when he argues, and when he prays, and it’s frightening to look at him when he is doing any of those three things, as if eternally on the border of somewhere else, a step away from a psychotic episode.

Greg loved him like a father, in the good sense and in the bad. He spoiled Joe and put up with too much of his crap. At the same time he was always preaching to him wherever they’d happen to be as if he were a kid. I remember the craziness that came over Greg as we returned from Mass one Sunday and found Sleepy Joe seated at the kitchen table and playing with the meat knife, holding it with his right hand and stabbing the spaces between the fingers of his left hand, faster, faster, pricking holes in the table, and right when Greg said to stop the fucking game, Joe misjudged a move and stabbed one of his fingers. Not badly, but enough so that blood splattered on the table. And Greg screamed out, “You idiot, you moron.” What didn’t he call Joe? “You’ve ruined my kitchen table, you asshole,” he said. “Look what you’ve done, it’s full of marks.” But Joe took it and remained silent, sucking on the wound between his ring finger and pinkie.

They fought a lot because they’re a lot alike, I used to think and still think; I imagine that Greg became a cop just as simply as he could have become a criminal. And that Joe became a good-for-nothing just as simply as he could have become a cop. But perhaps I’m not being fair to Greg, who was a peaceful sort of guy, whereas Sleepy Joe had a rage inside him that was eating him alive and making steam come out of his ears. I have always thought that he never became a serial killer simply because he was too lazy. He told us he was a truck driver, and although I had never seen a truck, there was no reason to doubt his word, except for the sleepiness. If it were true that he was a truck driver, he’d have long before wrecked a vehicle by falling asleep at the steering wheel. After we were married and Greg moved into my place, Sleepy Joe began to visit us frequently, dining with us and sleeping on the sofa in the living room. He usually slept straight through the day. He had his beers, burped loudly and resoundingly, like a sated baby, lay spread-eagled on the sofa to watch TV, and fell asleep so deeply and for so long that it seemed he had died. An amazing corpse, if the truth be told. I took advantage of this to watch him, his face half-hidden by his folded arm and his powerful body on display, barely stirred by a breath. A young lion in docile rest. Greg, of course, saw it differently. He thought that since childhood Joe was in a rage and cursing the world, fast asleep, or silently hatching some malicious plan. Deep down, I knew the truth about Sleepy Joe. It would be a lie to say I didn’t, but I never put it in words, and if I had, Greg would have jumped to his brother’s defense.

“Let him be, he’s young,” he’d have argued, “he can take life calmly.”

After the prayers at six, Sleepy Joe slept the entire morning. He’d wake up briefly to devour whatever was in the refrigerator, sleep again till midafternoon, and then he’d remain awake until the morning light, because, as he put it, a cautious man doesn’t sleep in the dark. I always thought it was something physical. In the darkness, his heart froze and he’d not dare close his eyes to confront whatever phantoms haunted him. I told him once, “Joe, you kill the nighttime hours with the sound of the television so you don’t feel lonely.” More than likely he responded with one of the filthy obscenities that came out of his purple mouth. I’m not making that up. His gums and his lips were of a purplish hue, identical to Greg’s. The brothers were those types of people with visible gums and thick purplish lips, or I should say with too much mouth in the paleness of the face, mouths that insist you look at them against your will. I can see the two of them as children back in Colorado, sharing a bed with the other siblings like sardines in a can, Greg sleeping like an angel, but Joe wickedly awake, a little Slovak punk with his eyes wide open under the coarse scratchy bedsheets, counting the thousands of minutes and millions of seconds that must remain till morning, not daring, in his need, to scream for his mother, that woman who never bathed them and who, as soon as morning came, sent them out to play in the backyard, whether it was winter or summer, and whether they were still dressed or in their underwear, so that they accompanied her in reciting the Angelus. Or maybe she was the source of the panic, the mother, it could be. I, for one, am glad we never met, and I’m heartbroken that I had to use her wedding band.

When Sleepy Joe was in my house he’d prepare for this nighttime sleeplessness by stocking up on Coors, Marlboro Lights, and the spicy Mexican candies he ate all the time, according to him so he could stop smoking. They were called Pica Limón and they were packaged in red-and-green wrappers; when I returned from work, it wasn’t hard to see if Sleepy Joe had come by, all I had to do is look for the ashtrays full of cigarette butts and the Pica Limón wrappers scattered on the floor.

“You eat hundreds of those to stop smoking,” I told him, “but you still smoke like a demon.”

“I eat the candy to stop smoking, and smoke to stop eating the candy,” he responded sarcastically, giving one of those looks he used to give me, one of those slow, pasty looks that would stick to my body.

From midafternoon till dawn, Sleepy Joe abandoned the sofa, which according to him he was keeping warm the rest of the time, to settle down in the best chair in the apartment, one of those Reclinomatics with faux leather that gave massages. He turned on the television and never took off his boots when he set his big old feet on the little glass coffee table I had bought for the living room.

“You’re going to break that, you pig,” Greg scolded him. “At least take off your boots, and throw them out while you’re at it. Crocodile-skin boots are for mafiosos.”

I, on the other hand, never said anything, not to be rude; I wanted Greg to think that I did everything possible to keep a peaceful home environment. I put up with almost everything Sleepy Joe did; the only thing that drove me crazy was when he fed Pica Limón pieces to Hero. The poor little mutt began to cough, drool, and grimace like a vampire, curling his lips and showing his teeth. I hastily went for a piece of bread to give him to quench the spiciness, while Sleepy Joe was bent over in laughter.

“What has that animal done to you for you to torture him like that?” I demanded.

“What has he done to me?” he responded, his eyes still teary from laughing so hard. “What has he done? Well, track that fucking cart all over your white rug. You have forbidden him to soil your rug and he pays you no fucking mind, so I’m punishing him for it, like he deserves. And besides, I get to laugh at him for a while, why can’t I laugh about a rat?”

“You’re afraid of dogs and that’s why you harm them, that’s what’s happening. You’re a shit, nothing more than a scared little boy. Even Hero terrifies you.”

“I’m not afraid of that filth of a half dog, I despise it. That thing should be dead. It pisses me off, you understand? The way it carries himself around with half a body bores me to no end. Who do you guys think you are? Good Samaritans? Can’t you see how absurd this is, you trying to save this thing, when the poor thing just wants to be dead? When that animal looks at you like that, straight in the eyes, it is begging to die with that half that remained alive by mistake. One of these days, I’m just going to do it in with a swipe.”

The worst part was that Sleepy Joe wasn’t bluffing. There was something in his tone of voice or expression that made you think he really did believe all that crap. His hatred for the most vulnerable always caught my attention. He simply abhorred them, maybe because they held up some kind of mirror to his life.

I met Sleepy Joe at the restaurant where Greg had invited him to meet his girlfriend who would soon be his wife, in other words, me. On first impression, he was ravishingly handsome but a bit dull. The guy who according to my husband was going to be my brother-in-law was a boring show-off. I didn’t like his habit of looking this way and that like someone who doesn’t plan to stay long enough to take off his hat, or when he made the bold assertion that he could swallow us all and spit out the seeds. And to finish it off, he barely spoke, and when he did, only to his brother in Slovak. He did not make a good first impression on me. A handsome man with holes in the head, nothing else. And that’s where it would have remained had I not seen a completely different side of his personality as the three of us left the restaurant. At the time, the streets were overrun with homeless people, a wave of epidemic proportions, homeless folk sleeping on the sidewalks, homeless drunks, homeless and playing a harmonica and begging for change. As we came out a particularly disheveled homeless person approached us, toothless, fetid, someone stripped of any dignity and barely alive, or I should say a scrap, someone who had been trampled upon by life and left in tatters. The wretch played the clown and had a sign hung around his neck that said, “Kick my ass for one dollar.” Greg and I passed by, trying not to look at him, but Sleepy Joe went right up to him to negotiate the kick in the ass for half a dollar. “I’ll give you fifty cents. You don’t deserve more, you piece of garbage.” That’s what Joe told him. The poor man accepted the deal, took the coins, and crouched, still laughing, or pretending to laugh. And then Joe delivered a brutal kick to the man’s hind end, a blow so outrageous it sent him face first into the asphalt. Greg and I were half a block ahead by the time it happened, but were still able to witness the scene. I started trembling. But not even then did it sink in what a pearl of a brother-in-law fate had handed me. Later, he began to come around our place, but in a more tranquil mode, with his A-game behavior plan, which wasn’t much, as noted above, but at least he restrained himself from assaulting the helpless. Although not without his words; he didn’t hold those back. He’d let out torrents of monstrosities, generally couched in threats against anyone who seemed vulnerable, or ignorant, or down-and-out, or poor, or crippled. “That guy has the face of a victim,” he said of an obese neighbor who could barely get up the stairs of the building.

“Drop dead of a heart attack already, you fat shit,” he screamed at him. “Do the world a favor and drop dead.”

Any class of persons with defects or problems drove him crazy and put him in an almost hyperventilating state. One time I went with him to get dinner at the Pizza To Go on the corner, and he called the cashier, a not-so-bright woman who did things at her own sweet pace, a damned bitch. That’s how he was, out of control. He felt a blind hatred for all beggars and thought that they needed to be wiped off the face of the earth. When he expressed these ideas, he grew very excited; I remember once he grew red in the face, and his body shook, recounting how the Spartans tossed crippled newborns off a cliff. Another case in point: Sleepy Joe couldn’t help but be glued to the TV screen when they broadcast the Special Olympics, but not because of any admiration for those athletes who made such great efforts, but because he wanted to grab them, shake them, and make them pay, as if they were guilty of something. He even professed that babies were abhorrent. But of course, it wasn’t always that way. There were days when he seemed normal, even charming, seductive, now and then telling some good jokes and proving generous in his gift giving, which he ordered by credit card during the TV promotions of It Has to Be Yours. And there were other days in which he seemed frenzied, bewildered, even beside himself. I don’t know, maybe I judged him too harshly, and maybe he was just a stunted adolescent, full of aggressions because of his many insecurities and fears. I don’t know. In any case, I had started to look at him in a different manner in regard to what had happened with my friend Cori, that episode with the broomstick. And I couldn’t forget the warning that she had given me right before she left: “Open your eyes, María Paz, open your eyes and be careful. That boy is sick. I know what I’m talking about.” That’s what Cori had told me, her last words before she left, and I hadn’t forgotten them. And when Sleepy Joy began with his string of foul language, I’d begin throwing cushions at him until he shut up. Or I’d leave him there alone and lock myself up in my room.

“Come back out with that pretty ass, come back out to Papi. It was a joke,” he screamed from the living room.

But I didn’t think it was funny. If Greg was there, Joe never dared to give Hero a Pica Limón, or look at me, or talk to me in that tone; in the end, he was terrified of his older brother. And there was a reason. If things got out of hand, Greg would have probably ended up on top. Sleepy Joe was nothing but smoke and mirrors, while Greg, in spite of his deterioration and the indignities of age, was still a formidable two-legged beast. I noticed that one Sunday in which they decided to bet on a game of tossing bracelets on the kitchen table. Greg won toss after toss rather effortlessly till he had accumulated twenty dollars and left his brother with a sore arm.

What were my brother-in-law’s favorite TV shows? None. As far as I could remember, he didn’t watch any shows regularly. No series, no reality shows, and definitely no news. Not even sports or pornography. It was on all night tuned to guess what, guess, I just mentioned it. Sleepy Joe’s passion was those shopping channels with shows such as It Has to Be Yours, which hawk all kinds of miraculous products and send them to wherever you may live — Asunción, Managua, Miami, you name it. There wasn’t a city on the continent that didn’t have a corresponding number to call on the screen. You just had to write it down really quickly, because in a blink of the eye they were already pushing something else. Sleepy Joe was hypnotized by the fat burner that would leave you slender as a sylph in two weeks, an ecological microwave that didn’t use electricity, the shaping girdle that took away what’s extra and put in what was missing, the stairs that transformed into a bed, the bed that transformed into a closet, and the facial lotion that gave you a lift so you could look fifteen again without surgery. Sometimes I sat with him, and I would start to say something about a product that interested me. Sleepy Joe would stop me and always bought it for me as a gift. He ordered it, paid for it by credit card, and less than a week later, it arrived. Most of their merchandise was for the home. One time he gave me a vacuum cleaner to get rid of the dog hair floating everywhere, and one December he ordered a Santa Claus with blinking lights that took up half the living room because it came complete with reindeer and sled.

“You know why Santa has so many reindeer?” he asked me. “Because he eats them. In the long winter nights, when the old man can’t find anything else to eat, he lights a fire and pit roasts one of his precious reindeer. The others, meanwhile, mourn their brother. And if the old man needs a woman and there are none in those wide spaces, he helps himself to one of his cheery reindeer. While the others look on and snicker slyly.”

I was intrigued by Sleepy Joe. He kind of scared me, but I was also half-fascinated by him. In any case, it was strange that a truck driver would have money to buy so many gifts, all the ones for him, sophisticated and expensive products to prevent baldness, such as castor oil, and Amazonian ointments, because the thing he was most frightened about in life was going bald. At some point, he became interested in my work, and asked me if he could take the multiple-choice survey so he could see what it was about.

“Which of the following smells bother you the most?” I began, and was going to read him the options when he cut me off.

“Do you want to know what stinks?” he said. “My life stinks, just like everyone else’s who live near the pier.”

I was shocked by his response.

It’s true we lived in a working-class neighborhood in one of the most dangerous areas in the city, and that we were swimming in garbage every time the sanitation workers went on strike. All that was true. But the apartment was my pride and joy, so I let Sleepy Joe’s response pass as if it had nothing to do with me. I scribbled his response in my notebook in the panels reserved for additional commentary. And as I went to move on to the second question, he said furiously that he wasn’t finished with his response to the first.

“It stinks not having money,” he said. “Money cleans everything, poverty is motherfucking filthy. People like you buy detergent, soap, lotions, thinking life will be better with them. Pure bullshit.”

“Look who’s talking,” I retorted. “You’re the one who is like that, hypnotized by television commercials, they show any little thing, and it is as if you had been given a way to acquire it.”

“We are sunk up to the tits in crap,” he said with the air of a fanatic and such fierceness in his eyes that I even got scared. “Everything is miserliness, scabs, grease, and drippings,” he added, signaling his surroundings with a circular gesture as if he were talking about the entire universe.

“Maybe the world is muck and debris,” I said, upset. “But do me a favor and tell me what’s dirty at all about this house, aside from the candy wrappers you throw on the floor instead of putting them in an ashtray, where they wouldn’t fit, of course, because all the ashtrays are overflowing with your butts.”

“Everything is disgusting,” he said. “Everywhere you look, filth. Go out on the street, grab a little stick, any stick, and dig a hole. Then get down on your knees, face to the dirt, ass in the air, and look through the hole. What do you see? You see an ocean of shit. This city, all cities, floats on a sea of our own shit. Every day we add to it. We send it from the toilet through the sewers. The system never fails. We wisely store our shit below like the banks store gold in their vaults. We have been storing shit for hundreds of years. Go ahead, finish washing dishes up here, tidy up your apartment, fall for lies, cleanse your skin with creams and lotions, use a lot of toilet paper every time you shit, and remain in control of your personal hygiene. But I’m going to repeat: all we have below us is shit. When a volcano erupts, do you know what spews out?”

“Rivers of lava.”

“Wrong. Make note of it there in your work journal. Write down that you understand absolutely nothing. When a volcano erupts, it spews rivers of shit, incandescent, shitty shit. Do you get it? Like diarrhea, a cosmic diarrhea. The earth gets pissed off and erupts in a diarrhea in which we all drown.”

“You’re disgusting,” I said, moving away from him, feeling nauseated. “You’re a pig, Joe, an authentic filthy pig. All you need is to make some comment so all the filth of the world slips past your mouth.”

“You’re right this time, you got me. I’m a pig. And do you know what pigs eat? They eat shit. They go around, sticking their noses in mounds of shit. You think you’re a know-it-all, but there are truths no one has told you about. Did you know that three-quarters of all living things are coprophagous?”

“They’re what?”

“Coprophagous, do you know what that is? Write the word down so you remember it. Three-quarters of all living beings: coprophagous. It means they feed on shit, like this, munch, munch, munch, yummy, yummy, yummy, they swallow it and they lick it, the fuckers. Write it down, three-quarters. Write down these words I’m about to dictate to you, memorize these, Copris, Helicopris, Onitis, Oniticellus, Onthophagus eucraniin, Canthonini. And you know the other rules. Don’t pull the chain of the toilet after depositing some stuff in the bowl, because you’d be wasting the food. And don’t be coming to me with stories; go with your surveys to someone who is more naive. I’m not one of them. Ever since I was a little boy, I knew how things worked. In high school, I had a friend who dreamed about burning down his filthy neighborhood. He set fires between garbage cans, lit firecrackers, and he was always going around messing with matches. He claimed he was going to build a great pyre one day, a global fire to teach the world a lesson, he said, and burn off all the shit that has been accumulating for centuries. All damn pigs beware, because I’m going to burn their asses with balls of flames.”

“Is that friend you?”

“No, a friend,” he responded. “A classmate in high school.”

But aside from his rudeness and obscenities, Sleepy Joe wasn’t someone I disliked entirely. On the contrary, I tended to like him. Physically, I mean. That’s what really disgusted me. Greg was becoming for me more of an old man, and with Sleepy Joe it was like the version of Greg when he had been younger. They had similar height and features, but Joe showed off his body in Lycra shirts with sleeves neatly rolled up over the biceps, and he wore tight stretch jeans to emphasize his ass and legs and to provocatively delineate the package up front. It was clear that he took very good care of himself. He must have spent hours at the gym, lifting weights and then on the tanning beds. God knows when he did all that, maybe while he was at his other house, the one he kept me far from, although he always denied there was such a thing. He assured me that for him settling down went no further than the roadside motels.

“What else do I need?” He looked at me with the eyes of a calf that has just been castrated. “During the day I have my truck and at night I don’t need much: a television, a bed, and a bar open twenty-four/seven, and I can find all that at any motel on the road.”

He sighed and played up the martyr angle. I was overcome with crazy feelings of just wanting to hold him, protect him, shelter him, and he noticed, of course he noticed, and took advantage of this. But he wasn’t a good liar. You couldn’t believe anything he said, and it was obvious that the only true thing in his life was his brother, who always lent him money when things got tight. Or just gave him money. He was a womanizer who abused the bonds of fraternity, a frightened boy who prayed away his fears, a good-looking good-for-nothing, with no job and of benefit to no one. That was Sleepy Joe, more or less. And yet when he stayed with us and he came out of the bathroom with his hair wet and a towel wrapped around his waist, I couldn’t take my eyes off his gorgeous six-pack tanned by ultraviolet rays. I’m telling you, Sleepy Joe with a towel around his waist was a god, and I had to bite my lips to restrain myself. Unfortunately, the temptation was ongoing because he took many showers, at least twice a day, in the morning and early evening, and if it was hot, in the afternoon also. The fight between the brothers often concerned those fifteen or twenty minutes that he spent in the shower. Greg would pound on the bathroom door yelling at his brother and asking if he was going to start paying the bills. And he was right, all that water and electricity for hot water weren’t cheap. But Sleepy Joe didn’t turn off the water; instead he yelled back at his brother that he was a pig, a dirty goat. And this too had some truth in it.

What a strange twist of fate, I thought when I saw my brother-in-law pass by me half-naked with steam coming out of his pores. That body, specifically that one and no other, is the one I’d have wanted beside me on my honeymoon, when I sunbathed on the Hawaiian beaches. Sleepy Joe knew exactly what was going on and he squeezed all he could out of the triangle, an electric triangle that vibrated dangerously when he was in the apartment: an older man, his young wife, and the younger brother. But now that I’ve told you about Joe’s six-pack, I should also tell you about the double-beamed cross on his chest on which I was almost crucified. One day, Sleepy Joe and I were seated on the sofa… but wait, not yet, that part comes later. I can’t help it; I keep jumping around and messing up the story. No problem, Mr. Rose, you can fix the order later before it is published.

The weird thing is that Greg didn’t even notice, naive as can be, sticking an Adonis in the house thinking that his young wife would take no interest in him. Greg, who was suspicious of everyone, jealous of everyone, who when we got home would make a scene if he had seen me speaking with anyone in the office, even if just on friendly terms. And who would threaten me with having to return the green card if I didn’t stop being such a whore. No man escaped Greg’s false suspicion, not the grocer, the neighbor, the insurance representative, his retirement buddies, my past loves, my doctor, and especially my gynecologist. My husband tortured himself imagining that I did things with all of them, or would if I had the chance, with all of them except one. When it came to Sleepy Joe, my Greg never had a single suspicion or bad thought, only brotherly chastisements, paternal affection, and the instinct to protect, my poor Greg; meanwhile the kid and I, pure lightning and thunder.

It made me shudder to think that Sleepy Joe was watching me. Greg had to punch his time card at eight in the morning, but since my hours were more flexible, I gave myself the luxury of leaving the apartment a little later. During that difference in time — twenty minutes, half an hour, an hour at most — Sleepy Joe and I would be alone. Sometimes he simply stood in the doorway not saying anything while I brushed my hair or buttoned my blouse.

“You need something?” I asked his figure in the mirror.

“No, I don’t need anything,” he responded with longing and sarcasm, as if to say, I need you, my little bitch.

And not a single suspicion from Greg. Is that maybe why I ended up in bed with Joe, the only man who could approach me without the threat that I’d lose my green card? I’ll confess it here: I tore it up in bed with Joe, touching the sky with my hands, making love to him not once, not twice, not three times, but many hundreds more, and to make it worse, right there, in the same marital bedroom I shared with Greg, on the same mattress and sheets, under the glare of the very same Christ hanging from the cross.

And since I mentioned my bedroom, I should describe it, because it is my great pride and joy. Even before I got married, I decided to do it first class and not spare any expense. I chose mint green for the spreads and curtains; I knitted pillow covers in white and arranged them against the headboard; I bought a double bed with an orthopedic mattress, which was actually a mistake because it did not leave enough space for the two night tables in white wood, or the dresser and the bedside lamps with their bell-shaped fringed amber shades that emitted a warm, intimate light. Over the dresser, there was a wide mirror where I’d apply my makeup in the morning light, because there were no windows in the bathroom and Bolivia had always warned that if you put on your makeup under artificial light you would end up looking like a sad clown. Later, when Greg moved in with me, he put up that crucifix over the headboard. I abhorred it because it was so realistic, so bloody, a nightmarish thing that clashed with the décor. I don’t know if I’m being clear, but that crucifix is some antiquated disagreeable thing that had nothing to do with the mint-green blanket and curtains that I had chosen to brighten my life.

A double-beamed cross on three blue mountain ridges, that’s how Sleepy Joe described the tattoo in the middle of his chest, some Slovakian symbol for something about the native land, and under the cross, in Gothic letters, the legend “Lightning over Tatras.” My Greg had exactly the same tattoo, double-beamed cross on three blue mountain ridges, and the same legend, “Lightning over Tatras.” Just like Sleepy Joe, the tattoo was in the middle of his chest. Neither of them liked to talk about it, but I realized that it had religious and patriotic importance for them. Was it the mark of a legion or some rebel group? Did it have to do with a place of origin, some fraternity, or the mafia? I never knew. Sleepy Joe liked to recount how he had ordered his two lovers to get a tattoo of the same cross on their asses, but smaller, thumb-sized. More bullying from Sleepy Joe, with the touch of a truck driver. If he was a truck driver. He said that his two girlfriends or wives or lovers, whatever they were, worked at night, in bars or other dives, and he showed me pictures of them that he carried around in his wallet. I hated him for that and at the same time was obsessed and demanded details, and asked questions that were tormenting me: Do they know about each other? Do they know about me? Of the three, which one did he like best? And other such nonsense.

“What did they offer that I don’t? Tell me. What did they offer that I don’t?”

“They let me sleep during the day and don’t bug me about it.”

That topic had become a permanent conflict between us, so much so that at times it seemed as if I were more interested in Sleepy Joe’s girlfriends than in Sleepy Joe. I imagine that’s how jealousy works; they set up a blind boxing match against someone you don’t even know, and because of this you’re overcome with the zeal to dominate every minute detail about your rival, to know her by her short hairs. Only then can you realistically calculate the chances of defeating her. As to my brother-in-law, I was slugging it out in a phantom ring not with one contender but two. One was called Maraya, and she was a disco chick. Judging from her picture, she’d have been pretty if not for her wide nose and her protruding front teeth with a gap between them, not to mention the face of not having slept for a few months, and the bags under her eyes that made her look sick. I thought she was a drug addict. But she had a hell of a body, impossible to deny that. She was one of those women granted the miraculous power to remain thin where it is desirable to remain thin and full-fleshed in those areas where it is desirable to remain so. At least that’s what it looked like from the pictures where she was wearing a black spandex top, hot leopard-print pants, platform boots, a sailor’s cap, and huge hoop earrings. She danced at Chikki Charmers, a roadside bar for truckers in the countryside, twelve miles north of Ithaca, New York. According to Joe, Maraya specialized in ballads, because Chikki Charmers would put on themed shows depending on the time of night, and she performed striptease and karaoke with slower songs such as Billy Joel’s “She’s Got a Way,” Rod Stewart’s “Tonight’s the Night,” and the Commodores’ “Three Times a Lady.” Because I bugged him so much for details, Joe once told me that in Maraya’s contract there was a clause that said that each night she had to perform dressed according to the era, whether it was the sixties or the Saturday Night Fever period of the seventies, when they danced hard to release the stress of the week. That’s the mood that she had to create for the scene, and to show off that stunning body, she had to wrap it in clothes made out of Lycra and spandex, elastic, satin, silver pants; and she had to wear platform shoes to appear six inches taller than she usually was, and do pirouettes and other moves on the pole, while removing her miniskirt, hot pants, and crochet bikini. I think that was it, the seventies.

Are you surprised, Mr. Rose, that each detail has been engraved in my memory, even the silliest ones? You probably know from your own experience that nothing bores more into memory than jealousy. Sleepy Joe’s second girlfriend went by the name of Wendy Mellons. She spoke Spanish, had children by other men, and was considerably older than Maraya, and older than I was, and taller and fatter, and apparently much older than even Joe himself, although he’d deny it. With a spectacular pair of tits and a formidable ass, according to him, but as far as I’m concerned she was a hammy grandma, a diva past her prime. She worked as a bartender at a place called The Terrible Espinosas in Cañon City, south of Colorado Springs, Colorado, the birthplace of the two Slovak brothers, which is maybe why Sleepy Joe loved her so much. This Wendy Mellons must have been like a second mother to him, for there is no other way to explain why he’d be so in love with that Little Red Riding Hood granny.

“Your two girlfriends are a pair of whores,” I liked to tell him.

“What do you want from me?” he responded. “If honest wives like you don’t give it up for me.”

And we laughed about the situation. What else could we do? In the end, I was married and in no position to demand a fidelity that I could not give in return. Of course, with Joe the laughter did not last long; it was but a brief ray of sunlight in between the thundershowers of the day, because he was just as soon overcome with a rage that poured from him like streams of black vomit.

“Get out of bed,” I said after we made love, “we have to get dressed and pick up this lion’s den; your brother will be here soon.”

And it was as if I had cursed his mother. Did not he, after all have a right to nap a little after a good fuck, or was I some pitiful whore that had to get up right away to wash off what men had dumped between my legs? When it came to offending others, Sleepy Joe had no limits. Rudeness. But not that kind of rudeness that is innocuous but the kind with malicious intent.

“I’m leaving this place!” I screamed at him in the midst of my frustration, and I didn’t know what to fear more, that Joe would stop me with a whack or that Greg would discover the whole scenario.

So I just started to clean, clean like a madwoman, not overlooking one hair or leaving one drool unwiped, one wrinkle unsmoothed, not the smallest bit of his sperm floating around, nor any traces of what had just happened, not even the memory of so much desire and so much sex and so much rage that had transpired in that bed. I opened the windows wide and sprayed air freshener throughout the house and doused myself with perfume behind my ears and deodorant between my legs. At the last minute, I was able to grab Joe’s underwear, hanging from the feet of the Christ, to whom I’d beg, My beautiful sweet Jesus, you who died on the cross, close your eyes, pretend you have seen nothing, forgive my sins and promise me you will keep my secret.

At times, Sleepy Joe would disappear for weeks, sometimes even months. During those times we knew nothing about him, did not get any calls or any other signs of life from him, as if the earth had swallowed him up. And then one day when I came from work the little red-and-green candy wrappers would be there, scattered on the floor of the living room, the ashtrays would be full of butts, and Sleepy Joe would be stretched out on the couch watching some shopping channel. Where have you been? What were you doing? Why didn’t you call? We thought you were dead and so on. They were useless questions and expressions of concern, because he never responded or explained. He reappeared just as he had disappeared, Casper the Friendly Ghost. One time he did say something. He had returned with one of those black armbands used for mourning, and I asked him who had passed away.

“Maraya,” he said, “I’ve just come from the burial.”

“Maraya? Your Maraya? The Chikki Charmer, the one who dances like Olivia Newton-John, but naked?”

“Shut the fuck up. Why would you mock the dead like that?”

“She died? Seriously?”

“I’ve never known anyone to die any other way.”

“I’m sorry. Really, Joe? I’m very sorry. I don’t know what to say. What a shock. Poor Maraya. How did she die?”

“In a Jacuzzi.”

“A Jacuzzi?”

“She lived in a place that had a balcony with a Jacuzzi. She went into the Jacuzzi on Monday night and died, and no one found her until Thursday morning.”

“You mean she was in the bubbling hot water for over seventy hours?”

“When they found her, the flesh was so soft, it was coming off the bones, like when you broil a goat.”

“Don’t be disgusting, Joe, I can’t even imagine, that’s the most horrible thing I’ve heard in a long time. Even I, who hated her, am horrified at what she must have gone through. But how did it happen, why couldn’t she get out? Did she overdose on something? I’ve always told you she was probably a drug addict.”

“She was murdered.”

“Inside the Jacuzzi? Who?”

“They don’t know, one of her clients, perhaps.”

“Did they call the police? Do they suspect anyone?”

“The police aren’t interested in such cases.”

“Who told you?”

“Some of her friends.”

“Her friends told you someone had killed her?”

“Her friends told me and I went and paid for the burial.”

“The burial of what was left of her… You did the right thing, Sleepy Joe. After all, she was your girlfriend for however many years.”

“That’s not why I did it. But regardless, I arranged for the ceremony that she deserved.”

“The Catholic thing?”

“I put a die on each of her eyes.”

“What?”

“A die.”

The whole story was so grotesque I almost burst out laughing. Fortunately, I was able to control myself because Joe seemed truly affected, or let’s say that he seemed stupefied, talking to himself more than to me.

“Why? What does it mean that you put a die on each eye?” I asked.

“That was something between me and her. She’d have understood,” he said.

“Is it a Slovak ritual?”

“I took all of her clothes out of the boxes.”

“All that Lycra and spandex, all those psychedelic colors that glow under black light…”

“What does that have to do with anything? Are you an idiot, María Paz? That’s why I never tell you anything, because you have no respect, because talking to you is like talking to no one. Go to hell.”

“I’m sorry, Joe. Please forgive me. It was an innocent comment, that’s all. So go on. What were you saying?”

He didn’t answer so I went on: “You don’t want to talk to me. You were saying that you took all of her clothes out of the boxes. I understand, because she lived in a rented room, which you had to empty. Something like that, right?”

I racked my mind trying to find some logic in his stories, but it was impossible. It was as if his brain worked under another set of instructions.

“I divided her clothes into four piles,” he said after a few minutes.

“That’s good,” I said, because I did not know what else to say. I always had to be careful not to say something he’d consider improper, but his criteria for such things were so inaccessible, it was difficult to gauge.

“And then I put each pile in a different corner of the room,” he said.

“But why four piles?”

“I burned the first pile, the second I gave away, the third I put in the coffin with the body, and the fourth raffled away.”

“I see. And who won the pile you raffled?”

“Strangers. Folks who had never understood her or appreciated her.”

“That happens sometimes. Very sad. But was there any family there?”

“She didn’t have any family.”

“Did you hire a pianist to play at the funeral?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You don’t understand what happened, do you? I try to explain things to you, María Paz. I really do. In fact, I need to tell you about these things. But I’m wasting my time because you are never going to understand.”

“Maybe if you explained things more… especially the part about the die on each eye, that’s what I’m most having trouble with.”

But he stopped trying to get me to understand and I stopped trying to understand. He took out the pictures of Maraya from his wallet, burned them, threw the ashes in the toilet, flushed, and fell asleep and slept for three days straight. After a month he stopped wearing the black armband and never again mentioned his deceased girlfriend. I decided to tell Greg that one of his brother’s girlfriends had been murdered. Greg had been a cop, after all, and he’d have some opinion on the matter. I never, or almost never, told Greg something that Sleepy Joe had mentioned, so that he wouldn’t be suspicious about when we could have spoken of such things. But the death of that woman made me anxious. There was something too strange and lurid in the details of this story, and I was suffering from nightmares about that poached flesh coming off the bone, and with a die on each eye, the raffling off the poor dead woman’s clothes and all that, so I told Greg. Omitting certain details obviously, I just told him they had murdered one of Greg’s girlfriends.

“She was a whore, wasn’t she? Whores hang out with thugs until one of the scoundrels kill them” was all Greg had to say in response.

I knew very well that Sleepy Joe was a raging madman, and that he was getting worse: madder, more raging. His bile rose at the strangest things. He was very anal about certain things, and heaven help anyone who questioned him about it. His food, for example. Each item had to be separated from the other or he’d push it aside with a look of disgust. The rice should not be mixing with the vegetables and the meat should not be touching the potatoes. He insisted it was disgusting but never explained to me why. Once, I gave him a very nice wool sweater with leather patches on the elbows and the shoulders. Mother of God, he almost threw it back in my face. Who did I think he was that he’d wear mixed clothes? “Mixed?” I dared ask. “What do you mean?” “Wool and leather mixed, you moron. Can’t you see? Only you would think of giving me such shit; God forgive some of the lowdown things you do.” I remained stunned for a while after each of these outbursts. What did God have to do with the goddamned sweater? After a while, Sleepy Joe would feel bad about his behavior and come to me with kisses and hugs, begging me to forgive him. That time in particular he ended up taking back the gift, but only when I showed him he could take off the leather patches without damaging the sweater. That’s better, he said, but never wore it nonetheless.

I knew better than anyone that to be mixed up with Sleepy Joe was playing with fire. But what could I do? He had become my vice. On his divine chest the double-beamed cross seemed all-powerful, almost horrific, as if it were a dark symbol of who knows what, while between the little breasts that had sprouted on Greg the cross looked pathetic. I know that as a young man, around the time he got the tattoo, Greg had the same athletic chest that his little brother had now, maybe even a little more tanned, and sturdier and more muscular, because Greg was the taller one with the wider shoulders of the two. But with the years, his double-beamed cross had taken on the appearance of a sad lamppost weathering a stiff breeze in the fog of so many gray hairs, and the peaks of the blue mountains in the background highlighted the rolls of fat on his belly. On the other hand, with Sleepy Joe… I’d dream at all hours about that cross tattooed on his chest. Shit, how I loved it, more with each passing day. Lightning over Tatras, may God forgive the lunatic lust I felt for my brother-in-law.

“The kapustnica has to boil for twelve more minutes, twelve minutes exactly, and then you turn it down to a low simmer. But be careful, don’t cover it completely or it’ll get smoky and be ruined. Or you know what, forget about it, don’t touch it, I’ll be back before the twelve minutes,” Greg indicated from the door, on the night of his fifty-seventh birthday as I have already told you, Mr. Rose. He was about to go out after having talked briefly to Sleepy Joe. Greg whistled for Hero to come with him, but we had already unattached his cart and I heard his helpless whines.

“Leave him alone, he’s already in bed,” I told Greg, my back still to him as I set the table. I never knew if he heard me or if he had already stepped out.

When the twelve minutes passed and he had not returned, I turned down the flame on the pot without covering it completely, just as he had instructed, and I took the opportunity to sneak a Swiss-cheese sandwich with mayonnaise, because I was starving and did not hold out much hope for the kapustnica. I’d have a few spoonfuls during dinner, trying to avoid any of the solid chunks, and as soon as Greg wasn’t paying too much attention, I’d tell him that I was going to the kitchen for bread or water and empty my plate in the pot. It had always been the same with the kapustnica, except for the first time, when we were not married yet, and he took me by surprise, so I had to gobble the whole thing down, not deceive the person who soon, bless the hour, would be my husband.

Ten more minutes passed and still Greg had not returned. So I went into the bedroom to fix myself up to surprise him; it was his birthday, after all, and for months he had been seeing me in the same attire, a blue suit that we had to wear as a uniform for work, except Saturdays and Sundays when I’d wear sweats around the house. So I decided I’d surprise him, put on a strapless, tight-fitting black dress, and a string of pearls that, although they were farmed pearls, would create that classic look I was going for, an impeccable flawless look à la Audrey Hepburn, and without even thinking about it the words to “Moon River” started coming out of my mouth, sung softly as she sang it looking out the window, “Moon river, wider than a mile, I’m crossing you in style someday.” And what a coincidence, Mr. Rose, the one who ends up telling Holly’s story is a young writer like you, or maybe it’s not a coincidence at all, but that down deep I’m searching you out above all so I could mimic Holly.

Whatever the case may be, that night while I fixed myself up, I sang Holly’s song, and why not, that had been my dream also, in style someday. Someday, someday, and why not that very day, that is, that very night, although Greg, my poor fat Greg looked more like Sally Tomato, the gangster who pays Holly, than Paul Varjak, the very handsome author who writes about her after she has left. That’s in the book; in the movie, it’s different because the author ends up getting married to her, and when I said in class that I preferred that ending, you thought about it a little bit and responded, “I’m not sure, I’m not sure, I think that for Varjak to remember Holly and write about her is his way of loving her even more intensely.” Wow! What a great phrase, Mr. Rose. You sometimes spoke so pretty.

That night while waiting for Greg to return, I put on a pair of high heels and went over the top a bit with a retro makeup job, like Holly’s. Remember that thick black line she drew above her eyelashes? Well, I did the same thing and I had a hell of a pair of eyes, then I put on some Anaïs, my favorite perfume at that time, pinned my hair back, letting a few strands fall carelessly over my cheeks, and, pushing Hero a bit to the side, I climbed on the bed to get a good look at my whole body in the mirror.

What a surprise awaited me. Just like Audrey Hepburn? Holly Golightly in person? What I saw in the mirror was a monstrosity. The strapless dress, which had fit me fine when I was single, now seemed way too tight. I looked like a Oaxacan tamale, with the thighs and belly all wrapped up, and if that were not enough, as it widened and stretched the dress rose up and revealed my knees, which had been pretty and shapely but now were swollen, unsightly. The neckline, which previously fell neatly in place, not revealing too much or too little, now was way too low and made me look cheap, like Bolivia but not as pretty, more like Maraya or Wendy Mellons, or at least that’s how I saw myself at the moment. So much for the classic look. Quite the makeover I had gone through. I knew I had gained weight the year and a half I had lived quietly with Greg, but I had never imagined it was so much. Shit, I said. Not a fat housewife. I shed the strapless dress before anyone other than Hero saw me in it. I buried it in a corner of the closet and resigned myself to the marine blue suit I had been wearing, which at least concealed the pounds. Ciao, Holly, maybe next time. I did leave on the high heels, and instead of the farmed pearls, I tied a fuchsia hanky around my neck that matched my lipstick. What the hell, I thought. All the same, generous Greg will think I’m a knockout no matter what.

I went back into the living room and looked at the clock. It had been thirty-five minutes since he had gone out the door. I hope he is not fighting with Sleepy Joe, I thought, that boy can sour his birthday. I examined the table I had set a while before and it seemed as if the tablecloth was wrinkled. I’ve told you that I’m obsessed with ironing. I detest wrinkles. It’s a hang-up I inherited from Bolivia and maybe from my grandmother Africa, and even life in jail hasn’t cured it. Because there are no irons here, I dampen my uniform at night and stretch it on the floor under my bed so that it is smooth in the morning, anything not to go around with wrinkled clothes. So that night I thought that maybe I could pass a quick iron over the tablecloth before putting back silverware, glasses, candelabra, bread basket — everything that I had set up so meticulously. I pulled out the ironing board and ironed the tablecloth, starching it with Blue Violet Linen Water Spray, just as Bolivia always did. I put it back on the table, reset it, and looked at the clock. Greg had been outside for more than an hour. I shut off the flame under the kapustnica, which was beginning to dry up, threw myself on the Reclinomatic in the living room, setting it to a gentle massage, and quickly realized how exhausted I was. I fell asleep at some point, and when I woke up it was eleven fifteen. Eleven fifteen! And no sign of Greg at all.

I called his cell number, something I generally didn’t do because he didn’t like for me to call him when he was dealing with his things, but this time the call was merited, something must have happened. Greg wasn’t the type of person who would abandon his kaputsnica for no good reason. I called his cell, Mr. Rose, and guess what rang in our bedroom? That little melody that worked my nerves, from ABBA’s “Mamma Mia,” just at the point where it goes, “I’ve been cheated by you since I don’t know when, so I made up my mind it must come to an end.” Greg had chosen it as a ringtone. Ridiculous: What connection could he have to that syrupy song and the brilliant white outfits the members of ABBA wore in the video, like idiot angels? Remember that ancient video? The blonde and the brunette, all in white, and particularly the two guys, not sure if they were the husbands, with the smiles and the perfect little salon hairdos? What connection was there between that and a crude, hairy cop like my Greg? How I jumped every time that phone rang. It seemed as if Greg had chosen that ringtone, that one specifically, to throw my affair with Joe in my face. Those lyrics, you can just imagine, Mr. Rose, how I thought they spoke directly to me. A warning, a call to order, an I know all about it, you bitch, and one day you will pay for this great betrayal.

“Change that ringtone, Greg,” I asked him. “Get something more serious.”

But he always had the same response. He liked it, so why should he change it. So that night, the night of his birthday, past eleven, I couldn’t wait anymore and I called his cell. It had gotten too late, something must have happened. But the only response was ABBA and “Mamma Mia” from our bedroom, which woke up Hero, who began to bark. So there wasn’t anything I could do.

Something had happened or else this was a repeat of the old story of the man who tells his wife he’s going to the corner to buy some cigarettes and never returns. But no one spends all day making a soup if he knows that before eating it he is going to flee from his house. I went down the five floors and out onto the street. I remember that there was a strong wind blowing, a cold wind with the smell of Chinese food. I walked a couple of blocks to the right of the building and then a couple of blocks to the left but found nothing. And then I realized that just at that moment Greg might have been trying to get in touch with me so I raced back up to the apartment, climbing two stairs at a time. Maybe he had called while I was out, or when I slept on the chair. Could I have been sleeping so deeply that the phone ringing didn’t wake me? It would be strange but possible, and what was more strange was that Greg would be gone so long without calling. He wasn’t that type of guy, least of all on such an important date. I was just about going out of my mind when the doorbell rang and I ran to answer it, convinced it was him, but in truth not so sure because he had a key and never rang the doorbell. That had always been an issue during my affair with Sleepy Joe, because I never knew when Greg would burst in and catch me with my hands in the cookie jar, as they say. So I opened the door and it wasn’t Greg. It was Sleepy Joe.

He was wearing a wool hat pulled down to his eyebrows and a wifebeater, with his marvelous arms on display in spite of the windy weather. That was him, as I’ve told you, an exhibitionist, showing off his goods whenever possible, so I wasn’t surprised by the getup.

“Hello, my hot ass,” he said, pinching my butt.

“Stop it, not now,” I whispered, convinced that Greg was right behind him.

It was a logical assumption, given they had been together, or at least that’s what I had imagined. But there was no one behind Sleepy Joe.

“Where’s Greg?” I asked him.

“Greg?”

“Yes, Greg, your brother.”

“Greg, yes, Greg. I was waiting for him and he never showed up.”

“What do you mean he never showed up?” I said. “He left here to go meet you.”

“There you go, and he never showed up.”

“What are you talking about? You called him. He went to meet you.”

“I don’t know. He never showed.”

I noticed something strange about him. He was trying hard to seem calm, coolheaded, but he was shaken up, disturbed. He was trembling. He who is white as can be that night was almost transparent.

“You’re lying,” I said. “You were waiting for him for two hours.”

“I waited for him for a bit, and then I just found things to do,” he responded with a nervous, wry smile I wasn’t quite sure how to interpret.

“Stop it with the hands,” I told him, because he kept trying to feel me up. “Can’t you see I’m worried?”

“Calm down, calm down, no hysterics, please.” It was more an order than an attempt to console me.

“I’m telling you that Greg went out to meet you when you called him and he hasn’t returned yet.”

“And I’m telling you to calm down. You don’t want to make me nuts. And you will.”

It was true. I realized that he was on the brink of bursting, so I opted to change my tone. Besides, I was still worried about Greg but not as much anymore. Joe had begun with sucking on the back of my neck and the dirty words in my ear, and I’ll tell you the truth, Mr. Rose, I have never been able to resist the bastard, I don’t know what it is about him that makes me abandon all common sense. Maybe it’s the testosterone, youth and testosterone, a big juicy plate of food when one is starving to death. But why do I need to explain it to you when you already get it? And besides, it’s too late, what good is it understanding when calamity has already struck? If I go on with these clarifications it is out of guilt that eats away at me. Not a pretty thing on my part, my Greg disappeared on his birthday and me happy with his delay and making the best of it with his handsome little brother. But things were weird, very weird that night. There was something strange with Joe, even in the careless way he touched me, as if his mind were elsewhere. Because he was lazy and a bum about everything except sex. In that arena he always put forward his best effort and was very dedicated. But not that night. He was unrecognizable that night.

“What are you thinking about?” I asked him.

He didn’t respond. He went into the kitchen and had a few spoonfuls of the cold kapustnica straight from the pot.

“Do you want me to heat it up for you?” I asked him, and he pressed me against the wall, placing his package in between my legs.

“Yeah, heat it up,” he said, but it was soft. He, who was always hard, was soft that night.

“Something is wrong with you,” I told him, “now I’m sure of it. Does this have to do with Greg?”

“Be quiet and hurry up, there’s no time” was all he said. “And take off those heels; you look like a cheap whore. Put on some comfortable shoes and grab a coat. Quickly.”

“We’re going to go look for Greg?”

“Yes, exactly, we’re looking for Greg. Go, the minutes are ticking. Hola, Colorado, viva amigo mios de Rio Huerfano,” he screamed, going in a second from down in the dumps to a euphoria that sounded artificial, put on. He screamed it in Spanish, tilting his head back and howling like a mariachi, which startled me.

“Tell me what’s going on,” I said. “You’re up to something.”

“Our time has come, Hot Ass. We’re out of here for good. Cucucurrucucu the pigeon!”

“What are you saying…?”

“Nothing. Get your coat. But get me a cold Diet Coke first. Now, come on. Move that ass. A Diet Coke. Not that one, you moron, that’s regular. Diet, I said, diet. Don’t make me repeat everything a hundred times. The regular one has sugar and this is going to be stickier than used candy.” Again his mood changed and he was beginning to lose it, which could happen quickly if his wishes were not fulfilled right away.

He took a knife out of his pocket and showed it to me, but pulled it back when I reached for it.

“Easy,” he warned me. “Look but don’t touch.”

“Why do you have that?”

“I bought it for Greg.”

“A birthday present?”

“Yeah. A birthday present.”

I detest weapons, and this was one of those horrible knives, with an ugly black blade, something a gangster or a mugger would have. But it wasn’t strange enough that I suspected anything; often, the brothers would spend whole Sundays with their weapons. It was their thing. There are some men obsessed with metal, and that was them. So it wasn’t strange that Joe would have brought a knife as a birthday present. I went to our bedroom, changed my shoes, and returned to the living room with a coat in one hand and Hero in the other.

“I’m ready,” I said, “let’s go look for Greg.”

Joe was cleaning the knife with his handkerchief soaked in Diet Coke. When he was finished he dried it with a cloth napkin, then wrapped it in the same napkin and put it on a high shelf.

“I’ll be right down,” he said as he went up the stairs to the roof. “Wait for me here. Don’t move. And put that dog down, he’s not going.”

Hero seemed to understand and whined. While I was waiting, I thought the present was all wrong like that. It wouldn’t hurt to wrap it properly. So that it seemed like a real gift. It was one of those things that occurs to us women, who care about details. Details, that’s how we refer to such nonsense. But I thought I’d get a couple of pieces of tissue paper, scissors, and a blue ribbon. I wrapped it carefully, not touching it so I wouldn’t smudge it after Joe had cleaned it so carefully. In less than two minutes it was done, with a ribbon and everything. On the refrigerator door, among the pictures and other memories put up with magnets, there were a few of those “To… From” Christmas cards. I saved them all for sentimental reasons, I guess, that hang-up inherited from Bolivia that nothing gets thrown away because it could come in handy one day. And that all garbage is recycled, or simply kept, collecting in a box. I looked for a card that said “To Greg, From Joe.” And found one, in his handwriting, perfect! Greg would appreciate the detail, so I put the card on the gift and hid it high up on the shelves, thinking that if Joe saw it, he’d ridicule me, or throw a fit, so best if he saw it right before Greg got it. And then Joe started making some racket on the roof. Some dry blows, as if with a hammer, and then he started cussing, like he did whenever he grew impatient, and then again with the blows, hard smacks, as if he were striking a wall with a sledgehammer. What he screamed while he was doing this I couldn’t tell, but I did realize that he was having a fit, something had set him off, and I so feared these rages that I went back to our bedroom. I sat on the edge of the bed petting Hero to calm him down. The poor little thing trembled every time we had to deal with one of Joe’s fits. And that’s when I heard the door slam, not the door to the roof, but the apartment door on our level. A hard, violent slam, the front door smashing against the wall when opened. At first, I thought that Joe had left, swinging the door behind him. Sometimes he would do that, in a fury. But then I heard voices, male voices. And I realized that a group of men had broken into my apartment.

Sometime later, I don’t know, maybe two or three months, after I had arrived at Manninpox, during those weeks when I was so befuddled, I came upon graffiti that Las Nolis had painted in a hallway. Guess what they used as ink, Mr. Rose, it’s not that hard. The only paint handily available to them, their shit. Aside from their blood, of course, which is for more desperate circumstances. The graffiti said, “From my skin inward, I’m boss.” It was typical of them, trying to raise awareness of such things, but it made me angry with them, for their snobbishness, for preaching such pretentious nonsense. But there is everything cooking in this rotted stew, from the most rebellious to the most wretched, from those just barely crawling by, who do not have as much as a place to drop dead, to a few daughters of wealthy folk who indulge in more than a few extravagances. Like Tara, an ex-model in her fifties but still in good shape, who was my cellmate for a while. She swore that was her real name and we called her “Tarada,” Spanish for loony, because she was dumber than a mule. Who knows what her rich lover did for a living, or the money might have been hers, I’m not sure, but the guy sent her everything, creams, lotions, nail polish… and a pine-scented spray that was my misery, for every time someone sat down to do number two in the stainless-steel toilet embedded right in the middle of the cell — on its own, like a throne, in full view — every time someone sat down to poop, Tara would bring out the spray, and squirt the fucking thing everywhere, smothering us, until it seemed as if someone had taken a big shit in the woods. But Tara’s lover sent her everything, including the soybean pellets that she had to apply subcutaneously. Can you believe it? I didn’t even know such a thing existed, soybean pellets. They’re these superexclusive beauty products that Tara knew how to inject under her skin near the hip; with a Gillette she made a tiny little cut, put the pellet inside, closed it up with Micropore tape, and that’s it. To regenerate the hormones, awaken sexual desire, and rejuvenate the skin. Each pellet cost $280, and her lover bribed the guards so that she got her monthly dose, or bimonthly, I can’t remember, and that razor, but she always got her soybean pellet on time so that her treatment wouldn’t be interrupted. And meanwhile those lunatics Las Nolis writing such nonsense on the walls with their own shit. From my skin inward, I’m boss. Nothing could be further from the truth. That there is some pure shit. Maybe Tara still has her skin intact thanks to her creams and her soybean pellets. But my story is different. My skin is no longer mine. I’m skinless, one of those who goes around in the raw flesh. It’s a figure of speech, of course — not literally. The thing is that ever since those guys got to me I feel as if I’m burning, as if my whole body is on fire. I’m talking about the FBI men who broke into my apartment on the night of Greg’s birthday.

One of them, whom the others called Birdie, locked himself with me in the bathroom, threw me on the floor, and hurt me, asking me where the money was. “The money,” he screamed, “the money.” He needed to know where who knows what money was.

“The only money here belongs to the Virgin of Medjugorje,” I told him.

“What did you say?”

“She appears, the Virgin of Medjugorje…”

“Shut up with this bullshit.”

“I’m telling you, I don’t believe in it either but my brother-in-law and my husband are very Catholic and they’re saving money for a pilgrimage there,” I blurted out nervously.

“What are you talking about?”

“The sanctuary of the Virgin of Medjugorje, it’s in Bosnia, or so I’ve been told. My husband and brother-in-law are saving money to go see the miracle. But take the money if that’s what you want. No problem, it’s in the kitchen in a jar.”

But that’s not what Birdie was looking for. He shut me up with a slap and started to go nuts. His eyes bugged out and he began to strike me in the face till I saw stars. I thought it was just a saying or something that happens only in comic books, but that night I realized it was real. I saw stars. After each blow, things went black, and in that blackness there were points of light like stars. Birdie kept on shouting at me, “the hundred and fifty thousand, you bitch, the hundred and fifty thousand dollars, quit acting stupid.” I had no fucking idea. Of course, I’d have told him if I knew.

The men ate Greg’s kapustnica, spread out like pigs on the living-room furniture. They put on some cowboy program on the television with the volume all way up, while the others wandered around the apartment, searching, emptying boxes, kicking everything around, and swallowing up anything they found. I asked about Greg. “Where is my husband? Tell me where my husband is,” I screamed, or I wanted to scream but they didn’t hear me, or they heard me and ignored me. “Don’t be acting stupid,” they repeated, and kept demanding the money. I was handcuffed in the bathroom. But I must warn you, Mr. Rose, that night for me is a blank; it has no substance, a fog that lifts only momentarily. The voices still echo in my memory, that’s certain, I hear them laughing, but the rest is very hazy. I think at times that I was left alone. Maybe because Birdie got tired of hitting me, or else he needed a break to gather his strength. Everything is off-kilter as I remember it, as if it had happened a hundred years ago or to another person. But I remember the coldness of the tiles. Those cold wet tiles made me shiver, maybe because they had pissed on them; the stink was intense. It smelled like males in heat and like my own fear. And I remember my neck pressed against something, maybe the toilet or the bathtub. They didn’t like the soup, I heard them say, but they ate it, and they drank beer, and I knew they were making a big mess, the dishes dirty, the glasses shattered, the tablecloth soiled, and their shoe prints on my white rug.

I wasn’t very much concerned about what would happen to me in the long run. “Nothing to fear if you have done no wrong,” as they say in my country. And I had never gotten involved in anything. With my papers in order, I didn’t see what they could accuse me of. I was convinced that they couldn’t even take me from my house. I demanded to see a search warrant, an arrest warrant, some document that authorized them to do what they were doing, and I was sure they had no such warrants. So during that whole time I struggled to convince myself to just hold on patiently. Stay calm, I told myself, stay calm and this nightmare will be over and everything will return to normal. Maybe that’s why I didn’t scream or cry during the interrogations, I didn’t want anybody in the building to hear. And look how the mind works sometimes; during that whole ordeal I was most concerned about the living-room carpet. Unbelievable. The worst part is that I still think about it, my white carpet; I must be nuttier than that woman I interviewed once who told me she couldn’t stand for the shags in her carpet to go the wrong way, and that every time someone walked on the carpet she followed behind setting the shags the right way with her hand. Without telling her, I classified her in my journal as anal, a fundamentalist about hygiene, which was precisely what we were looking for, to gather the names of these anal-retentive folks as a target list for things such as the multiservice vacuum that would suck up particles from the air, cat hair from corners, and even the cat if it gets in the way, the Miele S5 Callisto Canister, just the machine for such a task. And that was me, all anal, obsessing about my rug, when what I should have been worried about was Greg’s whereabouts, why he had not returned, what had happened. I did ask them, “What have you done with my husband? Where is he?” Because my only hope at that moment was for Greg to show up, my poor Greg, who was so in love with me, while I was so in love with his brother, but it was Greg I needed to see now, and inside I prayed for Greg to walk through the door, so he could show his police badge and everything would be fixed, everything new again, end of nightmare.

Or not? Was there another terrifying possibility? What if all this had been orchestrated by Greg himself, who had found out about my betrayal and had sent these thugs to give me what I deserved? Could they be friends of his? Accomplices in what was happening to me? Was this Greg’s vengeance falling on me like divine retribution? The very idea chilled my blood. I thought I could withstand anything, except for Greg to find out I was cheating on him.

And what about Sleepy Joe? Had these guys grabbed him? Was he handcuffed in the apartment somewhere? Was he being questioned also? I couldn’t even dare ask. Maybe Joe had managed to escape, or was hiding on the roof, and it was best not to alert them. If Joe had escaped, he’d return soon with help. He’d call Greg, tell him what had happened. And Greg would certainly come rescue me, because he’d not know anything about the adultery. Of course, it could also be that Sleepy Joe had fallen asleep on the roof, and had not even heard the break-in.

“Don’t eat the cake, it’s for my husband’s birthday,” I begged the FBI guys, but they couldn’t give a crap.

“No more birthdays that will count,” they told me, and ate the cake directly from the platter, with their hands, not even cutting it into pieces. Fucking pigs. They didn’t seem to be going anywhere, they had settled their haunches, and they seemed like they lived there and I was the intruder.

Then Birdie took me in handcuffs from my apartment to another place, and the interrogations, blows, insults, and rough-ups continued, now even more brutal. When they were finished with me, a few days later I think, they took me out of what must have been a police station and put me on a bus, chained like a rabid dog. On the way I was able to see trees, enormous swaths of woods. For a moment, I thought that they were just going to throw me out in the woods and I remembered the story of Hansel and Gretel, who tried to save themselves by leaving pieces of bread crumbs on the path that the birds ate later. But soon I saw the sign for Manninpox State Prison and I knew what awaited me. After I arrived, I don’t know how long I went without washing myself because they wouldn’t take me to the showers. My hair was disgusting, all stuck together. They had forced me to strip and had taken my clothes along with my wedding ring and my necklace with the coin piece. They made me put on a uniform made of threadbare cloth, a rag against the cold in that place, and at night they gave me a single blanket, so short my feet stuck out. They didn’t give me any underwear. I’d have paid a million dollars for a pair of panties, just that, just some panties so I didn’t feel so exposed, so helpless in the hands of these people, they some gods and me but some piece of garbage. I felt the wind sneaking up my legs and it froze me inside. Of all the people who knew me, my coworkers, Greg, Sleepy Joe himself, none of them knew I had been arrested, or where I was, because they had not let me get in touch with them.

At some point, they took a picture of me, the infamous prisoner mug shots facing front and in profile, and they assigned me a number, 77601-012. I swear, Mr. Rose, at that point I felt as if there was some hope, at least I had a number, was registered in some file, and if one day Violeta asked about me, they could tell her that it wasn’t my fault that I had not visited her again. If they disappear me, I thought, they’re going to have to account for me to someone. They’d open an investigation about 77601-012 that figures somewhere.

That mug shot was my ticket to survival.

6. From María Paz’s Manuscript

The darkness. What was it like? I shut my eyes tight and imagine it deep and velvety. I can’t remember what silence was like either. I cover my ears to remember, but it is concealed behind a buzzing swarm. These are things I forget, because here in jail there is noise and light all the time. I yearn for the calm of a long, dark moment during which there is no sound in my head. You told us you lived on the mountain, Mr. Rose, so you must know real darkness and silence. You also told us that you could see Manninpox from your house, and I wonder if now and then you look over toward us. If you can see Manninpox from your house, it means that from Manninpox someone can see your house. Or could see it if there were a place to look out.

The problem with my moments of solitude is that they’re too filled with Violeta. I can forget about crucial things that have to do with me, such as the charges against me, but I become twisted in anxiety about her. Has she eaten or left her meal untouched? Is she depressed because of the rainy weather? Has she been cured of the habit of pulling out her hair? Since the day she was born, I have had to watch over her. During the time that the two of us stayed back in Colombia, each of us in different cities, I tried several times to call her but we never spoke. For weeks I’d forget about her, but then I’d remember, and the thought that I was forsaking my duty to watch over her would crash over me like a wave. In spite of everything, life hadn’t been so bad for me then, better than I had expected. Of course, I cried a lot for Bolivia, that’s normal, even cubs and calves mourn the absence of a mother, everyone knows that there is only one mother. Everybody except me, who had two, you could say, because Leonor de Nava played that role well for me, better than Bolivia had. But in Las Lomitas I was a girl among girls, one more alongside Cami and Pati, let’s say I was more a sister than a daughter, and there I found happiness. But what about Violeta? How did it go for the abandoned baby? I don’t know, and I don’t think Violeta herself ever knew, or if she did she wasn’t telling.

“Violeta doesn’t forget,” she said at times.

“What, Little Sis? What is it you don’t forget? Is there something Violeta doesn’t want to remember?” I ask her, but she doesn’t respond.

Every time I called her in Colombia, her godmother said the same thing. “Violeta doesn’t want to get on. She’s small, the phone frightens her, I’ll tell her you said hello.” Cami, Pati, and I were always on the phone, if we ever fought about anything, it was about that, because whoever grabbed the phone first would hog it, and yet my sister Violeta was afraid of the phone. What can I do, I thought, to be able to forget about her, or to free myself from the burden of having to go look for her. Besides, Bolivia assured me that the nena was fine and that soon we would all be together. Once, I tried to tell her that things with Violeta were not going as well as she thought. I told her, “Yesterday I tried to talk to the girl, and I heard the voice of her godmother calling her. ‘Come, Violeta, come talk to your sister. What a horror this girl is, hiding in there again, all afternoon in there and no one can get her out.’ Are you listening to me, Bolivia? Violeta’s godmother said yesterday that the girl had spent the whole afternoon hiding there.”

“Hiding where?” my mother asked me.

“I don’t know, Bolivia. Hiding somewhere or behind something, some furniture, a door. I don’t know. The problem was that she had been there all afternoon.”

On that occasion, as on others like it, Bolivia uttered one of her favorite phrases, the one that annoyed me the most, and which she repeated until the day before her death: “Don’t worry, everything is alright.” Everything is alright, those three words summed up my mother’s philosophy.

These days, I call Violeta every week despite of the long lines to use the only phone in our section. But with her nothing is easy. I know she’s angry with me, that she hasn’t forgiven me for putting her in that school so far from home, and I know she has reason to hate me, I hate myself for having done it. So she comes to the phone but says nothing, it’s up to me to sing her the song about the snake from Tierra Caliente that smiles so that you can see its teeth, that one and others from Cri-Cri the singing cricket, which was her favorite character as a child, and that’s how I spend the ten or twelve minutes, singing “Sleepy Piggies,” “Cleta Dominga,” or “The Baker Bunnies,” until I have spent all the minutes on my card. But don’t think that Violeta is dumb or retarded. On the contrary, she’s exceptional. Strange but exceptional, and with an inability to tolerate lies. She knows perfectly well that if I’m calling her it is not to tell her about things as they are, that I hide from her that I’m in prison, and hide from her what happened to Greg, and hide a bunch of other things, that in some way I also hide from myself. The difference is that with me the lies help me live, but they suffocate her. We all live lying to each other, sometimes more and sometimes less, sometimes maliciously and sometimes for pity’s sake. Dr. House has said this, and he’s right. The unvarnished truth is not something that is very useful, and it doesn’t figure in any etiquette manual. But that’s not how things work for Violeta. She tells no lies and doesn’t wish to hear any; measured words and those with various meanings nauseate her. The psychologists have explained to me that Violeta doesn’t know how to interpret evasions and insinuations. That’s why when I call her from Manninpox she freezes and goes silent. Or she doesn’t come to the phone and that’s the worst, that’s how she defeats me, leaves me reeling all week.

“No more. Big Sis quiet. Big Sis quiet,” she told me when I began going around in circles and inventing stories to avoid telling her the real one. Since then, she has not said a word more.

And even so, I’m afraid to tell her the truth. It’s not easy to tell your younger sister that you’re caught up in the mother of all messes and that it’s possible you won’t see her for a very long time. Or maybe I don’t tell her for precisely the opposite reason, because deep down I’m convinced that any minute now I’m going to awake and this castle of horrors, this unrecognizable place, as if from a macabre fairy tale, will disappear. And I’ll go look for her immediately at her school in Vermont, and I’ll take her with me, and promise her I will never again have boyfriends who think living with her would be hell. Although it’s true, it is hell. But so what? Violeta might be a mess but she’s my sister, I love her deeply and I need her. How history repeats itself, or I should say how we repeat it stupidly without knowing it. Violeta and I were always forgotten about when Bolivia brought home one of her boyfriends. For the little lovebirds, my sister and I became like the plague, the little problem that fucked up pretty Mommy’s romance, so young but with such big, needy daughters. Every time a man lived with us, Violeta and I were superfluous, latching on, not really part of the script, or the main obstacle challenging the future happiness of the couple. When Bolivia died, I was left in charge of Violeta, and when I decided to live with a lover, Violeta automatically became the burden. History repeating itself. I’m telling you, the problem is we don’t learn. We fail miserably and then we do the exact same thing afterward. That’s why I sent Violeta off to that special school way up north in Vermont. You understand? I wanted to be happy and she was a burden. I guess I did the same thing as Bolivia, lured by the illusion of happiness. It’s a mistake, you know? The basis of all troubles and miseries are the dreams of such foolishness. That’s not what life is about, period. And it’s not that I’m telling you I’ve been miserable, it’s not that. I imagine there are those who have had it much worse. Or maybe I simply wanted to escape from a closed box by sending Violeta so far away. Look at it this way. For all those years, who was I? What memories do I have of my adolescence? Not many really; I was a closed box. I was the one who cared for Violeta, not much else. Once Mike sent me to buy cigarettes. Have I told you about Mike? It doesn’t matter for now; let’s just say he was one of my mother’s boyfriends. I was eleven years old, maybe twelve. Mike had invited Bolivia, Violeta, and me on one of his business trips, and that had become a whole adventure in and of itself. I had never been in such a fancy hotel and could not imagine that there would be a more luxurious place in all the world, a two-star hotel that I thought deserved all the stars of the firmament, and on the top floor, we found a soda vending machine and ice. We took up two rooms connected by a door, each room with its own bathroom and television, and in the bathrooms little bottles of lotion and shampoo. It was paradise. But the hotel happened to be located on a big avenue with lots of traffic and many lanes, a highway. I went down with the money Mike had given me, asked at the bar for the brand he smoked but they were out, went outside and asked at another place with no luck, and another one, and nothing. Someone said that I could probably find the brand across the way, and I did just what my survival instincts told me not to do: I crossed the highway. I didn’t want to show back up in the room without the cigarettes, so maybe I didn’t mind Mike so much, and at that point was insanely grateful to him for having brought us to that wondrous place. But in any case, I didn’t have a problem, I crossed the avenue with a group of others and nothing happened. I bought the cigarettes intending to go back and before I realized it I was under a car. I opened my eyes, and there I was, under a car, with my nose inches away from its metallic belly and my dress pressed down by one of the rear tires. An Asian man who must have been the driver was crouching on all fours, and when he saw me, he screamed. Aside from the Asian face and the belly of the car, I began to see legs and shoes and I knew there was a commotion around me. I heard an ambulance siren approaching. “It’s a girl,” a woman’s voice said, “she’s dead, she’s dead.” And then I understood that it was me, I was the girl who was dead. But I wasn’t in pain, in fact I didn’t feel anything at all, so I pulled my dress free with one tug, picked up the cigarette pack and coins that were scattered right beside me, I scooted out from under the car, I stood up as quickly as possible, and ran as fast as my legs would allow. I crossed through the other lanes hearing the brakes screech right beside me. At the hotel I hid behind some plant until they stopped looking for me and then went into the bathroom of the lobby. I washed my face and dried it with the paper towels, soaked the part of my dress that the tire had run over and dried it with the hot-air hand dryer, fixed my hair as best I could, and checked in the mirror to make sure there wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. After a few moments, I went back up to the room, gave Mike his cigarettes and change, and said nothing. In fact, I’ve never told anyone about it, although I can still see it today as clear as if I were watching a movie. And if I’m telling you now, Mr. Rose, it is for you to understand that I was no one. I was no one and nothing happened to me. My stuff didn’t count and it wasn’t worth recounting, that simple. And don’t think I suffered because of it; it was just the way things were.

Maybe that’s why I never tell anyone I’m in prison, least of all Violeta. I don’t know. Or it could be out of shame. She never liked that I was with Greg, let alone Sleepy Joe. The farce of my marriage seemed ridiculous to her, and because she’s a sly one, few things get past her. It was as if she knew from the very beginning that all my dealings with the two Slovaks lacked substance, that it could only go from bad to worse and would end up just like it did. I damned Violeta by trying to be happy and she damned herself by not letting me. She’s a ruthless witness; the telenovela I was involved in did not win her over, as I supposed down deep it never really won me over either, and that’s why it bothered me so much to have her there at every minute, recording it all. It’s not that she said anything to me, or that she made demands or gave warnings, but she had her own annoying ways of letting me know. She knows just how to patiently exasperate a person to her limits. She began to pee in her bed every night, and wandered naked on the roof, and sat on the corner pulling out locks of hair. She couldn’t stand Sleepy Joe. I think she didn’t mind Greg, or at least she didn’t give him reason to quarrel, although it wasn’t all easy with him either. Greg was a cop, you know, a cop to the bone, with a very narrow notion of the law, even if covertly he did nothing but violate the very law that he upheld. But that’s another issue, the trafficking of arms, which I only came to find out about here, because believe me I knew nothing about it before. But I was telling you about something else. I was telling you that Greg’s disciplinary codes were strict, and he thought Violeta mocked them.

For example, he said to her, “Violeta, stop playing with that glass, you’re going to break it. Can’t you see you’re going to break it?”

“Yes,” she replied, continuing to do what she had been doing.

Greg took it as contempt, when it was simply the way Violeta naturally responded. As I said, she understood everything very literally; she could not sense subtlety or insinuation. The phone would ring and she would pick it up and someone would ask if Greg was there.

“Yes,” she’d respond and hang up.

“But why didn’t you get me, child?” he roared.

“Why didn’t you get me, child?” she repeated.

“But they asked if I was here!”

“Violeta said yes.”

One day, Violeta was trying to lace up some roller skates and could not do it.

“You’re drowning in a glass of water,” Greg said as he went to help her.

“Idiot,” Violeta said, striking him hard on the arm. “Violeta doesn’t fit inside a glass.”

Greg couldn’t understand that she wasn’t being offensive, just literal. Once, when Bolivia was still alive, she sent Violeta to the corner to buy cloves and cinnamon to make her the maizena my sister liked. Because that’s another drama. Violeta would only eat white food: rice, spaghetti, milk, egg whites, wheat bread, vanilla ice cream; she pukes if you try to give her anything else. That day, Bolivia wanted to make her the maizena, a cornstarch drink, which of course is also white, and that is poached in a bath of milk and water, with sugar and cloves and cinnamon.

“Go get me some clavos y canela,” she told Violeta and handed her some coins.

Violeta brought back the canela, the cinnamon, and for clavos, which is the word for both cloves and nails in Spanish, Violeta brought back a bag of steel nails. You understand? You ask her for a thing and she grasps it at the most literal level. And Greg, somewhat of a moron himself, could never comprehend that Violeta did not quite understand. And she didn’t help. If Greg got home tired, she was loud to the point of driving him crazy, or she got lost in the neighborhood and he had to go looking for her. Every day something. But like I said, Violeta’s major conflict wasn’t with Greg but with Sleepy Joe.

But it’s incredible, hard to figure out why she insisted on fucking specifically with someone like him who is so wicked. He is almost instinctually wired to do harm; he has a pressing need to commit wrongs, probably without even realizing it, a childish urge that makes him take pleasure in the pain of others as children sometimes do with creatures in that perverse manner. Except that Sleepy Joe is a child with an adult’s sense of perversity. Or I should say, an evil, nasty, bad adult. That’s what he’s like, or was like; I don’t know what has become of him. I haven’t been in contact with him from here. Perhaps the separation has helped me understand him better, to glimpse how his mechanisms functioned. That’s how things were, Mr. Rose, or at least that’s how I understand them now. All you had to was watch. Anything with a crack, Sleepy Joe pounced on to break, for the pure satisfaction of dragging it to that point, and because hurting others makes his balls tingle and his brain jingle. He had to hurt Hero because the poor thing was a cripple, had to make Violeta sick because she was already sick, had to rape Cori because she had already been raped. Sleepy Joe needed to avenge himself on them, crush them like insects, he a god and they insects beneath his feet. He remained strong and all-powerful; the problem was that he could only achieve this in comparison with the weak. He needed to break the chain at the weakest link, maybe so that he himself would not break, because in the end, he must truly be the weakest link. That’s how he was. Imagine a chicken with only one wing. But not a good chicken. But a mean son-of-a-bitch chicken, with a broken wing. I don’t know when he suffered his own harm, probably as a child, as is the case with most irreparable harm. He seemed like a wounded young man. And not just his spirit but also his body. You should have seen the number of scars on his back.

“What are they from?” I asked him many times, always while we were in bed, I’d caress his back and my fingers would run against those tracks on his skin, one right beside the other, like the beads of a rosary. “Life marks you,” he always responded and said no more.

And yet, look, Violeta wouldn’t leave him alone. She too looked for ways to torture him, almost as if they were competing to see who could be worse. She realized that he was a man full of fear, and went at him from the weak side. She knew, for example, that the little shit was afraid of dogs, and to bug him she’d sneak stray dogs into the apartment, flea-ridden little pests with their tails between their legs, but they tormented Joe and drove him to fits of hysteria. She was also able to get to him in other ways. Because his passion was the shopping channel she’d stand in front of the television when he was watching. He’d touch her to move her to one side, and she’d bite him hard. Because she’s a firebrand, and when she becomes enraged, she has the strength of a thousand demons, my sister Violeta, who otherwise seems so weak and fragile. She has never liked to be touched, not even caressed, and hugged, forget it, she reacts as if she has been burned by a cigarette. She also had more ingenuous ways of startling poor Sleepy Joe, Violeta the gnat. She knew he was terrified of sleeping, although against his will he fell asleep at times. But never in the dark. He didn’t like to sleep in the darkness of the night, and so during the day he always seemed sleepy. He hated the nightmares that the night brought, which in Spanish has an ugly name: pesadilla, which sounds like quesadilla, but which in English is “night mare,” a nocturnal mule, a black and brilliant female wandering the vastness of the night terrified and alone. Violeta took advantage of this, for she made no distinction between night and day and could get around in the darkness as well as in the light.

“Last night the black mule came, Violeta saw her,” she said, and Sleepy Joe would get all freaked out, because he knew Violeta did not lie, not because she was good, but because she was guileless, ignorant of the mechanisms of deception, so the visit from this mule had to have some substance, and Joe was very superstitious.

And I don’t blame him, there’s something about Violeta’s ramblings that make them seem prophetic. Corina feared that Sleepy Joe would do something to her, to my little sister Violeta, such a pretty and helpless woman, and so ignorant of sex although she had developed into a woman, a beautiful woman, my sister, quite pretty, damn it, and what a brew of hormones was bubbling in her. I wasn’t sure if Violeta knew what she was doing when she sunbathed nude on the roof, knowing Sleepy Joe would be around. I think she was tempting him, provoking him on purpose, just because that was one more way to torment him. Anyway, I didn’t want to sit back and do nothing and see whose interpretation of the situation was right, Corina’s or mine. Whatever the case, I thought it would be best if I enrolled Violeta in the school in Vermont.

I don’t think it was such a great torment, Mr. Rose; it wasn’t as if I were sending a kid off to slaughter. It’s a wonderful school, with teachers who specialize in the education she requires, very expensive, on the edge of a forest. Fortunately, Bolivia’s friend Socorro Arias de Salmon takes care of the tuition; she says it’s something she had with my mother, a pending debt. In many ways, I think that my sister is better off in the school, she who always hated the city. Imagine what it is like for someone who can’t stand physical contact to have to deal with crowds, buying cards for the subway, standing in line, making transfers, the eternal maze of stinking tunnels, the noise, people going up, people going down, people shoving. At school on the other hand she had the expanse of green, the sky, the trees, and the peace of the world, and they teach her not to be so selfish and to live among others, I mean to understand them better, which is something she doesn’t know how to do. In the end it wasn’t a bad choice. They specialize in cases such as Violeta’s; they understand her and are educating her, which is important, because I understand that Violeta never did well in regular schools, where she scratched and bit her classmates and sometimes she too would come back all beat up. Be that as it may, I can’t forgive myself for sending her there; the guilt is eating me alive.

I’m not sure if you can say, Mr. Rose, what made me so drastically rebel against Violeta. Except that I wanted to live my life, is that a sin? Finally a life of my own, a chance to worry about something that wasn’t Violeta, Violeta, Violeta. My dealings with her have always been tormenting, ever since the plane brought us to America. I noticed something weird that very first day, after five years apart, but I wrote it off as the behavior of a spoiled child, because I knew that those who were too pretty also tended to be whimsical. To begin with, she had shown up at the airport with a stuffed toy giraffe, which I thought was a big mistake. Even at that age I had a keenly developed sense of the ridiculous and when we walked onto the plane I felt the other passengers give us that look that said, Oh, God, don’t let those girls with the giraffe sit near us. You know the look, the one saved for those returning from Mexico with mariachi hats or from Disney with Mickey Mouse ears. Fortunately, no one sat next to us. She let me buckle her seat belt but didn’t respond when I wanted to talk about Bolivia’s new car.

“You know who Bolivia is?” I asked her.

“You know who Bolivia is?” she returned the question.

“Bolivia is your mother and she’s waiting for you in America.”

“Your mother waiting for you in America.”

“Yours too.”

“Yours too.”

“Yes, good. Bolivia is your mother and my mother and is waiting for us both. With many presents. In America.”

It wasn’t true that Violeta was frightened about her first time on a plane, as Doña Herminia had warned me. Violeta simply wasn’t — frightened or anything, she was simply not there and thus ignored me, until I tried to take the giraffe away from her, then she screamed.

“We have to put it up in the bin! The giraffe, Violeta. You can’t keep it with you. The stewardess said that all personal items had to be stored in the overhead bin, those are the rules,” I tried to explain to her. Before Manninpox, I was always very respectful of rules, and I couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t part with the stuffed animal, when it had been made clear that we should heed the rules for the safety of all.

I knew very well what a plane crash was like because two years earlier, when I was ten, a DC-4 had taken a nosedive into our neighborhood. The passengers and many people on the ground had died, especially those having lunch at a restaurant called Los Alegres Compadres. Our lives had been marked by that accident, the only major event that had happened in the history of Las Lomitas. Some of the dead were people we had known, including a girl from our school. And for months afterward it was as if we were in a movie, with the trained dogs looking for bodies at the wreckage site, and police tape surrounding the area. Everything connected to the event had been a major commotion — the Red Cross, the funerals, the prayer sessions, the news stories on television — and for a few days we were the center of the world. There was also a sense of triumph among the neighbors who could have died but had by some miracle survived.

The residents of Las Lomitas were lower middle-class, that is, we only ever traveled by car, and in other neighborhoods we joked that this had been our only opportunity to die in an airplane crash. Who could have known at that moment that two years later I’d be the first person from the neighborhood to get on a plane? That’s why I wasn’t going to allow Violeta to ruin everything by not putting the giraffe in the overhead bin as the stewardess had ordered.

“Listen to what you’ve been told, Violeta. Or are you deaf?” I demanded. “It could be very dangerous!”

Even then it was part of my character to give respect to authority, especially uniformed authority, as I demonstrated by marrying a cop. It was a hang-up that I got over quickly here at Manninpox, but that stewardess on my first flight with her indigo-blue uniform and red scarf around her neck must have seemed like the very owner of the sky to me. I was so fascinated by her confident and stern manner as she made her way up and down the aisle serving juices and giving orders that I swore that one day I’d be a stewardess. Fortunately, those types of pipe dreams don’t always play out, because a few years later I saw Pretty Woman with Julia Roberts and I swore I’d become a prostitute. I struggled a bit with my sister for the giraffe, but she was making such a racket that I gave up.

“You didn’t cry as a baby. Where did you learn to shrill like that? Hasn’t anybody taught you how to speak?” I told her, even mocking her somewhat.

When it came down to it, the things that made me superior to her were my age, the English I’d learned in school, the double-A cup bra, and the patent-leather shoes with the princess heels that Leonor de Nava had bought me just for the occasion. Not to mention the collection of Condorito comics that Alex Toro had given me the afternoon before when we said good-bye, but that I’d left behind because it had not fit in the luggage. I came to the conclusion that I didn’t quite yet like this hysteric sister that had been my fate, and that I missed Cami and Pati very much.

But how could I not love Violeta, so white and so pretty, with her long wavy hair and those green eyes that looked like jewels, as if in that perfect little face someone had set two stones of light that faced not out but inward. Alice lost among the underground marvels she encounters, that’s who Violeta was and continues to be. Not much later, I felt bad about having been rough with her. A bad start for a new life, I thought, and tried to talk to her about other things but to no avail: she didn’t let go of the giraffe and she didn’t let out a single word. She immediately pulled her arm back if it grazed mine, and I was too tired to deal with all her sensitivities. To make the flight that left at noon from the capital, I had awakened before dawn and traveled several hours on the bus with Leonor, and after the emotional good-bye and all my expectations of what awaited us, I fell asleep and for a bit did not have to think about Violeta.

I was awakened by an acrid stench. It smelled like urine and was coming from her. I opened my eyes and I noticed that she had the giraffe pressed between her legs, but it took me a while to realize that she had been about to burst from the urge to pee and that instead of asking for the bathroom she had peed on the giraffe. And now the giraffe was soaked, a disgusting stuffed thing dripping a yellow liquid. So I snatched it from her, and she screamed again.

“The crew is going to find out you peed on yourself and there’s going to be hell to pay. If you don’t shut up the plane will crash; shut up already, pee-head.” The more I insulted her the more she screamed.

“Let’s go to the bathroom, nena.” I opted for a new tack. “Inside the plane there’s a bathroom with running water and everything. Let’s go wash you and the giraffe up. They’ll send us back to where we came if we arrive in America looking like this. Everything is clean there and you smell like urine. Bolivia told me they don’t accept dirty people.”

Fortunately, she was uncomfortable enough on the wet seat that she allowed me to convince her. We walked down to the end of the aisle and went into the same bathroom, where we barely fit in to close the door. Miraculously, Violeta was no longer screaming. She pulled down her panties and sat on the toilet although I told her not to do it, because Leonor de Nava had taught me that in a public toilet, women should urinate squatting without touching anything for balance. But Violeta seemed peaceful in there; the tight quarters didn’t seem to bother her. She sat on the toilet as if it were a throne and looked at me for the first time.

“Make sure the door is locked,” she said, and I realized that she could speak normally whenever she wanted.

I washed the giraffe in the sink with the liquid soap and afterward tried to mask the lingering smell with the hand lotion and cologne offered there for the passengers in small bottles ordered neatly on the counter. I really liked those little bottles and the only reason I didn’t take one was because I was afraid that they’d detain me for being a thief in America. I read the sign in the mirror that said, “Out of courtesy for your fellow passengers, please leave the bathroom in the same condition you found it,” and I found that very civilized and very American. After wringing out the giraffe as best I could “out of courtesy for my fellow passengers” I wiped and dried the whole bathroom until it was in “the same condition I found it” or even cleaner. The nena seemed calm at last, sheltered in a corner as if inside a cave, pressed up one against the other without protesting, her skin not repulsed at the contact with mine. That’s where I began to understand that Violeta was threatened by large spaces, and that on the contrary, her personality softened when she was in small spaces where she could feel protected by the four walls.

We returned to our seats and they brought us the meal on individual platters. I was astonished at how well everything was organized. It was incredible to see each item in a separate plate covered in aluminum foil, the plastic cup in one corner and in the other the dinnerware and napkin in its plastic bag. The best part was going to be the hamburger inside, with French fries and milk, because this would be our first true American meal. What a disappointment when I saw it was just chicken with vegetables, salad, and flavored gelatin, exactly the same thing I was served almost every day in Las Lomitas. But nothing was going to dampen my enthusiasm, and I consoled myself with thinking that if it was an American chicken it must be an amazing chicken.

That was the first time I was served a meal on a platter; the last time was in solitary confinement. Sometimes someone or something reappears out of nowhere and makes you feel as if a circle has been closed, that something that began a while ago has come to an end, that some maktub is being fulfilled, as my friend Samir would say. Even if it’s something as silly as a plastic tray. They had me locked up in a cell where everything was gray, with no natural light. The walls, the metal door, the bunk bed, the cement floor, the stainless steel toilet, all gray, gray, gray, and lacking a sense of time because they had taken my watch, and not seeing anyone, not even myself because there were no mirrors. I couldn’t even see the face of the human being who opened the slot to slide in my food. The tray came in, the tray went out. Three times a day. They only gave me a plastic spoon, I guess so I wouldn’t think of cutting my wrists. Useless precautions. Later I’d learn that you can make a stabbing pick from a spoon, even a plastic one, it’s what the Latina inmates called chuzo or manca. Spoons, pencils, hairpins, and other innocuous objects of daily life, here they become weapons.

The tray came in and the tray went out, but I could not tell who was bringing it to me. At first I shouted my head off. “Is there someone there? My husband is a cop,” I yelled, “let me call my husband.” But no one answered. I started to think that maybe I had died and that death was that gray place where I didn’t know about anyone and no one knew about me. Day and night with the buzzing fluorescent light that I wanted to turn off to rest or at least to cleanse my eyes of the insistent gray, exchange it for a darkness of deep black. But no. If I closed my eyes, I saw the dirty pink light that filtered through my eyelids. If I opened them, there was the gray, gray all around. They always gave me exactly the same food three times a day, a Styrofoam cup of café con leche and a donut. I used to like donuts, now I hate them. Café con leche and donut, café con leche and donut. Until one morning there was an orange on the breakfast tray. An orange! I couldn’t believe it. It seemed like a miracle, as if suddenly light had entered my cell. That orange shone as if it were alive, I swear, Mr. Rose, and it let me know that I too was alive. Because of that orange I was able to remember what the color yellow was like, which I was forgetting. I thought, the sun is like this orange, and it shines out there. I can’t see it, and its light doesn’t shine on me or warm me, but that doesn’t mean that the sun is not still there, and any moment I’ll be out of here too, and I’m going to sit in the sun and rid myself of all the dampness and confinement. And never again will I eat a donut. In jail, where you don’t have much, every object that falls into your hands takes on religious qualities, of a medal or a scapular; a pencil or a comb can take on those qualities. You press it in your hands, create a bond with it, treat it as if it had a soul. That’s what happened with my orange. My mouth watered just looking at it, but if I ate it I’d lose it, and it was my only company in that hole. I kept it intact until it began to turn and then I ate it before it was too late. But I saved the rind, which emitted a pleasant smell for a while and then lost it. But I didn’t lose the color; I was able to save that little piece of yellow.

Later, there would be my first night outside of solitary confinement, in the section with the other inmates. They transferred me late at night, and I stood for a long while looking through the bars at the endless, well-lit hallway with cells on each side. It was pleasing to be able to look beyond the cell wall, a joy to the eyes to be able to see far and deep, a good thing to confirm that the world was bigger than a cell. A bit later I lay down and fell asleep immediately, dreaming of the hallway, which became a subway station, and the cells train cars that passed quickly by. I woke up with a good taste in my mouth. I thought, if I’m on the subway and this is one of the trains, does that mean it’s going to take off toward some other place?

The following day they allowed me to wash for the first time in who knows how long. It was a short shower but with hot water and soap. It may not have been Heno de Pravia, Bolivia’s favorite soap, but in the shower I thought of her, of them two, or I should say us three at that time. I thought about my mother’s round pretty body, and baby Violeta and her lizard’s body, and my dark-skinned slight body, almost inconsequential when compared to Bolivia’s. Maktub, I thought, maktub, better this way, much better that Violeta had been in Vermont, that she’d been spared the raid on the house, the screams, the persistence of their questions, and the blows they had given me and would have likely given her. Good thing she didn’t see how they brought some of her favorite things down from the roof terrace in black bags. In the end, it was good that Violeta had been away at school, seated in a garden, safe, where no one could reach her or harm her, making wicker baskets in her crafts class and learning what laughter is, and what tears are, and hugs, and any other expressions that others call emotion but that she has trouble with. When I speak to you about Samir I’m referring to the man in my neighborhood who sold baklava, halvah, mamoul, and other Arab sweets. The same one who tells me that he finds it odd that Westerners use toilet paper. Greg didn’t trust this Samir but I liked him because he was as sweet as the honey confections he made, because each time he passed by his store he called out to me, Ai-Hawa, you are my Ai-Hawa, the air that I breathe. Samir explained to me that in his language there is the word maktub, which means that everything has been decided and written, everything, everything from the beginning. That morning under the shower, the first time I’d been allowed to wash in Manninpox, I tried not to think about anything except the lovely days of my childhood, my first childhood, the one before Bolivia’s trip. Not to think about anything, let my body focus on the hot water. But I couldn’t stop my mind from wandering back to Samir and maktub. Maybe everything was maktub since then, from the time Bolivia said good-bye to us when we were children. Everything maktub since then. Everything that is now coming to being.

This chapter is written in a hurry, Mr. Rose, I’m sure you’ve noticed. It’s just that this will be the last chapter, and not because I have exhausted everything I have to tell, not at all, the three of us have just arrived in America, after all. The story of Bolivia, Violeta, and me, a drama that I titled Little Women in Queens, because when we first arrived they had made us read Alcott’s Little Women in school. Yes. I’m writing against the clock now, because today, Saturday, Socorro Arias de Salmon is coming to visit. And I will give her all of this to send to you. It is a desperate decision made at the last hour. It was only yesterday that they told me she had asked for permission to come, and they wanted to know if I’d accept her request. It’s going to be my first visit in Manninpox, and likely the last, at least for a while, so I came up with this idea, a bit suicidal, to send this manuscript with her. I know it’s like tossing a coin, all or nothing, either it gets to you or it is lost forever. And that will be the end of all of my efforts to see my story turned into a novel. I hope I did the right thing, Mr. Rose, and that Socorro can find out where you live. Who knows? Let’s cross our fingers. We did what we could. There aren’t many other options anyway. There’s a rumor that in other sections they’re already beginning with the security searches. And that they’re going cell by cell taking what they can. They say that this time they’re very picky and stricter than ever. Only one thing is certain: I’m not going to just wait till they take away my papers. Anything but that. Maktub there as well.

I have two hours from this moment on. And I have to decide what story I choose to tell you. How can I fill the rest of my life? I think the best thing would be to continue chronologically as if nothing were happening, as if I still had all the time in the world. That is, continue the story of our arrival in America and taking the first steps of our American Dream, and then just stop wherever, when time runs out.

So Violeta and I were having chicken and vegetables on the plane, or I should say I was having it all, her meal and my meal, because she hadn’t touched a thing. Meanwhile, Bolivia wasn’t doing well, I know because she later told me the story many times of how she had to deal with hell and high water on the day of our arrival. Some months before, let’s say eight months, she had realized something. Something that was self-evident and if she had not realized it, it was because she had not wanted to: with the little she earned, and the amount she sent to Colombia for her daughters, then rent and living expenses for herself, she was never going to put away enough money for our visas and plane tickets. That simple. But what was it that suddenly made her realize this? I don’t know. The thing was that one day she stopped deceiving herself with happy accounting tricks and settled on the truth, the hard fucking truth. She had been working like a slave for four years in New York without having saved enough and living on hope, pretending things were fine, letting the years pass, but then that truth struck her like a full-blown slap, she said. She sat in Alice’s little plaza in Central Park, the one where Alice is with her tea party companions, the Mad Hatter, the White Rabbit, and such. It was the place she had wanted to bring us on the day of our arrival, a very pretty place that I knew from photographs she had sent of her there. On the back she had written, “To my daughters, we will meet here again.” From the day I received it, I placed it in my wallet for safekeeping, where it should still be, although they took my wallet when I arrived here, but they’ll give it back some day, and the picture will still be there, a very young Bolivia with a red wool cap and scarf standing by the Cheshire Cat. But it was there in that same place that she realized she’d never make it, she could work another four years, and it would still not be enough. Meanwhile, time would continue to pass, her daughters would continue to grow older, and what had begun as a temporary separation would become permanent abandonment. The possibility was terrifying, abandoning her own daughters, and although she never told me this, I suspect that she was frightened less by the idea of abandoning us than by the thought she might get used to it. That is, seated there next to the cat, Bolivia must have known she was in a quandary: either she went back to Colombia or she abandoned us. And it hurts me to think that at least for a moment she must have thought of choosing the second option. But even if it happened like that, she corrected herself right away and began to look for a temporary solution. Like most Colombians, she knew how to dance, was genius at the salsa, mambo, and merengue. On Sunday afternoons she went with her friends, two Dominicans called Chelo and Hectorita, to the Copacabana, where someone would always pay for her entrance and maybe a couple of drinks. She had met some men there who were crazy about her. She was still pretty, my mother, although work life had tattooed her legs with varicose veins, caused her eyes to wrinkle with crow’s-feet, and made the skin on her hands red and peeling. But she was still alluring and full of life, and knew how to arrange it so she’d have what she needed to shine there at the Copacabana: Bolivia knew how to dance. Among those who attended that club on Sundays, there was a rich Venezuelan called Miguel who had become well known for a phrase he kept repeating: it’s not Miguelito, call me Mike. This Miguelito or Mike took an interest in Bolivia and was soon approaching her with what she called serious propositions, such as coming to live in Spanish Harlem. He had a nice place, this Miguelito who liked to be called Mike, I know because later on Violeta and I would also end up at his place. It was a spacious apartment with great light, wine-red wall-to-wall carpet, expensive furniture, and even a white grand piano that they had gotten in there somehow for who knows what because no one played. Mike was tall and always gasping for air because he wouldn’t stop smoking even though he had suffered from asthma since he was a child, a serious case that often had him on the verge of suffocating. He wore a wide-brimmed Panama hat, white shoes and pants, a palm-print shirt, and had an enormous belly.

“Why are you dressing up as if you were coming from the beach?” Bolivia often asked him.

“I’m not dressing up, it’s who I am.”

Deep down, I always liked this Miguelito, call him Mike, better than any of the scum we had to put up with later. This guy had character, that can’t be denied. He was the owner of a packaging company and that may have been the reason Bolivia said yes one of those Sundays at the Copacabana; she’d later be less subtle about her reasoning: if this man supported her, she could save the money to bring her girls. And what was said was done. Maktub. The new apartment was a dream, more beautiful than she could have imagined, but living with her new boyfriend was more difficult than she had suspected. Until you sleep beside a severe asthmatic, you have no idea what a torment the night can be, for the afflicted and the partner. Bolivia came to understand that for Mike the bed wasn’t a place to lie down, because he’d sit up almost at a right angle with a bunch of pillows propped up behind him, and he’d snore like a seal if he happened to fall asleep, or wheeze all night if he didn’t. Sometimes she pitied him, and tried to help him by boiling eucalyptus leaves, getting him the inhaler, massaging his back, and begging him to stop smoking. Other times, and these were more frequent, she thought of him as a giant and clunky noisemaking machine. She couldn’t forgive all the horrible nights and the days she struggled through at the factory because of him, overcome by such sleepiness that she shut her eyes even though she was holding a hot iron. But my mother withstood this respiratory drama for seven months, during which she was able to save the money she needed. She sent us the tickets and said she’d be here waiting for us, and ten days before we arrived, she left Miguelito, called Mike, without offering too much explanation. According to Bolivia herself, she told him as he served her the morning coffee. Ciao, Mike, I’m not coming back tonight, I’m going to live with my daughters who will soon arrive. She had warned him previously that the setup would last only until her daughters arrived. Then good-bye forever. That very afternoon, Bolivia sublet two rooms with a bathroom in an apartment of Colombians, far from Spanish Harlem, near the East Village, which was cheap then.

Her roommates were single and pleasant, students, or so they had told her, and she believed them, or had to believe them because she had no other choice. That’s the way my mother thought: if I can’t afford another place, then this is the best place. It wasn’t huge or pretty, safe or peaceful, no wall-to-wall carpet or grand piano, and in the end wasn’t even private because the entrance and kitchen were shared. The money she had saved was enough to buy a whole other round of used goods, three simple mattresses, a table with four chairs, a black-and-white television, and a set of picture frames.

“The two rooms turned out very lovely,” she told me. “Like a dollhouse. I was very lucky to have a place to receive you. All that was missing was a vase and the towels and sheets I had left at Mike’s.”

Our plane arrived on a Monday night at eight and Bolivia had asked for a week off from work, so that she could show us our new American home. That Monday as we were about to board at the airport in Bogotá, she got up at six to finish ironing the blankets, cleaning the whole place, going to the market for crackers, food, eggs, cereal, maizena, soda, flowers, and at around noon she went to get the rest of her luggage from Spanish Harlem. Returning in a cab, she noticed the commotion of sirens near her block, and when she got closer she realized it was directly in front of her building. She asked the cabdriver to stop, got out at the corner, and went into the deli to find out what had happened.

“Get out of here, woman, they’re searching your apartment,” the store clerk told her. “Get out.”

“But why?”

“For the same reason as always, drugs. Get lost, woman, before they grab you as well. Did you leave your papers up there?”

“No, I have the papers right here in my purse. But I have my furniture in there, stuff for my girls. I’m going to go see if I can get my stuff. I’ll explain to them I have nothing to do with these drugs,” Bolivia resolved.

“Oh no you won’t,” the man detained her. “Over my dead body. I won’t let you go.”

“What about my things, my girls?

“Your girls are lucky there’ll be someone waiting for them at the airport tonight. Their mother was almost taken away by the feds. Thank God and get lost. Now, what are you waiting for?”

The rest of her belongings were in the taxi, and the taxi driver was cursing because of the delay as he emptied the trunk of the car, leaving Bolivia’s things on the sidewalk.

“Now what do I do?” she asked the store owner. “I have nowhere to put my things.”

“Come. Leave them down here until you get set up. There’s room in the store.”

Bolivia could not have been more grateful. May God repay you, as they say in Colombia. She stacked her belongings in one corner of the store and set off on foot to look for a place to rent, because in a few hours we would arrive, and she had no place to put us. How would she tell us she had no place for us to sleep? All the promises of the good life in America, so much waiting for the great moment. But where was my mother going to find someone who would open their doors, just one someone who would take pity on them and say come on in, comadre, bring your daughters and make yourself at home, where two fit so do three, where three fit so do four, and if we have to water down the soup, so be it. That’s how Colombians welcome each other. But in New York, no one told her these things, and Bolivia couldn’t find a place, and she had to suspend the search to come get us.

The plane arrived on time and Bolivia saw us immediately, her two girls standing there almost unrecognizable with the years that had passed, very different from each other, me darker than she remembered me, almost an adolescent but still a girl, and with hair, a lot of hair, messy and unruly, that’s what she’d tell me later, she said that on first sight I had seemed more hair than girl, and that she watched me looking around with those sullen eyes and that face of few friends. That’s how she saw it, but it was just that my face was puffy from having slept most of the flight.

“I looked at Violeta from the other end of the gate and I don’t know what I saw in her,” Bolivia would tell me years later, “but I saw something. Very pretty, my girl. But strange.”

I have to love them both equally, Bolivia promised herself as she approached us, I have to love them both exactly the same, not an ounce more for one or the other. And I’m not sure if she succeeded. I’ve always thought our mother loved Violeta more. Maybe to protect her, but it wasn’t just about that. There was something the girl had that I lacked, some magic in between temper tantrums that made it easier for Bolivia to be a mother to her than to me. Who knows? Between the three of us nothing ever arose spontaneously, everything had to be learned slowly after five years of everyone on their own. Bolivia was going to have to get used to being our mother, us to being daughters. We had a lot to learn, sometimes I think too much, or perhaps too late. In any case, it wasn’t going to be easy.

At that point, the story of that day ties in with my own memories, a swarm of people and suitcases in that airport, very hot, Violeta restless and me in a black mood, maybe because of exhaustion or all the confusion. María Paz! Violetica! María Pacita! Violeta! The woman with wavy hair and red lips that ran toward us, screaming our names, turned out to be our mom and she fell on her knees and embraced us and we embraced her, although I think Violeta was hesitant. I wasn’t hesitant, but it was strange. Five years of not having seen Bolivia, five years of speaking to her on the phone, had made her more into a voice without a face, and at the point of meeting her, there in the airport, I felt as if that voice that was so familiar was coming from the wrong face, I couldn’t make the two square off, I don’t know if you get what I mean.

Bolivia, for her part, who had fought like a lioness to get to this reunion with her daughters, lived through that moment as if it were a personal victory, the end of a long journey, a kind of impossible goal that became reality through a monumental sustained effort. A victory, yes, but a Pyrrhic one, because her little girls were here, but where could she take them? Up to that point every time Bolivia was about to surrender, every time she was about to drop dead from exhaustion, or that she couldn’t take it anymore, every time that happened, she got a second wind with the mere thought that one day she was going to see us again, just as was happening at that moment at the arrival gate in JFK. Except that she did not imagine Violeta looking so strange and she couldn’t quite see me in that young woman with dark skin and too much hair, as if I was not her daughter but that I nevertheless brought back memories of the man who had impregnated her, who I learned from Socorro, because my mother would never talk to me about these things, was a sailor on a Peruvian fishing boat, half-native and half-black, who had arrived to the Pacific Colombian coast in pursuit of a school of tuna. He had partied with Bolivia for a whole week and then taken off after another school of tuna. And never returned. That was my father, and Bolivia thought of him when she saw me at the airport that day.

“You look like your father,” she told me that time, and never mentioned him again.

Bolivia had imagined the reunion with her daughters just as it was happening, except that in her dreams, we left the airport hand in hand, like in the movies, heading to a pretty house with plaid blankets and curtains and a bouquet of flowers on the table, a place where her two girls would marvel at things like the air-conditioning and the remote control. But she had no such things to offer us, and she couldn’t find the words to tell us what was happening. She just wanted us not to find out what was happening, and, putting on a face as if everything was alright, she hailed a cab having no idea where we might be going. While the driver loaded our luggage into the trunk, she thought, I have two minutes to figure out where we are going, one minute, half a minute. She covered me in hugs and kisses and tried to do the same with Violeta, who didn’t let her, and meanwhile the taxi driver insisted on directions and she didn’t know what to say.

“Where to, señora?”

“What’s that?”

“An address, lady, you haven’t given me an address. Where are you going?”

“Just go out here, I’ll tell you. Go straight here, I’ll tell you. Cross that street, take a right there,” Bolivia responded because she had to say something, to keep the car going, to stall while she thought of something, and meanwhile she prayed, help me, my dear, dear God, show me the light, tell me where I should take these girls to spend the night.

“Here,” she said finally in front of a hotel.

A dumpy hotel, a reeking hole in the wall, with dirty linen, stained carpets, cigarette burns on the furniture, and one window that looked out on a black wall. What did I think of all of this? I don’t remember; I was just tired. It must have already been a disappointment when we realized Bolivia didn’t have a car, but that shitty hotel definitely laid waste to any pretenses I may have acquired from living with the Navas. In any case, when Bolivia awoke the following day near dawn, I was ready; I had the suitcases packed and Violeta ready as well.

“Get dressed, Mom, we’re getting out of here,” I told Bolivia.

“But where, honey?”

“To America,” I said. “We haven’t gotten there yet.”

“But this is America, my pretty girl,” she said.

“Don’t lie to me, this is not America.”

Then she made a phone call and things got better quickly. Soon we were having breakfast in a big elegant apartment with a wine-red carpet and a white piano with a big-bellied man named Miguelito who spoke Spanish and asked us to call him Mike. Mike offered us corn arepas, black beans, white cheese, and café con leche. When I looked out the window I saw that many of the signs outside were in Spanish: Chalinas Bordadas, Pollos a la Brasa, Cigarillos Piel Roja, and Las Camelias. We had arrived. There with Miguelito, in that apartment in Spanish Harlem, we would spend our first few years in America.

And so, Mr. Rose, the time draws near. So off this goes, see if it gets to you, like a message in a bottle. I have a cramp in my hand from writing so fast, and it’s a little sad too, because it’s as if I am saying good-bye to you. Thank you for your company. Telling you all this has been a way to keep close, I should confess to you that lately you have been like that orange because you remind me that it is bright outside and that one day I’ll be there, outside, and that everything is going to pass, as all nightmares pass. It’s 11:40 according to the clock in the hallway. The countdown is about to run out. Visiting hours begin at 2:00. The inmates have to be ready in the visiting room by 1:30; at 11:45 they ring for lunch and I have to go even if I’m not hungry. So I have only five minutes to tell you these last things. If we’re going a line a minute, it would be a paragraph, at least a paragraph, a good one to finish our novel. If you ever see Violeta and recognize her, tell her that the first thing I’m going to do when they let me out is go get her. And tell her I will get out of here, whatever it takes, to be able to keep that promise. Tell her that in spite of everything, I love her. Tell her I’m sorry, to forgive me and wait for me, I’m going to come for her. And what else, my God, what else can I tell you, Mr. Rose, in the minute I have left. You make up a good ending for the novel. But make it beautiful. Please, you know I hate depressing endings. Invent something. You know about that, it’s your job. Don’t make me look bad with the readers; I don’t want them to pity me. Ciao, Mr. Rose, the bell for lunch just rang, it was truly great meeting you. Maybe we’ll see each other again one day, although I’m not holding my breath. It all depends on maktub, what has already been written. And now, for real, ciao.

7. Interview with Ian Rose

Rose was still in the shower when the buzzer rang and had to get out wet and in a towel to open the door for Pro Bono, who had arrived earlier than agreed upon at the studio on St. Mark’s. “Maybe ‘agreed upon’ is not the right term,” Rose tells me. They had not actually agreed to anything yet. Rose had been asleep when he answered the phone at about four or five in the morning and heard Pro Bono give an order through the fog of his sleep. “That’s his style, giving orders. I hadn’t agreed to anything,” Rose clarifies. Pro Bono had told him to get ready because they had to leave in an hour. “Anyway, I got up,” Rose tells me, “I guess to see what would happen. Soon I was opening the door for him, with a towel wrapped around my waist, and he, of course, was looking like a million bucks.”

Even at that early hour, Pro Bono was more gussied up than on the previous day: his shirt impeccable, white and crispy; a heavy Hermès silk tie; a dark flannel, custom-tailored suit with chalk pinstripes; a touch of classic and clean Equipage cologne; Cartier Panthere watch, wedding band on his left ring finger, and a ring with the family shield on the pinkie of the same hand. A bit too fancy for Rose’s taste. In that, just that, it was clear that the hump had made a dent in Pro Bono’s personality, which was otherwise overwhelming. It was as if he had to use everything in his exclusive closet and barricade himself behind big brands to make up for his deformity.

Rose let Pro Bono in, offered him tea and, like the day before, immediately felt intimidated by the man. Pro Bono was overbearing, at once irritable and paternal, or patronizing — Rose wasn’t sure what to call it. In any case, it was a combination Rose did not like to deal with.

“It’s about María Paz,” Pro Bono told Rose, ignoring Rose’s greeting and glaring at him with yellow-hazel eyes.

“I figured,” Rose said.

“It’s serious.”

“How serious?”

“Serious.”

“Did something happen last night?”

“It’s been happening for a while, but just I found out about it last night.”

“What makes you think I can help you?”

“We have to be at Manninpox before 9:15. You know the way because you live right near it.”

“How do you know that?” Rose asked. The day before he had given Pro Bono the phone and address of the studio on St. Mark’s; he had not mentioned the house in the mountains.

“They know everything in my office.”

Rose tried to explain that he wasn’t going back to the Catskills yet because he had unfinished business in the city. But Pro Bono wasn’t one to take no for an answer, and simply pretended not to hear. He had assumed that Rose would go on this trip and that was the end of the discussion.

“He said it like that, ‘you have to leave early, my friend,’” Rose tells me, “that’s it, as if I were one of his employees — and then to top it off calling me friend whenever he wanted me to do something. That’s who Pro Bono was. It really threw me off when he called me friend. Why would he call me his friend if we weren’t friends? One day I told him to fuck off and the next day he was Paris Hiltoning me, making me his new BFF.” Rose decided that was how that kind of person — one who is used to maneuvering others to do his bidding — acts.

Pro Bono told him that he had received a call from Mandra X, and Rose knew right away who that was. María Paz had mentioned Mandra X in the manuscript, and the name had stuck in Rose’s mind. Was it some kind of homage to Malcolm X? A reference to mandrake? She was a terrifying creature for whom María nevertheless seemed to express only gratitude, even affection, one might say.

“Mandra X is not the type to just run her mouth,” Pro Bono said.

“What did she say?”

“She says it is urgent we find María Paz, or she will die.”

“We’re all going to die.”

“This is not a joke, my friend.”

“A matter of life and death, huh? And you want me to believe that you have no idea where María Paz is?” Rose asked.

“I lost track of her a while ago, that’s why I need you.”

“All I know is what I read in that manuscript that I brought to you yesterday.”

“Stop acting all innocent, Rose. María Paz spoke to me about you. Although I have to say the girl is a bit in la-la land. She made it seem to me that you were much younger.”

“And to me that you were much more handsome.”

“Help me be of use to her, Rose. The girl is your friend, and she must have gotten herself into a mess. A new mess, I should say. Don’t turn your back on her now. She trusts you, told me so herself various times.”

“She trusts me? She doesn’t even know me. Unless… wait, I think I get it now. You came here this morning looking for Cleve Rose.”

“That’s who you told me you were, Cleve Rose.”

“I never said I was Cleve Rose.”

“Cleve Rose, María’s writing instructor.”

“No, you don’t understand. Maybe your office doesn’t quite know everything, sir. Check into that when you get back. I told you my name was Rose, but not Cleve Rose.”

“I’m not following.”

“Cleve Rose was killed in an accident, sir. I am Ian Rose, his father.”

“Cleve Rose is dead?”

“I thought you knew everything.”

“And you’re his father?”

“Like I said, I am not Cleve, I am Ian. And I have never met María Paz.”

Pro Bono seemed upset with that bit of news. It flustered him for a moment; he who was always so obnoxiously sure of himself was now a bit befuddled.

“Sorry to have to tell you,” Rose told him, “but my son can no longer help you.”

“Then you will have to do.”

“I can help you even less so, I’m afraid.”

“But you sought me out, asking all those questions about her, and besides you have that manuscript, those papers.”

“Only because the chain of mistaken identities is long. That manuscript was sent to Cleve, not me. But Cleve was already dead, so it came to me.”

Knowing there was no way to get out of the situation, Rose nevertheless tried to impose a few conditions before leaving for Manninpox with Pro Bono. For one, he needed to know what this was all about. For another, no more calling him “my friend.”

“About one, I can’t tell you because I myself don’t know,” Pro Bono said. “About the other, that’s fine, my friend, I’ll stop calling you my friend. I’ll be downstairs.”

On the road in Rose’s car, leaving Manhattan through the Lincoln Tunnel, Rose asked why they were using his car and not Pro Bono’s.

“I’ve heard that you have a much finer car than this one,” Rose said, “a red sports car that makes you very popular with the ladies.”

“It’s black, not red.”

“Socorro said it was red. That woman from Staten Island, a friend of María Paz’s.”

“Socorro is a manipulating freak. Take anything she says with a grain of salt. My car is black, a black Lamborghini.”

“So what the hell are we doing in a blue Ford Fiesta?”

“Let’s just say they made me hang up my driving gloves, too many speeding tickets.”

“And that’s why you need me to take you to Manninpox? Couldn’t you just have hired a driver?”

“So you’re telling me that the renowned Mr. Rose who taught María Paz’s writing workshop was your son,” Pro Bono said, changing topics.

“He was.”

“And he was murdered?”

“I didn’t say that. I said he was killed.”

“Are you certain?”

“Only death is certain, as the saying goes.”

“How do you know he wasn’t murdered?”

“Murdered by whom? Cleve had no enemies. He was a good boy.”

“Everyone who deals with María Paz makes enemies.”

“Cleve was simply her teacher. He didn’t have any dealings with her.”

“Or so you would think. Look, Rose, maybe it’s best if you just keep your eyes on the road. Didn’t anybody teach you that when the line is solid you can’t cross over it?”

Rose lowered the windows to see if the cold air would help a bit. All this bossing around unsettled him, as did not knowing the purpose of their trip, and the cologne of this character, which filled the car with the aroma of something like horses. Pro Bono’s person, like his office, was infused with the supposedly aristocratic smell of horses, but not just the whiff of any old horse grazing in the field — more like the smell of a Thoroughbred’s riding saddle. Rose had a wealthy friend obsessed with equestrianism who had told him once how much money it took to develop and maintain a champion. Rose had thought it absurd; it was more than the friend spent on himself. Pro Bono smelled like that ilk of horses and could not stop himself from blurting out commands on how to drive: slow down, watch out for that car, light is about to turn red, start veering right, look out.

“Who’s the one without a license?” Rose protested. “Just let me drive.”

“You’re not very good.”

“You want to get out? I can still drop you off at the bus station and go back to sleep. If I’m not all that good, it’s because you’re driving me crazy with your tyrannical little orders.”

“Fine, I’ll shut up and you focus on the road.”

“How about this? You shut up and listen to me,” Rose said, taking an off-ramp and parking the car on the shoulder. He let go of the wheel and faced Pro Bono. “Look, I’m not quite sure what you want, but I can tell you what I’m looking for. The only thing I’m interested in is finding out what happened to my boy. Is that clear? You, María Paz, that Socorro woman, I couldn’t care less about any of you. I just want to know what happened to Cleve. I’m not sure what that has to do with María Paz. Maybe nothing. But for now, she is the only lead I have. Now if you can kindly tell me what made you change your mind about me from one day to the next, that would be a good start.”

“I realized I need you to find María Paz.”

“I’ll take you to Manninpox and our partnership ends there.”

They drove on in silence and a couple of hours later got off the main highway and took an old road that wound up the mountains through a forest of trees. Everything seemed wonderful out there at the end of fall. The flock of geese against the deep blue of the sky, the light breeze past the almost bare branches, the fiery colors of the landscape, the smell of wet earth. It’s the same every year, Cleve, exactly the same. And yet you should see it, son, it still startles one as if there had never been such a lustrous season, thought Rose. And since he couldn’t help but feel better, he tried to make peace with the character dozing beside him, painfully shrunken under his hump, yet peaceful, stripped at last of his armor of arrogance, reduced to his true state of an old man that for who knows how many years, eighty at least, had had to make his way in the world with that weight on his back.

“Do you need to lean the chair back a bit?” Rose asked when Pro Bono opened his eyes. “The lever is there on your right. You’ll be more comfortable.”

“I wasn’t made for comfort, my friend,” Pro Bono said, shutting his eyes again. But a bit later, more fully alert now, he asked Rose, “Do you know the great thing about my Lamborghini?”

“Everything,” Rose said, “everything must be great about your Lamborghini.”

“The best thing is the driver’s seat, custom made for my size out of carbon fiber fabric. La Casa del Toro ordered it especially for me. A full-fledged Lamborghini Aventador LP 700-4, a relentless mechanical force, made expressly so that a cripple like me could drive it two hundred miles per hour. What do you think of that?”

“What else can I think? No wonder they suspended your damn license. But listen, I was thinking… Mandra X, or Mandrax. You know? Mandrax, the barbiturate. Those little blue-and-white capsules that were big in nightclubs moons ago. Do you remember them? No? Well, yeah, you’re not much a nightclub person, I take it.”

“Filicide with Mandrax? Could be. Good job, Rose! Maybe you’re brighter than you look.”

“Don’t expect any miracles from me, Señor Attorney. I am a man broken by sorrow, very simple.”

Mandra X, real name Magdalena Krueger, was serving life in Manninpox and was in fact German, as María Paz had guessed. She was born in a place where two rivers come together to form the Danube. As was the case with Jesus Christ, nothing is known about the first thirty years of her life. It was at that point that she made her entrance into the history books when she turned herself in to the Idaho authorities after murdering her three children in cold blood. The lead-up to the trial was a huge controversy and caused quite a scandal in the press. She was convicted by public opinion from the start, but there was a movement led by several human rights groups and pro-euthanasia organizations in her support. In the end, she was sentenced to three consecutive life terms, destined to remain behind bars throughout this lifetime and the next two. Pro Bono was silent about whatever legal intricacies led her from the judgment of an Idaho jury to a prison in upstate New York. All he confirmed was that Mandra X had been taken to Manninpox, and there she would remain forever and ever. She had been spared the death penalty because of a single mitigating detail: according to the record, the victims, the children who happened to be triplets, suffered from a debilitating combination of worsening birth defects that included blindness, deafness, and mental retardation. She had been fully devoted to them until they were thirteen years old, and at that time had decided to do them in with an overdose of narcotics, all three of them at once, making sure to take precautions so they would not suffer or realize what she was doing. “I just put them to sleep, put them to sleep forever,” she declared to the press with a measured calm that one reporter called breathtaking.

Mandra X told the judge that from the moment they were born she had known that there would come a time when life would become unlivable for them. She still had plenty of strength left and had up to that time relied on a family inheritance to be able to remain at home and care for them. But the children could not go to any type of school, and because they could not tell night from day, there was always one of them awake, demanding her attention. Caring for them was a Herculean undertaking. To make matters worse, the money from the inheritance was dwindling fast and they could not live on the welfare check from the state. On the day the children turned twelve, Mandra X had been diagnosed with cancer of the bladder. It had gone into remission, but she became obsessed with the idea that soon it would return. The last thing she wanted was to die and leave them alone.

She made no attempt to cover up her crime or get rid of the bodies. On the contrary, she placed the duly shrouded children in their respective beds, and before turning herself in, made sure that the funeral and burial arrangements were paid. She foresaw any and all issues that could arise and managed to take care of everything beforehand: three coffins in just the right size, the hearse, wreaths and candles for the funeral service, cremation arrangements, and permission for the ashes to be taken to Germany and sprinkled on the Danube from a certain bridge in her hometown.

After she had been sentenced and taken to prison, Mandra X contacted Pro Bono and the organizations that had helped her, and, locked up in her cell, she began a strict exercise regimen and her studies of American penal law.

“Mandra X… Medea X,” Pro Bono told Rose. “The enraged, ferocious, fooled Medea. You know what Euripides has her say? She shouts, ‘Death unto you, my accursed children born of such a deathly mother.’ At first, my knees would tremble every time I had to be in her presence.”

“Like Clarice Starling when she goes to see Hannibal Lecter,” Rose said.

“What?”

“Never mind.”

“Since then we have become partners in crime. We both speak the language of freaks, I suppose.”

“But, wait, there’s still something that I’m not getting, this friend of yours…”

“Hold on there, I didn’t say friend, I said partner,” Pro Bono corrected him. “Mandra X does not have any friends per se.”

“Fine. So this person, your partner, murdered her children because she was afraid that she herself would soon die, and they would be left with no one to care for them…”

“Yet that was twenty years ago and she’s still with us,” Pro Bono completed the thought. “Is that your objection?”

“Not an objection. Who am I to judge? I get her motivation, and I guess that ideally she should have died right after the trial so that the whole sensationalist story would have had an apt ending. But that’s not what happened. The cancer never came back. She misjudged the entire situation. Don’t you think that she should be retried and sentenced to death just for that?”

“Execute her because she didn’t die? Not very prudent.”

Mandra X had helped María Paz, shown her how to survive in prison. María Paz became an entirely new person after Mandra X allowed her into her group.

“Las Nolis,” Pro Bono added. “They were known as Las Nolis, but the real full name of the group, the sect, was in Latin: Noli me tangere.”

“Sounds a little outlandish, prisoners throwing around Latin,” Rose tells me, “but that was the name. And why not? They were trapped in a medieval castle, so shouldn’t they be using Latin? Anyway, noli me tangere means ‘don’t touch me,’ from somewhere in the Bible. It seems that at first Las Nolis had misjudged María Paz. She came across as a weakling, a stupid, pretty little thing. According to Pro Bono, she had to prove her steeliness.”

The members of Noli me tangere were unified by the guiding principles of survival and respect. Simple and direct as that. But Mandra X was a wily old fox, and she knew that for the enterprise to work she needed to add touches of mystery and mysticism to it, have it develop its own ceremonies and myths. In prison, as well as in the world outside, but particularly in prison, such a makeup is essential if any enterprise is to have a sense of purpose. Without theatrics, there would be no meaning; without rituals, no loyalty.

“Was it a kind of political rebellion or a religious cult?” Rose asked Pro Bono.

“Neither, nothing as complicated as that.”

Mandra X had come up with a way to bring together women of different ages, social classes, education levels, religions, skin colors, psychological and moral tendencies, and sexual preferences. She did it by focusing on the one thing they had in common: they were all prisoners. They were residents of the worst kind of ghetto. Basically, Mandra X offered them the opportunity to become her property so that they would not have to be treated as less than human in such inhumane conditions. It also helped that they were all Latinas, the other thing that they all had in common. Although she herself had an Aryan background, she had become the head of a Latino gang. Pro Bono wasn’t sure how Mandra X had ended up in such a position, but he knew that she had hacked her way there by force and charisma, and because she had lived many years in Latin America and was fluent in Spanish. On top of that, she was an old-timer. She had been at Manninpox almost longer than anyone had and had become a leader in the fight for prisoners’ human rights. Dark rumors circulated about her legendary crime, and about her philosophy and her methods.

“María Paz writes about group sacrifices in Manninpox,” Rose said. “About Las Nolis and orgies.”

“What does the pretty little María Paz know about any of that?” Pro Bono said.

“Blood sacrifices,” Rose insisted. “She says blood was spilled.”

According to Pro Bono, the whole situation was difficult to understand unless it was properly placed in the context of the powerlessness, confinement, and extreme deprivation that the women experienced. For them, their wounds were the only things they could call their own. They inflicted these wounds on themselves, and no one could stop them. Their scars were their marks, which they themselves had chosen and crafted, unlike the numbers they had been assigned, the cells in which they were locked up, and the uniforms they had to wear. There were some things, however, that no one could take from them: their blood, their sweat, their shit, their tears, their urine, their saliva, their vaginal fluids.

“Something’s better than nothing,” Rose quipped.

“The whole thing reminds me of this Dutch mystic from the fourteenth century, Saint Liduvina de Schiedam,” Pro Bono said.

“I don’t know who she is,” Rose said, thinking that Cleve would have surely known.

“A strange woman, half mystic, half insane. She delighted in her own decomposition, applying torments on her body and giving herself over to infections and disease until she had become a mere semblance of the thing she had been, the scraps of a creature. She transformed herself into living waste to discover her true identity. Reading about her has helped me to better understand Mandra X and her Nolis. Listen, Rose, things in there work on another level altogether,” Pro Bono said as Rose watched the low arch of the autumn light gild the landscape. “Look, my friend, if you are going to go in there with me, you’re going to have to change the way you think about things. It’s another world in there, and it forces you to think in different terms.”

“I’m not sure I’ll go that far with you… my friend. Why don’t you tell me a little about María Paz.”

“María Paz is another story. María Paz is a normal person, to the extent such a thing exists. Her time in Manninpox was an experience that without a doubt made her stronger and allowed her to mature in ways she would have never outside of prison. I personally witnessed the process, yet it did not change her into what I would call prison flesh.”

“So then María Paz is not like that mystic?” Rose asked.

“Neither are the others really, not completely, no need to force the comparison. Mandra X and her girls reclaim their pains, but also their joys. They want to feel alive through suffering and crying but also through singing, masturbating, writing, making love. In the end, Mandra X makes evident that in prison you can live a life that is on a fully human level of dignity if you fight for it stubbornly enough.”

“María Paz says that they slashed their skins and cut into their veins.”

“Fine, that too, if it’s done through their own free will.”

“She writes that they smeared the walls with their own shit.”

“They graffiti the walls with shit, or with blood. What else are they going to do it with? It’s not like they have spray paint on hand. I’m telling you, don’t judge the situation out of context. What might seem disgusting to you and me is something they experience quite differently. Look at serious artists like Sade and Pasolini; they talk about a circle of shit and a circle of blood.

“Circles of shit and blood, that’s what made sense to Las Nolis. They eschewed detergent and bleach, which washed away the human stains, turning them into ghosts. You have to begin by understanding that not even the clothes they wore or the sheets they slept on belonged to them. They were washed, disinfected, and handed over arbitrarily to whoever took them next. But Las Nolis were no Goody Two-shoes,” Pro Bono said. “They knew what they wanted and they got it. They could always cover some wall with their shit, smash their plates of food on the floor, or conduct a chilling chorus of screams at lights out. Or turn the prison into an inferno by setting mattresses on fire and destroying any motherfucker who got in their way.

“Read Jean Genet,” Pro Bono said. “He was a brilliant criminal and wrote about it like no else. He said lice were a ‘sign of our prosperity… they were precious. They were both our shame and our glory.’”

“I think I’m getting it,” Rose said. “So the lice. I’m going to read this Renet.”

“Genet,” Pro Bono corrected him, and then went on talking as if to himself, like an old man who retreats to the habit of just chattering away no matter who is listening; soon he was off on dozens of tangents, wandering all on his own, citing Sade, Sacher-Masoch, and Roudinesco, recounting anecdotes about Erzsebet Bathory the Bloody Countess, Gilles de Rais and Comte de Lautréamont, Saint Liduvina, Christian martyrs, the murderous cults of the Nizaries, black widows, the geniuses of the dark, the biographies of the auto-flagellants, and the princes of perversity.

From Cleve’s Notebook

Researching the history of American prisons, I came upon this little book reprinted in 1954 by Yale University and I read it in one sitting. It’s a biography of Edward Branly, a strange character and the architect who designed Manninpox and overlooked its construction between 1842 and 1847. It was one of the first big jails in the country, along with Sing, Auburn Prison, Cherry Hill Penitentiary in Philadelphia, and New Jersey State Prison, all of which were as impressive and bombastic on the outside as they were reviling on the inside. I read all 156 pages without even getting up for a cup of coffee. I needed to know what kind of cold-blooded person had so meticulously planned the most efficient manner to torture the two thousand women who would one day be imprisoned in Manninpox. I wanted to know more about the man who, with such professional zeal and artistic relish, had come up with every miserable detail of the place: the elongated slots that act as windows and were made to let in just a thread of light; the lack of ventilation, which forces the prisoners to live under the permanent sensation that they are suffocating; the horrible drainage and sewage system that makes the perennial stench of piss and shit accumulate in the air year after year; cells designed for two prisoners that are no bigger than closets; the genius of barred doors, which ensured any movement could be observed from outside and that the prisoners knew they were under constant scrutiny; solitary confinement cells when the behavior of the prisoners left something to be desired, and punishment quarters if they didn’t behave in the isolation cells; the sound of bars slamming shut, expressly designed to reverberate through the hallways as if telling everyone just how fucked they were and that they should forget the outside world because their imprisonment was eternal; or the bathrooms without doors or curtains so that everyone showering or doing their necessities would be completely exposed, to prevent, in the very words of Branly, “sexual assaults, acts of violence, or any other type of immoral behavior.” But the most peculiar aspect of the architect’s mindset, the most surprising one, has to do with the contrast between the outright perversity and gloom of the interior of the structure and the grandiosity of its exterior. Or in his own words, “the manifestation of a sublime aesthetic.” Using the word sublime to refer to a place of abandonment and suffering? What kind of a moron would think of a prison as sublime?

Although perhaps Edward Branly wasn’t such a moron. For designing Manninpox and overseeing its construction and with other connected commissions, he earned what today would be between twelve and thirteen million dollars; but if he wasn’t a moron, he must have been a sadist. You can imagine him growing up with an abusive father and a decent mother whom the drunk father beat until he knocked her senseless, or something equally horrifying. Or maybe the father forced the mother into prostitution to pay for his drink. Whatever the case, an abused child who as an adolescent enjoyed locking up the cat in a chest and who as an adult would become a torturer of women, but a timid one, incapable of doing so directly, so instead becomes the mind behind a thousand different ways to torture these women by locking them up, degrading them, reducing them to rags. It seems to me that only such a type of degenerate could conceive such a moral monstrosity as Manninpox. However, the little gray book proved me wrong. Edward Branly had been just the opposite, nothing short of a great man, respected and admired in his time and an exemplary citizen. One of those of whom it was said had impeccable manners, Branly was a champion of progress and reform in keeping with the just and liberal model. His prison was seen in his time as an outstanding accomplishment and a critical contribution to “upholding the dignity, worth, and empowerment of a society,” to quote the hagiographer of the book. That is, in that time, Manninpox was not seen as some monstrosity. On the contrary, although it was a penal institution, it was imagined it would play a reformist, even redemptive, role, a pillar in a society that metes out just punishment to those who deserve it. And in that sense, Manninpox was not unique, just one in a series of many monumental castles of horror, unforgettable and omnipresent in the conscience of the inhabitants of a country who should know what awaits them if they should veer down the wrong road. “This is progress, this is civilization. We have arrived!” so proclaimed the official who opened Manninpox, with Branly himself standing there, who took a bottle of champagne and smashed it against the foundation stone.

From the time I first went into Manninpox, and as I return to it weekly, I cannot stop thinking of that world of confinement that coexists in the shadow of ours, in which doors are open and the air is plenty, where the rest of us exist without truly knowing what it’s worth. Ever since meeting María Paz, I can’t help but wonder what twists of fate would have led a person like her to reside on that side of the bars, while a person like me resided on this side. It all seems so painfully arbitrary. For a moment, just for a moment, I can imagine that the separation and the walls vanish. The other day, she came to me with two pieces of paper torn from a legal pad in which she had completed an exercise I had assigned. When she handed them to me, our hands grazed, and an electrical charge coursed through my body. It seemed that the contact had been prolonged longer than strictly necessary, that the moment was paused in time and we were one, touching, feeling, and communicating with each other. Becoming aroused as well, I must admit, or at least I was. But the significant thing was that during the time that graze lasted, she and I were on the same side of the bars. Or maybe just together in a world in which bars did not exist. Just for a moment. I don’t know if she felt the same thing. Perhaps she didn’t even notice. But no, she did notice, of course she noticed. The little wily one must have caught my astonishment and made me into the laughingstock of the group when she talked about it.

“Oh, Mr. Rose, your lightning rod is blushing,” she said about the scar on my forehead but emphasizing the double entendre, in that flirty little voice that all the prisoners use, half giggling like schoolgirls if you say nail because they interpret it as fuck, or if you say blow because it means to suck dick, on and on in this way, till it becomes exhausting.

“Yes, it blushes,” I said, trying to make a quick exit, “and careful, because it burns, just like Harry Potter’s.”

Interview with Ian Rose

“You seem to have read everything. Have you heard of this?” Rose asked Pro Bono, taking out of the glove compartment a little book with a gray cover and handing it to him. “I found it among my son’s books. It’s a biography of Edward Branly, the man who—”

“Edward Branly, that sounds familiar,” Pro Bono interrupted him. “The inventor of the wireless telegraph?”

“Another Edward Branly, an inventor of new ways to torture women.”

“Why does this seem strange to you?” Pro Bono asked after perusing the book. “That’s the mentality that the America of that time was built on, the same mentality that holds together the America of today.”

“And it doesn’t repulse you?” Rose asked.

“Me? Yes it does. That’s why I’m a defense attorney and not a prosecutor.”

Manninpox was a very old prison, darker than the new ones, but also more difficult to run. That gave the inmates more room to protest and to come together around certain concepts. For example, whatever is filthy is human and belongs to us, whatever is clean is inhuman and the tool of our jailers. This was an old belief that rebels like those in Sinn Féin were able to reanimate, making their filthy hunger strikes into weapons. Pro Bono was the author of a good number of theories on the subject that he had published in various essays. According to him, so-called good people are terrified of filth, blood, and death. The “decent” folk play up the type of civilization that offers immortality as a utopia, and from this comes their obsession with security, both personal and national. From there also came their devotion to youth, dieting, keeping fit and active, plastic surgery, good health, extreme cleanliness, antibiotics, disinfectants, and antiseptics. They are convinced that America can make them immortal, and they conceal sickness, filthiness, old age, and death to deny their existence. But the American utopia according to Pro Bono would do nothing less than banish immortality. What kind of people have we become, he asked himself in his essays, that we pretend to live by ignoring death? It was common enough to hear the American dream described as living to possess. Wrong, according to Pro Bono. The equation needs to be inverted: possessing to live. Possessing in order not to die. Immortality was the true American utopia. Las Nolis, refusing to play along, incorporated death into all their rituals. That was their clarity, what gave them an advantage over others.

“So María Paz didn’t take part in that? The blood things?” Rose asked.

“María Paz was herself a living sacrifice. In an environment where self-mutilation is valued and even exalted, what better symbol than María Paz, innocence personified and submitted to a bloodletting?”

“That road goes to my house.” Rose gestured to the left when they came to an intersection in a narrow, steep road, darkened by thick plant growth. “That way, some fifteen minutes up the mountain, you come to a little lake called Silver Coin Pond. On the side of the road, there is a large boulder, and beside it a maple that is taller than the others are. Not long ago, the face of a man named John Eagles appeared on it. They had ripped it off him and nailed it to the trunk. That death has stuck to this mountain. It weighs on the people still. It will not be lifted.”

“Who did such a thing?” Pro Bono asked.

“Unsolved. The authorities claim it was outsiders in a drug frenzy, but the locals blamed escaped prisoners. Residents here think prisoners escape from Manninpox and roam in the woods committing atrocities. Every time something bad happens, the locals blame it on them. A missing chicken, a fire in a stable, a noise in the darkness, a stolen bicycle. You can try to reason with these people, explain to them that no one can escape from that windowless fortress. But they don’t buy it. They believe the prisoners escape and they are frightened.”

“When did that happen? The guy’s face ripped off?”

“A few days before the death of my son.”

Soon, the hulking mass of Manninpox appeared on the horizon, a place as undesirable as any, the nightmare of its good neighbors, the dark cloud of sunny days, a stain in the amazing scenery. Rose, who up to that point had not yet decided whether he would go in, realized that there would be no escaping it. If there were any answers to his questions about Cleve’s death, they were locked in that place. Pro Bono, who was a regular there and knew the procedures, got him a badge as a legal professional, his assistant, but told him he would not lie to Mandra X. He would let her know he was the father of Cleve Rose. This was not going to be a regular visit.

Mandra X enjoyed certain privileges. She could receive visitors during the week, including members of the press, in private and without the presence of guards, according to provisions made by the state assembly for prisoners with recognized leadership records on human rights issues. They were put in Conference Hall, a room with absurdly tall ceilings and five metallic tables with four chairs each, placed far enough from each other so that conversations would not be overheard. They were the only ones there, and Rose thought that there could not be a more desolate place. To ease his anxiety, he tried to figure out in what direction his house would be. But there were no windows in the room, making it impossible for him to orient himself. They must have been underground. At least Rose had the sense that they had been descending as they traversed an access ramp. He shivered and regretted having left his coat in the car. So he lifted the collar of his jacket and buttoned it up. It felt strange to feel a breeze in the air, which somehow snuck into that sealed place, making the solitude in there even more unbearable. The drafts made it in but not daylight, not a single ray of sunlight. The place was lit by fluorescent tubes on the ceiling, which emitted a grainy light that broke up the space into a million vibrating points. Rose tried to make out any human sound, a cough, steps, some sign of life in the distance, but heard nothing. On the other hand, he heard bells trilling like the voice of God and metallic noises that reached his ears from various angles repeatedly, dry, deafening noises of gates slamming shut — or was that just the echo of older noises? Good God, he thought, and stuck his frozen hands in his pockets to warm them up.

“I don’t know what got into me in that place,” Rose tells me. “Maybe claustrophobia. I felt my chest tightening. A horrible pain, and on my left side, so I thought it could be my heart. I just wanted to get out of there. Like I said, it was a huge room, but I felt as if all that empty and cold space was closing in on me. No one came; no one opened the door, no one. We remained there alone, under lock and key for what seemed like an eternity, although in truth it must have been no more than fifteen or twenty minutes. I felt they had forgotten about us. Till finally Mandra X appeared with a guard on each side, although there was no physical contact.”

From what he had been told, Rose expected Mandra X to come in breathing fire and smashing things, an enraged bull trotting into the arena. But there was none of that. Mandra X walked in as patiently, coldly, and majestically as an ice queen, balancing her muscular bulk, scoping out the place, her mouth pursed and her arms bent slightly and separated from her body. Although Pro Bono had advised him to be cool and not stare with his mouth agape as people often did, Rose could not help but keep his eyes on her from the moment she walked in. She was a totemic figure, a being above the confines of nature, or below them. Hard to tell if she was goddess or demon, man or woman, a temple devoid of statues or a statue with no temple. That’s what she had been able to turn into after so many years of being locked up in a cell, with no other option but to metamorphose, cutting and painting and perforating herself with metal spikes and needles, becoming a contemporary version of Saint Liduvina. She had transformed herself in all the physical means possible. Tattoos covered every inch of her skin, not leaving a single spot blank, as if some child armed with a blue crayon had gone to war on her. Her elongated earlobes seemed detached from her head. The lack of eyelashes and eyebrows gave her an otherworldly appearance. Her hair was buzzed short and lined with razor cuts, so that her head seemed like a miniature ancient geoglyph. On top of this, her nose and upper lip were pierced and her tongue bifurcated, and her neck and arms adorned with scars. That’s just what you could see, what her uniform wasn’t concealing. Rose didn’t even want to imagine, but he couldn’t help remembering that according to María Paz, Mandra X had her nipples injected with ink and added a crown of rays around each, two dark suns in the middle of her chest. And the smell that came off her… Not exactly smelling like a saint, Rose thought, more so like homeless folk who pass by you pushing their clanging carts. She carried her theatrical bearing well, like a Delphic Sibyl, but a savage one, not lovely or green-eyed like Michelangelo portrays her in the Sistine Chapel, but a snake-like Sibyl, grotesque and somehow sublime as well, as the Sibyls must truly have been.

“Suffice it to say that she has had tattooed the phrase ‘I have a dream,’” Rose tells me. “Believe it or not. There in those dungeons lives a creature who dares to dream. To be truthful, I don’t know. It was creepy. In the outside world, people wear shirts that say, ‘Single and at your service,’ ‘I love NYC,’ ‘Fuck y’all,’ and ‘Ban nuclear now.’ But that monster tattooed ‘I have a dream’ across her forehead. It was no wonder Pro Bono had said that Manninpox seemed to exist simply to hold her in, Mandra X, the minotaur in that labyrinth of stone. And she wasn’t by herself. She came with another inmate of the same size, or maybe even bigger. But I swear I didn’t even notice. My eyes were glued to that… species of bull inked in blue. I didn’t even notice the other one until they were right beside us. In silence.

“Pro Bono had neglected to tell me that Mandra X does not talk directly to anyone from outside, only through an intermediary. Perhaps not to incriminate herself, I never knew the exact reason. I was never able to hear her speak but for a single phrase. At times, she would whisper something in the ear of the other inmate, who was the one who spoke with us. Afterward, Pro Bono told me the other inmate was known as Dummy. Maybe because that’s her role, she’s like a ventriloquist’s dummy. But out of Mandra X’s mouth, not a word. Not one. The minotaur was content just to look at us.

“She didn’t join us at the table, but sat a few feet away from it. And she looked at us. To start off, Dummy asked about me. ‘Can we trust this guy?’ Do you know what Pro Bono told them? He said he didn’t know me that well. Unbelievable, but that’s exactly what he said. There you have it, my new BFF, betraying in me in the company of this monster without a moment’s thought to the consequences. ‘If you like, I can go,’ I said absurdly, as if I could just walk out that huge, solid-steel door, and I started to get up, but then Pro Bono explained that I was Cleve Rose’s father, and with a whisper from Mandra X, Dummy gestured for me to sit.”

Rose imagined it had been some kind of test: Mandra X wanted to take a fresh look at him and he had to accept that. It was impossible not to anyway. It was clear that she was the alpha among the four of them, the dominant macho who said when and how and for how long things would transpire. Dummy began to talk about María Paz right away. About how when the other inmates first saw her, the first thing they said was, “That one ain’t gonna make it.” Two kinds of people ended up in Manninpox. The first group consisted of those who take responsibility for their actions, and they admit that they committed a crime and it has proven costly, and they throw it right back in your face: “I did it, so what? — and I’m paying for it now, and when I finish paying I’m outta here and you’ll never see my ass again.” The other type says, “I did nothing, this is an injustice and the fuckers who did it are going to pay.” This latter group remained active and alive out of pure indignation and the need for vengeance. But Dummy explained that María Paz belonged to a third category, those who condemned themselves, who did no wrong but still felt guilty. She was fucked before she could defend herself because she killed the defense attorney within her, a horrible handicap.

“You can always tell the victim type, something about them, as if they were marked or something,” Dummy said beside the watchful eyes of Mandra X, who observed the proceedings as if from a pedestal, making Rose’s blood cold with her utter silence.

“The more victim traits a person possesses, the more likely she will attract a bolt of lightning. But that’s not mine,” Pro Bono said. “I’m paraphrasing René Girard.”

Rose paid close attention to everything but said nothing. He didn’t dare look Mandra X in the eyes, but he could not stop looking at the blue lines that ran up and down her arms, and he wondered what they meant. Are they veins? he wondered. Veins tattooed over the real veins? But then he noticed that each of the blue veins was labeled with a name in minuscule letters running parallel to it, and although he wasn’t able to read them, he would have had to put on his glasses, he remembered that María Paz had recounted how the net of veins on Mandra X were a mapping of all the bodies of water of Germany.

“The theory about getting hit by lightning is correct. There are those with a lightning bolt on their foreheads,” Rose tells me. And while he doesn’t recount the story of his son’s scar yet, he tells me about Luigi, a boy from his neighborhood when he was growing up.

This Luigi, skinny and younger than him, was by all signs an evident victim, a poor shit, a sad little runt, whose mother screamed at him and beat him. And Rose did too, of course he did. All he had to do was hear Luigi cry and a committed cruelty arose in him like he had never experienced before — an exacerbation, an arousal even, that took over his person every time he heard Luigi wail. And Rose had never been a bully, the opposite in fact: the tough kids at school had abused and ridiculed him to no end. Rose could have said what Obama had said about the same type of experience: “I didn’t emerge unscathed.” Yet an almost sexual urge had led him to beat Luigi, make him howl, help fuck him up some more because he himself had been fucked up, and simply because Luigi’s mother, by beating Luigi, had passed him on and put him at the mercy of all his superiors. Luigi was a loser, and veritable sufferer, and Rose thought that abusing him was not only okay but also inevitable: his little whimpers were an invitation to mistreat him.

The other prisoners thought that María Paz attracted misery because of her tendency to lower her guard, to hide behind her favorite phrases: “I don’t know,” “I don’t remember,” “I don’t understand,” and with the modest habit she had of pulling down her shirt all the time, as if it were too short on her. The older inmates told themselves that María was a martyr for anyone to overtake, a value judgment about which they were almost never wrong. Manninpox exposed the weak, confused, and defeated ones, and chewed them up. It gulped down their blood. In María Paz’s case, all this wasn’t meant figuratively; her blood dripped warmly on the cold stones. At first, she appeared to live in the clouds, incapable of telling her story even to herself, incompetent when it came to putting together the pieces of the puzzle to make a whole. During her first weeks, she couldn’t even figure out what her downfall had been. She talked about things that had happened to her as if they had happened to someone else. The first time Mandra X talked with her in private, María Paz complained that they hadn’t given her panties. When she had arrived at the prison and traded her clothes for the uniform, they hadn’t given her panties. They left her without underwear and that upset her horribly. She complained about that as if it were her one and only problem, having to go without panties and feeling exposed and violated. Maybe if we get her panties this rag doll could become a person again, Mandra X had thought, and found two pairs, so she could wash one while wearing the other. That seemed to calm down the novice a bit. She had already been through a lot. After a confrontation, she had spent a few days in solitary, no one knew how many. She herself didn’t know, had lost count. It was understandable that she would be a little discombobulated after what had happened, but she was going to hit bottom if she didn’t react somehow.

“They didn’t even tell her about her husband’s murder, and if they had, it hadn’t registered,” Rose tells me. “Pro Bono had to tell her, more than a month after it had happened.”

“Sir, did you know María Paz was pregnant?” Dummy asked Pro Bono. “You didn’t know? Really? Pregnant, you know? Bun in the oven, little one inside. Does that shock you? Well, yes, she was fucking pregnant.”

“I had no idea,” Pro Bono said after a few seconds of silence, and Rose sensed that not having known about this truly upset him. “She never told me.”

Of course she didn’t tell him. María Paz never told anyone anything, especially if it was about her pain. But that’s how it was; she was pregnant. Although she hardly mentioned it, because she was incapable of admitting it, even to herself. According to the perception they had about her inside the prison, María Paz was a bramble of confusion, a goddamned bundle of nerves. Day by day less so, admittedly, and little by little she had been waking up, getting the hang of things, because whoever didn’t wake the fuck up wasn’t going to survive long at Manninpox, washed away by the current. But at first she was a babe in the woods, in utter denial of things and trembling all day.

“I take it you also don’t know that she lost the child after the beating that she took from the feds,” Dummy asked Pro Bono. “Not a clue, right? Or that this was the reason for hemorrhaging? No, you couldn’t know. The little princess never talked about those things because they hurt. Better just to remain quiet. Better not to say that the guards even refused to give her sanitary napkins, throwing it in her face that she had used up her tampon quota and the quota for the whole prison. But María Paz was one of those people who believed that if she didn’t talk about things it was as if they didn’t happen.”

“Foolish me for not having suspected it,” Rose says. “María Paz could have very well been pregnant, of course, with such a busy amorous life. And yes, of course, the beating they gave her when they arrested her must have caused her to miscarry. It must have really hurt her to lose the child in such a manner, who knows in what basement of what station at the hands of those sadists. And she was incapable of reasoning that the fault was theirs, those who beat her; I know the scene well, have lived through it myself. She created a completely new set of reasons to punish herself over that lost child, the same old beating on the chest with guilt: It’s my fault my child could not be born, my fault I was a bad mother, my fault the child wasn’t Greg’s but Joe’s, or the other way, my stupid fault it wasn’t Joe’s but Greg’s.”

Rose says he noticed something that was consistent throughout María Paz’s manuscript: she lingers in the present or dwells in the past, but leaves the reader hanging on the issues that are most pressing, that call most for resolution. But, of course, it could be that María Paz did talk about her pregnancy and that those passages are among the missing pages.

“Did you know, sir, that María Paz was sent to a hospital near Manninpox because the hemorrhaging wouldn’t stop?” Dummy continued to ask questions. “They scraped her insides. A curettage they called it, sir. No, you didn’t know. She didn’t tell you. She wasn’t capable of painting the whole picture. The way she sees her own life, it is full of holes, like a piece of fucking Swiss cheese. People think of things. People come up with ideas. Initiatives, as they say. The son of this man here, Professor Rose. He thought it would be a good idea for María Paz to write things down. So she would be more aware, as they say. Brilliant, your son, sir. A good person, but naive.”

“My son was an excellent teacher and he did what he could here,” Rose jumped in, leaving inhibitions aside when faced with the insulting of his boy.

María Paz’s problems hadn’t ended with that. According to Dummy, or according to Mandra X as related by Dummy, the medical care offered to the inmates at Manninpox, especially gynecological care, was shameful. The sick inmates were transferred to a special ward of a nearby public hospital, where, according to certain security regulations, they were kept in a separate wing and cuffed to their beds. They were forced to wait hours, sometimes days, then they were summarily attended, given a haphazard diagnosis, and treated accordingly. Nobody explained anything to them. What was wrong? What medication had they been given? The inmates remained ignorant of all details; they were simply acted upon as if objects. María Paz had not been an exception to this. They scraped her and she apparently recovered. The bleeding stopped, so they sent her back to her cell. But a couple of weeks later, the hemorrhaging started again, although not as bad as before. Every day little maroon spots appeared in her panties as a reminder that her insides were still damaged. Mandra X forced her to focus on the trial that she was waiting for, to prepare herself, to review the arguments in her defense, to make sure the chronology of events was clear in her head so that she wouldn’t contradict herself, wouldn’t lose hope. But María Paz wouldn’t come down from the clouds. She pretended to be out of it and got lost in dreams that had nothing to do with the facts, fantasies about that house with the garden she said she was going to buy.

Rose tells me he didn’t fully buy the picture of María Paz they painted of her in prison. He thought those women didn’t really understand her character. From what he had read, he knew the type of person she was. But, of course, when he was in Manninpox he didn’t say any of this. You don’t tease a pair of dragons when they’re sitting right in front of you. María Paz wasn’t one to be interpreted through ideologies, Rose thought, she need not be judged because she wasn’t aggressive, or proud, or forward like the rest of Mandra X’s militants. María Paz wasn’t of that brand; her style was more discreet, according to Rose, which didn’t mean it was any less effective. “Necessity has the face of a dog,” as she wrote in her manuscript, and Rose was beginning to understand that her personal code of conduct must have been guided by just such a maxim. He knew dogs well, their peculiar manner of slowly filling in the gaps with countless acts of humility and patience, and yet at the same time, with such guile and conviction that it made them by far the smartest of animals. That’s how María Paz went through life. She didn’t disgust anyone, and she didn’t bark or bite. No fuss or declarations, more or less going forward diagonally. Like a dog swimming. Rose had seen his dogs swimming. It wasn’t a crawl or a butterfly or a backstroke, but a freestyle paddling that was just enough to keep their heads above the water, yet so effective and persevering it would have allowed them to cross the English Channel if they had wanted.

Rose guessed María Paz’s character was the antithesis of a challenging and belligerent individual like Mandra X. He saw María Paz as pragmatic, measured, used to not asking for more than her share, to not exposing herself more than necessary, to moving efficiently below the surface, taking care of one thing at a time, without wasting her energies on causes or pointless issues. Mandra X was an agitator, a leader, a rebel with a cause. Not so María Paz. A survivor, as she herself had said about Bolivia, her mother, which suited her as well, Rose thought; she had become an expert at keeping her head above water without much ado, just like the dogs.

One day, the guards came to get María Paz in her cell to take her to court. The decisive moment of her trial had arrived. Mandra X had visited a few moments earlier and had seen her praying and pleading with all the saints to grant her freedom so she could find her sister, Violeta.

“To hell with the saints,” Mandra X told her, “and forget about Violeta for now. Worry about your own skin. Go fuck the asses of those sons of bitches who are keeping you locked up. The saints have nothing to do with this. You have to count on yourself.” And as María Paz walked down the hall heading for the bus that would take her to court, chained up like Houdini, Mandra X was able to yell one last thing: “You’re gonna get out of here because you’re innocent, Do you hear me? You’re innocent and you’re going to be free.” But that’s not how it turned out. María Paz had returned to her cell with a fifteen-year sentence.

A few weeks later, the shock of the tragedy lifted a bit when Pro Bono requested a mistrial from the supreme court because María had not been provided with a proper defense. In Pro Bono’s words, “the trial was shit, a sick joke, a series of fuckups.” And what happened? Pro Bono was successful with his petition, and the court ordered a retrial. A do-over. Back to the drawing board. Pro Bono petitioned that the defendant be freed in the meanwhile, but he was denied. She was considered a flight risk and remained in Manninpox.

It was during that time that María began to change. The other inmates noticed how some other person seemed to be emerging from the inside. They noted how she matured, getting stronger and distancing herself from the lost and defeated María Paz who had been at the first trial under those pitiable conditions and without any real defense. Pro Bono’s support and the solidarity with Mandra X, in combination with the hope of a new trial, animated and energized her in a way that she even developed a sense of humor. She went to bed at night with the hope that she would be found innocent and with the feeling that her freedom was just around the corner. She began to read everything she could and was excited about Cleve’s writing workshop. It was only sometime later that she got hit low again with what the Latina interns call the reckoning, especially after her sister, Violeta, refused to talk to her on the phone. Otherwise, María Paz remained active and in a good mood, consulting the dictionary to learn conjugations and grammatical rules, committed to improving her written English to leave behind some record of what she had lived through. But not everything was going as planned. The supreme court, which needed to set a date for the new trial, postponed it time and again. Why? Rose didn’t quite understand. Pro Bono explained it to him, but he was incapable of capturing the minutiae of it. Legal intricacies, asshole moves by the prosecutor, insufficient evidence, the give-and-take of Pro Bono’s negotiations with the prosecution. Months passed and the new trial started to become a mirage. And although María Paz’s mind apparently withstood the uncertainty and the accompanying stress, the same was not true of her body, and it began to falter again. María Paz internalized the issue and the hemorrhaging returned worse than ever, draining her of vital energy.

Mandra X and Las Nolis tried whatever they could to prevent this final breakdown, home remedies that were crude and insufficient to address chronic anemia, things like contraband fresh foods and supplements, eight to ten glasses of water daily, no coffee.

“A lot of the inmates thought this was bull,” Dummy told them. “They preferred other methods. I mean like spells, superstitions, and all that crap.”

Some leaned toward white magic, some toward the other kind. There was everything in there. Candomblé, voodoo, spells, palo mayombe, masses, and even exorcisms — a whole panoply of approaches, according to Dummy. Mandra X put up a fight against it because she despised the irrational, no prayers for her, or incense, or candles lit to virgins, she was at war against all that. But it was still everywhere. The prisoners had learned to appreciate María Paz. There was something about the girl that won people over, a natural seductive quality, and rumors spread that Mandra X was letting her die. According to Dummy herself, even Mandra X realized that this was true to an extent, for all she could do was apply hot compresses to deal with the sickness. Things were definitely not going well.

Among the Latinas, there was an old woman named Ismaela Ayé who considered herself the queen mother of sorcery in the place. She was the only one who had been at Manninpox longer than Mandra X, so the two were rivals for that title, and for every other title as well, sworn enemies from day one. Ismaela Ayé had been retired for years. According to her, her decline had started when the guard confiscated a pot of holy soil; it was dirt from Golgotha, she claimed, which had been her source of power.

“Bullshit,” Dummy said, “Ismaela Ayé had slowly been cornered by Mandra X, that’s what had happened, her and her trashy, third-world hucksterism, all that caveman Catholicism and crappy devotions — what jar? what dirt from Golgotha? — as if we all just fell off the truck. Mandra X had pushed Ismaela aside, convincing the others to become a little more aware, to act rationally, not to be fucked by authority or by their own ignorance.”

With María Paz’s health crisis, Ismaela experienced a renaissance in power, gaining power by spreading rumors about Mandra X, using her evil tongue to spread curses from her cell, like a murderer of her own children who does not understand the sacred value of blood. Ismaela Ayé started reciting passages from the books of Exodus and Hebrews to cast guilt on Mandra X, and took advantage of the situation to promote the glory of living blood, the blood of Cavalry that falls on the celestial chalice, and other such hyperboles that in the end caught the attention of the other prisoners and reverberated throughout Manninpox.

At the same time, Mandra X knew that she was in trouble, that María Paz’s health crisis made her limitations all too evident. The other inmates were judging her, doubting her methods, waiting for a breakup. Perhaps Mandra X could assume her previous position again only if she got rid of Ismaela Ayé. It wouldn’t have been hard; all it would have taken was one good whack. The old woman was nothing but a dry-skinned bag of bones. But such a thing would come back to bite Mandra X in the ass, so she opted for more conciliatory measures and tried to make peace with Ismaela: “Please understand, this María Paz is no Jesus Christ incarnate; she’s just a sick girl.” But the old woman didn’t let up; she knew she had Mandra X in hot water. Nothing else to do, Mandra X’s theories and the practices of Las Nolis regarding pain as redemption and wounds as badges sounded horrible in light of the reality that María Paz was dying. Mandra X was between Scylla and Charybdis, between the negligence of those who ran the prison and the fanaticism unleashed among the inmates. She had to soften to the point of prescribing herb teas, yoga exercises, and cold sitz baths, and this began to undermine her image and influence. On the other hand, the popularity of old woman Ayé continued to skyrocket, and the Latina inmates opened their ears to her sermons, which asserted that we all are Christ figures and that all blood is sacred, that Moses sprinkled the book with such blood, that Yemaya’s blood comes from these shadows, that the lamb so sealed the covenant, that such sacrifices to this or to that were beneficial. “A vulgar jambalaya,” Dummy told Pro Bono and Rose. Ismaela’s brain was sotted and she couldn’t remember anything in detail, so she just jumbled everything up, and what she couldn’t remember she made up. What she couldn’t make up, she dreamt up. And yet, overnight she was able to win over many inmates with her stories, dragging the women into a drunkenness of superstition and supernatural thinking.

“It set everything back decades around here,” Dummy said, “a return to the fucking Middle Ages, that’s what happened here. María Paz, half-conscious amid it, and Mandra X powerless, looking on as the girl was dying in her arms and not able to do a thing about it, because all her recourses had been exhausted, and each day María Paz was getting worse, physically and spiritually. Mandra X saw her as resigned, babbling without end about her sister, Violeta, with a drooly smile, as if she herself was the first to understand that it didn’t really matter, because at that stage not even the damned divinity could save her. At last the pressure forced Mandra X to give in, and she allowed Ismaela Ayé to take charge of the patient and work her sorcery.

“She let the old woman do her thing, you know,” Dummy said. “There was no other choice.” The first thing Ismaela ordered was for María Paz to be lowered from her cot to the floor, face up, her body stiff and extended, the arms perpendicular to the torso. A crucifixion is what the old woman pulled out of her sleeve, because according to her the cross is a passageway, a door, a crossing of paths, and before the power of the cross, bad luck takes a hike, goes the other way, and stops assaulting the victim. And did it work?

“Oh yeah, it worked, worked like a fucking charm,” Dummy said. “Half an hour after lying there, crucified on the floor, María Paz has a seizure and she passes out. She goes comatose, practically dead. Responding to nothing. And the old woman? Is she feeling bad about it? Admitting her ignorance? Her guilt?”

Not at all. Ismaela Ayé remained very calm, proud, proclaiming up and down that her method had begun to take effect, that the bad luck had been cut at the legs, and that from that moment María Paz would begin to improve.

Mandra X confronted her: “You just killed her, you rotted old woman!” But it had no effect on Ismaela, who insisted that this was how it had to be, first the patient had to hit bottom before arising and coming of the depths. She had to go down into the darkness before embracing the light of the Almighty. This is what she was blabbering, with María Paz good as dead.

As things happened, the management of the prison finally did something. They had no choice but to transfer her to the hospital again, this time in a coma. Five days later, María Paz came back to the prison on her own two feet. She had come out of the coma, and although she looked weary, she was alive, even cheerful, and she told the others they had pumped her with antibiotics and anti-inflammatories enough for a horse. And forty-eight hours after returning from the hospital, she was informed that the supreme court had granted her temporary freedom until the new trial. She could go home.

This privilege was something rarely granted except under very extraordinary circumstances, such as with a reputable prisoner with deep roots in the community or an individual with an impeccable record, above all one who is prepared to put up a considerable bond. María Paz did not meet any of these conditions. Her profile, in fact, was quite the opposite. Yet, she was free to go. To go. Go home. She could walk out of Manninpox, just like that? Just like that. She was offered conditional freedom and would be under close watch until her new trial. But she could go wherever she damned well felt like it. María Paz couldn’t believe what she was hearing. How was it possible that all of a sudden they came with such news? “Get your things together,” they ordered. It was seven at night, everyone in their cell already, when the guards came to hurry her out. She couldn’t do as she was told. She sat on her cot, her bare feet on the stone floor, and she couldn’t move, her eyes fixed on nothing, wrapping herself up in her blanket as if it were a shield.

“Get the fuck outta here,” Mandra X screamed from the cell across the way. “Are you deaf? You can go.”

“But how?” María Paz didn’t quite get it. She felt nothing. Or she did feel one thing: panic. She didn’t dare move, as if it were some kind of ruse so they could say she was fleeing when they shot her in the back.

“Don’t ask questions,” Mandra X told her. “Just go. Get out.”

María Paz dressed herself, put some things in the box they had given her, although she didn’t quite get everything in. She left behind the pictures she’d put up on the wall, and they didn’t really give her a chance to get things she had lent others, or say good-bye to anyone, hugs or such. They led her out through the hallway. She was stunned and kept on her feet by the ton of medications they had given her. She looked back as if to ask something, plead to someone, as if instead of leading her to freedom, they were taking her to some horrible punishment. On seeing her, her fellow prisoners came up to the bars of their respective cells and began to applaud as she passed. At first timidly, just a few of them. Soon, all of them — a standing ovation. “You made it!” they shouted. “You did it! You fucked them! You made it, kid!”

With respect to how María Paz must have lived that unexpected and decisive moment in her life, the sudden instant when they opened the door and said, off you go, Rose says he thinks only one word is apt: awakening. In her manuscript, she repeatedly said that the chapter of her imprisonment wasn’t real, more like a hallucination, an improbable period that would end with a return to normal life. Rose tells me that as far as he can figure that’s why when she was in prison she never called any of her friends, such as her coworkers in the cleaning company, whom she considered her most trusted friends. She didn’t even tell them of her situation, so as not to call attention to the episode that to her was so illusory and unreal. Day after day, hour after hour in Manninpox, María Paz waited for the nightmare to end. If they had so suddenly and without rhyme or reason ripped her away from her home and taken her prisoner, then just as suddenly and without rhyme or reason they told her she was free to go home. Even if the freedom they were offering her was a fragile one, because the new trial was still to come, she must have felt that moment was the end of her nightmare, the longed-for moment of awakening. Rose reminds me that’s how things happened in dreams, arbitrarily, out of nowhere, illogically, without cause or consequence. Just like that.

It was a few months after that day that Mandra X and Las Nolis heard anything about María Paz again. Until now; now they had news again, and it wasn’t good. That’s why they had summoned Pro Bono, and Pro Bono had recruited Ian Rose, or who he had thought was Cleve Rose but then had to settle for Ian. And there they were, with Mandra X telling them through Dummy that there was bad news. Dummy stressed once again that they never told the inmates what illness they were suffering from. They didn’t show them lab reports, if they even performed any tests, or inform them of their diagnoses, and forget about X-ray results or anything like that. So now, they got to the point of the story. A few days ago, they had left an inmate who was paralyzed from the waist down alone and unhandcuffed in the infirmary for a few minutes, long enough that she was able to look at her medical folder, which they had left within her reach. She grabbed the folder and put it under her ass in the wheelchair and snuck it out of the infirmary. In the folder, there were a few medical reports that belonged to other inmates, and the prisoner in the wheelchair sold one of them to Mandra X for twenty dollars because she knew it would be of interest to her. It was María Paz’s medical history, and Dummy now produced it from her breasts and handed it under the table to Pro Bono, who looked at it and passed it on to Rose.

“Wait. How did Dummy hide such a thing in her breasts if security was so tight?” I ask Rose.

“They say that the surface of Neptune is full of diamonds,” he responds. “Have you ever heard that?”

“As far as I know, the only thing on the surface of Neptune is the wind,” I respond.

“Well, now you know there are mountains of diamonds.”

“And?”

“Try and get one of those diamonds. See if you can. It’s the same with Dummy’s breasts, which are like a pair of mountains where you can’t find anything. She can hide whatever she wants between those mountains and no one will ever find it.”

According to the report, the medical procedure performed on the inmate, María Paz, that is, had not been completely successful, María Paz, that is, had not been completely successful, and consequently there had been an infection in the reproductive tract. An endometriosis caused by the unclean conditions under which the scraping was performed. The endometriosis had been so severe that María Paz had gone into septic shock. The decrease in blood flow along with lowered blood pressure had led to disrupted circulation, as a result of which the vital organs began to falter, and it was unlikely that the patient would ever be able to get pregnant again.

“But that’s not the worst part. With the report were the results of an X-ray. A dated X-ray. According to the date, it was taken the last time María Paz was at the hospital, a few days before she left. Look,” Dummy said, gesturing to use the pencil Pro Bono had in his hand and drawing something on the surface of the table. “What do you see?”

Rose tried to make out the drawing but couldn’t. Just a doodle, some kind of inverted vessel, with extensions on each side, which reminded him more than anything of the boa constrictor that swallowed a hat as drawn by Saint-Exupéry in The Little Prince, Cleve’s favorite book as a child.

“What do you see there?” Dummy insisted.

“A butterfly?” Rose took a timid guess.

“No, not a butterfly. You, Mr. Attorney, what do you see?”

“A flower?” Pro Bono ventured.

“It’s a uterus, gentlemen,” Dummy said. “Here are the ovaries and here are the Fallopian tubes.”

“These two wouldn’t know the difference between the Fallopian tubes and the Eustachian tubes,” Mandra X said, laughing and startling Pro Bono and Rose, who jumped back in their chairs at the unexpected interruption that had ruptured the silence of the Sibyl, both of them shocked by the surprise because it hadn’t been much of a joke. According to Rose, it was the only thing Mandra X said throughout their entire visit, her only contribution, which had seemed so funny to her. It was when her mouth opened to laugh that Rose saw the bifurcated tongue fluttering in the depths of its cave.

“Can’t you tell?” Dummy continued. “It’s a uterus.”

“A uterus, of course,” Rose said, embarrassed at his obtuseness.

“If that’s a uterus, my grandmother is a bicycle,” Pro Bono said.

“If your grandmother is a bicycle then so is your mother, but what I’ve drawn here is a fucking uterus. The uterus of María Paz. Now look,” Dummy said, drawing a little mark in the center of the alleged uterus. “Look right here. What do you see now?”

“A fetus,” Pro Bono said.

“Not a fucking fetus.”

“A tumor?” asked Rose.

“Shit no, not a tumor. It’s a clamp. Believe it or not. In the X-ray you can see it perfectly. There, the fucking clamp is clear as the light of day. But we had to destroy the X-ray. The bosses don’t like anybody messing with crap from the infirmary. But right there in her uterus. A perfect silhouette, no room for error, a surgical clamp. One of the small types, a little nothing, like this in the shape of a U, a fucking metallic U, small but treasonous, murderous, hidden up her woohoo, sure to fuck her up. That’s why we got in touch with you, Mr. Attorney, so you can let her know. She can’t go on living with that thing inside because that’s what’s making her bleed.”

“How in the hell did it get in there?” Pro Bono asked.

“How in the hell indeed,” Dummy responded. “That is the question. How do you think? You, sir, you tell me,” she said to Rose, “how did that clamp end up in there? We didn’t get it at first either. It took us a while before we put things together, before Mandra X put the whole sequence together.”

According to the course of events as Dummy saw them, María Paz had a miscarriage when she first arrived, and the savages performed a curettage in the most negligent fashion. Hence, all those months of hemorrhaging, which kept getting worse until she went into a coma. Then they took her to the hospital again and sent her back a week later, not really having done much, apart from bombarding her with antibiotics to control the infection for the moment. Because although they didn’t tell her, they took an X-ray in which they found the clamp that they had left in there because of their own incompetence and carelessness. What would have been the right thing to do? Naturally, go into surgery and remove the thing that was going to kill her, the source of the sickness inside her because of their own stupidity. That would have been the logical and proper thing to do. But nothing is logical or proper in Manninpox, or if there is, it’s only so through some perverted means. María Paz was in such terrible shape that they must have figured she could die if she had surgery. How else can one justify what they did?

When they arrested her, they had beat her up so bad, she miscarried. Then they had botched the curettage and left a clamp inside, and then they figured she was going to die on the operating table. They didn’t want to risk such controversy. So what do they do? They fix it so she can go. She was given her freedom. That was their solution to the jam they were in. If she’s going to die, let it be outside where the guilt won’t fall on them.

“That’s why María Paz was set free,” Dummy said. “That’s why these sons of bitches let her go.”

“And here I was thinking it was a miracle from Ismaela’s cross,” Pro Bono said. But no one laughed.

“The miracle was performed by the cross, sir,” Dummy corrected.

“Clearly,” Pro Bono responded. “There’s no other explanation.”

“You have to find her,” Dummy said. “She has to know and get it taken care of right away.”

“That might be difficult.” Pro Bono sighed.

“You have to, sir. There’s not much we can do from in here. Her life is basically in your hands.”

With María Paz’s life in his hands, as Dummy had asserted, that’s the state in which Pro Bone and Rose left Manninpox on that day.

“It’s practically impossible,” Pro Bono said.

But impossible or not, they had no other choice but to get working on it right away, or at least think of how to begin, start discussing possible contacts, places to look. They had to get in touch somehow. But neither of them could think of anything better than contacting Socorro in Staten Island.

“We have no other option, even if the old woman is a pathological liar,” Rose said. “Maybe María Paz went to see her.” His hand still hurt from the crushing handshake with Dummy, and he brought it to his nose, that old habit of his that Edith had hated, smelling his hand after shaking it with someone. There had been no handshake with Mandra X, not even a cordial good-bye from her. Just as she hadn’t spoken but once, she made sure there was no physical contact at any time. When she realized the meeting was over, she got up and walked out of the room in the same fashion she had come in, unapproachable and stinking, like the Queen of Saba.

Rose was suddenly overcome with exhaustion and asked Pro Bono if they could stop by his house for a while to rest and eat something before returning to New York, and so he could check in on his dogs. Pro Bono preferred to have a coffee at Mis Errores.

“We don’t have time,” he said.

“What if we put an ad in the paper?” Rose suggested.

“An ad?” Pro Bono said somewhat mockingly. “Like what, ‘Girl, you have a clamp inside,’ in the New York Times classifieds.”

That’s the point when Rose decided he had had enough. If Pro Bono wanted his help, he was going to have to come clean about some things. What the devil had happened with María Paz? Why didn’t Pro Bono know where she was? Rose said he was not going to lift a finger until he was caught up. There was something strange going on here, something very weird and confusing, and he was not just going to play along anymore. He was going to be told everything or he was out.

“Of course, I’ll explain, of course,” Pro Bono assured him, tapping him on the shoulder. “You are absolutely correct. If you’re going to be involved in this, you have a right to know everything about it. I am going to make things clear to you. Well, at least to the extent that they are clear to me, which may not be saying much. Please, calm down, I’ll lay things out, but it has to be little by little. Let’s do it section by section, like a butcher. Don’t expect me to summarize in three sentences what is a deviously complicated situation. Clarification number one: if we are going to go looking for María Paz, it has to be done in an absolutely discreet fashion. If not, we may cause more problems than we prevent. Nothing public, no fanfare. We have to figure out a way so that she is the only one who receives the message.”

“That sounds more like a warning than a clarification,” Rose protested.

“Let’s try again. But let’s get our heads in place. Let’s remember what we’re dealing with. Let’s see, it’s only eleven. We still have time tonight. Do me a favor, Rose; can you take me somewhere? It’s near here,” Pro Bono asked, paying for the coffees.

“Right there, to the left,” Pro Bono said as they neared the place. “That hotel right there. Let’s see. I think that’s it. Yes, this has to be it. The Blue Oasis. I should have remembered a name like that. Blue Oasis, okay, that’s it.”

“Do you need to use the bathroom? Grab a bite? I don’t understand what’s going on.”

“I’m letting you in on everything. Isn’t that what you wanted? María Paz and I stopped at that hotel when she was released. I was the one who was waiting for her at the gate. By myself. No one else.”

It had been raining on the afternoon María Paz was released, and Pro Bono had been waiting in his car for a while. They had told him she would be released at five, and he had completed all the paperwork, but it was already dark with no sign of her. The guards at the gate wore black raincoats and ponchos and moved like ghosts between the beams of light that cast white figures on the wet pavement. Ensconced in his Lamborghini with a portable reading light, Pro Bono tried without success to read the latest novel by Paul Auster. He had never before been at Manninpox after three or four in the afternoon and was unaware of the otherworldly dimension the prison acquired after dark. The hooded figures became friars and the bulk of stone a macabre monastery. It was almost eight when he noticed a side door open, and then he saw her exit in that darkness whitened by the spotlights.

“It was an indelible moment,” he told Rose. “I saw her approach among the thousand drops of rain made visible by the watch lights as if silver confetti were falling on her.”

Inside the car, Pro Bono asked her if she wanted to go eat somewhere to celebrate her freedom. She didn’t hear him or look at him, as if all her senses were sealed off, except for touch, because she passed her fingers over the surface of things as if remembering the texture of the tender, lovely, warm world that she had erased from her memory. Pro Bono repeated the invitation and she nodded. But not like this. She didn’t want to get to New York all wet and smelling like prison. So he proposed stopping at a hotel on the way so she could bathe and fix herself up. It shouldn’t take long, and they could have a late dinner in the city. What she really wanted was to get under a long hot shower and wash away the nightmare, baptize herself anew, and rid herself of all the prison grime, so that there wasn’t one particle of Manninpox left on her, not even under her nails. And as if she had suddenly found her voice again, she soon started blabbing, giggling at herself for talking so much, “jabbering on like one just set free,” she said, remembering a saying from her country. She confessed to the lawyer that she could lock herself up in a bathroom for hours, that she had spent months showering in groups, and that she wanted nothing more than to lock herself up in a clean bathroom and stand under the hot water without feeling the eyes of the guards checking her out, and forget forever about that little drip of water that came out of those showers that she only had access to twice a week, with her back pressed to the cold wall. What joy, never again having to shower like some spider pressed to the cold wall. She wanted a hot shower, great clouds of steam, and then to dry herself with plush towels and be allowed to toss them on the floor when she was done — thick, dry, soft white towels with no holes, not damp, for she was not sure if such a thing as dry towels existed anymore. She also loved those little shampoos and conditioners in hotel rooms.

“So I stopped at one, the first one along the way.”

“The Blue Oasis…” Rose said. “It was important for you to remember the name, no?”

“Precisely. Illicit things happen in hotel rooms, my friend. Nabokov had Humbert take Lolita to one that is called Enchanted Hunters. Room number? 342. Memorable. And where does Tennessee Williams’s Night of the Iguana take place? In the Costa Verde hotel.”

“What’s the hotel in that song by the Eagles?” Rose asked. “‘Hotel California’—‘this could be heaven or this could be hell.’ And in Leaving Las Vegas, Nicholas Cage locks himself up in a hotel room to drink himself to death. The Desert Song Motel. And this one is a softball for you, Mr. Attorney, in the bathroom of a certain hotel, a secretary is stabbed to death in Alfred Hitchcock’s—”

“The Bates Motel!”

“Exactly, the Bates Motel. Memory is funny that way; it remembers the Bates Motel but forgets the Blue Oasis…”

“I’m a married man, my friend.”

“I understand.”

“Although nothing worth concealing happened that night.”

“Except that you were in a motel room with a girl, a girl who was your client on top of everything.”

“I was with her and I wasn’t. I was with her, but not the way you’re thinking. I watched TV while she locked herself up in the bathroom. That’s it.”

“Where did you watch the TV from?”

“From the bed. It was a motel room.”

“Did she watch from the bed too?”

“Yeah, maybe, I don’t remember, maybe.”

“So you were both lying down on the bed at the same time?”

“Have you taken a good look at me? I could never really be lying down lying down. But maybe we were in the bed, maybe even under the blankets, and maybe I even held her.”

But still, Pro Bono kept his clothes on. He never takes them off in front of anyone, not even Gunnora, with whom he has been for forty-seven years. Truth be told, he never even sees himself naked anymore. As an old man, he avoids mirrors to avoid the disgust.

“So you want me to believe that you got into bed with your suit on, and your watch, and your fancy shoes.”

María Paz needed to talk, needed to be loved, needed to be listened to, to be told everything would be alright. She was delighted with the quality of the mattress. She opened and closed the curtains with the remote control, went barefoot on the plush carpet, stretched out on the king-size bed, kissed the clean sheets, hugged tight the fresh-smelling pillows. She told Pro Bono that in Manninpox she had to sleep with her arms as a pillow because, for months, they had failed to give her a pillow, and when she finally got one, it was so disgustingly greasy she preferred not to use it. Pro Bono wanted to take her for a good meal in the city, to celebrate those first hours of freedom with a fine bottle of champagne. But she said she was happy there, didn’t want to leave. Why should they go anywhere else with the rain outside, and it was so nice in there. “Please, sir, let’s just stay here.”

“I would wager that at just that moment you let her place her head on your shoulder,” Rose said.

“I don’t remember.”

“If you don’t remember that means that you did.”

“There was a rerun of one of her favorite shows on TV.”

“So she was the one who turned on the TV and not you.”

“That’s right, she was the one.”

“What did you watch? House?”

“I don’t know. Some show about doctors.”

“House. In her manuscript, she mentions how much she likes it. So she watched House and you passed your hand through her hair, which was wet, first because of that walk through the silver confetti and second because she had just washed it.”

“It was dry. She had used the hair dryer. If your next question is going to be if we had sex, the answer is no.”

“Yeah, Clinton said the same thing. ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman.’”

“Let’s not go so deep into the gutter. I may have a hump like Richard III, but I am not a villain. And besides, I have my pride; I don’t put myself in situations in which I will appear more grotesque than I already am. I’m telling you things exactly as they happened, Rose. This is a voluntary confession, right? I suddenly felt like telling someone these things I have told no one before. What would be the point of lying? There was never the slightest indication that either of us were interested in what you’re thinking about.”

Pro Bono couldn’t relax inside that room. He felt guilty, couldn’t stop thinking about his wife, was annoyed at the smell of floral air deodorizer, terrified by the possibility of this pretty girl asking him for any kind of thing in bed for which he was not ready. In any case, he couldn’t get comfortable, so he told María Paz about Balthazar, the French bistro where he wanted to take her. The truth was that his handicap was making him more self-conscious than it ever had before, and he needed to find a way out of the situation. He had always been a man who distinguished himself more at a dining table than in bed, more a gourmet than a Don Juan. The name of the restaurant reminded her of the Three Wise Men. “What do you eat there?” she asked. And he told her that his favorite dish was filet mignon au poivre. She: What’s that? He: A big hunk of meat grilled and covered in pepper butter. She: Very spicy? I’m not into spicy food. As he explained to her she could order anything she wanted, the commercials ended, and she again became hypnotized by the program. When it ended, she announced that she was starving and couldn’t wait for the peppered meat: Why don’t they order room service instead? By then, Pro Bono had grown a little more at ease and considered the harm in staying. Examining it closely, it was a once-in-a-lifetime moment; the occasion called for what she desired, this young, beautiful, charming girl who had just come from hell itself and was now happy. Why not keep her so, when it was so easy? The whole scene was infused with a delightful candor, and it was in fact raining buckets outside. Hell, why not? “Room service it is,” he told María Paz, “order whatever you want.” Soon enough a cart with a white tablecloth appeared at the door packed with everything María Paz ordered, double portions of everything: chicken soup, club sandwiches with fries, caprese salads, and apple pie with vanilla ice cream. Pro Bono suggested she order wine but she preferred ice-cold Coke, so they toasted to her freedom with Cokes.

“Conditional freedom,” she specified with her mouth full of food. According to Pro Bono, that’s basically what transpired in that hotel room. She ate and he watched her eat.

“As if I had taken her to Maxim’s in Paris,” he explained to Rose. “She wolfed down that whole thing, her portion and mine — I barely had a bite. Then she burrowed down under the covers like a mole in its lair, and she went into a deep, quiet sleep that could have lasted a day, a week. I don’t know if you understand, my friend Rose, but given the circumstances, that’s as close to that thing called happiness as you’re going to get.”

Given that no happiness is everlasting, Pro Bono had to return home, where, likely, alarms had begun to go off. He was after all a married man with a daughter; he was even a grandfather. He called his Gunnora. “Hello, dear, I’ve run into a little trouble trying to get this prisoner out, but I’m fine, just letting you know, I’ll tell you the whole story when I get back, you know how these things go sometimes.” Before dawn, he and María Paz were in the Lamborghini on the way to New York. She was ecstatic and so was he.

“Did you talk a lot on the way?” Rose asked.

“Not really. It had stopped raining and she wanted to roll the windows down, and I did, though it was a bit cold for it.”

María Paz let her hair loose in the breeze and turned on the radio all the way up. “Let’s go, Thelma,” she told the lawyer, and because he didn’t get it, she told him about the movie. He was Thelma, she said, and she was Louise. Pro Bono drove her to Staten Island, and dropped her off at this woman Socorro’s place. “She’s like an aunt,” María Paz explained. And then came that difficult moment, the end of their celebration.

“When you said good-bye?” Rose asked.

“The rebirth. Leaving prison and returning to real life is a kind of birth for prisoners more difficult than their first one. Prison infantilizes, makes you dependent. It takes away everything but also takes care of everything for you.”

Still inside the car, María Paz gave Pro Bono a desperate look, one that said that she was terrified to be dropped off there in the middle of nowhere. But he had no choice but to ignore it. “You have to make do, my girl.” He was going to help her in the trial and do everything he could to help her avoid any more prison time, but that was as far as he could go for the moment. She had to understand that his relationship with her was a sideline thing for him. His real life was elsewhere, one he had built brick by brick and sheltered from all ills, a successful life in spite of his handicap, a good marriage, beautiful family, a brilliant career. It was clear that someone such as Pro Bono could not risk this all by pushing certain envelopes, not even for an innocent and beautiful girl such as María Paz. Before he drove off, he watched her walk toward the house. From the front door, María Paz waved good-bye. “Bye, Thelma,” she screamed, and he responded, “Bye, Louise.”

“Did you ever see her again?” Rose asked.

“Yes, of course, a few times. But never like that night in the Blue Oasis. I was her defense attorney and there was a trial coming up, my friend, of course I had to see her.

“Freedom suited her well. She looked radiant,” Pro Bono told Rose in hushed tones, as they remained parked in front of the Blue Oasis, as if they had nowhere to go. Rose still didn’t get the point of the story, the obnoxious old man suddenly confessing all his secrets to Rose like he was his old high-school pal. Didn’t they have somewhere to go? To begin their investigation, like in The Wire? There was a girl who was going to die because of the clamp inside her body. Pro Bono behaved as if there were nothing better to do than confess his sins inside the car, like he had set up shop there.

After she was released, María Paz religiously kept her appointments with the parole officer and then went to see her lawyer, always carrying her little dog in a handbag. Miraculously, she had been able to get him back: Hero had been given to an animal care organization and she found him there, alive and well, waiting for her. Since the thing couldn’t walk, she was hesitant to leave him alone again, given that she might not return and he would be abandoned again.

Pro Bono was not only representing her, but he kept his promise of accompanying her to buy new clothes so she would look like a princess in front of the judge and jury. He assured her that appearance was crucial in these types of trials. They got tired of listening to evidence and made their decisions based on a look, or even a smell. Pro Bono took her to Saks Fifth Avenue, but María Paz was not really sure. She thought that the store was too expensive and the clothes not really for younger women, and a little too upper class. “That’s what you have to appear as,” Pro Bono tried to tell her, “like a lady, a pretty, well-dressed lady. Specifically, an innocent lady; judges tend to believe innocent ladies wear expensive clothes.”

He finally managed to convince her, and he bought her an outfit made from a fine dark fabric, a white blouse, shoes with moderate heels, and a Gucci handbag that cost a pretty penny. According to him, the girl looked great. When she looked at herself in the mirror, front and sides, she said that since she was not going to a funeral, they should add a little color. “I can’t show up there like this,” she told Pro Bono, “look how I’m dressed, as if in mourning, as if we were going from the courthouse to the gallows.”

Pro Bono got a lump in his throat at hearing this.

“It wasn’t an easy case,” he told Rose. “It wasn’t a sure winner at all. I never said anything, bought her a pretty Ferragamo scarf. Guess the color.”

“Not a clue. Is it important?”

“The most important part of the whole story. It was a pink scarf. French pink, to be exact. She wrapped it around herself and looked gorgeous. Her skin was soft and dark against the light-colored silk, and her black hair was resplendent. She had been right, that little touch of color made a huge difference.”

Before they parted, Pro Bono gave María Paz enough money to get her hair done up in a bun at a nice hairdresser, because loose hair could be downright counterproductive. “Too showy,” he explained. He advised her not to put on too much makeup, not to wear red lipstick or nail polish, nothing. “Discretion is the better part,” he told her. “It’s not enough just to be innocent, you have to look it.

“But enough with these stories,” Pro Bono said suddenly, sitting up in his seat and looking at his watch, as if to regain the sense of time and shake himself out of his reverie.

“I agree wholeheartedly,” said Rose, “but get to the point, where is María Paz now?”

“I have to tell you something, Rose. I hope you won’t take it badly. You see, what happens, my friend Rose, is that in these two weeks coming up I’m not going to be in New York.”

“What do you mean?”

“I have to go to Paris.”

“Paris? To Paris, now? What?”

“It… it’s our honeymoon.”

“Whose honeymoon?” Rose could not believe what he was hearing. “What are you talking about?”

“Actually, my second honeymoon. I’m going with Gunnora, my wife. It’s not my doing, believe me. She is set on this, wants me to take her to Paris for a second honeymoon.”

“This is a joke, right?”

“No, sadly it’s not.”

“Don’t we have to look for María Paz?”

“You’re going to have to do it, Rose. For the first two weeks. Just these two weeks. As soon as I return, I’ll come rejoin you. Don’t worry, I’ve set it up nicely, one of my people will be with you at all times, someone I trust to the death.”

“I’m sorry, I’m still not sure I’m getting this. You lure me right into this mess, and then you just leave me hanging? And you think I’ll just agree to it? Fuck you, my friend. Now I understand why you got in touch with me, now I get it. There’s no suspended driver’s license; that was a lie, you needed some jerk to fill in for you, so you could wash your hands and take off for Paris. I fell from the sky, didn’t I? I was just the idiot you needed. Fuck you, Pro Bono; I will not get more entangled in your trap.”

Rose was so outraged that he could feel the anger hammering in his chest and his veins throbbing at his temples. He tried to say more but tripped on his words. So he turned from the old man and glared out the window. He had to cool down, get a hand on this mess he had walked into. He had to think, think, but clear thoughts evaded him. Pro Bono’s words continued to do cartwheels in his head, enraging him even more.

“Believe me, going to Paris is the last thing I want to do right now,” Pro Bono said. “I care about María Paz. You see that, don’t you, Rose? I’m terrified about what may happen to her. But it’s only two weeks. Two weeks, that’s all I’m asking, then we can continue together. Please calm down. You’re right. I should have told you from the start. I apologize. I am very fond of María Paz. I respect her and have supported her without fail all this time. When everything seemed lost, I was the one there by her side. You’re new to this whole situation, Rose, but I’ve been there. I’ve risked a lot for that girl. And all I’m asking now is for a short two-week vacation.”

“Are you denying that the only reason you called me was because you needed a replacement? Knowing that I would get stuck with this?”

“Two weeks, Rose. Chances are María Paz won’t show up so soon. I think it will take a month or more to find her, if we do. But for the moment, I need to attend to my wife. I’ve been putting off doing this for her for two years. Two years is too long for a woman as old as me to wait. Gunnora has lived for this these past years. We have the plane tickets, hotel reservations in Paris, tickets one night for La nozze di Figaro, her favorite opera, she—”

“Is guilt eating you up that badly when it comes to your wife? What sins are you atoning for, sir? That night in the motel with María Paz? Or were there other nights like that one? What’s the story? Are you in love with María Paz? Is that it? Is that the reason for this trip to Paris?”

“Stop, Rose, you’re being absurd. You’re very upset, so it’s understandable. I wasn’t expecting any different. But it’s two weeks, that’s all I need.” Pro Bono left his cell phone number on a business card that he stashed on the dashboard. “Call me whenever you need to, day or night, I’ll be looking for it. And look, you won’t be alone. I leave you in the best of hands. William Guillermo White, the best investigator in my office, has been instructed to follow you twenty-four/seven.”

“Why do I have to be involved then? Why can’t this great investigator just do his thing on his own?”

“Because you’re the only one with certain information that can lead us to her.”

“Me? What do I know about María Paz?”

“You, nothing. But your son knew.”

Right at that moment, Rose heard the noise of a car engine and turned to look. There it was, like a hallucination. Powerful, sleek, and gleaming jet-black like his dog Dix: a sports car that had pulled up and parked right next to them. A Lamborghini. Was it Pro Bono’s? Another cold calculation by the fucking old man? A tall, overweight man got out of the Lamborghini. He was thirty or thirty-five, with appealing features, a five o’clock shadow at noon, unkempt hair down to his shoulders, and wires coming out of his ears that were connected to something in his pocket. He was a wearing a conventional business suit made of a fine dark cloth, no tie, a Nirvana T-shirt under an unbuttoned white shirt, and, half-hidden under the hem of his pants, a pair of thick-soled sneakers that put a bounce to his step and added a couple of inches to his height.

“William Guillermo White,” the man said, extending a hand to Rose.

“Who on earth?”

“William Guillermo White. I’m an assistant at the firm. Everybody calls me Buttons.”

Rose chatted for a moment with the newcomer, and before he realized it, Pro Bono had snuck out of the Ford and was off in his Lamborghini, racing away in a flash and leaving behind a wake of tremulous air.

“I… can’t… believe it,” Rose muttered, more to himself than to his new companion. “I can’t believe it. It was all lies, that son of a bitch… speeding tickets.”

“Speeding tickets?” Buttons laughs. “Don’t be stupid. Opera tickets, maybe, that’s more like my boss. Lesson number one: never trust a rich man with opera tickets.”

“Don’t fucking tell me that he made you drive up here, two and a half hours, just to bring him his car. Who’s the stupid kiss-ass now?” Rose growled, turning his anger toward Pro Bono on the poor assistant who had been nothing but cheerful up to that point.

“A little kissing ass, you got me there. But how often does one get the chance to drive a Lamborghini? Besides, I came to speak with you, Mr. Rose. At the behest of my boss, of course. So you’re right, I’m a kiss-ass, a brownnoser.”

“And they call you Buttons. Why the hell do you let them call you Buttons?”

“Because I’m always fidgeting with the buttons of my shirt, until I just pull them off. Little tick of mine. Among others, I hate to say. Then I suck on them. Like this.” Buttons pulled back his lips to reveal a white button clenched between his teeth. “It works for me. Calms the nerves. I also know a heap of button jokes. You want to hear one? This guy says to some other guy, ‘Why don’t you press for the elevator?’ And the guy presses the door of the elevator. ‘Not there, you idiot,’ the first guy says, ‘the button.’ So the second guy looks down at his shirt and presses one of the buttons.”

“That’s not a button joke, that’s a joke about autism.”

“Fair enough. Why don’t we grab a hamburger at the diner, I’m starving.”

They got the food to go and ate and had some beers at Rose’s house, surrounded by the dogs.

“Do you think your boss is a bit smitten with this María Paz?” Rose asked, unsure why he did but perhaps so he wouldn’t have to hear another button joke.

Too many contradictory things had happened, and his mind had short-circuited and gone blank.

“Smitten? No, I wouldn’t say that,” Buttons responded. “I would say he’s in love with her, at his age. There’s a kind of delightful love that is called what it is, a love that’s spoken and acted on. It’s not that kind of love. But there is another kind of love that is not really obvious, or spoken, or acted upon; it just is, without the lover even being aware of it or able to do much about it. That’s the kind of love I’m talking about.”

“And yet he’s leaving for Paris when she most needs him.”

“He wants to go to Paris, and so he goes, that’s what rich people do, Mr. Rose. They have certain priorities, you know. It’s in their DNA.”

“But doesn’t he stand up for the rights of the indigenous, those without water, and whatnot?”

“And for María Paz also. But Gunnora is Gunnora. Gunnora, his daughter, his granddaughter, his house in the suburbs, his library, Paris, his Lamborghini, his rose garden… all these things exist in a whole different reality for him. A reality that he gives priority.”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t make sense. I was beginning to have another kind of image of him, even thinking he wasn’t like other lawyers…”

“And you weren’t wrong, sir, that’s a fact. Think about it, he’ll only be gone for two weeks. It’s not like he’s deserted his causes forever. He’ll be back in two weeks, leading the crusade for María Paz again. And we’ll lose him again for Gunnora’s birthday or whenever they perform The Marriage of Figaro at La Scala in Milan.”

“What happened in that trial, Buttons? That’s what I want to know.”

“As do I, Mr. Rose, but I don’t know, I can swear to you. I can tell you what I personally witnessed that day, but that’s the extent of my knowledge.”

The trial was set for 11:30 a.m. at the Bronx Criminal Division courthouse on East 161st Street, where Buttons arrived with his boss two hours beforehand. Pro Bono likes to be early; he’s not one to risk racing against the clock. Neither Pro Bono nor Buttons had eaten breakfast, so they went down to the cafeteria.

Pro Bono picked up copies of the daily papers on the way, and ordered coffee, a fruit bowl, and a muffin. Buttons had a slice of pizza and a soda. They sat at a table away from the others and ate in silence. The boss didn’t like to chat or be distracted in the hours before a trial. He needed to focus. They exchanged at most a few words, from what Buttons recalled. Pro Bono told him he had had a good night’s sleep, that he was refreshed and rested. He added that the duel that morning would be unto death, but that he was confident it was winnable. Buttons was somewhat more skeptical, but in general he agreed. The evidence against María Paz was very weak. And then they parted. Buttons had other things to take care of that morning, and he left Pro Bono there reading the newspapers. María Paz had not yet arrived at that point, but nothing to worry about. There was plenty of time.

“And that’s it,” Buttons said.

“Not much,” Rose responded.

“Not much at all, really. But that’s all I know about it. I saw the boss again that afternoon in the office. That’s when he told me that María Paz had never shown up. He was as befuddled about it as I was. We didn’t have a clue what had happened.”

“And you never saw her again?”

“To this day.”

“It’s so strange, her whole story. Unbelievable, even. You can say she actually escaped from Manninpox. Well, with the clamp and all, but still. In the end, she escaped…”

“True, you can say that,” Buttons said. “But, you know, from the moment she missed her trial she became a fugitive from justice, and that unleashed the state police, the FBI, Interpol because she’s a foreigner, the DEA because she’s Colombian, and the CIA to come after her. Not to mention the famished, unscrupulous packs of bounty hunters. And that’s supposing she was still alive, of course. Do you know how many prisoners have escaped from American prisons since 2001? A mere twenty-seven. That’s it. And of those twenty-seven, you know how many were recaptured?”

“No idea.”

“Take a guess.”

“Twelve?”

“Twenty-six. Out of twenty-seven. That means that during the entire decade, one prisoner successfully escaped.”

“Two with María Paz, if we count this as an escape,” Rose said, toasting with his beer.

“The boss asked me to conduct an investigation,” Buttons said, finishing his meal and tossing a last piece of burger to one of the dogs.

“No!” Rose screamed. “Don’t feed them human food. They’re trained to eat only from their dishes. You’ll spoil them.”

“Did you hear what I said? The boss asked me to conduct an investigation.”

“And?”

“I found out some things. Unpleasant. About the death of your son.”

“The authorities that investigated the incident said it was a traffic accident. Open-and-shut case.”

“They’re part of the bureaucracy, they don’t care. But I think I came across something.”

“I don’t know if I’m ready for that,” Rose said, even though he had been living the past few weeks unable to free himself from anything having to do with the death of Cleve, looking for any shred of evidence that would help him understand the unfathomable and irreversible fact of what had happened. Yet he shut his eyes tight and turned the other way, terrified, each time he came upon something concrete. “You have to understand. It’s just too much to take for one day. For the moment. I’m taking the dogs out. Make yourself at home, Buttons,” Rose said on his way out. He rested for a while on the porch, petting the dogs and trying not to think about anything. Skunko lay at his feet, Dix bit the hem of his jacket, and Otto scratched behind an ear. Why is this dog scratching himself so much? Rose thought. Not that ear infection again, I hope. He wondered if his desire to disconnect was the result of the Effexor he had just taken.

“When are we going to talk about the death of your son?” Buttons asked later that night as he built a fire. He didn’t have a car to drive back to the city, so he accepted Rose’s invitation to stay.

“I ran to the morgue when they called me to identify the body,” Rose said. “I prayed the whole way there. Let it not be him, let it not be him, still convinced it couldn’t be Cleve. And in a manner I had been right, that dead person wasn’t Cleve. He was so disfigured, so still. That couldn’t be my boy, my Cleve, my only son, that destroyed wounded body. But all it took was a second look to make clear that it was him, in spite of the grotesque, wounded face, almost unrecognizable, but there was the lightning-bolt scar in the middle of his forehead. That was all that was really left of him. Afterward, they couldn’t pull me away from him. They would have to shut the place down, or go home, or put away the bodies, whatever it took, but I wasn’t going to walk away from Cleve. At some point, Edith appeared, not exactly sure when. A few years before, she and Ned had returned from Sri Lanka and settled down in Chicago. That’s where he was going. He wanted to be at his mother and Ned’s anniversary celebration. I don’t know the years, not sure if they ever officially married, well, no, they couldn’t have, because Edith and I never got around to getting divorced. There he was right in front of me, Cleve, my son, covered in a shroud. Edith was on his right, and I was on his left. I should tell you this, Buttons, just to make it clear. There were three dead people in that room. You may notice that I walk, and work, and even enjoy a hamburger and a beer, just like a normal person, but it means nothing. It became very clear to me at the cemetery, when Edith and I were finally able to look into each other’s eyes; we both knew that three people were being buried. That was my last stop, what’s happened since is of no matter, it has become all about enduring and letting time pass. And taking care of my dogs, they need me. Actually, what followed afterward was the guilt, mountains of guilt, or remorse, of beating myself to a pulp for allowing it to happen. An insane guilt, you know. The shrink even prescribed some pills, so I wouldn’t go off the deep edge permanently.”

“Do you want to tell me about that?”

“It’s a long story.”

“We have all night.”

Rose had no idea where to start. Maybe on the day Cleve, when he was ten, had leaped into an empty pool after his parents had lost him. Apparently, he had jumped even though he was fully aware it was empty. He dislocated his shoulder, broke an arm, and split his forehead open when it smashed into the floor of the pool. You couldn’t really say this was a child who had just tried to commit suicide; the pool wasn’t deep enough for that, even a kid his age would have known that. But it had been a call for attention that alerted his parents that they had a very sensitive child, one much more vulnerable than they had imagined. From that day, the Z on the child’s forehead was proof that in their dysfunctional family there was a weak link that would snap if too much force were applied. Years later, when Cleve, already an adult, made the decision to go live with his father in the Catskills, Rose was clear about the fact that he had taken on a humongous responsibility, which came to a climax with their feelings about the motorcycle. For Cleve’s generation, a motorcycle was simply a means of transportation, good times, hot women, and, with any luck, sex here and there. To Rose, on the other hand, the very word “motorcycle” spoke of extreme danger, risking one’s life, a guaranteed accident on wheels, or any such parental hysteria. And he warned and warned his son about all this till his breath ran out, and this led to huge fights and chilled relations between them, something that was constant from the day that Cleve showed up at the house with that Yamaha to the day he died, on that very day they had fought about it.

“It was a monster with four cylinders, four carburetors, and four cylinder heads,” Rose informed Buttons. “It guzzled gasoline like some rabid dog and it was unbeatable on the road but almost impossible to handle in an emergency situation because it was so long and heavy with a high center of gravity. Every single day I admonished him about it. But he would admit to none of these flaws, he worshipped the thing, was madly in love with it. That Yamaha had him under a spell. He was always cleaning it, hugging it, and structured his days around checking the air filter, carburetors, oil, gauges. He spent a fortune using only premium gasoline. It was blind love, a total understanding between man and machine. So put yourself in my position. My most important job in the world was to stop Cleve from repeating what he had attempted ten years before. A pool then, a motorcycle now. The only thing I had to do was prevent that. I failed. No other way to put it.”

“It wasn’t your fault, Mr. Rose. You can’t torture yourself like that. If it were only so simple. Like I said, I did some investigating. Cleve died on a secondary road that ran parallel to I-80. It was raining that afternoon, and he was about an hour and a half away from Chica—”

“I’m very well aware of all that,” Rose cut him off. “It was raining and Cleve lost control of his bike and ran completely off the road.”

“I was told your son was a very experienced driver who would have known how to deal with water from the sky. The thing is that it’s not certain if the accident happened because the pavement was slick or because he was run off. Think about it, he could have even lost control of the bike as he was trying to lose a pursuer. He might have noticed that someone was following him,” Buttons said. “But it’s impossible to know for sure because there were no witnesses, no radar guns, no criminal investigation. The only two entities involved in the case after the accident were the highway patrol and the paramedics, and the autopsy concluded that it was an immediate death due to the blunt trauma caused after having lost control of the motorcycle because of a combination of the excessive speed and the wet road. It is well known that rain greatly increases the chances of a rider losing control of a motorcycle, so they don’t usually think twice about assigning blame in such cases, and they are almost always ruled accidents. In Cleve’s case, they didn’t tape off the area or preserve the integrity of the crime scene; they stepped all over the ground, littered it with cigarette butts, and decided to forgo tests without even considering connections… because it was never considered a criminal investigation.”

“There was no crime. And stop chewing on that button, it makes an irritating noise.”

“Not a problem,” Buttons said, spitting out the button. “They did not follow guidelines with regard to keeping the scene, but they took pictures, lots of pictures. I downloaded them to my Mac. Do you want to take a look? Maybe you should have a drink first. Are you ready? Look at this one. You can see the body exactly as it was found. There are cuts where he was struck by the thorns.”

“Of course he was cut by the thorns,” Rose said, barely looking at the images on the screen. “I’m going to beg something of you, Buttons, don’t make me relive these events if you don’t have something worthwhile to add.”

“Fair enough, so let’s move slowly. Look at this one; Cleve’s not wearing his helmet, it rolled somewhere below.”

“Why are you torturing me with this nonsense? He’s not wearing a helmet because it came off during the fall.”

“Or someone took it off.”

“For what purpose? Not to steal it, they left it right there. It came off; it’s not a very complicated mystery.”

“It’s a great helmet. A half helmet with a full face shield of excellent quality and double straps into double buckles. You can see that if I magnify the image. One of these helmets doesn’t just come off, and your son was not one to ride with it unstrapped, especially if it was raining. I think, after the accident, somebody took the helmet off.”

“He could have taken it off himself.” Rose clutched both hands to the side of his head. “If he didn’t die right away, he could have pulled it off. He always complained it was too tight.”

“Possibly; there’s a lot we don’t know, too many things. But let’s go back to the thorn cuts. Look at this, on his forehead, there are nineteen little cuts, almost equidistant and almost in a straight line. And now take a look at the acacia branch right next to his body. You see how it’s bent? If we increase the magnification to three hundred, we can see that at some point that branch had both ends tied together.”

“In a circle?”

“Or a crown. And now look what happens when we use Photoshop,” Buttons said, moving the piece of the branch and putting over Cleve’s forehead on the screen. “You see it? The thorns of the branch are a precise match with the cuts. If we had that branch here, there would be blood on it.”

“A crown of thorns,” Rose, who had grown very pale, said.

“Are you okay, sir? I’m sorry, breathe, lie down. Wait up, I think I should get you that drink after all,” Buttons said, and when he returned with two whiskeys, Rose had gotten up. He was no longer faint and the concerned expression on his face had vanished. Unlike before, he seemed frighteningly calm.

“Let me ask you just a couple of questions. Just respond yes or no. My son did not kill himself in that accident, he was murdered.”

“I’m afraid so, sir.”

“Yes or no, Buttons.”

“Yes.”

“And they tortured him.”

“I think they took off his helmet to press that crown of thorns on his head.”

“Was he still alive?”

“Impossible to know. But I would guess he wasn’t. The fall most likely killed him and the crown of thorns was later. A ritual or something, we’re still investigating. While you walked your dog, Mr. Rose, I took a walk around the property. I’m sorry for my intrusion, but I had to. I called Eagles’s widow. Her number was on the bags of dog food. She told me some things. And then I rummaged in the attic. The attic was Cleve’s room? That was pretty clear. I found some women’s clothes, some makeup.”

“So what if my son had girlfriends, or friends, who came to visit?”

“They had name tags on them that suggested they could have belonged to María Paz. But wait, that’s not all. Outside, in a clearing in the woods behind the house, there is a wooden cross. Do you know what I’m talking about? Have you ever seen it? But maybe the point of it is to remain unseen, in fact, to go unnoticed, a makeshift cross. You could say that it is just two sticks tied together with twine. Well, I assumed it could be signaling a grave or something like that, and I dug around a bit. But all I found was this box, one of those that could be used for ashes, and also this.” Buttons reached out and handed Rose a bronze medal hanging from a ribbon soiled and eaten by fungus. “What I want you to be keenly aware of, Mr. Rose, is that danger is near, that it has been lurking right outside. Maybe it has even snuck into the house.”

Rose scrutinized the bronze medal on one side and the other.

“I think I know where we can find María Paz,” Rose said.

8. From María Paz’s Manuscript

Here I am, Mr. Rose, out of Manninpox but still wandering through America, “saltando matones,” as they say. That was one of Bolivia’s many Colombian expressions, leaping over bramble patches. I have never talked like this, but as time passes, I am beginning to sound more and more like her. Saltando matones, indeed, because matones are exactly what I am trying to avoid, but not in the sense that it is used in the expression of brambles or thickets, but in the other sense of the word, which also means thugs and killers. In spite of it all, I still sit down to do my homework for you, as if to keep you updated, Mr. Rose. As if it is certain that I will no doubt see you again one day and turn all these pages in, so you can add them to the manuscript that I sent you from Manninpox. As you can see, I have not forgotten about you. It hasn’t been easy. To survive, I mean, since getting out of jail. I didn’t dare return to my apartment right away because of everything that had happened there. My whole being shrank at the mere thought of returning to that place, but I had to go look for Hero. I decided to make rounds in the neighborhood first, fearing what I would find there, or more to the point, who I would find there. I was not ready to come face-to-face with Sleepy Joe. I strolled by a few times first, getting closer and closer to our building, but not too close, to see if I could get news from someone. About Hero, you know. The first thing I had to do was figure out where my dog was. I sensed that people were pointing me out: There she goes, look, that’s the one they just let out of jail, the one who murdered her husband, who was fucking her brother-in-law, all that and who knows what other gossip. Fortunately, a neighbor did have news about Hero, good news. She told me that the cops had turned him over to an animal protection organization, so that perhaps I could get him back one day if I ever got out. Had they taken pity on Hero because he was lame? Maybe they had heard that he was a war hero, and this world is not so far gone that it’d let a decorated patriot starve to death.

My main problem was (and continues to be) the lack of money, so at night I stayed with my mother’s old friend, Socorro Arias de Salmon. I had given her my manuscript in Manninpox, and she assured me that it had been delivered, sent by mail to the proper address. That made me very happy, it has made me hopeful that you read all of it, which is why I continue to do my homework, writing whenever and wherever I can to finish my story for you. Like I told you once, I don’t like novels with wishy-washy endings, or worse, those kinds of endings that just tick off the reader. But staying with Socorro wasn’t easy, given her husband wanted to know nothing about me. This Mr. Salmon, also an immigrant, was an Olympic asshole, one of those who still believed that coming to America was the closest thing to going to heaven and spent his life making sure he wouldn’t get expelled from paradise. I’m talking about the on-their-knees, hypergrateful bootlickers who are more Catholic than the pope. I don’t know if you understand what I mean. So Socorro let me stay there, but hidden from her husband, and the neighbors as well, of course, and the whole world, because the woman had a serious case of heebie-jeebies and her skin broke out in hives because I was staying there. Hiccups, allergies — what didn’t she come down with? Shitass-scared, they call those kinds of people in Colombia, shitting on themselves about anything, that’s how they were, the Salmon couple, he with his adulteries and double standards, she with her breakouts and rashes, and me in a corner of the basement next to the washing machine as if I were a pile of dirty laundry. The poor woman twisting herself into shapes with all my used tampons, because I’m still bleeding, not as much as before but a little bit every day. Imagine poor Socorro, having to throw out all those tampons in the neighbor’s trash because of what her husband would say, how would she explain such a thing when years before she had already been the very figure of menopause on two feet, or rather menopause with her hair in a bun, skin breakouts, and nails painted a bright red, that was Señora Socorro. No sir, this was no life, some development, out of jail and into a hole. The worst of it was that I couldn’t have my dog with me. I could go claim him — but where would I take him? I had to work up the nerve to go back and live in my old apartment, me and my dog, and maybe someday my sister as well. There was an eviction notice plastered on the door of the place, and it had been sealed off with police tape, and it was still fire damaged — but so what? I would sneak in through a window and take it from there. I had learned that at least it was still empty. The owner had not rented it to anyone else. It’s not easy to find good tenants in those shitty neighborhoods today. “I would never put you out on the street,” old, sly Socorro said to me, though she was deep-down glad I was getting out. As a parting gift, she gave me this mink coat, pretty amazing, I have to say, a bit moth-eaten and such, way out of fashion and with the lining all torn, an old geezer of a coat that smelled disgustingly of mold, think Grace Kelly crossing the Atlantic to become the princess of Monaco. But hell, enough complaining; it was a mink, after all. Socorro probably gave it to me to soothe her guilty conscience, so that I wouldn’t leave empty-handed. She said it was for the cold or so that I could sell it and get some cash. For the cold? Yeah, sure thing, tightwad, I was going to go around looking like Cruella de Vil, so that the animal rights people would spray me with paint for skinning the good Lord’s little creatures. The only person who would have bought such a thing was Prince Rainier himself. Can you imagine the whole scenario? Coming back from prison without a penny to my name but wrapped in a fur? It was funny, given everything that had happened. Maktub, I know all fate is maktub — remember that? — written down somewhere, but whatever entity is in charge of destiny has a good sense of humor. Anyways, I got to my neighborhood with everything I owned on me, and my Hero, my little sweetheart of a dog, who had gone crazy mad when he saw me. I couldn’t tell who was squealing more when we first saw each other, Hero or me — enough to break someone’s heart.

It wasn’t easy to go back. I was panicking — the shitass-scared one was me now. I swear, Mr. Rose, I felt like Lazarus come back to life still stinking of the dead. Confinement in prison is hard, but it’s harder to poke your nose back out into the real world. I soon realized how maddeningly difficult it was going to be to return to real life, which was not the same one I had left and which wasn’t really mine anymore. What had been mine had come to an end. That day I returned will always remained burned in my memory, me hugging Hero tight, both of us trembling, as if he knew what I knew or feared finding Greg there, both of us in the same state, not being able to confirm the rumors about Greg’s death really until that day. Everything that led up to that day had been so unreal, beginning with his death, a bit of news that I wasn’t sure whether to believe. There I was, back home, slowly climbing the stairs of my old building and recognizing the old smells that were different on each floor. A scorched smell on the first floor from the time the owner tried to burn down the place to collect insurance, cat piss on the second floor, pine-scented disinfectant on the third floor, and cigarette butts on the fourth floor. I went late on purpose that night to avoid running into anyone. I had no wish to run into the other tenants and have to deal with their questioning and accusatory looks. There she goes, the woman from the fifth floor, the one from that huge controversy, with the murder and the bursting down of doors, who was sent to prison and now is back. I didn’t want them to look at me with suspicion or, worse, pity. I didn’t want to be that person, the one from the tragedy. Truth was, I didn’t want to be any other person either; I didn’t want to be anyone. Ideally, I would have liked to have been invisible and gone into the old apartment like a ghost. Fortunately, not a soul was around that night, not even the silent boy who always sat in the stairway between the second and third floors, perhaps asleep already, or his family had moved, leaving the building desolate. And I was a ghost as well, and Hero half a ghost, returning home. Except not returning, just getting there; we weren’t really returning, returning to what, to whom, because there was nothing left of what we had once had, ruins perhaps, embers, ashes, a profound hurt in the chest and stabs of disillusion. Although actually, everything was the same, difficult to believe things had changed so little. The same light-colored floor tiles, handrails with chipped gray paint, the meager light from the few lightbulbs that weren’t burned out. I paused at the last landing on the stairs before reaching the fifth floor to look for the keys in my bag. I’m going into my turf. And what is there to greet me?

A humid cold that encircles my legs and gusts of air that flow in through the broken windows, and that’s when I realized I didn’t need my keys — for what? — considering all the locks had been burst open, and the door knocked against the doorjamb, letting the wind pass like through the door of a saloon. That’s what it was like. And inside? A hole, a real shithole, like they say here. No water, no electricity, no telephone, because of course they had been cut off, the furniture all destroyed, grime and stink everywhere. Because the locks had all been broken and there was no way to shut the door from inside, I was at the mercy of anyone who wanted to come in. Unbelievable, I thought, all those bars and locks in Manninpox so that I wouldn’t open any door, and now not even a miserable little dead bolt to lock my house. I’m telling you, that maktub writer likes his laughs. A little bit of a downer, the whole scene. Downer and then some, but what was I to do? I wasn’t going to sit there and start crying. I had come from the depths of hell and this was supposedly a new chapter. “On the stairway to heaven blind with tears,” another of Bolivia’s sayings for you. Make the best of it, I told myself, and I got to it. I found an extension cord, plugged it to one of the public outlets outside, and ran it into the apartment. It was freezing cold, with no heater or anything, but I knew that in the basement there was always a collection of useless and not-so-useless things, piles of stuff — you know how the gringos are, even poor gringos, who use their things for a year and then just toss them. I went to down to dig around in the pile and found a small heater that didn’t look in such bad shape, and just as I thought, the thing worked. Nothing outstanding that put out suffocating heat, but enough to survive, though only at night. During the day, I had to unplug the extension cord so the neighbors wouldn’t notice and complain. And for water? Well, I did it by the bucketful, like we used to do whenever we visited our family in the country as children. Whoever used the outhouse went down to the river and hauled up a bucketful of water for the latrine. That’s what I had to do now, but of course not from a river, I had to haul water up from the faucet downstairs. Don’t think that’s such an unusual thing around here. How many people make do without any money to pay for public utilities? You can pass by and everything seems copacetic, but just take a peek behind the façade to see what real poverty is. Guess what I did for food. Depended on the charity of soup kitchens: good hot soup, some fruit, often a bit overripe, and little cartons of milk… not bad compared to Manninpox. To sleep? Well, to sleep, Hero and I used a thin foam mattress I had found in the basement. We had to improvise in that area because the FBI bastards had disemboweled all the mattresses and furniture. Then the smell. That was the worse. Rotted food in and out of the fridge. There was no way to get rid of the stink, although I spent a whole day of scrubbing away with those steel pads and a whole bottle of Ajax, which I had to buy, because they had emptied the old ones on the floor, looking for cocaine probably. You have to understand, Mr. Rose, I don’t want to bitch, it would be a serious lack of appreciation, but I swear sometimes I even missed Manninpox. There at least we had electricity, and running water, and three meals a day assured. And if I start complaining about these days, how do I tell you about the days that followed, all that stuff that happened afterward that was much worse? One night, I got home late and put Hero on the floor — I took him with me everywhere, night and day, in a tattered old bag — and I searched for the extension cord to turn on the light. There were only a few days left till the trial, and I was hoping that everything would go smoothly and I would be able to reestablish my identity as a free individual, so I could go back to work for the cleaning supplies company, make some money, reactivate my credit card, pay the old bills to get heat and water and light again, fix up some of the furniture, and rid the place of grime and memories. Clean out, as they say, and learn to forget. I had been unexpectedly released and life was giving me a second chance. It wasn’t something you waste. If fate had forgiven me, I was going to have to learn to forgive myself. Maybe I could even get a loan to buy the apartment. Who knows, there had to be some program for ex-prisoners in such a great democratic country that helped with things like that. Of course, nobody came by this house anymore, not even the cops. It’s as if the place had been erased from the map. Not even the owner came around to collect the rent. Maybe he was dead or had just given up on this place, left it like all the other godforsaken places in this neighborhood. After “white flight,” it was we persons of color who stayed behind, or I should say persons of many colors. As I figured, all I would have to do was take possession of my apartment and get everything in order again. How difficult could it be to set up a place to lead a decent, independent human life? I would get in touch with my old work buddies, throw a dinner party, and I would tell them such strange stories about what had happened to me since they had last seen me, almost like I was telling them about an old movie, one of those that they showed on TV recently, but no one could remember the plot. Then after that, I would go get my sister, of course. That would be the true beginning of a new life. I would take Violeta out of the special school, thinking of the face she would make when I showed her I had fixed up the room on the roof, the one she had always liked, her refuge upstairs, and I would lead her by the hand to the bathroom I had fixed up just for her, with a Jacuzzi and everything. You don’t have to bathe using the sink, I would tell her. I hoped Violeta would listen to me and not make a scene, Violeta who hated to shower and instead loved to clean herself in the sink on the roof, not caring about the cold or about parading around naked where everyone could see her, no matter that I got tired of telling her, you’re not a girl anymore, you’re a woman, a beautiful woman, and should act as such.

All that would be later, though, all that was the dream I was building up high as the moon while living down below in the rubble. For the moment I had to give time its due, without becoming desperate or depressed, keeping my priorities in order, surviving as best as I could in the ruins of that apartment, and focusing all my energies on the upcoming trial that was getting closer each day. That’s where my head was that night I returned home late, put the dog on the floor, and began looking for a candle, when I tripped on the mattress, the one I had brought up from the basement and that on top of everything smelled of urine. I tripped on it and asked myself what it was doing out there. I had left it in the bedroom and not where it was now, crossways at the entrance. Very strange, and my first instinct was to grab Hero and get the hell out of there. I should have done it, Mr. Rose, I should have. But I didn’t, just one of those times when I didn’t listen to my instincts. Analyzing it, I can’t quite figure out why I didn’t take off right away, when it was very obvious something was wrong. I guess in the end I didn’t do it because everything seemed so wrong during those days, one more thing seeming wrong just didn’t register; I was immune to things that seemed wrong. I must have thought that the stray cats had broken in looking for food and moved things around. But Hero was also startled and growled. It couldn’t be clearer if a hundred roosters were singing, or more to the point, one dog growling, but I refused to listen to the message. In the end, I think I didn’t run away because I didn’t have anywhere to run to. Better just to stay there and deal with whatever I had to deal with. I kicked the mattress aside, grabbed a candle, and went searching in the darkness for matches to light it, when someone grabbed my arm and pulled me back. Hard. Ugly. A big hand covered my mouth. Someone breathing on the back of my neck, and pressed against my butt, a… a man’s thing. Horrible? Disgusting? Terrifying? Of course, it was a horrifying experience, well, at first a very horrifying and then not so much, not so much and not at all, because soon I recognized that hand, that smell, that breath, that other thing.

Have you guessed? If you bet on Sleepy Joe, then ding-ding, you win. Apparently, he had been there, waiting for me in the dark, crouching quietly in a corner. I don’t know how long he had been there. It’s possible that he came often, and stayed the night once in a while. So I arrived that night, and he jumped me. I almost had a heart attack at first. You have to understand, Mr. Rose, my thing with Sleepy Joe had been a torrid love, and you can’t simply delete those things. You can shove them completely out of sight or bury them under a mountain of forgetfulness, but when you least expect it, they come back full force. That’s just how it happened here, my old flame jumps me from behind, and before I knew it, we were back to the same old thing, embarrassing as it is to admit it. I’m not saying I still loved him or anything like that, the opposite, in fact. I knew better than anybody what an absolute bastard he could be. A do-nothing, an asshole of the worst kind, but he hadn’t done anything to his brother. Sleepy Joe adored his brother, Mr. Rose, and I was sure he hadn’t lifted a finger against Greg. Sleepy Joe was not the murderer. And he was still a hot little papacito, no use denying that, so with all those repressed desires built up from Manninpox, that long dry spell, that abstinence that made me want to explode, starving and with my man right there, like a pie cooling on a windowsill. But not as you may imagine it, because there was a lot to talk about first. It was obvious he only wanted one thing, a little toss in the sheets to get things going, but I needed to talk. I needed to know what had really happened to Greg, what Sleepy Joe knew about the murder and this mess I was in up to my chin. What role had Sleepy Joe played? How deeply was he implicated? Did he know about the arms trafficking? Who had killed his brother? Why the fuck did he not come to visit me in prison? How is it possible that he abandoned me at the lowest point of my existence? What was that whole muddled history of the knife, the one I had wrapped as a present like an idiot? A whole rush of questions brimming with rancor, mistrust, and suspicion… and hatred. Because deep down, I felt a physical hatred for him, a primal hatred thickened with regrets. You would think that even the most feverish lust would cool under these circumstances. You would think. But Sleepy Joe wasn’t your run-of-the-mill character. He wanted me on the bed, or on that filthy mattress, and that’s it. But that’s not what I wanted. Well, maybe a little bit, because Sleepy Joe was no good to the core, but damn, he was fine. “Come here, my little hot ass, don’t waste this present I’ve unwrapped for you,” that’s what he said, the damn flirt, and I could easily confirm that he wasn’t kidding. He goes at me with kisses all over my neck, and I slowly get lost in his smells, a little bit saying no and a little bit saying yes. And right in the middle of all that he blurts out a very strange question, well, strange for someone in the throes of this kind of passion.

“You have that hundred and fifty thousand, right? Tell me you do, my love, tell me you have it.”

“What hundred and fifty thousand?” I said, pushing him away. “Don’t fuck with me, Joe. They almost fucking killed me for that, some hundred and fifty thousand I didn’t know shit about. So you tell me. What hundred and fifty thousand?”

“Whatever you want, my little hot ass.” He backpedaled, trying to calm me down to get back to business, “Take it easy, my love, don’t get all flustered, let’s just stay with this and we’ll talk later.”

I needed to think. Hit pause to take in everything that was happening, bring down the temperature to avoid making a huge mistake. We were still inside in the dark and it was cold, so I was able to convince him to go out in the hallway for a moment to plug in the extension cord. But he kept on coming at me when he came back, determined not to let me interrupt things, so the fever had risen instead of dropping. Although maybe not, maybe that’s not how it happened. I think I’m lying, Mr. Rose. Maybe writing is not a good medium to tell about these intimate things, or maybe I just shouldn’t be telling you in such detail. In any case, I think I’m not being clear. The confusing thing about the feelings we carry inside is that they never are what they seem, always something different. Here I am confessing to you that what I felt for Joe was physical desire, and yes, that’s partly true, but it’s also not true, because in those days what I really wanted was something or someone to return to after a long voyage, and the familiar and once-loved body of Sleepy Joe could very well have been felt as a home, a place where you are received with a hug. I don’t want to get entangled in my psychological ramblings, Mr. Rose. So be that as it may, the scene was sexual. Now another confession, this one a bit stupider. It has to do with female insecurity. The truth was that I was self-conscious about being so thin. The last time we had made love I had been some forty-four pounds heavier, and Sleepy Joe wasn’t at all attracted to the sylph type, and had always said he liked my body because it gave him something to hang on to. Now I’d come back looking like a scarecrow, all bones, and I didn’t want him to see it, to realize that the thing he liked about me was no longer there. I had an idea. I’m not sure if right at that moment or a bit later, but I had an idea. Maybe not such a great idea. “Wait here,” I said to him in a very seductive voice, “I’ll be right back.” Sleepy Joe stayed in the living room while I went into the bedroom and took off my clothes, all my clothes. The mirror in my vanity was broken. They had destroyed it with everything else when they had burst in, but for one jagged piece that still hung there. I caught a glimpse of myself there. Where before there had been a full and delightful body, as someone had once described it, now it was just a skinny thing, too skinny. And that wasn’t the worst of it. When I looked closely, I realized how evident the suffering was on me. Maybe that’s what I should keep Sleepy Joe from seeing, I thought. What I need to hide from him is not so much this thinness, but the pain and weariness I’m carrying inside. That person in the mirror looked like a piece of cow cud or something that had been put through a grinder. Everything that had happened to me had turned my soul into jelly. Something told me that I needed to keep that from Sleepy Joe. I’m not sure why. It just seemed like an anti-aphrodisiac. Who’d want to hook up with someone so beaten down? I didn’t feel very seductive, let’s just say, but at least with my clothes on it wasn’t so noticeable.

Now that I’m recounting all this, Mr. Rose, I realize there may have been different reasons. I didn’t want Sleepy Joe to guess the true state of my ruins, because it would prove costly, I was sure. He would be merciless, taking advantage of it to hurt me further. Getting naked in front of him would be like taking off my armor and exposing myself. But that’s what I think now, like I’m telling you, that night my head was somewhere else, so the next step was to let my hair loose and lower my head to brush it all forward, all of it, and then in one gesture, throw it all back so it fell down my back thick and frizzy. Do you see where I was going? Then I put on the mink that Socorro had given me, finally finding some use for that coat, throwing it over my skin and bones, bare naked under it. An old female trick, à la Marilyn Monroe, fill a man with wonder by appearing naked under a fur, also very useful to hide physical defects, in this case, my hyper thinness, so Sleepy Joe wouldn’t realize I was bony as a stray cat. Not to mention the hemorrhaging, so that he wouldn’t notice that especially. God forbid he thought I had my period, because then the whole seduction ruse would be fucked. There was nothing that terrified him more than menstrual blood. Like I’ve said, no one could outdo this man when it came to weird ticks and prejudices. I stripped down, threw on the fur, and went out to try my luck. My Greg, with his obsession with Christmas carols, had a video in which Eartha Kitt sang “Santa Baby.” Kitt is naked under her white mink in the video, or so it seems, and my poor Greg used to imitate her using a towel, clowning around, showing his bare shoulders as he sang along karaoke-like about seducing St. Nick to get a blue convertible for Christmas: “I’ll wait up for you, dear Santa baby, so hurry down the chimney tonight.” You can imagine. But first, let’s shoo Greg from my memory, Mr. Rose, so I can go on with my story. It’s hard to explain how much Greg’s memory weighs on me, all that time I had cheated on him. That was not right, my poor old man. Poor me too, left without love or company. But let’s move on. I went back to Sleepy Joe in my tattered mink, all seductive and stuff, cue the sexy music, a sexy little kitten moving in stealthily step-by-step through the hallway, humming “Santa Baby” and letting the fur slide ever so slowly down my shoulder. And the Neanderthal of Sleepy Joe, instead of focusing me, all of a sudden could see nothing else but the fact that I had a mink coat. Think about it, Mr. Rose, he realized I had a mink coat. He went nuts.

“You liar,” he screamed. “You do have the money! You took the hundred and fifty thousand. How else would you have such a coat? You bought it with that money, you fucking liar, admit it.”

Unbelievably, for Sleepy Joe that coat was proof that I had the money and was spending it on luxuries. That made him start to get violent. He grabbed me hard and demanded I tell him where the money was, with his big open mouth close to my face. “Where’s the money, you bitch? Did you spend it all already? You didn’t save even a little bit for me?” And liar and bitch, and liar and bitch. “Not even a little bit for your papacito? Huh, you bitch? Not even a little bit?” He had me by the hair and was tugging it so hard it hurt. This can’t be, I thought to myself, is life just a repeating reel? Before this it had been Birdie, now Sleepy Joe, both assaulting me for the same reason — the only difference that Sleepy Joe wasn’t smacking my face. He shoved me around but did not strike me. I just want to be clear on that detail, Mr. Rose: Sleepy Joe, the thug, the scrounger, did not smack me, while the FBI, who supposedly stood for law and order, had beaten me senseless. But the two scenes also had their similarities, and to think that so much fuss was about some money that I had never seen in my life, one hundred and fifty thousand blessed dollars. Son of a bitch, if I would have had that kind of money, none of these losers would have seen me or my shadow again. I would have taken off for Seville, Seville in the spring with the flowers blooming, that city I had never visited but dreamed about, fled to Seville where these animals couldn’t put a hand on me. I tried to think about that and only that, Seville and its blooming gardens, while Joe manhandled me and screamed, sticking his chest out and getting all machito on me, till I was in tears because of that deep and violent voice. All that show of manhood so I would throw myself at his feet and shrink like a worm. What did this asshole want? For me to apologize. Fine, I’d apologize, I’d suck him off if that’s what it took for him not to smash my face in, and was just about to beg forgiveness on my knees. But for what? I hadn’t even seen that money, much less had my hands on it. So beg for forgiveness out of sheer exhaustion, to save my neck, so this animal would think he had won, that the battle was his, that I was not even worth hitting anymore. Beg for forgiveness so Mr. Macho Man would stop his assault. But something in me didn’t want to go there, bend over, humiliate myself. I just didn’t feel like it. Hadn’t I just survived hell itself, where I had to learn to defend myself against real monsters? I wasn’t going to let this shitty little asshole bring me down now. I could give him a Swiss kiss that would rip the lips off his face. See if he stopped screaming then? I had never actually done the Swiss kiss to anyone while in Manninpox but I knew about it through the grapevine. Better to try a more proven method. So I head-butted him smack in the middle of the nose with such a brutal force that I heard something crack, like a branch breaking off, and when I saw the concern with which the moron took his hands to his blood-soaked face, I said to myself, now, María Paz, now or never! And I was off, without a hitch, as they say. Bone thin and naked as I was, I untangled myself from him, slipping out of the coat like a serpent from its old skin. He held on to the moth-eaten mink with one hand, more surprised than anything, his face covered in blood. He tossed the coat aside and tried to chase after me, but his feet got caught up in the extension cord and he came crashing down with a loud thud, like an armoire tumbling over, leaving the apartment in darkness again. I wish you could have seen that idiot, Mr. Rose. The way he came down as if struck again, in the end — it was comical. Too bad I didn’t have a video camera. The howling when for the second time that night that nose got smashed in was unforgettable. That gave me time to run into the bedroom and hide behind the stinky mattress leaning up against the wall, leaving a little space where I was just able to fit. There I waited, protected by the darkness, like I hoped brave Hero was, somewhere else, and listening to Sleepy Joe grope around in the darkness and bellow, looking for me. The night could not last forever, and soon light began to seep in through the window. A pale mist began to fill the room, and since it was so thin at first it didn’t quite reach my hiding place, but soon enough it spread and brightened the whole room, leaving me exposed. All Sleepy Joe had to do was stick his head in the room and he’d see me hiding there behind the mattress like a terrified, sorry-ass little mouse. That’s not how it was going to be, I decided. Instead of panicking, I grew very peaceful. If there was nothing to do, there was nothing to lose, I said to myself. If Joe was going to find me, he might as well find me ready to defend myself. So I came out from the hiding place, went to the closet, and grabbed a baseball bat that had been Greg’s since he was a kid, gripped it tight with both hands, and waited strategically behind the door, taking a good stance to be able to unleash the bat across Sleepy Joe’s head as soon as he crossed the threshold. Then I heard the tap of his yellow boots. Heard him coming. If he was out to hurt me, he had best be ready to be hurt twice as bad. Greg had made me watch his favorite video a thousand times: “The Twenty Greatest Home Runs,” which among others included highlights of Kirk Gibson’s glorious high fly-ball doozie in Dodger Stadium, Bill Mazeroski’s World Series slam, and the best one of all, the one that I had seen so often that I had memorized it, October 3, 1951, Bobby Thomson of the New York Giants battling the Brooklyn Dodgers for the National League pennant takes a pitch from Ralph Branca, and with all the soul and cojones he had in him line-drived the fuck out of that ball for the most memorable home run of all times. And that’s the exact position I was in behind that door, with a strong grip on the bat and ready to send this retard Sleepy Joe flying out the window so his head plunged into the asphalt and he became what he truly was, a little splatter of shit, a piece of garbage that everyone would simply step over like all the other garbage in this neighborhood.

Alas, I was no Bobby Thomson. What a loser of a ballplayer I turned out to be. Sleepy Joe came in and in a matter of seconds he wrestled the bat from me.

“Time to pray, my little hot ass,” he said, his face all drool and blood, and because his voice was all nasal with the broken nose, he sounded more dejected than enraged.

“Go ahead,” I said. “Go up to the roof and pray; I’ll wait for you right here.”

As if he was going to do as I said. He grabbed my arm and bent it behind my back in some jujitsu hold and led me up the stairs to the roof. It was dawn, the time the little Slovak boys performed their prayers. Once up on the roof, Sleepy Joe took off his belt and bound me to the railing with my hands behind my back and naked as I was.

“Let’s see if you can let me pray in peace, you two-timing whore,” he said.

“I’m cold, Joe,” I responded.

“Shut up, bitch, or I’ll warm you up with a beating.”

“But why are you tying me up?”

“So you don’t escape.”

“I’m not going to leave.”

“Bullshit, you bitch.”

I had never actually known what the brothers did on the roof during their prayers because they never let me up there, assuring me it was not for women. But this time I saw how Joe lit some candles, spread out some blankets, messed around with a bell, took out a Bible, incense, and I couldn’t tell what other knickknacks and placed them all very meticulously on a red cloth spread out on the floor as if for a picnic. What a dirty Mass, I thought.

“Stop playing around, Joe,” I called. “Come here, hon, untie me. Or at least cover me with something; don’t let me freeze to death here. And don’t get so close to the edge, baby, careful or you’ll fall off.” I said all this in a very sweet tone to see if I could win him over, but he was so focused on the whole ceremony that it was as if I wasn’t even there.

“Get over here, Joe, give me a little kiss.” I didn’t know what else to try. “Come on, let me go, don’t be such a bad boy to me. Let me clean up that nose, my poor little baby. Does it hurt a lot? Why don’t we just go back down, things were so good there—”

“Shut your mouth, you whore, I’m doing this,” he said without even turning to look at me.

Sure enough, he was doing that, on some cosmic voyage or some shit, as if he were in another world, tooth and nail with his god so nothing else mattered. Meanwhile, the city slept below, and I trembled naked in the cold. What could I do? Scream? Wake up the whole neighborhood, yelling for help by causing a scene? Not a bad plan. But Joe must have thought about such a possibility at the same time, because he interrupted his little Mass and came over and gagged me with a handkerchief. So much for my plan. After he was done muffling me, the nutcase moved away and knelt on the very edge of the roof — and because there were no parapets on the cement roofs of the buildings in this neighborhood, the edge was like the edge of a cliff. A wind swept across the roof, blew out the candles, and tousled my hair. The city was waking up little by little below, and I was a little stunned by the change in my brother-in-law. Just a little while ago, he had been a raging macho hyped on testosterone, and now he seemed to be some type of angel glowing in the divine light of morning. He was moving in slow motion, half monk and half yogi, and he began to chant, at first in a low voice with his head lowered and his whole body folded in on itself, like some giant fetus floating in the amniotic fluid of the first light of day. Then slowly his voice grew louder. He straightened up and let his head fall back theatrically, and his body went into convulsions or something, as if electrical shocks were coursing through his body. His body shook epileptically, but somewhat controlled, the petit mal, let’s say — I know too well about these things with all the psych wards I’ve had to visit for Violeta.

A song in two different tones now broke out from Sleepy Joe, first one tone then the other. For the first tone, a grand and serious voice emerged from his throat, a voice like Greg’s, I remember thinking, if I closed my eyes I could imagine it was Greg who was there, it was his Gregorian chant. Motherfucker, I thought then, I was hallucinating because of the incense that, not for nothing, smells like weed. What purpose did all this serve for him? What was the point of this ridiculous theater? Did he miss his brother? Was he summoning the spirit? I began to shiver. And then it was no longer Greg’s voice that was coming out of that throat, now it was a little thin voice, almost a child’s, that responded to the other one. Sleepy Joe’s voice as a child? The two brothers together and praying? Oh, God, so horrific I was getting goose bumps. They must have been very ancient chants from Slovakia, but so incomprehensible, son of a bitch, lightning over Tatras. In spite of it all, there was something very impressive about it, I had to admit. Sleepy Joe’s silhouette over the city was a potent sight. My loser brother-in-law had become a dark, half-naked priest, with the bloody face and the rivulets of blood dripping on the crucifix tattooed on his chest. He spread out his arms as if he wanted to hold the universe and let his head fall back. No laughing matter here — this was scaring the shit out of me. His back was tense, so arched that his ribs stood out like a vault. I was beginning to lose it, I don’t know, so much so that Sleepy Joe seemed to be emitting heat and brightness, perhaps burning, it seemed as if the air around him had caught fire. The veins in his neck popped out and his fists were so clenched that I could imagine his nails cutting into his palms. Could it be that he had some kind of supernatural powers? Greg used to say that his little brother was imbued with the Spirit, but I never believed that crap, because I knew that if his little brother had any powers they were located elsewhere. But now, watching this mystical display, I wasn’t so sure. Stop with this idiocy, María Paz, I told myself — what powers? what possession? — it’s just your asshole brother-in-law monkeying around with rusty buckets and pots and tin sheets. But the reality was that the man covered in blood celebrating this ancient ritual at times did seem more than just a man. Of course, I knew that wasn’t the case. He was just some maniac. Not a devil, just a man. It was a line from some movie that came into my head then. And it helped calmed me down, not the devil, just a fucking man. I repeated it to myself. This Sleepy Joe was like a coyote, mysterious and cowardly. A loser, all fucked up and defeated by life. But in that state he was in during the ritual, shaken by some sort of celestial orgasm, with his eyes gone white and fully raised to the heavens, Jesus, you had to respect it. I swear, Mr. Rose, more than a man. As if some high-voltage electrical shocks had transformed him, that’s what it seemed for a moment, and I began to understand some things then. I felt as if Corina were beside me and suddenly I got it. My Corina, I’m sorry for my stupidity. This is what you saw, Cori? This is why you fled, to save yourself. This is what frightened the shit out of you. This fear I feel now was your fear. These muffled screams were your screams. Oh, Bolivia, my beautiful mamacita in heaven, Corina in Chalatenango, have mercy on me and save me from this lunatic. Something has happened, now I can see that this uncouth man who had been my lover has been endowed with some horrendous power. He was a terrifying being, inside and out; he instilled fear in others and at the same time was devoured by it. His faith was nothing more than panic raised to a maddening power. But this was the first time I witnessed the full metamorphosis. I had known the signs. They were obvious every time we made love.

Sleepy Joe made his way through life half-asleep, lacking in initiative, no plans, indifferent and drowsy, a pack of muscles that went underused. In bed, however, he was able to let loose that impressive voltage that dwelled inside him.

“If you were to put such energy into work,” I always told him, “you’d be a millionaire.”

When it came to sex, everything about him was much too grand and lasted forever. There was in him a kind of excess that made me think of a goat, an animal in heat, a satyr, something not quite human, like those hyperactive and hypersexual monkeys Violeta and I saw once in the zoo, jerking off and fucking like crazy in the cage. Violeta was speechless. “Let’s go,” I told her, grabbing her arm, “come on, Violeta, there are other cute animals.” But Violeta did not move from there. “You go,” she responded, “I want to see this.” I had also glimpsed the other Sleepy Joe, in those fits of rage that made him want to kill everyone and everything. This monk-like creature on the roof was not my brother-in-law, not my boyfriend or my lover, not his brother Greg, not the poor, good-for-nothing Joe, the sleepy, lonely, fake trucker. He was something else now, a feverish possessed lunatic, a sinister priest, a murderer clown. This son of a bitch would no doubt kill me, I thought. Suddenly that became very clear to me. Or at the least impale me with a broom, as he had done to Corina.

There were some nails lying around and I started to try to reach them with my foot, little by little, so he wouldn’t notice. Until finally I was able to get a hand on one and with it I started to loosen the knot on the belt, doing it in little steps, patiently, slowly. It was time to gamble all or nothing: Sleepy Joe was flying, stoned with the divine presence, and as the knot started to come loose, I gave a good pull on the belt, managed to free myself, and flew down the stairs as fast as I could. I wasn’t going to make the same mistake as before, no more of this hiding in the rat hole. This time, I grabbed my mink and shoes, and Joe’s wallet, which in a stroke of brilliance I snagged out of his jacket, and ran out the door. I flew down the stairs and out into the street! I buttoned the mink all the way up so that it wasn’t obvious I was butt naked underneath, and soon I was down in the labyrinths of the subway.

Hero! Shit, I had left Hero behind again. I hadn’t even seen him when I rushed out, and to look for him at that moment would have been suicide. But whatever was to happen, this time I was committing to rescuing him once and for all. At the next station, I got out of the subway and hailed a cab. You must be wondering, Mr. Rose, why I just didn’t call the cops to have Sleepy Joe arrested. The answer is simply that the cops are the enemy, that’s the main difference between your people and my people. You have authority on your side, and we always have it against us. If I would have gone to the cops in the state I was in, an ex-con in their eyes, a mess, ass naked under the mink, do you get how fucked I would have been, Mr. Rose?

“Just go,” I told the cabdriver.

“Where?”

“Just away from here.”

After a few minutes of riding around, I gave the driver my address. When we got there, I instructed him to park nearby, behind some garbage Dumpster halfway down the block. I scrutinized the driver while we waited. He was an ogre from the very heart of Africa, a man of few words who took shit from no one. This was my man, I told myself. Nothing was going to faze this guy. And money was not a problem because there was three hundred dollars in my brother-in-law’s wallet.

“If you don’t mind, I’m going to hide here,” I told the driver, crouching on the floor of the backseat and greasing his hand with a hundred-dollar bill. “Go up to the fifth floor of that building and let me know if there is anyone there. Go in the apartment, check everywhere, the bathroom, the kitchen, everywhere. If there’s no one there, check the roof, just a look, and come down and let me know. There’s no lock on the door. I just don’t want to run into my drunk of a husband, you know. He hits me when he drinks. No big thing, you have nothing to worry—”

“I’m not worried,” he cut me off. It seemed he’d done this kind of thing before.

“If you run into him, just say you must have the wrong floor.”

“I can take care of myself, miss.”

“Good, I’ll wait for you here.”

Ten minutes later, the driver returned. Good as new.

“He’s in there alright,” he told me. “On the roof. Some tall blond dude?”

“Then let’s wait till he comes out. I’ll stay down here and you keep a lookout. I have another fifty. Easy money. Just tell me when he leaves.”

“There goes the son of a bitch,” the driver announced forty-five minutes later. “That’s the dude on the roof.”

And sure enough, it was him — hands in pockets, head buried under the upturned collar of his jacket. Sleepy Joe walked down the street and out of sight.

“Wait for me here,” I said to the driver. The plan was to go quickly into the apartment, get Hero, some clothes, especially the stuff Pro Bono bought me for the trial, which I had left sitting out, and leave there forever.

“Hero?” I started calling him. “Hero? Hero! Come here, my little doggy, where are you, my precious? Where you hiding? Come to Mommy. Don’t be afraid; Joe’s gone; the monster’s not here.” But nothing. I looked for him under the sofa, behind the refrigerator, in the bathtub, the closets, nothing. He had to be somewhere. He always used to hide really well when Sleepy Joe was around, but I couldn’t find him anywhere and it was not that big of an apartment. I climbed up to the roof, already very freaked out, I knew he couldn’t even climb up there in his state, but I went to check. The sun was already hitting the tar full force, and the remains of Joe’s ceremony were scattered all about. Candle stubs, little wax puddles, a few rags blown by the breeze, and a thread of smoke from incense still burning. That’s it. Now that I’m telling you this, Mr. Rose, I recall this amazing nightclub I once went to with Sleepy Joe because Greg was out of town tending to some problem in his other house. Sleepy Joe and I went dancing, my idea — I paid for it and chose the place, a nightclub named Le Palace that was one of the most astonishing places I had seen in my life, with music blasting so loud that I felt it vibrating inside of me, and that extravagant mob flying on Ecstasy and drinking tons of water, women showing off their tits, the trannies wrapped in sequins and feathers, the couples amid the incredible high-tech laser light show. Four floors of live music, and I floated amid the lights and careless laughter as if I were inside a fish tank, not knowing for sure if all that was real or if I was just dreaming. Needless to say, I had an amazing time, even if Sleepy Joe was in a shitty mood and had to be dragged to the dance floor. But in the middle of it all, I lost an earring. It was a little gold stud that I really liked but I hadn’t even noticed I had lost it till I got home. So the following morning, I had to go back to the nightclub and see if I could find the earring. The place was closed but the workers let me in while they looked, and I was shocked. In the light of day, the spell from the night before was shattered. Imagine Cinderella’s world after the clock strikes twelve. The so-called Le Palace was just an empty soulless warehouse area, a really gloomy place, deathly silent and with battered furniture covered with dust, badly painted black walls, torn curtains, a suffocating smell of cigarettes, and garbage in every corner. In the light of the day, the nocturnal paradise was reduced to ashes. Now, on the roof of my building, I looked with the same unease at what remained of the great ceremony my brother-in-law had conducted. It was so desolate, such an inconsequential place, littered with broken toys. That was the feeling I had, as if I were seeing the remnants of a children’s game. The whole scene was nothing more than a poor imitation, an absurdity instead of a real ritual. And that had been the horrible scene, the dark nightmare? I swear I felt ridiculous about the ghosts I had invented in my head. Where had that unwarranted fear that had left me paralyzed just a couple of hours before come from? But then I found something that congealed the blood in my veins. It was something so frightening that my legs weakened and I fell to the ground. I had to cover my mouth to stifle the scream that escaped from me, in pieces, almost comical, like one of those doomed girls in a horror film. What followed was something visceral, absolute terror. I saw Hero. Sleepy Joe had nailed him to the wall. My doggy. Sleepy Joe had nailed my dog to a wall up there on the roof. There was Hero crucified, bleeding, and already dead. I bent over at the waist clutching my stomach as if someone had kicked me there. I was paralyzed by the pain, the horror, the anguish, the trembling, shaking like a leaf, Mr. Rose. When I was finally able to react, I pulled the nails off, washed the wounds, kissed Hero’s snout, and stroked his body a long time, crying over him, and then I placed the remains in a pillowcase.

From Cleve’s Notebook

I hadn’t known anything else about María Paz since the workshop at Manninpox had ended. But I thought a lot about her, all the time, I should say. I was hooked to her pain, tangled to her hair, dreaming of her eyes, maddeningly wanting to touch her legs. Who knew if I would see her again, and the uncertainty was killing me. When I tried to visit her in prison, they told me she wasn’t there anymore. Her old friends couldn’t tell me anything about her because they had not heard from her. And then one morning, I’m on Facebook and I get a friend request. I always deny them, hating these intrusions from strangers. But this one said, “Juanita wants to be your friend.” I had no idea who this Juanita was, but it was a Latina name and I immediately thought that perhaps it might help if I became friends with her in relation to María Paz. Instinct? Premonition? Neither, really, more like desperate love. How many times had I answered the phone convinced it would be her, and nothing? How many times had I followed some woman down the street thinking it could be her, and nothing? And now another time, this friend request on Facebook, which I immediately thought could be connected to her. And it was. This time it was.

María Paz had been looking for me through her friend, this Juanita getting in touch. So we arranged to meet that afternoon in Central Park, and because I was coming from the Catskills, full of hope and very jittery, I almost killed myself on the way down trying to get there on time. The meet-up was somewhere she had proposed, near the statue of Alice in Wonderland, right in the heart of the park.

I can’t say that there was anything exciting about that first moment, anything romantic. Something wasn’t right, something had broken, and things were different than they had been in Manninpox. I had spent weeks going over in my mind each of those moments of shared complicity, those sudden bursts of excitement, those shocks of illicit attraction between us. But at the park, all that was gone. In the plain light of day, in an area reserved mostly for children, with her as free as I was, no guards watching us, no rules and regulations to follow, the magic had gone. We were a couple of strangers, she without a uniform, all made-up, her hair longer, a flashy pair of earrings. Perhaps prettier than before, I’m not sure, but definitely a lot thinner. And something strange about her, as if the fire of that raw beauty that made me so insanely attracted to her had suddenly gone out. Something missing, that’s how I would put it. She looked dazed, half-asleep. I felt as if I were looking at some creature that had just risen from the dead, some being from some other reality that hadn’t fully made it into ours. I tried to convince myself that the girl of my dreams and this stranger were the same person, but something faltered in me. I went to give her a hug, see if the physical contact would thaw things a bit, but she brusquely cut me off, and I felt horrible, mistaken, ridiculous, out of my element. Later, she told me of the sudden and miraculous turn of events that had led to her freedom, which I supposed had a lot to do with this new mood between us. This woman has just come back from the underworld, I told myself, so it was natural that our world would still be a little strange to her. And what had been her first impression of me? Couldn’t have been much better. I must have seemed just like any other guy, no longer donning the writing teacher mantle, instead wearing a threadbare leather vest and boots, which were white because I had bought them in a thrift store and that was the only color available, but which aside from being white were also bulky, as if they were made for an astronaut to walk on the moon, not to mention the ugly red mark on my forehead because my helmet was one size too small. Some motorcyclists take off their helmets, tidy up their hair, and look great in a matter of minutes. I am not one of them. When I take off my helmet, I look sopped and disoriented, like a plucked chicken. The first thing María Paz asked me was if I had received her manuscript. And I said I had no idea what she was talking about. What manuscript? A very long one, she told me, and it had taken her days and days to write it while she was still in Manninpox. She was horribly disappointed when she realized I didn’t even know about it. It was clear she had put everything she had into writing her story, and that the manuscript had been lost was like a blow to the gut, one more loss among so many others. I felt like an idiot consoling her, assuring her we could find it, could find out what that woman from Staten Island who was supposed to have sent it to me did with it.

“Why did you try to send it through that woman and not your lawyer?” I asked her, and she said that there had been rumors going around that everything was going to be confiscated and she had no choice but to hand it off to the first person who showed up to visit.

Be that as it may, things were tense there in the park. Maybe we had both been expecting too much, and when it came to it, things were just different. Maybe my expectations were just different from hers, but, whatever the cause, it was an anticlimactic scene. It seemed in fact as if the old connection was missing. The conversation was going in reverse, each exchange of words like giving birth, the kind of birth where you have to use forceps, and that was just on my part; I was doing all the heavy breathing and pushing and all the while she remained undaunted: silent and absent. There I was, putting on a show, playing ping-pong against myself. What a difference from those moments after class in the prison, the way we contained ourselves in front of the other inmates, the distress in front of the guards, the indirect communications between her and me, the little word games, disguised seduction, all that spilled energy, the sexual drive under extreme circumstances. All that illicit flirtation, that pseudo fucking right there in that jail, or at least that’s what it seemed to me, but now everything was flat, sadly antiorgasmic. We finally had a chance to tell each other everything we had kept suppressed before, but it was as if there wasn’t anything to say. María Paz was definitely acting strange. She seemed so dejected, so sad. I tried to change the mood with a rigorous interrogation: “When did you leave Manninpox? Have you been found innocent? Are you on some sort of parole? How have you been since then? Have you been able to get in touch with your sister?” Such basic questions seemed to puzzle her, or bore her, or something; in any case, she let them pass without even trying to respond. When I asked about her time in jail after the class was canceled, she responded with a gesture of indifference and said, “I told you about all that already in the manuscript that was lost. Everything was in there.

“Tomorrow is my trial,” she told me suddenly, and then a bulb came on inside my head: the eve of the trial, of course, that is the root of the problem, worst time possible for any kind of romantic connection. I told her that it was no wonder she seemed concerned.

“No, it has nothing to do with the trial,” she retorted.

“So, what is it then?”

“My writing, does that not matter to you? Do you know how many days I spent writing that? How many hours, with shitty pencils the size of a cigarette butt? Even in the dark, I wrote. Come on, Mr. Rose. I dreamed you were going to read all of it one day, kissing ass with the guards, to see if they could slip me any piece of paper, and now that all the shit is lost, all that work for nothing, and you’re telling me I shouldn’t be upset.”

“María Paz, I’m really sorry, me more than anyone, but don’t be like that with me, it’s not my fault.”

“It is your fault, who else’s? You were the one who put all these delusions into my head,” she responded, turning her back to me and pulling some papers out of her bag, which she tore into pieces and threw in a trash can.

“What are you doing?” I shouted to her. “What are you tearing?”

“New chapters that I brought you. So what? Everything is fucked anyway.”

Quite the little scene she was putting on, right in the middle of the park, an unexpected tantrum by a spoiled brat and with the destruction of the manuscript in theatrical gestures à la Moses breaking the Tablets of the Law. If I had not been a writer or aspiring to be, I would have never understood the frustration of someone who had spilled her guts on these pages, and when I say on every page, I mean every paragraph, every line… and more so under such harsh conditions as she’d done because of what I had made her believe. So it felt like a violation when she was tearing up the pages, as if she were violating some part of her, and both of us remained still, shivering, and mourning.

It took a couple of minutes to react, but eventually I did. I moved to the garbage, and, like a Red Cross volunteer, I set off to rescue any of the surviving torn pieces of manuscript. Some had been smeared with organic yogurt, others with the remains of Turkish wraps, and the luckiest ones Van Leeuwen ice cream.

“Leave it alone, Mr. Rose,” she told me, “don’t.”

But that wasn’t going to stop me. I continued sifting through the garbage, which I was not disgusted with at all, until I had recovered most of the manuscript, and although all wrinkled and sticky, my girl’s chapters made it out of the sinking boat alive and ready for a little reconstructive surgery. I put the pieces in a plastic bag that I also found in the garbage and tucked the bag safely in a jacket pocket. I had hoped that after my heroic feat there would be some appreciation, or admiration, the kind of moment when Lois Lane finds out the geek Clark Kent is Superman. But that wasn’t the case. María Paz hardly reacted.

“Why would you bother?” was all she said to me, but I suspect that deep down the gesture had moved her.

After a while I asked, “Do you want me to go?” And she asked, “Where?”

“To your trial, María Paz. I want to go with you.” And she accepted, but accepted without much excitement, and so we remained there, acting like strangers. Me from a simple and calm world, she from one shaken by drama; me with a secure future, she with her fate hanging by a hair; me looking at her from between the ears of the White Rabbit, she sitting on the bronze mushroom beside the Mad Hatter; the two of us finding no way to break our deafness, or our muteness, because we had failed to articulate what we had wanted to say from the moment we met. In any case, I felt exhausted, defeated, convinced by that point that I had invented everything, that all that give-and-take at Manninpox had been unilateral, that any give had a corresponding take that was just a figment of my imagination. Standing there, it occurred to me to ask, “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” The riddle posed by the Mad Hatter in Carroll’s book. I guess I asked it because what else was there to say with us just standing there. María Paz knew how to respond: “I give it up. What is the answer?” she said. Exactly what Alice says. She must have read the book at least twice, because she knew exactly what I was talking about and kept to the script perfectly. “I haven’t the slightest idea,” I replied, just as the Mad Hatter did. Bingo! There was the magic, the connection, the key to the door that was closed until that moment.

Then finally we laughed, as if we had suddenly recognized each other. We hugged. Holy shit, what a hug, the great, long hug of two people who become one, using four arms to press in, to amass, until they find that they no longer want to let go. Her face buried in my chest, my face buried in her hair, a long-expected, long-awaited hug from eternity to forever. I mean, it was the hug of a lifetime. Things between us began to proceed as before, or much better than before; arguably, we moved the second stage of a narrative, which graphic novelists call “things go right” and that comes after “conflict begins” and before “things go wrong.” By now, we were starting to float in the bliss of “things go right,” and she told me she wanted to know something about my world because I had shared hers during my days at Manninpox, but she did not know anything about mine except what she had imagined from the few facts that I let seep in.

“We can do that later,” I said. “For now it is important you rest and get ready…”

“Perhaps there is no later,” she said. “I want to do it now.”

I asked her if she wanted to visit Dorita, and it upset her because she thought I meant my girlfriend. I explained that Dorita was not my girlfriend but the girlfriend of the suicide poet, and that she and the poet were the protagonists in my series of graphic novels. I suggested we visit the Forbidden Planet on Broadway, which sold manga and anime, retro and modern comics, pop-culture items, Japanese figures, and T-shirts and hoodies, and where both vendors and patrons were fans of my novels. I explained that Forbidden Planet was a heaven for nerds, a nostalgic corner that smelled of lost childhood, where children who were no longer children went to look for toys. It had been one of my places of worship and a great showcase for my Suicide Poet and His Girlfriend Dorita. She agreed to go but said she wanted to eat something first.

We went into the first diner on Madison Avenue that we passed and ordered spinach omelets and salad, and she began to recount, from beginning to end, the implausible events that led to her release from Manninpox and the multitude of things that had happened since. All of it was very emotional, and I thought she was going to break down and start weeping, but she didn’t: my girl was beyond tears. Though the trial was to take place the next day, we did not say anything, not a word, not mentioning it as if to not tempt fate. But, finally, the topic had to be addressed; it was unwise to continue avoiding it.

“The only thing that’s important now is the trial,” I said, very aware that it was not the best way to approach the issue. She remained firm and did not answer. Instead, she talked a lot about Sleepy Joe, her brother-in-law, and confessed that she had also been his lover. She harped so much on this guy, it made me feel lousy, because at the time, she seemed interested only in him. And what a story she told, a folksy and spooky version of the drama of Paolo and Francesca, the two kin who become lovers and dwell in Dante’s hell. The difference was those two had been killed by the husband, while in this story the husband was dead. According to the description María Paz offered of her brother-in-law, I saw him as a sexist, an abuser of women, an ultra-Catholic, an uneducated and violent man… an ordinary person. And then, I saw him for real. Speaking of the devil or its semblance. At first, I saw it in the eyes of María Paz, the flash of panic. She was facing the entrance to the diner, and I was on the other side of the table, facing the back of the room.

Suddenly she saw something, or someone, who appeared behind me, and the color drained from her face. I turned to look toward the door and saw this somewhat handsome thug with a hostile, sullen, pissed-off look on his face. He was white, muscular, and supple, but show-offy, cocky, wearing very tight jeans, the kind you have to put on using plastic bags, topped off with an ostentatious belt buckle that signaled he was ready to whip anyone. He avoided looking our way, though it was clear he saw us. He passed right by and sat at a table a few feet away with his back to us.

“That’s him,” María told me, grabbing her bag and getting ready to run out of there.

“Him?” I asked, although I had guessed already. “Who?”

“Him, Sleepy Joe,” she murmured his name as if it were an evil spell, and I, very nervous, was only able to respond that she should calm down. I suggested she should not let her fear show.

“What did he do to you that you get like this?” I asked several times, but she didn’t respond. She pretended to continue to eat but couldn’t even swallow one bite; it was obvious that she was not all there. I only had a view of the man’s back, and I noticed how he passed his hand through his ashy, dirty hair every once in a while; but then he turned as if wanting to catch my eyes. And I couldn’t avoid them, those eyes, inexpressive, fucking cold eyes devoid of feeling. At that moment, I realized that he was your typical neighborhood hoodlum, a good-for-nothing, but I sensed something very dark dwelled inside him. This poor devil could become the devil himself, I thought.

“What’s up with this horrible guy?” I began to ask María Paz, but she got up and dashed out of the diner before I could finish speaking.

She hurried up Madison Avenue with me trailing her, and pushed through the heavy glass door of an upscale boutique, running all the way to the back of the store like a soul possessed. In the shoe section, I finally caught up and grabbed her by the arm.

“Why is he following you?” I asked.

“Because he wants some money he thinks I have, but I don’t have it. Partly because of that, and partly because he loves me.”

We ran back to my bike and got on to try and lose this loser: a blurry sequence of turns and skids, me and María Paz going around in circles in the city, feeling this animal on our heels, disappearing into alleys and passageways to shake him off. Meanwhile, I was trying to get María Paz to explain things to me, to get me up to speed about this threat, this mystery. The realization hit me like a bucket of cold water, that unlike when we were behind walls of Manninpox, where I didn’t have to deal with the crimes she may have committed, here, in the real world, in the streets of New York, I was getting the whole package, the girl and the consequences, the girl and her past, the girl and her true story, the one that she had not wanted to tell me in the writing exercises I assigned for class — me insisting we should call the cops on Sleepy Joe, she insisting we could not.

“That son of a bitch is harassing you,” I said almost furious. “Why don’t you just fucking turn him in?”

She refused without offering any explanations, so I just tried to convince her to spend the night in my studio, where I knew I could take care of her. I told her I would sleep on the floor and she could have the bed so she could rest, that the following day I would make her breakfast. Then a nice hot shower that would leave her feeling like new, and I would take her on my bike to Bronx Criminal Division, escorting her safe and sound right up to the door of the courtroom. For some reason she refused. Unbelievable, just like a woman. According to what she told me, the only reason why she couldn’t stay with me that night was that she had clothes for the trial stashed away in some other place, and she wanted to look good. “We’ll get the clothes and then I’ll take you home with me.” I begged her, but she made the whole thing difficult, too much of a big deal, and there was no way to convince her.

“If everything goes well tomorrow, we’ll take off wherever we want to go,” she promised me, “but if things go the other way, well then, they go the other way.”

I knew that phrase was going to play in my head all night; I wasn’t going to be able to shut my eyes for fear of dreaming of the places I would take her if everything went well, the secret beaches, the cabins in the woods, Prague, Istanbul, Santorini, or Buenos Aires. But all those dreams would be overshadowed by the threat of this fucking shit Sleepy Joe. I would have to ask her for a few more details, tell her to paint me a more complete picture, so I wouldn’t have spent that most important morning in her life wandering around. Because she assured me she had a place to stay, I let her go against my wishes. The best I could do was to promise her that the following day I would be there in the first row, keeping her spirits up. I could not stop her from getting off my bike and running down the subway steps into the bowels of the city. She hadn’t given me a phone number or an address where I could reach her in case of an emergency. “What for?” she said. “We are going to see each other in a couple of hours at the trial.”

The following day, I arrived before there was anyone in the courtroom, all dressed up in suit and tie, and I sat in the first row like I had promised her. A pair of attendants came in to install microphones, move some chairs around, and do whatever else, their steps echoing in the empty chamber as they left.

María Paz was still not there. A little while later, other people started coming in, guards, a lawyer, a very peculiar old man who I imagined was her lawyer, everyone, except her. The minutes passed and she did not arrive, my nerves were a mess, everyone else was just looking at their watches. There was no sign of her. I chewed my nails to the nubs and no sign of her. It sounds unbelievable, but María Paz never came. For some reason she never showed up. Never showed up to her own trial, forcing the judge to declare her in contempt and issue an arrest warrant, setting the powers of the law after her. What the fuck had happened?

It was the strangest thing and I racked my brain trying to come up with reasons for such a disaster: 1) Sleepy Joe had found María Paz and killed her. 2) Sleepy Joe had found María Paz and kidnapped her. 3) María Paz was running from me and she went looking for Sleepy Joe because deep down she was still in love with him, and they decided to flee the country together. 4) Somebody else did not want María Paz to testify and offed her. 5) María Paz hit her head and came down with amnesia like in the movies. From the moment I left the courtroom, all those reasons kept turning in my head, driving me crazy.

I remembered the manuscript from the day before and I returned quickly to St. Mark’s, dashed into the studio, took out the pieces from the pocket of my leather jacket, cleaned them up as best as I could, spread them out on my desk and began to tape the pieces together like a jigsaw puzzle. A puzzle that was about life and death, and I almost couldn’t shuffle because my hands were trembling so hard. It was dark by the time I had something that I could halfway read. The story in that manuscript was alarming, like everything about that woman, but in the end, it shed no light on what would have led her to miss her trial.

There was nothing to do. I had run out of hope. María Paz had lost herself again in the world, and I had no other option but to wait, night and day, until I heard from Juanita on Facebook again or some other sign reached me. If that happened, then María Paz was still alive. In more optimistic moments, I imagined her as a fugitive, hidden in some hole looking for a way to contact me. Although it could be that by that point she could be in a bikini wandering the beaches of Puerto Vallarta, in the arms of the criminal Sleepy Joe. I was desperate, checking my e-mail and Facebook all the time, reading the papers to see if there was any news of her arrest or even her death. Anything was possible, and I was in a bad state, completely disconcerted, with absolutely no appetite, and consumed by anxiety.

I’m writing this in a hurry from the Catskills. This afternoon I have to leave for Chicago, and I want to write down the recent events, now that I have finally been able to reconstruct everything. I don’t want to let another day pass, so I don’t forget any of the details. What else can I do? It’s the dark part of this job. María Paz was going to be the heroine of my next series of graphic novels; the poetry before all, as Hölderlin said. In the end, the hand follows the heart. After our meeting in the park and running from Sleepy Joe, María Paz went to some place in Queens, to the home of her friend Juanita, an ex-coworker, who had the clothes that María needed to wear for the trial. Juanita caught her up on all the hot gossip from work, made sure she had a good night’s sleep and a full breakfast, helped her dress, and said good-bye to her at the door with a big hug. “Good luck, my dear,” she said. She didn’t go to the trial because she couldn’t miss work, but that night she waited for her at the Estrella Latina, the best place in town, where they were going to celebrate by partying all night long.

“Can I bring a friend?” María Paz had asked her.

“A friend? There is a friend? Great. What’s his name?”

“Rose.”

“Ha. A lot of rug munchers in these women’s jails. So then your friend is a woman?”

“He’s a man, silly. A gringo. Rose is his last name.”

“Is he cute?”

“You’ll see for yourself. If they don’t throw me up in jail again.”

María Paz got to East 161st Street with plenty of time to spare. When she got out of the cab, the tight skirt ran up her legs, and she noticed the driver sneak a peek. Outside the courthouse, she tidied up her outfit, wet the ends of her fingers with her tongue, and pushed back a lock of hair that kept falling obnoxiously over her forehead. Following Pro Bono’s instructions to the letter, she had tied her hair up in a tight bun. She looked very distinguished, Juanita had told her, she seemed Andalusian. “A big-eared Andalusian,” María Paz had responded, pointing to her ears that jutted out of her head, according to her like the fins of a shark. It was a beautiful day, chilly sunlight and a blue sky, but she felt as if she had a dark cloud hanging over her. The feeling didn’t bode well, but nevertheless she made her way resolutely across the plaza toward the central building of Bronx Criminal Division. She strode toward the place courageously, although she thought it was an absurd courage, because it was leading her straight to her doom. Yet, she kept moving. Whatever would be would be; she was ready for it. In the end, it was all the same. Today was her day. If there were any justice in this world, things would turn out okay. But whoever said there was any justice in this world? She had given this a lot of thought and concluded that justice was just a sham, a shadow-puppet show put on by society to avoid dealing with the issues, a kind of theater that had nothing to do with ascertaining the truth. She would have liked to have felt strong, optimistic, confident, beautiful. Her lawyer was the best in town, and she was wearing a dark suit that looked amazing on her, surprising even her when she caught the reflection of her svelte figure in the glass windows. Crazy, she thought, finally I look a little bit like Holly; I had to go through all that hell just to look just a little bit like her. She clung to the two-thousand-dollar Gucci purse as if it were a shield, and she thought that wearing the pink scarf was a herald of her imminent victory. On her neck was the broken coin necklace given to her by her mother, Bolivia, when she had left for America, on her finger the wedding ring given to her by her deceased husband. Both pieces of jewelry been returned to her when she left prison, but today she felt as if the amulets were not working. Rub them all she wanted, but they were powerless. “Wish me luck, Gregory,” she told Greg. “Don’t go abandoning me now because I cheated on you, you know how much I have already paid for that.” “Help me, my beautiful mommy,” she told Bolivia as she crossed the esplanade, “if you are with me at all, you have to help me.” María Paz had gussied herself up the same way her mother had many years before when she went to meet the official from the immigration office to get her green card, and María wanted to believe that this time things would come out just as well. It would be just if they came out just as well, so much effort couldn’t have been in vain, so much struggle to conquer America could not end in tragedy. “Come on, Bolivia, lend me your strength, help me, Mommy, this is your mission, don’t forsake me now, don’t let your dream end in a nightmare.”

“Mommy? Greg?”

Nothing.

“Mommy? Greg?”

No one responded.

Today, my dead are dead, María Paz thought.

For days she had been meticulously studying the dossier Pro Bono had given her, all the instructions of what to say and what to keep quiet. Everything she had to say was memorized, but the words weren’t hers, nothing of what she was going to say in that courtroom room was what she really thought. Pro Bono had warned her that the outcome of that day would depend in large part on her, by her ability to radiate a bright light, her ability to seem transparent and reliable. That will be hard, she thought, very hard to radiate a bright light in this fucking bleak mood. Because deep down she knew they were going to break her. What kind of verdict can you expect from people who don’t know her, who don’t like her, who don’t care about her? And why would someone like her expect justice? She, who had experienced firsthand the arbitrariness of it all? She had to be optimistic, as Pro Bono had advised and I had insisted. Me, Cleve Rose, known to her as Mr. Rose. But all she felt was fatigue, a tremendous fatigue that had no cure.

“It has been so long since I make any decisions for myself,” she had complained to her friend Juanita. “Everyone making decisions for me. Life has pushed me where it wants without consulting me, giving me little choice.”

Today, her fate would be decided by a flip of the coin, she knew that whether it’d be head or tails, the world would go on as it always did. In the end, what did this trial have to do with her, when she knew she would be nothing more than a spectator there? It would be others who decided, and she would have to attack. For the moment, she continued crossing the plaza toward the main entrance. Once inside, she would have to pass through the metal detector, submit to a pat down, show her appointment citation, and cross the huge lobby to find her courtroom. But before she got there, she had the impression that she was being watched from above. It was nothing but a slight disturbance, a vague intuition, someone’s eyes fixed on her, something like a silent scream from above that made her look up.

Above she saw Pro Bono leaning over a railing in the gallery. She was about to wave to him, but something held her back. She had never seen such an expression on the lawyer’s face, a stony and urgent look, as if he had been trying to get her attention forever. Why hadn’t he just called her name? All it would have taken was one little shout. But Pro Bono could only stare, Jesus Christ how he stared, a frightening gaze. When he finally got her attention, he made a tiny gesture that took but a second, and her veins grew cold. A secret gesture meant only for her among the crowd of people in the main lobby: he slid the tip of his index finger across his throat, as if he were slitting it. The message was loud and clear to María Paz: you’re fucked, he was saying, and there was nothing he could do. Pro Bono then shook his head, almost imperceptibly, but clearly signaling for her not to come any closer, now with a small shooing gesture, telling her to get out, to leave before it was too late. And then he repeated the first sign, as if to leave no room for misinterpretation, the index finger slicing across his throat. Everything was clear. Pro Bono was telling her, go, flee before it’s too late. While up in the gallery, Pro Bono adjusted the knot on his tie as if that was what he had meant to do when he brought his hand to his throat, down in the great lobby María Paz felt like she was going to barf, as if all the breakfast that Juanita had made for her was coming back up, the Rice Krispies, orange juice, and toast with a poached egg. Her head began to get hot, her heart thumped in her throat, her pupils dilated, and her legs grew wobbly. She was going to have to turn around and head out the way she had come, and do so unnoticed in that place watched over by a hive of undercover cops, secret agents, whistleblowers, security guards, and cops. She slowed down but avoided stopping altogether, which would have given her away, so she got hold of herself, straightened her posture, took a deep breath, put on a blank expression, and forced herself to take a few more steps forward. She got into the act that had been scripted on the spot: she was late, and with a dramatic gesture of a smack on her forehead with the palm of her hand, she realized that she had forgotten something. She pretended to look frantically for that something inside her bag and then murmured a reprimand to herself for being such an idiot. How could I have left that in the car? Now she had to dash back to get it, she simply had to. Her confidence grew and she even managed an embarrassed smile—I know, I know. I’m such a nincompoop; I didn’t bring the most important thing. She realized that her nostrils were flaring, a sign that she was beginning to hyperventilate, something that had first happened to her in Manninpox, and that now occurred every time she became too anxious. She made a concerted effort to breathe evenly, turned 180 degrees to head back, and exited the building, remaining very cognizant as she moved away that one false move meant her doom. Above all, she must not look back. She commanded herself: Do not turn around or your fate is ten times worse than a pillar of salt. To her surprise, she was suddenly very enlivened by an odd current of new energy rushing through her insides. No, she murmured, now everything is entirely up to me. She would no longer have to play as the visiting team, she could finally rely on her own strengths, and those at least she could trust. She sensed that a door had opened to a new world, and she was suddenly thirsty for life and desperate for the freedom she had not experienced in so long. Let’s see, you bastards, she challenged the world. Let’s see who comes up on top this time. Stand back, motherfuckers. You’re not going to snatch me this time. Serenity and control, those were the crucial twin elements in the moments that she left the plaza behind and headed toward the parking lot. She lengthened her stride a bit but did not shift into a run, emulating the brisk pace of top models on the runway instead. She was just someone who had forgotten an important document in her car and was in a hurry to get it. She made it to the parking lot, meaning she had gotten through the worst of it, had left the minefields behind her. And at that moment, she was overcome with a weird urge to return home. She missed the Nava sisters and yearned for Bolivia. She needed Mandra X and wanted to hug Violeta, pet Hero, find a coin to call Corina. Or to be holding the large, safe hand of her husband, Greg. Or her father’s hand, whomever it was that hand may have belonged to; even that bastard Peruvian seaman who was probably her father came out well in this hypnotizing script she was writing on the spot. If she could only close her eyes and return home. She was inundated with a sudden wave of nostalgia, an unforgiving depletion of adrenaline that left her exhausted. Where a few minutes before there was determination, there now followed a schmaltzy indifference that was no help at all. But the worst of it only lasted a few minutes because the revelation suddenly struck like lightning. Home? What home? What goddamned home have you ever had? How can you return to something that never existed? This lightning strike did not bring her down. On the contrary, it burned away the gauzy, drooly nostalgia that was hypnotizing her and debilitating her. She remembered a Juanes music video that had been playing a lot recently, Juanes in an orange jumpsuit whispering in a gringo prisoner’s ear, “No one left to account to, no one left to judge me.” And damn it, he was right. That’s how I feel, baby, with nothing to explain and no one to explain it to. I’m coming after you, Juanes, and God save those who try to judge me. I feel sorry for them waiting for me with the verdict that they can stick where the sun don’t shine, because it’s me, and I account to no one. There’s no love that will stop me or hate that will hinder me; even if I waltz straight to hell, I still win. Heads or tails, I win. She had all her powers under her control and was finally going to get ahead, two steps forward and one step forward, like her mother used to say, the Colombian Wonder Woman, fucking them all and blasting them into little pieces. She took out the useless keys to her apartment and made them obviously visible and jingled them, the keys of the car door she was about to open. The rows of cars before her became obstacles that she needed to overcome, that she was already overcoming. She walked past the first row, the second, the third. Someone approached her from behind, a man apparently from the heavy steps. He was getting closer and closer, almost directly behind her. María Paz chose a cherry-red car, a color that inspired confidence, and pretended it was hers. She placed her bag on the roof, pulled out her sunglasses and put them on, and turned to face the intruder.

“Do you have a cigarette by any chance?” she asked him.

The man pulled out a box of Marlboros, gave her a cigarette, and lit it with a Zippo before he moved along. Then and only then, while she pretended to smoke and tried not to cough, did she dare look at her watch for the first time. It was still ten minutes before the scheduled opening of the trial, 11:30 a.m. The alarm bells had not gone off yet; the hounds had not been let loose. She still had at least twenty minutes before they began to suspect she might not show and started looking for her. She stayed in place till her pulse recovered to normal. It didn’t matter if fires raged inside, as long as outside the air seemed calm. Purposefully, she kept the air of a well-dressed, handsome woman in her sunglasses on a cigarette break by her car — nothing so strange about that: Why would she smoke inside the car and stink it all up? Anyone who saw her would think nothing of it, just a woman who now casually crushed the butt of the cigarette on the pavement, a regular person, maybe a secretary or a lawyer, or someone who worked in the administrative offices of the court, certainly not a former inmate at Manninpox; those folks did not look so decent, they did not own two-thousand-dollar Gucci bags.

From some nook in her mind, the elusive image of a dream from the previous night alighted: a huge vagina made of cloth, just the thing itself, unattached, the edges sewn together and round as a ball. Furry, rabbit-like creatures poke out of gashes in the vagina, but they are indeed not rabbits. Someone tells her that one of the creatures is ill, and she picks it out right away, because it is the one throbbing. She cuddles it in her hands and calms it down because she knows that this little beast, or whatever it is, will be safe with her. She gives it a three-letter name that she has never heard before: AIX. The little creature immediately responds to the name. And that’s it, that’s all she remembers, because the dream bursts and vanishes like a soap bubble.

But María Paz remembered the name, and before leaving the parking lot, she wrote it with her finger in the coat of dirt on the cherry-red car. At the last moment, she noticed that Pro Bono’s Lamborghini was parked nearby. It had to be his, there was no mistaking it, and it would have been too much of a coincidence that there were two of them there. Her first thought was to hide underneath it until the lawyer came back, ask him what happened, why he had made her flee, figure out what happened, count on him to escape, rely on him, take shelter under his wing. But she immediately thought otherwise. She didn’t have to ask Pro Bono anything. She had to believe him and go. He must have had his reasons and that was enough for her. Also, she couldn’t put him in a compromising position; the old man had risked all he could, and she couldn’t ask him for more. No, from that point on, she was her own boss; she was alone. From now on, I will depend on me. All she had to do, her main task, was to get the hell out of New York, the city that opened up before her like a sea. She left the parking lot, mixed in with the passersby on Melrose Avenue, and took the first bus that came along. She got off after a few stops, not really knowing where, and walked as fast as the tight skirt and high heels allowed her. Above all else she needed to be quick on her feet, so when she walked by the first cheap Chinese street vendor, she bought a pair of cloth slippers that she immediately put on, tucking the high heels in her bag in case she needed them later. It was like in those movies where the good guy changes clothes so the bad guys following him won’t recognize him. María Paz took off her coat with the same purpose in mind, pulled out the hairpins holding up her bun, and let her hair fall down her back, her exquisitely black long hair like that of Our Lady of Mount Carmel.

María Paz knew New Yorkers well: she was aware that a select few of them walked down the street in a hurry to get somewhere, well dressed, thin, attired in black and charcoal gray, while the great lot of the rest of them went around dressed as if for a carnival, a grandiloquent parade of ridiculous and absurd Third Worlders. And if only a few moments before she needed to look as if she were one of the snooty ones, now she needed to blend into the anonymous crowd. So at another vendor, she tried on an ensemble of green, red, and yellow scarves, hat, and gloves, an unsightly combination only worn by certain Caribbeans, curiously only where it was hot. She looked at herself in the mirror the salesman had handed her and laughed at the thought of what Bolivia would have said if she had seen her like this — Bolivia, who had always been so well kept, with her light, inoffensive colors — not to mention what Socorro Arias de Salmon, who was so afraid to seem different, would have said. And there was how she, María Paz herself, would have looked upon all this just a few years ago, when she was so terrified of being perceived as having bad taste that she couldn’t breathe, and her main goal was not to seem like Latina trash, so she dissimulated her accent, avoided mentions of her nationality, and made sure to stress time and again that Latinos were not all drug traffickers, not all terrorists or members of the Mara Salvatrucha or the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. Off she went, with the multicolored knit cap pressed down to her eyebrows, the accompanying wool scarf instead of the silk one around her neck, those ridiculous gloves on her hands, the cloth slippers on her feet, and, hanging above her head, the bench warrant and bad name and criminal history. Fuck, wearing all this, who was she going to impress or convince of her innocence? But she was no longer obliged to convince or obey anyone, or be anywhere on time, or look good for anyone, or buy anything, or cancel subscriptions, or pay bills on time, or be or not even be a good lover, or get good grades, or be prettier or skinnier, or show up for an arraignment, or pass any test. None of that, zilch, zero. Jesus Fucking Christ, she thought, putting on this goofy cap has been the most liberating action of my life. Of course, she still had the Gucci bag, which clashed badly with her new look. She thought she should just toss it somewhere, casually throw it out somewhere, or give it to a passerby. But then all eyes would be on her. It would be a major scene, even in a city that has seen everything; people don’t just give Gucci bags to strangers. And shit, why would she give away such a marvelous gift from her lawyer? No sir, she would never again own such a precious thing, that Italian aroma, the thick buckles and perfect size that molded to her hip in such loving fashion.

In one of the subways she took that day, someone next to her was reading the Daily News, and she had been able to get a peek at the pictures and headlines. What an exposé, right in the middle of the paper. On the right page, a picture of a very young and handsome Greg in his police uniform, and on the left page, Greg’s crumpled body in a pool of blood. An emotionally moving picture of Greg with Hero. And one last picture, darker and much smaller, of María Paz herself. The mug shot from Manninpox, her hair a mess, looking like a lioness in heat, the placard with the serial number hanging on her chest. The visual was very obvious: the demented Colombian versus the good American cop. Pro Bono had always told her that juries were very susceptible to the whims of public opinion, and this kind of publicity must have exacerbated their patriotic spirit. It would not have been difficult for Pro Bono to put the pieces together, and she guessed that Pro Bono had grown certain about which way the verdict would go. He must have been very concerned about what he saw in the paper, enough so to give her the signal to go. At least that was her theory. After spending some time making herself scarce among the shelves of bargains in a secondhand store, she took another bus, and when she got off, she slipped into a movie theater. Near dusk, she was attracted by Andean music that was coming from a schoolyard. There was a cookout where traditional dishes were being served, and María Paz bought a ticket. She mingled among the lute and charango musicians, kabobs, ceviches, pisco sours, and Inca dancers late into the night. Right there, among the members of the Peruvian community, she met a family that believed she had recently arrived in New York and offered her a place for the night. As the band grew weary, the guests danced a few more short waltzes and drank a few more pisco sours, because the organizers were about to make last call. The musicians put away their instruments and left, and María Paz looked at her watch. It was 11:20 p.m. In ten minutes, she would have been a fugitive of justice for twelve hours.

At that same time, in another corner of the city, I was freaking out knowing nothing about what had happened to her. And it would be another seven weeks before my uncertainty was eased when I received a Facebook message from Juanita one Saturday morning. The message said, “Two little ducks in front of Dorita.” Shit, it was not an easy message to decode. Two little ducks in front of Dorita. That’s it. Could it be referring to the duck pond in Central Park? The offices of the Ugly Duckling Presse on 3rd Street in Brooklyn, because I had once told the class at Manninpox that I did some work for them? Or maybe the Peking Duck in Chinatown? Nothing made much sense until a bell went off. The “two ducks” could very well be Colombian slang for the number 22, the shape of which resembles two ducks waddling to the left. So maybe it was not code for a place but for the time, twenty-two hundred hours, or 10 p.m. “At Dorita’s” was much easier to figure out. There was only one Dorita who was known to us. María seemed to want to meet at 10 p.m. at Forbidden Planet, where I was going to take her the night of our reunion to show her the series of my graphic novels, The Suicide Poet and His Girlfriend Dorita, before Sleepy Joe changed things. If it wasn’t that, then I had no clue what it could be. A date maybe? I started thinking maybe it made more sense that it was a date. The 22nd of this month? No, it had to be the time. Forbidden Planet at 10 p.m.? But then on what day? The next day, a Saturday, I waited for her there from 9:30 p.m. to midnight. She didn’t show up then, or on Sunday, or Monday. On Tuesday, I was running late, and when I arrived there at 10:20 p.m., I thought I saw her at the front door. But the woman was wearing a strange cap pulled down to her eyes and the rest of her face was under a scarf, so it was only when I was very close to her that I knew it was indeed her. I had already decided that I would hide her in the house in the mountains; it was, for the time being, the best option. I had to get her out of the city, because they would be looking for her with a magnifying glass in places where you needed your identification documents and were reported for the slightest suspicions. God forbid she had tried in desperation to check into a hotel. I didn’t even ask her. There was no time for debates. I simply signaled that she climb behind me on my bike and took off. I only revealed our destination when we were already on the way. Her response was to ask where it was, and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when I told her it was just down the road from Manninpox.

I’m not quite sure how to explain what’s happened since that night. Let’s just say we’re living as if in a dream, the two of us hidden in the attic, making do with things as if we are two kids in a tree house because we couldn’t care less about what is happening in the world below that is bristling with dangers. We shit on those dangers for now. And the dangers shit on us, stuck in that attic of the house like ants after a fumigation.

All the powers of the state are set against María Paz, and I’m still a little puzzled how this charming girl has become the bull’s-eye of so many pissed-off macho men — agents of the CIA and the DEA, migrant and bounty hunters, and a posse led by the vermin Sleepy Joe, who must have been howling in his cave because so many others were trying to snatch his prey. But María Paz has not wanted to talk about any of that. She does not bring up her past, much less her future. I think it is comforting to her to feel as if she is in a boat in the middle of a timeless sea. Once again, she and I are floating in the bliss of a period of “things go right.” Seven months ago we went through a similar ephemeral period that lasted only a couple of hours; then we passed through a very long and anguishing “things go wrong,” and now we have returned to the bliss of the good days.

Like any good graphic novel heroine, María Paz is complex; there are no predictable plots in her story. Everything is extraordinary, very intense, and at the same time so otherworldly and unreal, such as letting the days pass ignoring what has happened, purposely ignoring all the possible consequences, letting the world fall to pieces all around us. And that’s just a figure of speech. Symptoms are beginning to appear, a new phase of “things go wrong” has reared its ugly fucking head. Four days ago, a horrendous crime took place on this mountain. The victim was the man who brings us the bags of food for the dogs; it is something utterly indescribable, they didn’t only murder him, but they ripped off his face. The authorities are still searching for the suspects and have the area under twenty-four-hour patrol: a good thing on the one hand, because it reestablishes the sense of safety, and a bad thing on the other hand, because for us up here it make us recluses with much more claustrophobic force than before. Now it is clearer than ever that María Paz cannot as much as peek outside or the entire security operation would descend on the house. But I’ve decided not to tell her. What good would it do? For the moment, I see no reason to worry her. Up here, she is secure, free from any danger, ignorant of the mayhem outside that has everybody on edge. María Paz needs her rest. The important thing is that she recovers from the damage of what she has gone through, enjoys herself however she can, is pampered, eats a lot, sleeps as much as she needs to, and is left alone. So I keep the fears and conjectures to myself.

For now, I have no intention of letting this bubble of blind, deaf, exclusive, and self-sufficient happiness in which we both float burst. Because I’m on vacation, I don’t have to go anywhere. No one bothers us up in the attic and we are together twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, with the exception of a couple of nights a week when I go down to have dinner with my father so as not to arouse suspicion. I return to the attic with a healthy portion of the meal. María Paz is effusive and generous when we make love, but I have not been able to get her to sleep in my arms. After we make love she turns the other way and curls in upon herself like a seashell, and I have to make do with the unconditional affection of Skunko, who has begun to sleep draped across both of us, and I resign myself to simply watch her for hours. I am astonished by her tendrils of black hair invading the pillows, and her long eyelashes silky as spider legs. I linger my gaze on the curve of her shoulder, on the protruding ears that she hates so much, on the soft splendor of her skin, the light hairs on her nape, the lapping waves of her breath, the white cotton panties that she wears, bigger than any other girl I have known — prison maxi panties, to be truthful, or more like orphanage maxi panties, that are far from sexy but still manage to turn me on, like everything about her. Now, I understand more profoundly what Boris Becker meant when he said that he only fully realized how dark-skinned his wife was when he saw her naked body on white sheets for the first time.

We never dare ask what is going to happen when we are brought down by force to face reality. When I asked her how she survived after fleeing from Bronx Criminal Division, she said that it was thanks to kind folks. She told me about the Peruvians she met at the cookout and a rich bachelor from Park Slope who allowed her to use his penthouse. She also recounted times when she panicked, lonely nights, times when she escaped just by a hair, about dangerous corners in some neighborhoods, and about a friend’s betrayal. There were also the two sisters who sold tamales from home and hired her to knead corn flour.

“I had never eaten so many tamales,” she said.

“Why didn’t you leave the country?” I asked the obvious question.

“Because of Violeta, my sister, Violeta, I can’t abandon her. I will not leave until I can take her with me.”

I found all this out during our first few nights together in the attic, when she spoke nonstop until the early hours of the morning, weaving together the disconnected episodes of her epic. On a particularly chilly night, she recounted to me the events around her husband Greg’s death. She spoke at length and candidly, and somehow we got into the Gothic scene about her friend Corina and the broomstick. She mentioned that event, but as with others was somewhat oblique around the topic of Sleepy Joe’s participation in it, as if she wanted to lessen his guilt, so I had to remain alert and insist that she make certain things clearer, that she couldn’t invent things because I knew more about all of this than she thought. I told her that I had taped together the manuscript she had ripped to pieces in Central Park, and so that I knew well the horrific actions that Sleepy Joe was capable of, like the abusive interrogation he had submitted her to and the death of her dog. María Paz’s response was to stop the story cold, and since then she has not told me about anything else in her past, as if the instinct had dried up, or she preferred to forget the content of those sections. We talk to each other a lot, but always sidestepping certain issues and keeping the conversation at surface level. She is allowed to ask me about heaven and earth, but I can’t ask her anything.

I see her floating in a state of grace and innocence, a nymph in the woods, or maybe more like a lily, a fawn, an odalisque. Too many things have happened to her, very serious things in a short span of time, so it’s understandable that she doesn’t want to torment herself by unraveling the treacherous twists of fate. It is almost as if she has gone into hibernation to regain her strengths and get ready for what is to come. Truth is I don’t know, don’t want to know, don’t want to think about it either. But at the same time, I am terrified of what she still may be keeping from me.

While she sleeps beside me, I remain awake thinking about it all, as fucking insomniac as they come. I sense her sweet breath and soft snoring, and I ask myself who this woman is who is so full of darkness and secrets. One night recently, I tapped her on the shoulder because I needed to know the answer to one question right then.

“Have you been lying to me?” I said.

“You have to believe me, Mr. Rose,” she said half-asleep.

“Why? Tell me why I have to…”

“Because when people tell you things, you should believe them,” she said, and curled herself up tighter than before and fell back asleep. I couldn’t help but think about her twisted relationship with her brother-in-law/lover. I have compiled a list of character traits and habits for him, such as sleeping during the day, visiting brothels, his obsession with María Paz, his taste for spicy candy, the useless purchases from infomercials, and, above all, the performance of bloody rituals. I have read that while bloodless rituals are at core symbolic or figurative, the bloody ones necessitate the spilling of blood of a sacrificial victim. With the exception of bullfights in Hispanic cultures, or of such things as fight clubs and ultimate fighting tournaments, this kind of bloodletting as spectacle is rare in the West, because people are horrified and disgusted by blood and can only deal with it on the screen, where it doesn’t hurt, stain, or infect. The peculiar thing about Sleepy Joe is the leap backward, the primitive, brutal ritual. And so, little by little I have begun to understand a few things. The problem is that my investigation is typically amateurish, and in reality it just follows a method I found in a blog that I came upon by chance in serial form called Killing Me Softly. That’s why I thought it would be better to get a more qualified opinion, so one day I left María Paz alone in the attic to head to New York, supposedly to hand in a manuscript to Ming, my editor, but in truth to ask him about Sleepy Joe, whom he didn’t know and hadn’t even heard of. But he asked how he could possibly help in gathering the information I required.

The fact is Ming collects everything and is an expert in a thousand things, the more bizarre the better. He’s an expert, for example, on the many varieties of caviar, ancient African bridal gear, and a sumptuous and fierce species of warriors called betta fish. But of all his obsessions, the one that he devotes the most time to is noir comics. Along with being an editor of one of them, Ming owns an astonishing collection of volumes on the occult that he has found all over the world. And folks who are expert on this subject are expert on the subject of murderers.

Neo-noir comics, originally inspired by Frank Miller’s Sin City, and frequently printed in black and white, is a bristling and electrifying genre, as if on amphetamines, generally misogynous and eschatological and centered on sadistic, disgusting, maniacal crimes, with decadent and vicious detectives.

It’s not my genre, of course: my suicide poet and his girl are little sisters of the blind compared with the freaks that appear in noir. I told Ming more or less what I already knew of Sleepy Joe, his habits of burning and destroying on a massive scale, the dice on the eyes of a dead ex, the ritual with a broomstick involving Corina, the ritual with a knife involving his dead brother, the bone-chilling event with the dog.

“He doesn’t sound like a big-time murderer,” Ming told me, “more or less a small-time killer, timid, unsure. At least for now, although maybe he may yet do more terrible things.

“His ceremonial executions are crude, but whatever they lack in finesse, they make up for in conviction,” Ming continued. “For now, he threatens and assaults but does not kill, or he kills animals but not humans. Although things may escalate depending on what is propelling him. There must be a touch of necrophilia. It’s possible that he nailed the corpse of the dog to the wall after it was dead.”

“Which means he tortures cadavers?” I asked.

“I don’t think he sees it as torture, more like purification or glorification. Perhaps he makes his peace with the dead through the ritual. It could be how he asks forgiveness, as in how he sliced the corpse of his brother with a knife, a brother with whom he identified. Greg, the older brother, his idol, possibly the only person who cared for him and worried about him. Sleepy Joe must have adored him.”

“Yeah, he adored him, but snatched his wife. Some love.”

“There you go. He adored him up to a point. Look closely at the details: it was a pure instance of substitution; when he took the wife, he put himself in the shoes of his brother, he became the brother, and made María Paz the ardent object of his desires. When María Paz didn’t want anything else to do with him, she stripped him of very fundamental things, castrated him when she rejected him sexually, negated the identification with the brother, and to top it off he believed she took his money. He must have felt as if he had been skinned alive, anyone would have felt as such. He beat her but did not kill her because that would be the end of his desideratum, and he’s no idiot. But he beat her almost to death, and began to destroy the beings she loves. She is left with nothing and no one. You understand. That’s the message he is sending her: ‘The only person you have in this world is me.’ You have not told me that she is with you now, but I imagine she might be. If so, be very careful. You are getting directly in the path of Sleepy Joe, a complicated individual.”

“Can you sketch me an outline of his modus operandi?” I asked.

“Fuck, Jack the Ripper had a modus operandi; this bastard barely knows where he is heading,” Ming said.

At that point, I told him about the Eagles case and that I thought Sleepy Joe was the culprit.

“It has his trademark, a ritual over a cadaver,” Ming responded as he fed mosquito larvae to the iridescent and bluish Wan-Sow, the best of his bettas. Ming meant that unexpected forces were pushing Sleepy Joe to more dangerous levels. “If Sleepy Joe is Eagles’s murderer, it would mean that the guy is getting close, Cleve.”

If he is the murderer, he is among us. Although it is highly unlikely that he’ll remain wandering around there, given that since the night of the murder the area is crawling with patrol cars. The cops come by our house at least twice a week, calling out at every door to make sure everything is okay. This has become for us a protective barrier against Sleepy Joe, and at the same time the greatest threat, because if they discover María Paz, she is history. That is, those who can do us in are also our protectors; damned spot we’re in, so dual and complex. As the Coen brothers scripted for George Clooney in O Brother, Where Art Thou? “Damn! We’re in a tight spot.”

For now, I have María Paz by my side in this attic refuge, and she is my only reality. She peruses my books while eating cheese, leaving them all greasy. For long periods, she does nothing, she wastes all the hot water while showering, she brushes Skunko and paints her toenails. Afterward, she lies on my bed and watches some reality shows that I think are horrible but that she won’t miss and then recounts them to me episode by episode in complete detail. First thing in the morning, she does aerobics following the instructions of a woman called Vera in a program called In Shape with Vera. She has a double portion of ice cream for breakfast, later she puts on my clothes, that is if she doesn’t remain in her pajamas all day, and entertains herself rummaging through my drawers and disorganizing my things. She sits by the side of the window hidden behind the curtain to spy on the deer that ravage our garden and the moose that turn over our garbage cans looking for food. She appears serene, light — I would say radiant, in any case — very beautiful. I am madly in love with her.

But I live in a state of alertness with my hairs standing on end. I spend many hours psychoanalyzing the brother-in-law, dissecting his personality. For obvious reasons, I have been interested more in his story than the story of the murdered brother. Arms trafficking seems like a very ordinary subject matter, one more chapter in the kind of corruption that is eternal. And besides, I hate cops, and any atrocities that they are accused of committing are possible and likely probable. In contrast, I have reached some interesting conclusions about Sleepy Joe. As a child, he must have always been scared to death. In general, those types of bullies have been bullied themselves, they become abusers because they have been abused, anybody who reads comic books knows that. I imagine that in his case, old childhood fears must have reemerged in adulthood, creating a sick and distorted ritualization. María Paz recounted that when Sleepy Joe was a boy, the mother forced him to recite a prayer called “A Thousand Jesuses” that was a repetition of the name a thousand times. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. Of course, maybe this wasn’t the best tactic, a thousand Jesuses is an exaggerated number of Jesuses; you can go a little nuts during the few hours on your knees repeating Jesus in Slovak.

She has also told me that in the bedroom of Greg, Sleepy Joe, and the rest of the siblings, there hung a large portrait of the baby Jesus nailed to a white cross. Not the adult Jesus but the baby Jesus. Crucified. Such a thing, a child as a crucificado.

I would not have been able to open my eyes with that portrait in the room, that would have been the least of it, but I would not have become a master criminal because of it. Who knows what else could have happened to him, from what root the tendency toward evil had sprouted.

There must have been other things, because in the end being the son of a mother who says the rosary every day does not automatically lead you to nail a dog to a wall. It was too obvious to look automatically for Christian roots to any perversions, but perhaps the drama has less to do with Christianity than with the Carpathians, their region of origin, mountain ranges that I imagine gloomy and menacing, boulders cut by picks and vertigo-inducing cliffs, with frozen landscapes and a national history crisscrossed with everyday butcheries and cruelties. The whole Slovakia thing may be nothing, I couldn’t even pick out its exact location on a map, but that’s how I imagine it during my nights of insomnia. Then I remembered about the lands of Vlad Tepes, Dracula, the insatiable impaler who liked to eat his dinner among the dozens of Turks whom he had ordered to be strung from behind. And don’t some of Sleepy Joe’s actions seem Dracula-like: Corina and the broomstick?

Isn’t it easy to make connections?

But those are just the speculations of the sleepless, too many horror movies. The only thing that’s clear is that the more I know, the more I am disgusted with Sleepy Joe.

I am the type of person who cannot stand the suffering of animals. I must admit that sometimes I feel like Brigitte Bardot with her maniacal and exclusive obsession with the well-being of seals. I do not compromise with anyone who engages in the abuse of animals in any form, and that’s why I’m a vegetarian. But to nail a dog to a wall, you have to be a sadistic motherfucker to do something like that. And that would be enough to earn my hate, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. If there’s something I can’t stand in this world it’s a man who mistreats a woman. Zero tolerance, much less if it’s the woman I love. Yet there is another side of him that caught my attention, a corner of his character, one only, that inspires a degree of envy, his knack for the ritualistic, which seems authentic. He is a nobody, illiterate and vicious, but he retains the sense of the sacred. Or least he is one inspired son of a bitch. A taut string of conviction vibrates in that bastard, and I dashed to write that phrase down before I forgot it. Writing graphic novels for so long, I have developed the habit of thinking in vignettes, which I translate into catchy expressions that fit in dialogue balloons.

Some force is pushing Sleepy Joe beyond himself. Something lifts him from his current surroundings. At nights, in the safety of my bed, I intuit what an angry María Paz had to experience on her own on the roof, tied up and terrified, naked and trembling from the cold as she watched her brother-in-law officiate that ceremony. She knows exactly what all this is about, and after so many days of silence on the matter, early this morning she uttered a phrase whose meaning I haven’t quite fully deciphered. I don’t know if it was said in defense of her brother-in-law or against me: she warned me not to underestimate Sleepy Joe.

“You may hate him, yes, despise him even, whatever you want, but never underestimate him.”

“Alright,” I said, somewhat annoyed, “I’ll be careful; I don’t like the idea of being nailed to a wall.” Not to mention a broomstick up my ass.

Two days ago I told María Paz that today we would have to separate for a few days, just a few, because my mom and Ned’s anniversary was coming up, and I had promised both of them that I would go to the celebration in Chicago. I hate the idea of leaving María Paz alone here, knowing that Sleepy Joe is near, but it is much more risky to try and take her out given the police presence. I can’t miss this fucking anniversary, my mother would kill me, she’s already very touchy since I decided to live with my father, and missing her party would be the last straw. Besides, María Paz is fine on her own. She is in a house owned by white people who are more or less rich, or at least upper middle-class, and, as such, free from suspicion. The state troopers are well aware that they are here to protect us and not make things harder, and they will not have any awareness of her presence unless she makes it known by peeking her nose out of the hiding place. I have warned her a thousand times that she cannot do it, not under any circumstances. She cannot be tempted to look out the window at the garden, as she does when I am there, or go down the stairs, or go to the front door, under mortal risk.

“Look me in the eyes, María Paz, promise me you are not going to do anything crazy while I’m gone,” I said, and tried to soothe her anxiety. “It will only be forty-eight hours, forty-eight hours of common sense on your part, that’s all I’m asking. Before you know it, I’ll ride back up to the house on my bike. Think of it like this: I will only be gone this afternoon, tomorrow, and the following morning, just the ride there, the party, and the ride back. Don’t pull any stunts during that time or engage in risky action, just do that for me. Do you understand?”

“What if something happens to you?” she asked, widening her big black eyes so that I wanted to jump into her, plunge into the deep dark water of those eyes, forget about Edith and Ned, to hell with their anniversary, there will be others, but I can’t, just can’t.

Edith would kill me, and if you ask me whom I fear more, Edith or Sleepy Joe, I’d have to say Edith by a few heads.

“Nothing’s going to happen to me.”

“Motorcycles are very dangerous…”

“Now you sound like my father.”

I’m going to leave her plenty of food and a ream of paper, in case she is inspired to write something new. As a temporary farewell, yesterday we made love and took a shower together, me struggling to hold her under the warm stream as she slid down my arms, wet and slippery as an otter, and I brought up her dream again, although she didn’t seem to want to talk about it this time.

“So AIX?” I asked her.

“What?”

“AIX. That’s what you said the creature in your dreams was named, the one that comes out of the cloth vagina. That was it, right, AIX?” And I wrote the letters in the foggy glass of the shower door.

“And what if your father comes up, Mr. Rose?” In spite of all the intimate acts we had shared, to her I continued to be Mr. Rose, her creative-writing teacher; she never called me Cleve.

“My father is going to be in the city. Besides, you know he never comes up here. Why? Will you get bored?”

“How can I get bored, when I am in heaven?”

Her response could not have been more lovely or full of joy. But it concerned me somewhat.

Even though María Paz may not think of it in these terms, she is as locked up and deprived of liberty here as she was in Manninpox.

“Why don’t you start writing your memories over again,” I suggested. “I’ll leave you my laptop, you know how to use it now, or there is paper if you prefer longhand.”

“Ugh, no, Mr. Rose, write everything down from the beginning again, way too long. That’s lost, and it should stay lost. Oh, one little thing before you go,” she said, handing me a small wooden box that she took out of her bag. The box contained Hero’s ashes and the medal of valor given to him in Alaska.

María Paz wanted me to bury the box and keep the medal, but the medal was attached to a blue ribbon that was all stuck to the ashes, so I suggested that we just bury the box with everything inside.

She agreed, and asked that it be buried in a clearing in the woods that was visible from the window. Today, before I leave for Chicago, I will do it in a big way. I am going to give Hero the funeral rites of a hero, a war hero, with Wagner and everything. I’ll burn his name into a small wooden placard and mark the spot of the burial with a makeshift wooden cross. Although on second thought, no name. It would be stupid to do that and then already be well on the road when the police make their daily rounds and investigate. Or what about if my father saw it and was curious about this Hero. What hero? He’d wonder. I will just bury the box, make a quick cross with two pieces of wood, and that’s it — no Wagner or any such other stuff. I’m doing terrible on time. I promised my mother I would not ride the bike at night, and I’m already cutting it close.

A few hours later, I say good-bye to María Paz, my father, and the three dogs. I go to the garage to get a shovel, but I pass by the kitchen for a second to grab a Gatorade and I notice Empera putting out the food for the dogs. She has her iPod headphones on with the music so loud she doesn’t even realize I am standing there, so I pause for a second just to watch her. I have always suspected that she is not much of a dog person. She does not have much interaction with them or much less pet them. On the other hand, she prepares their food bowls with care, adding the appropriate vitamins and supplements to each plate. She doesn’t feel any affection toward the animals, but she also doesn’t mistreat them or neglect them, that’s what I was curious about, and I am pleased with what I see.

“Hi, Empera,” I say to her back, and she almost has a heart attack she is so startled. “It’s a good thing to see you don’t nail dogs to the wall.”

“God Almighty, child, the things you say. Why would I do such an awful thing? Dogs stink to heaven, but they are God’s creatures also.”

“Okay, so tell me what you think about this, Empera, you who know so much about life… What’s going on inside the head of a man who nails a dog to the wall?”

“Nails a dog to the wall?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it’s an atrocity. The only thing a person like that has in his head is madness, and the best thing is to lock him up in an insane asylum. Nail a dog to the wall like they nailed Christ to the cross, that’s heresy. How can you nail such a dirty beast as if it were Lord Jesus? To die nailed is a privilege of the Almighty. That’s heresy, no doubt. As far as I see it, such a person does not believe in God.”

“Thank you, Empera! That’s exactly the kind of thing I was talking about,” I say, and I go back upstairs. “I need to see one thing.”

Suddenly, I have the urge to check this one book, and it has to be now, not when I get back, it has to be right now, even if my mother kills me for being late.

“So,” María Paz asks — she’s by the window, waiting for Hero’s funeral to begin—“not yet?”

“That’s next,” I say kissing her. “I have to jot down something first.”

I know exactly the location of all the books on my shelves, I could pick one out with my eyes closed, and especially if it is Borges, who I am always reading and rereading. But shit, it’s not where it is supposed to be, and immediately one party becomes suspect. I ask María Paz, and she pulls out the book from under the bed. It’s the second volume of the complete works of Borges, and it’s not difficult to find the passage I am looking for, all underlined as it is with my notes on the margin. Page 265. It’s Borges’s commentary on John Donne’s Biathanatos. I read the note I scribbled on the margin a few years ago: “Biathanatos, one of those improbable and cursed books that every so often cast its shadow over humanity, like the Apocalypse of the false John the Evangelist, or the Necronomicon that Lovecraft conceived but never wrote.”

According to Borges, the purpose of Biathanatos is to expose that the death of Christ was in fact a suicide. Therefore, the entire history of humanity, from Christ and to Christ, is nothing else but the staging of a spectacular and self-induced deicide, accepted by the Son and promoted by the Father, who created the earth and the seas as a setting for the torment of the cross on a stunning cosmic gallows. And if it’s true that Christ died a voluntary death, according to what Borges claims Donne says, and here is Borges’s quote: “This means that the elements and the worlds and the generations of men, and Egypt and Rome and Babylon and Judah were formed from the void to be destroyed. Maybe the iron was specifically created for the nails, the thorns for the crown, and the blood and water for the wound.” There it is; Old Man Borges gets it just right, as always, and before Borges, Donne. And this leads to the corollary, the cherry pie.

After this passage, all I have to do is turn the corner to get to Sleepy Joe. The result is surprising. More than surprising, dazzling. If Borges is right, and if John Donne was right before him, each one of those ritual crimes or imitations of crimes must mean a step toward the greater ritual for Sleepy Joe, the definitive one, the one that expresses the culmination of all his anxiety, the apotheosis liturgy he has been so insistently pursuing, his own immolation. His own homicide — that must be what he is ultimately searching for. “How nicely you throw people off, you bastard,” I would tell him, “how expertly you disguise yourself, a small barrio thug, aficionado of indoor tanning who goes around showing off your six-pack, but who is shaken by sublime tempests inside, you fuck. I’ve figured you out, you damned punk, now I know that your minicrimes are reaching for perfection. What you did with the broomstick to Corina, the postmortem cuts on your brother’s body, the martyrdom of little Hero, and who knows what other perversions I don’t know about… Go ahead, you asshole, keep on climbing that ladder, giddyap, many steps to go, move ahead, man, go for your highest level yet, put your soul into it, no stopping until you have made it, put more heart into it, almost there. Your last victim will be you.”

9. Interview with Ian Rose

“In the woods near the house, Buttons dug up a box with a medal and ash remains,” Rose tells me.

“Whose ashes were they?”

“Not a human’s but an animal’s: Hero, María Paz’s dog. Who knows why it had been awarded the medal, some heroic deeds in Alaska, apparently.”

Rose learned from Buttons who had killed that dog and how, and the pieces of the puzzle began to fall into place in Rose’s head. It was becoming evident he was involved in a horror story unleashed by a lunatic. Cleve had been murdered, and it had not been an isolated deed. Rose had to accept this. He couldn’t let the pain cloud his judgment. He had to do something, and do it on his own. “It’s too personal a matter,” he tells me, “not the police’s, not Pro Bono’s, not anyone’s but mine, my issue, because Cleve was my son and I owe him at least that.” Buttons had offered to help, but it just didn’t seem right to Rose, and he began to shake him off. When it came down to it, he didn’t know who any of these people really were — Pro Bono, his assistant — or what they really wanted. He trusted no one and saw ulterior motives everywhere.

The unearthed medal made one thing very clear: María Paz had been in the house at least once without Rose having known about it. It had been at some point between the death of the dog and Cleve’s death. She may still have been there, for all he knew. Rose began to look for her everywhere on his property. He became obsessed with her presence, which he sensed here and there as if she were a ghost. He checked the same places again and again, although it was evident that the trail had gone cold. But she had to have been there, God knows how long, and with Cleve’s blessing. Of course, it was too late to give him the third degree, and the dogs kept whatever they knew to themselves. María Paz needed another accomplice, someone who surely must have known she was there, because that someone had her antennae tuned to every nook and cranny of the house.

“Emperatriz, the cleaning lady,” I say to Rose.

“I knew Empera must have met María Paz. When I saw that medal, I became convinced that there was some connection there. It would have been impossible for María Paz to have been there, stayed there, and eaten there, without Empera knowing. It was different with me. I never wanted to meddle into Cleve’s affairs; the attic was liberated territory and I never went up there. Empera, however, has always been a little bit nosy. And I don’t have to tell you how things are among you Latinos; not to be offensive, but when you live in a foreign country you behave like a big clan, everyone is treated as part of the same group, you hug, kiss, and are instant blood relations the first time you meet. You establish a solidarity pact with anyone from the homeland, even if the homeland extends from the Rio Grande to Patagonia, correct me if I’m wrong. Empera must have known something about María Paz’s stay with us. Maybe a little bit, maybe a lot, and whatever she knew I had to coax it out of her. I had to be tactful, like I said, because I had no idea who was involved in the death of my son, directly or as an accomplice. It could have been anyone from María Paz to Empera. It was also possible that I was on the hit list, and not just me but my dogs as well. Remember this maniac killed people and dogs, so I couldn’t decide whether to leave the house for their safety or to remain in the house to deal with things head-on. Finally, I decided to stay. I felt as if I could handle anything except letting someone who had hurt my boy so badly escape.”

For years, Rose had not given much thought to Empera’s presence in his house, having hardly any substantial interaction with her or noticing her much as she went about her business. He heard her going in and out of rooms accompanied by the slapping of her plastic sandals and jingle-jangle of her ostentatious earrings. He had no idea what Empera thought about life, whether she was forty or sixty, married or single, or how many children she had. The only thing that concerned him about her was that she was responsible, did her job, and fed Otto, Dix, and Skunko when he was away. He was impressed by how detailed she was when it came to cleaning. Empera spotted grime everywhere, even in places where no one would think to look, and she did not rest until she eradicated the last particle of dirt. She made this challenge a personal one, as if she did not want to be defeated by the dirtiness of the world, and was always asking Rose for money for more cleaning supplies. She knew the commercials on television by heart, put a blind faith in them, and if Rose was not careful she would recite them to him word for word to convince him that she just had to run out and buy them — this liquid to wash, that bleach for the whites, Mr. Clean, Tide, Cottonelle toilet paper. One time, she had shown up with a product that was specifically for removing blackberry stains, because one of Rose’s white shirts had blackberry stains.

“Empera,” Rose had said, “I must have been twenty-five years old the last time I ate blackberries.”

“Well, then that’s how long those stains have been on your shirt.”

Rose tells me that the enforced distance between him and his employee had to do with her nagging about the dogs. She complained all day long about how they made a mess and shed hair everywhere, let out toxic farts, ruined the furniture with their drooling, and, to top it all off, carried parasites in their stomachs that made humans go blind.

“Even if I go blind, I won’t get rid of them,” Rose warned her without even looking at her.

Empera had likely read whatever letters she found in her boss’s storage boxes, and she kept track of his expenses and debts. She must have also known every morning how much bourbon he had drank the night before by keeping track of the level in the bottle. By the stains on his bed, she knew he was up-to-date on his nocturnal privacies, and she was informed about his medical conditions by the prescriptions in the cabinet. It would not be surprising to him if she knew his e-mail password. Neither his mother nor Edith, and sometimes not even Rose himself knew more about him than Empera did. But who was she really? Could he trust her?

“I remember that Empera tried to warn me of the presence of someone strange in the house, or had come to me with some story that Cleve had a girlfriend up in the attic,” Rose tells me. “And I remember also that at the time I told her to mind her business, which exonerated her somewhat, but I remained suspicious and didn’t want to take one false step.” There was only one person beyond all suspicion, who moreover was attached to the family in an emotional way, and whom Rose could consult: Ming, the editor.

“Don’t tangle yourself up in too many theories, Mr. Rose,” Ming said when Rose paid a visit to the editor’s apartment in Chelsea for the second time since Cleve’s death, this time to give the editor an idea of the anguished and somewhat confusing framework of his speculations. “This is a simple but revolting story, with a clear-cut murderer named Sleepy Joe. Cleve and I agreed on this point.”

“You talked with him about this?” Rose asked.

“Yes, I did indeed. He had Sleepy Joe in his sights.”

“Alright,” Rose said, “Sleepy Joe. But who are his accomplices?”

“If I may suggest something, it’s better to assume that others are innocent until proven otherwise. Proceed slowly; don’t let yourself become overwhelmed by the whole unmanageable package. The first thing you have to do is find María Paz. Do you want me to help you, Mr. Rose? I could arrange things here, find someone to feed my bettas, and…”

“No, Ming, this is something I need to take care of on my own. Thank you, it’s good to know I can count on you.”

“Promise me you’ll get in touch if things get ugly.”

“I think I’m going to need a gun. I don’t plan on killing anyone,” Rose said, more or less lying. “It’s just a precaution.”

“I have a few. But they are basically collector’s items,” Ming said, as he pulled out a small pistol from a cabinet, giving to Rose and identifying it as a Remington Model 95.

“It looks like a toy,” Rose said, making sure it fit in his pocket. “Does it work?”

“I doubt it,” Ming responded, pointing to the name engraved on the barrel, Claro Hurtado, one of Pancho Villa’s bodyguards. “It clearly didn’t work so well for Claro that July 23, 1923, when they gunned him down in Parral, Chihuahua, along with his big boss. I also have this,” he said, pulling out a katana that according to him was the Hattori Hanzo sword used by Beatrix Kiddo in Kill Bill.

“Is it real or a prop?” Rose asked.

“The edge has been shaved down, and it was manufactured to be ultralight so that Uma Thurman could wield it.”

“It feels like it’s made of fiberglass.”

“No more useful than a rat’s tail,” Ming said, as he placed other collector’s items on the table.

Rose noticed a solid, black piece, free of ornamentations or other frills, which inspired some confidence in him.

“And whose was this?” he asked.

“It doesn’t have much of a history, or it does, but a personal one, because I inherited it from my father, and my father in turn from his father, and so on into the mists of time. It’s a Glock 17 9 mm. A solid and serious gadget. With a hard trigger, but on the other hand you can load seventeen cartridges into it, and it fires quickly. I have ammunition for this one, half a box, and I can show you how to load it.”

Rose stored the Glock and the box of ammunition in the glove compartment of his Ford Fiesta and returned to his home in the mountains resolved to put Empera through an Inquisition-style round of questioning. He sat her in front of him and bombarded her with questions. As expected, Empera proved a tough nut to crack, and the more he pressed her, the dodgier she became. She had no idea what he was talking about and rolled her eyes every time he mentioned María Paz, responding in a haughty tone that she didn’t know anything about anything, and that, moreover, it was none of her business. Rose couldn’t get her to shift from that position, although he swore on his son’s grave that he was not trying to harm María Paz or turn her in to the authorities. On the contrary, in fact. It was only when he explained in detail to Empera the situation with the clamp in María Paz’s uterus that she seemed to soften and said she would do what she could.

“But I’m not promising anything,” she warned him, “and by the way, I should remind you that it has been sixteen months since my last raise.”

“We’ll fix that. Don’t worry about the raise. But can I count on you?”

“No guarantees, but I’ll see what I can do.”

Rose tells me that it became imperative to find María Paz, because of the clamp, sure, but above all because he was sure that sooner or later she would lead him to Sleepy Joe. And because something very strange and powerful began to grow inside him, something that was not so much the pain from the loss anymore, but instead, in a weird way, a substitute for the pain, a kind of consolation, perhaps the only one possible.

“I don’t know if I’ve told you that I’ve never been attracted to the idea of vengeance,” he says. “It has always seemed a distractive fallacy to me, one of the most pervasive misconceptions, a hateful and absurd national sport. Thousands of movies and television shows, heaps of novels, weapons sales and propaganda, a whole multibillion-dollar industry that feeds off the lust for vengeance that haunts Americans. But not me. It had never interested me before. Nevertheless, something inside me began to savor it the moment I put a face to the thug who had killed and tortured my son. It was then that I began to dream of making him pay for all his actions, one by one. I wanted to see him turned into a pile of shit, to kill him with my own two hands, watch him bleed and scream in agony, and beg forgiveness. I wanted to spit on him, shit on him, waste him.”

Night and day, it was always there: a shifting mass of lava that sketched and erased the incandescent image of his son, Cleve. Cleve bristling with thorns, like the Nazarene or like a porcupine. Cleve, the target in some macabre plot. Cleve, the sacrificial scapegoat in some disgusting ritual. His murderer had to be somewhere, this lunatic possessed by a terrible sense of the liturgy, this asshole with a mania for sacrifice that was one of the many manifestations of his mental illness. Wherever he was hiding, Rose would find him.

“You have to understand,” he tells me, “this is about one of those changes that strikes you as if a blow to the head. Cleve’s death had become a nameless torment that was eating me alive, a permanent guilt with no logic. But all of a sudden, it had a name, one name, and one name only: Sleepy Joe. Finally, there was something besides me to blame, someone aside from myself on which to take out the rage.

“Bringing Cleve back was not possible, but I could blow the fuck out of that Sleepy Joe. One thing followed the other. It was something as irrational as a physiological need, as pressing as eating or sleeping. At that moment I didn’t see it as such, but today I realize that past a certain point, no one would have stopped me from doing what I set out to do even if they had given me incontrovertible proof that Sleepy Joe had nothing to do with Cleve’s death. Do you understand? These facts would have been irrelevant to me. When the mechanism of revenge is triggered, nothing can stop it. Vengeance doesn’t have to be sure about what it does; it just needs a target, any target it can properly aim at. You’ve received a mortal blow, and to remain alive you need to deliver a similar blow. You’ve chosen your bull’s-eye and you go after it. Vengeance is not reflective or flexible; it’s implacable and blind. It has nothing to do with justice. Whoever believes that he is enforcing justice through vengeance is just lying to himself. It is about something much more primal, more bestial. You’ve become an enraged bull, and they’ve just waved a red cloth in front of you. In Colombia, there was a saying that once caught my attention: ‘kill and eat the dead.’ ‘He could kill and eat the dead,’ that’s how they described someone in a rage, just a popular saying, a hyperbole like any other. And at the same time, maybe not. That phrase gave me the chills because it seemed to contain some ancient wisdom from ancestral times in which cannibalistic vengeance was the supreme form of vengeance. I didn’t even remember the saying or think about it until I discovered someone had murdered Cleve in such a horrendous manner. From the moment I identified the perpetrator, that saying began to resonate in my memory: to kill and eat the dead, to kill and eat the dead.”

Rose had nightmares the night that Buttons slept on the sofa in the living room. He went to bed shaken with his revelations, terribly distressed, and awoke at dawn, feeling a bruised resentment all over, as if he had suffered a horrible beating. Rose thought he had dreamed of mutilated bodies. Amid the carnage, a woman let out an irritating harangue that he would have rather not heard, but that had some revelatory meaning. Who was she? Someone he knew, but not well, or well but not completely, simply someone who understood something amid the butchery. He fed Buttons breakfast and drove him to the train station afterward, asking for a couple of days to take in all this new information and assuring him that as soon as he recovered from some of the shock induced by the details he would call him to start looking for María Paz.

He never called Buttons or responded to any of his e-mails and phone calls. He imagined that under orders from Pro Bono, Buttons would begin a parallel search using his own contacts.

“Better that way,” Rose tells me. “Each man in his home, and God in all of them.”

The dream still rattled around in his head. At first, he thought that the woman in the dream could have been Mandra X, but then he realized that it could also have been Edith, his ex-wife. He decided to call her, simply pick up the phone and call her, though he wasn’t sure why. At that point, Edith was still under the impression that Cleve’s death had been an accident, and Rose had no intention of changing that.

“Do you remember that album from the trip to Rome? Do you still have it, by any chance?” he asked her, and she knew immediately that he meant the one with the pictures from the trip to Italy some thirty-five years earlier when they were newlyweds and Cleve had not been born yet.

Edith said she must have had it somewhere in her house, and Rose asked her to send it to him as soon as she could. She agreed to send it without asking why, and that very night, a package from FedEx SameDay arrived at the house in the Catskills.

“Did the album have anything to do with the death of your son?” I ask Rose.

“Well, I was more than anything at that moment obsessed with the tools employed in the Passion of Christ. There was the crux of the matter, just as I had intuited from the first, when I found that old newspaper clipping of the murder of the ex-policeman, confirmed later with the nailing of the dog to the wall, and even more so when Buttons made clear how my son must have died. Yet, there was something missing, and I needed to know the exact list of objects aside from obvious ones, the cross, the nails, and the crown of thorns. Then I remembered our trip, those days with Edith in Rome, and of a specific place we had visited then, the Ponte Sant’Angelo, the bridge that crossed the Tiber toward Castel Sant’Angelo, the antique mausoleum in Adriano. Along the sides of that bridge, on pedestals, there is a series of marble angels sculpted by Bernini and his workshop, and each of those angels holds one of the instruments of the Passion. Of course, I could’ve found the information I was looking for in many places, beginning with Google. Bernini’s representation of the Passion was one of thousands on the topic. But that one in particular was special to me. The Sant’Angelo bridge brought back many memories, both fond and troubling, but intense, perhaps too intense. I think that’s why I became obsessed with looking at that album.”

He thought he would put himself in the shoes of Sleepy Joe to understand how he worked. The first thing he needed to do was to stop hating him, cut off any hate, which is blinding. Rose couldn’t afford blindness, he had to remain vigilant and come to some conclusions. Based on the premise that even the most insane or evil of men has his reasons for doing what he does, Rose could come to know Sleepy Joe’s motivations. He wanted to switch minds with the victimizer, as he had seen Will Graham do with the Tooth Fairy in Red Dragon. It sounded childish to put it that way, Rose realized, but he was up to his knees in this thing, completely out of his element, and using horror movies as a guide. He, who knew absolutely nothing of the criminal mind, and who was not a detective or investigator, just a father torn apart by the death of his son.

“And maybe everything was like a child’s game,” he tells me, “except one thing, my conviction to find the criminal. Whatever it was I had to do, I was going to find that man, and I was going to destroy him.”

I am Sleepy Joe, Rose began repeating to himself. He was upstairs, in Cleve’s attic, the place he thought most fitting. I am Sleepy Joe and I’m going to murder this man Cleve. Why? Why am I doing it? One, because I damn well feel like it. I am a thug and go through life doing as I please, or doing nothing, and if I kill someone, it is because I want to and I can. Two, I am going to kill him because he’s getting involved with my girlfriend María Paz. (Pro Bono had mentioned that Cleve and María Paz had been together, and if Pro Bono knew, Sleepy Joe could have known as well.) Cleve and María Paz love each other, or they like each other, or at the least, they’re after each other, and since I suffer from terrible jealousy, I’ll kill him and keep her. How should I kill him? Simple, I’m a trucker and he rides a motorcycle: I have the advantage. Cleve makes things easier when he takes a shortcut through a little-traveled road on the way to Chicago. I tail him, force him to accelerate, sideswipe him with the truck, and he runs off the road and kills himself. Done and over. Wipe off the rival and get away scot-free because there are no witnesses. Up to that point, everything seems rational. Then I put a crown of thorns on his head? That is, I get down from the truck even though it’s raining, run down the side of the road, find the body… and I perform this ritual. I have to do the ritual, that’s my thing, justifying my crimes with this mystical element, or the other way around, let the mystical elements lead me to my crimes. I notice the abundance of thorny acacia everywhere and break off a few branches, the ones heavy with thorns. There are nineteen thorns in total. Do I count them one by one, or do I even care? I count them; there are nineteen. Does that number mean anything? It reminds me of the acronym M-19, the name of the guerrilla movement in Colombia when I lived there. So what? I let go of nineteen, I’m interested in associations that Sleepy Joe can make. I’m losing focus; I have to remain in his shoes. I pick that branch of thorny acacia, handle it carefully, making sure the thick, long spines don’t harm me. What about if someone sees my truck? It’s worth the risk. I shape the branch like a crown for my victim. Do I hurt myself by mistake? No. I use gloves, to protect my hands and to not leave fingerprints. (There were, in fact, none, Buttons had confirmed.) I am Sleepy Joe, and I have powerful reasons for doing what I do. Do I punish my victim because I’m jealous? Is this vengeance? No, this is not about jealousy; it’s about something else. I’m not hesitant, that’s not my thing. What I am doing is not grotesque, or lunatic, or absurd. On the contrary, I am enormously pedantic and sure of myself, and my actions are full of transcendental meaning, although no one else may see this. They’re ignorant; I am enlightened. The moment is sublime; I’m the priest and have chosen this man as scapegoat. He’s the object of my ceremony, the Christ figure in this Passion play. The victim shines before my eyes with a sacred radiance that summons his sacrifice. Christ figures are meant to die. I tell myself that their mission is to clean this world that is dirty with sin with their deaths. (Concerning this last point, Rose rereads a portion of María Paz’s manuscript to confirm; she too knew that her brother-in-law was obsessive about ritual cleanliness.) I’m Sleepy Joe again and tremble with fervor; I even get somewhat excited, begin to get an erection. I’m transfixed and hard, the victim calling me, inviting me, he is there for me, offering a submissiveness and willingness that excites me. God’s calling tingles in my balls and demands the execution of the lamb. I obey because I am his prophet, his executor, his angel of death. Yahweh responds and lets me know that he counts on me. Divine punishment will be executed through me, and all the filth in the world will be purified. Shit, this is some big stuff I’m involved in here. I feel such fever that I need to put on the brakes; I can’t come till right at the point of consummation.

That’s it for the Sleepy Joe thing. Could the murder really have taken place like that? There seems to be a lot missing, Rose thought, I’m not getting this, too removed from the real heart of the thing, the blind conviction, a rapture so profound that leads me to torture and kill. This truck driver’s advantage over me is so enormous, in that he defeats me with the simple gift of his faith. He is the one endowed with belief: that makes a huge difference, and tips the scales in his favor. He is very adept at the ritual sequence, vibrantly engaged in each of the stages leading up to the summit of pain. His acts are based on a millennial tradition that is foreign to me. He thinks himself a prophet, while I’m a nobody. He counts on enlightenment, while I heed my hydraulic engineer’s logic. That’s why I’ll never understand him and continue to despise him. “Stay put,” Rose commands himself, “don’t get all scattered.” How does Sleepy Joe work, or I should say torture? In the first instance, knife wounds in the hands, feet, and side, the stigmata of the cross. He inflicts them on his own brother. The nails, much more vile, he reserves for the dog. For Cleve, he reserves the crown and the humiliation of the thorns. In a way he crowns Cleve king, thus must consider him his principal victim, his most significant victory, at least up to now. Or maybe not. Maybe he just improvises according to the circumstances and choses the thorns mainly because they were readily available. The sharp weapon, thorns, nails, all elements toward maximum suffering. Each of the victims has been sacrificed or purified with one of these weapons. Does Sleepy Joe hate his victims? Not necessarily. It could even be the opposite. It seemed that he liked his brother. How does he choose them then? What are the criteria? Maybe the deciding factor isn’t the victim but the act itself. Undoubtedly, the common denominator is María Paz. Unless, that is, the guy went around conducting similar ceremonies on victims that had nothing to do with this case. Buttons and Ming were convinced of his more universal sacrificial tendencies, and there was Corina, María Paz’s Salvadoran friend.

Rose returned to the manuscript, which was his guide, his map, and reread the passages about Corina.

“Open your eyes, María Paz. Open your eyes and be careful. That boy is sick. I know what I’m talking about.”

And this:

“‘I think he was praying,’ she told me one of those days.

“‘Praying? Who was praying?’

“‘Your brother-in-law.’

“‘You mean he prayed that night in your house? Before he did what he did, or after?’

“‘During… like in a ceremony.’”

But what exactly was it that Sleepy Joe did to Corina, why did he violate her with a broomstick? Rose went down the kitchen to look for a broom. Once in the attic again, he brandished it against an invisible enemy. He worked up a sweat. Or was it a fever? He felt his head burning, as if he had made it through some threshold, and was about to completely break through.

If I were Sleepy Joe, what damage could I do with this? Strike or wield, or even rape, as I did with Corina? I could stick the head of an enemy on a broomstick as if it were a stake. Or pierce it through the victim. A sharp stick. A spear? A long, penetrating spear, prehistoric, frightful. The spear, the mother of all weapons for the Chinese, the blazon of Pallas Athena, the sharpened head made of steel, amber, bronze, and obsidian. Wasn’t Christ’s side pierced with such a spear? Lance, spear, Britney Spears? If I were Sleepy Joe, would I not have penetrated, pierced, violated Britney, Athena, or Corina with this lance, spear, broom? It is an elaborate scheme, but it holds together. If it was really like this, what next? What other techniques of martyrdom did Sleepy Joe’s imagination resort to? Which ones had he employed yet, or not?

Rose didn’t know. That is, what could the next victims expect, or what had he done to other anonymous victims? For one, the cross was missing, the final and most drastic torment, the zenith of the expiation. And he must employ others as well; Christ had to endure all sorts of horrors on the way to Cavalry. This is where the album that Edith sent came in.

Rome, a summer twilight, years before. Edith and Rose are holding hands and in love, or at least Rose is in love with Edith, who wears a light-colored, low-cut dress, from which her tanned cleavage peeks out. They are crossing the Sant’Angelo Bridge, and the impressive vision of Bernini’s angels greatly affects them: their violent, androgynous, dark beauty; their unlikely wings, which seem useless for flight; their anguished compassion before the suffering of the Son of God. They are less agents of glory than provocateurs in a cosmic duel, and each one holds in its hands one of the initiation props, or deadly weapons, depending on how you look at it. In the duty-free shop at the airport, Rose had bought a Canon AE-1, and in his enthusiasm to try it out took many pictures of Edith, including on that day, nine of which survive in that album, one in front of each angel, not counting a tenth that must have come loose, leaving behind only little sticker slots where the photograph had been. Looking at those pictures, some many years later, was dizzying, transporting in some fashion for Rose. He recounts to me how he simultaneously relived his wife’s abandonment and the death of his son, and that the brutal grip of that twin loss dragged him against his will, threatening to break him. So he decided to let go of the reins and be taken, release the resistance and go with it, submissively, in a hallucinatory journey propelled by a torrent of violent images.

Looking back on it now, he feels it was a deep plunge that almost drowned him. He began to look at the pictures one by one, trying to focus on the angels and letting the figure of his wife fade into abstraction. “Get out of the way, Edith,” he murmured to her, “this has nothing to do with you.” In her handwriting, written on the back of each of the pictures were details of the date the picture was taken, the name of the place, and any other pertinent facts. “That’s how she is,” Rose tells me, “she has to document and classify everything; her books are full of marginalia.” The first angel holds up a small pillar, more like a miniature version of one with a corresponding caption, Tronus meus in columna, my throne on a pillar, according to Edith’s footnoted translations.

“Bravo, Edith,” Rose told her, “you were always so systematic and organized, with everything except our marriage; you put me away like some old apparatus and you couldn’t even remember where. But focus, focus.” It’s the pillar used during the whipping. Rose remembered it well. During that trip to Rome, they had seen the original, the very pillar, in Santa Prassede, just a few steps away from the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore. Just like the replica held up by the angel, the original is short and stout, as if the Christ bound there had been a pygmy. Tronus, Rose wrote over the head of the angel, Tronus meus in columna. “Your name is Tronus, and you did wrong, extremely wrong, by binding that pygmy.”

The following angel holds up a whip, and the inscription reads, In flagella paratum, ready for the whip. “Flagella will be your name,” Rose told the angel. “Break down the Christ Almighty with a lacerating whip of seven tails, because that’s your task: whip the chosen one until he bursts.” The next angel has two heavy large nails in his hand. Quem confixerunt, the things that perforated me. Rose wrote a name above the angel: Clavus. “Cleave and nail the angel with this name. Nail the victim to the wall, pierce it, perforate, like a dog: leave it crucified until it dies. Take a poor dog and transform it into a god, or take a god and deal with him as if he were a dog.” The angel on the next page in the album holds a cross. A sanguinis lingo, from the tree that bleeds. Cross, crossed, crossing, cruising, cruiser. Rose’s thoughts dashed to the cruise he had taken with Edith to the Greek islands. Did you love me, Edith, that night in Santorini? Did you even love me then? But he immediately caught himself and abandoned that memory. “Focus, focus,” he told himself. “Stay with this thing.” This powerful angel with barely a squint in his eyes is holding a cross, this is his fragmenta passionis, or at least that’s what Edith noted, good old Edith throwing around those Latin phrases. The great winged squinter holds up the cross as if it were nothing, as if it were weightless, as if the cross itself were also winged, the wood of death that curiously enough is also the tree of life, the conflux of the four cardinal points, the compass rose, rosa rosa rosam rosae rosae, of course, a rose is a rose is a rose, and that’s his name, Rose, Rosicrucian, the rose that hugs the cross, at the intersection, the crossroads, fingers crossed for good luck. The cross, object of danger and risk, doorway to other worlds, a dizzying reality of conflicting realities, life and death, heaven and hell, man and God. The point where the boundary between the zenith and the abyss vanishes. Wasn’t that more or less what old Ismaela Ayé wailed about behind the walls of Manninpox? If Ismaela Ayé could conceive it, so could Rose, who took up his pen and christened that angel Crux. “Hi, Crux,” he told him. “So you will be known.” The inscription on the angel who holds the spear with which they stabbed Christ on the side reads Vulnerasti cor meum, you have wounded my heart. A powerful phrase; the Lord Christ wasn’t a bad poet, or the credit would actually have to go to Bernini. Rose decided that angel would be called Cor, the angel revealed its own name, cor, cordis, the core; besides, the letters look perfect, C, O, R, spaced on the photograph, somewhat humorous to Rose because the O just happened to encircle Edith’s face as she stands on a pedestal in the picture. Let’s see you escape that and fly away with Ned to Sri Lanka. “Dismissed, Cor!” Rose ordered the angel. “I leave you with Edith, a very bad girl. You’re in charge of her. And let’s go on, everything marches on, I have pulled one string and now the whole skein is coming undone at full speed.” Cor: the name is also connected to Corina. “They drove that spear through your heart, Cori? No, he drove it through your pussy, the axis mundi, the heart of hearts.”

The next picture is a difficult one, because the angel is holding a sponge. Very strange, a sponge, something so common and removed from the sublime. What harm can you do with a sponge? Aside from tickling someone under the armpits with it, Rose couldn’t think of anything. “Read, idiot,” he told himself. The inscription says it all. Portaverunt me aceto, they gave me vinegar. How methodical of Edith, how precise, everything translated perfectly. “I see, I see,” Rose said. “The anguished Christ was thirsty and must have asked for water, and they gave him vinegar. Gross. Twisted, like they say. They dunked that sponge in vinegar and burned his lips with it, scorched his throat and laughed at him. Bad, bad, bad angel. You deserve a spanking, and as punishment you will be known as Sponge Bob.” Of course, Edith believed something else, as always, going against the current. At the bottom of the picture Edith had written Posca, a term Rose had never heard, but which Edith thankfully defined, “Posca, a popular drink in ancient Rome, a blend of water, vinegar, and aromatic herbs.” Can this be true? Could some charitable being have dunked the sponge in posca and reached it up on a stick to the parched mouth of the dying man? “Fine, Edith, we’ll call this angel Posca. Sponge Posca.” But this didn’t end there, something else. “That’s not you in the picture, Edith. Who is that standing at the foot of Posca but me, Ian Rose, wearing a T-shirt that bears the face of James Dean, a very clear impression of that famous face? However, the face of the angel has been cut off. You decapitated Posca with the Canon AE-1. It doesn’t matter. Decapitated angel, you will no longer be known as Sponge Bob or Posca; you have some luck. You will from here on be known as James Dean.”

“Picture after picture, and my fever kept rising,” Rose tells me, “as if my brain were on fire. Look, I’m a simple person; I don’t know anything about these altered states. But that night I was flying. And at the same time, everything seemed so real, I mean the angels, Edith, Edith’s absence, Cleve, Cleve’s death, his murderer, the shadow of his murderer, myself, Rome, the Catskills, they all took on the same kind of harsh reality, the same intensity, everything existed equally and at the same time, the fever brought everything together before my eyes, within reach.”

Next was the angel Rose most feared, the one he had been waiting for, the one that truly anguished him, the one holding the crown of thorns. This is Cleve’s angel, Rose thought, and shuddered. He found the inscription appalling: Dum configitur spina, as the thorns stab. Edith, not knowing that one day her son would suffer the thorns; Edith, not even knowing that one day she would have a son, noted that this angel enjoyed the privilege of being sculpted by Bernini himself, who left the creation of the other angels to his apprentices. “Thank you for the clarification, Edith,” Rose said. “You were always so studious.” This angel ensnared Rose like none of the other ones; he couldn’t stop looking at it, or maybe the other way around, the thing couldn’t stop looking at him. It is a terrible angel, Rose realized. “Cleve, my son, what kind of a father am I who was not there to protect you from this assault?” This was also the most anguished of all the angels. Bernini had made it easy to perceive the trapped scream behind his parted lips. That, and the threatening torment in the depth of its eyes, made it into a macabre figure. “You will be called Thorn,” Rose said with an unfathomable rage and scribbled the name various times, Thorn, Thorn, Thorn, stabbed the angel with the name, scratched it and scratched it and scratched it until the only thing visible in the picture were the scratches. The bridge had disappeared, leaving behind only scratches. The Tiber had disappeared — Rome, the angel, the crown, and above all Edith, all disappeared. All that was left were scratches from top to bottom; Rose had stabbed Thorn with a million sharp scratches, with thorns, that is.

The following page revealed an almost feminine figure gently holding up a cloth: Respice facie, look at the face. “What should I call this angel?” Rose asked himself, less frenzied, less aggressive, catching his breath. “Facies, of course. That’s what you will be called, look how I delicately write your new name in a corner of the picture.” This is the angel holding Veronica’s cloth, the handkerchief on which the face of Jesus remained engraved when the woman named Veronica went to wipe away the blood and sweat. But Edith’s note made something very clear: it was enough just to consider the etymology of the name to realize that this Veronica had never existed, that she was no more than Vero Icon, the true image of Christ engraved in Veronica’s cloth, that is, the cloth of the true icon. “Damn, Edith, you are a smart one!” But that wasn’t all with this angel either; on the contrary, things were just getting started. One: with a rag or a piece of cloth, someone cleans the face of a man. Two: the face of the man remains impressed there, like in a photograph. A face. The face. A face on a rag. On a rag? A red rag? John Eagles, the dog-food deliveryman, with his face ripped off and stuck to a rag? Did this finally explain the mysterious murder of John Eagles? But John Eagles had nothing to do with Sleepy Joe, didn’t know him, had never crossed him. Or had he?

Rose was exhausted, his overheated brain could not go on and demanded some rest, but he wasn’t done, the task not completed, one more angel remaining. The last angel in the album holds in one hand the tunic that they ripped off Christ before crucifying him and in the other hand the dice with which the Roman soldiers gambled for it among themselves. Miserunt sortem, they tried their luck. Fucking centurions, gambling for God’s clothes. “You will be called Alea,” Rose said. The whole scene has never really made any sense to Rose. The Robe, a movie Rose saw as a teenager, played up the incongruity by changing the coarse tunic for a more presentable, obviously expensive purple cloth, and Richard Burton, the lucky centurion who won at dice, walked away satisfied wearing the flamboyant robe. But you don’t have to be Richard Burton to know that purple is the imperial color, exclusive and sumptuous. That’s all well and good. But to gamble for a pitiful cloth woven by a poor artisan from Galilee, and then be dragged up the mountain, torn by stones and whipping, a thing of misery, all muddy and stained? It made no sense. But for Rose, it couldn’t matter now. No point getting lost in theological debates; that’s not what’s important. What mattered was to tie up loose ends, put two and two together, follow the scent. The scales tilted toward Maraya, Sleepy Joe’s other mistress. Rose, drunken with revelations, consulted María Paz’s manuscript. He wanted to find out what María Paz had said about Maraya, the table dancer at Chikki Charmers, who was boiled in a hot tub till the flesh fell off her bones; poor Maraya, who as a corpse had a die placed on each of her eyes while her friends fought over her clothes, a victim of the mania and obsessiveness of Sleepy Joe, a miserable fuck with some strange fixations. Too obvious, Rose thought. All this was all too easy. “Disgusting,” he muttered, and he felt his bile rise against the murderer so predictable in all his shit. “Motherfucker, Sleepy Joe,” Rose grumbled, “your shoddy puzzles are straight out of Paulo Coelho and Dan Brown, some shoddy mystic, how disgustingly you follow the pattern to the letter, that’s your bravery, your audacity, you kill with the instruments of the Passion of Christ, one after another, rising up those bloody steps. That’s your great invention. But you’re just a routine murderer at the end of the day.”

Rose went from hallucination to boredom, from shock to disappointment, from fire to ice. It was over, he had figured out the case, at least roughly, forcing a detail here and there, filling in the gaps where needed, admittedly, but in any case getting an overview, assembling enough support in reality to feel that he had basically succeeded in untangling the mess. The fever had subsided and with it the state of exaltation. He had given birth, and now he felt he was sinking into postpartum depression, the maternity blues. Fleeing from this mood, he went to the kitchen to make tea, but could not find milk and had to resign himself to drink the tea without its cloud. “Sorry, Mother.” He looked for the bottle of Effexor and was about to down a couple with a sip of tea to put an end to crisis, but relented. “No more pills,” he said to the demon Effexor. From here on, he needed all his tools and faculties, including pain, anxiety, and panic, everything that was part of his system of alerts. He buried the antianxiety pills in the soil of a potted fern, climbed back up to the attic, and dropped, exhausted, on his son’s bed.

“I am the detective, I am the avenger, I play victim and the executioner… Forgive me, son, playing all these stupid games to make sense of the senselessness of your death,” he said aloud not so much to Cleve but to Cleve’s things surrounding him in the attic.

Two days later, winter descended suddenly upon the area. It had not stopped snowing in the past twenty-four hours and Rose was overcome by a sense of lethargic weightlessness, looking out the window at the snow falling with the slow grace of silk. Perceived as such, with the heat of the fireplace and through the windows, it seemed beautiful and harmless, something even warm about it. Yet Rose knew it well enough to be sure that this time it was not going to stop until it enveloped people, animals, and things, vanquishing all sounds, erasing all color, leveling all shapes, and leaving the land converted into a white ball, inhuman and bright as the moon, a static frozen landscape of serenity. Rose pressed his hands against the warmth of his teacup when Empera burst in like a whirlwind and handed him her cell phone.

“You want to take this,” she said.

“I’m calling about the grates,” a female voice declared.

“What grates?” Rose, who had still not come fully down from his hallucinatory state, asked.

“You know the grates, the ones you ordered.”

“I haven’t ordered any grates,” Rose said, annoyed with the insistence, but Empera shot him a look that made him realize that this could be important, something to do with María Paz, maybe “grates” was a kind of jail code. For what? Rose was speechless and there followed a tense silence that he didn’t know how to break. He couldn’t very well blurt out, Is that you, María Paz? This could very well be a clandestine contact through phones that were tapped, or using recorders and things like that.

“The grates, you know,” the voice said.

“Are you a friend of the grates?”

“A friend of a friend.”

“Have you been in touch with her?”

“That’s why I’m calling, to tell you that she has the catalog.”

“The catalog of the grates for the garden?”

“Exactly, the grates for the garden.”

“And when can I see it?”

“She wanted to know if you could meet today if possible, about three in the afternoon in the food court at the mall. Your housekeeper says she knows the one. If you can’t today, we can talk later to make an appointment for tomorrow or…”

“Tell her I’ll be there, drinking a Diet Coke,” Rose said, emphasizing the Diet Coke because it seemed an apt detail. How else would María Paz recognize him among the crowd?

“You shouldn’t.”

“I shouldn’t what?”

“Drink Diet Coke. If you have to drink Coca-Cola, at least don’t drink the diet one; it’s pure poison,” the voice said, and Rose had no idea if they were still talking in code, or if the caller was just concerned for his health.

“Alright, tell her that I will be drinking regular Coke.”

“Like everyone else there.”

“You’re right. Tell her I will be drinking three cans of regular Coke. Three cans placed in a triangle on the table,” he said, and felt ridiculous, as if he were playing a game of spies.

“Then what do you prefer?”

“The regular Coke,” Rose said.

“I mean the appointment, for today or later.”

“Sure, sorry, I misunderstood. Tell her today. And to bring samples.”

“Samples?”

“Samples of the grates, tell her to bring them. Tell her it’s important, very important,” Rose said and was going to add that it was a matter of life or death, but he refrained so that those who might be listening in on the call would not mistake him for a terrorist. Life or death, fatherland or death, victory or death, death to the infidels: it was best to avoid any kind of language that sounded like extremist talk.

By noon, Rose was busy putting the chains on the tires of his car, and then began shoveling the driveway. He was soon out of breath with the exertion and stopped halfway through, stiff and sweaty, feeling like a Santa Claus under many layers of clothing. From a distance, the three dogs watched, resigned and still, sitting in a row from biggest to the smallest, as they always did right before he was about to leave for anywhere. When Rose finished shoveling, he said good-bye to them very affectionately, as always, maybe not as always, this time more so than ever, giving each a Scheiner’s sausage and a tight hug, with a finality to each gesture, as if he were going on a journey with no return. Empera had filled him in on the details that he had not received by phone: the meeting would be at the Roosevelt Field mall in Garden City, accessible by the Meadowbrook Parkway. Empera was helping after all, perhaps grateful for the salary increase. She also agreed to stay in the house until Rose returned, to look after the place and watch the dogs.

When he turned on the engine of his Ford Fiesta, Rose admitted to himself that he would have preferred a thousand times over to go to the food court with Ming at his side and now regretted not having accepted his offer. The idea of María Paz pursued by the law, bounty hunters, and her criminal brother-in-law was not an appealing one and certainly made Rose skeptical of getting into trouble with so many people. After all, he was no epic hero, or to put it how Cleve phrased it, the epic wind did not blow at Rose’s back. But there was nothing to do. He could not pass this up, because it was unlikely there would be another chance. There was a frustrating bottleneck on the parkway and Rose was so nervous that he took the wrong exit twice, but he still managed to get to Roosevelt Field with plenty of time to spare.

The food court was crammed with people, with ornaments and twinkling lights, with music and smells: humanity preparing for Christmas. Rose, who had been locked up for months in the shadows of his grief, was taken by surprise with this crowded bazaar that surrounded him with all its agitation and clamor. Strange, he thought, how now we celebrate the birth of Jesus in a manger, but come spring we commemorate his death on a cross. Poor puzzled mankind, inventing so much silliness to hide the fact that it understands nothing. But what does my Cleve have to do with all this? Who the hell tries to make these things clearer by confusing Cleve with that king born to die crowned with thorns?

All around Rose there were dozens of young women moving about with coffee-colored eyes and hair, and judging by the photo of record, any of them could be her. With fifteen minutes still to the appointed time, Rose bought three regular Cola-Colas. It was hard to get a table but one finally opened, and the next step was to sit down and arrange the three cans in a triangle. How stupid to use such a sign, he realized as he was doing it. It is impossible to arrange three cans in anything other but a triangle. It may have been relevant to specify what type of triangle, an equilateral, isosceles, or scalene one, depending on the length of its sides, or a right, obtuse, or acute one, according to the degrees of angles. He put down the three cans in whatever manner, as if it mattered, those three cans of Coke were invisible in the sea of the products that crowded the place. How stupid, really, when it would have been much more practical and sensible to specify other details, to have said, for example, that he would be wearing a gray coat and a black scarf. In the end, it wasn’t entirely his fault; no one had yet had the sense to publish Conspiracy Tactics for Dummies. It was already a quarter past three and no sign of the girl with the grates. If she had come, it would have been very difficult to find him in the middle of that zoo. Rose began to sense that he had somehow failed and did not know what to do but wait and tap the table with one of the cans. What if this was nothing more than a trap, and he was going to end up thrown in a Manninpox for men? The noise of the place disoriented him, and the loud ambient music thundered in his ears: Pavarotti howling “Silent Night” and “White Christmas” from the loudspeakers. It did make Rose smile, remembering that Cleve used to call Pavarotti Ravioloti. “I really like Ravioloti’s records,” he used to say, as if it the great singer were an overstuffed pasta dish.

While he waited, Rose thought about something he had heard many times before, that Plácido Domingo was the greater tenor of the two, that in Milan, Pavarotti always failed to hit the high notes during the second act of Don Carlo. “Maybe you blew it at La Scala,” Rose told Pavarotti, “but here in this food court, the victory is all yours, rest in peace, you marvelous fatso, here you out-howl all of us together.” It was already half past three and not a sign of María Paz.

Rose stood to become more visible, and surreptitiously scrutinized the women milling about, loaded with children and packages. Could María Paz be that that melancholy skinny one, waiting for something, or someone, sitting alone at her table in front of a disposable cup? She was brown, more or less pretty, had the long dark hair, but just then her beau arrived, kissed her, and sat beside her. So no, not that one. Did María Paz dye her hair blonde to evade her pursuers? Was she that blonde who was so engrossed with her cell phone, punching the little keys with a demonic agility? Wrong again. Without pausing from her texting, the blonde stood up and left. Wait, someone approached. It was an old woman in winter getup, with a pink coat, white boots, and too much makeup that adhered to her face like a mask. The old woman just wanted to know if the coupons that she was holding in her hand were good for the sale at Macy’s. Rose apologized and said he didn’t know, not even bothering to ask about the garden grates. Clearly, this was not the girl.

At half-past four, he gave up. He had been waiting for ninety minutes; at that point, he deduced that the meeting had been thwarted. Or Empera somehow had gotten the information incorrect, and he had gone to the wrong place. Or something had happened to María Paz and she could not make it. Maktub, as she herself said. What could he do? Rose began to go, more relieved than upset, almost running away from the food court and resolving for the time being to relax and disconnect from the situation. He had had enough clandestine activity for the day. Ciao, María Paz, see you later, for now you’re on your own. Sorry, I did what I could; I can’t do any more for you. The situation brought with it a ferocious appetite. Rose realized it was already dark outside and he had not had lunch yet, so he asked for the whereabouts of a real restaurant. No food court, no junk food; since Cleve’s death months before he had been eating terribly and sparingly, but suddenly he felt like eating a hearty meal, and doing it slowly. Someone directed him to a place called Legal Sea Foods, and he went and had clam chowder and an order of shrimp wontons. Now he could return home; the dogs would be waiting. He paid his check and went back to the central area, where Ravioloti was still hitting all those high notes that his detractors claimed he could not hit. A few minutes later, Rose noticed a heavily pregnant woman moving rapidly toward him. She wore a ridiculous multicolored hat and scarf, a crazy matchy-match. Rose made to get out of the way, fearing that if the girl crashed into him, she would give birth on the spot. But she walked right up to him, arms akimbo.

“Are you the father of Mr. Rose?”

“And you… you’re here about the grates?”

“I suppose so.” She took half a step back to look at him. “You’re the other Mr. Rose. The father of Mr. Rose.”

“How did you know?”

“Oh, good God, I’ve known you for a while,” María Paz said.

“As have I known you, more than you think,” Rose said, and then realized how truthfully he had spoken, that from reading her manuscript, reading it so many times in the solitude of night, he was more intimately connected to her than he had allowed himself to believe. Now she was there, in the flesh, and he not only felt he knew her, but more than that, he felt a certain closeness to her. There was also something nice about her that made him let his guard down, her guileless smile, perhaps, or her cheerful look. Or maybe it was compassion he felt for her, with that huge protruding belly pushing out from under her coat, a kind of compassion tinged with discomfort at the extravagant knit cap and scarf, and the self-confidence with which the girl carried herself, flashy and out of place as she seemed. But the jumble of feelings suddenly gave way to a more powerful emotion, and Rose’s heart soared at the insane delusion that had taken over his mind. Could it be Cleve’s child? Was this woman bearing the child of his child?

“Is it my grandchild?” he asked, his voice overcome with emotion.

“But how, Mr. Rose; it would have been very nice, but the dates don’t quite match up.” María Paz laughed.

“Then that clamp inside you must be huge,” Rose said, trying to conceal the interplanetary sentimental journey from which he just landed with a joke and hastening to dry his tears with the sleeves of his coat.

“You mean the pregnancy?” asked María Paz, for whom the word “clamp” had little meaning. “This pregnancy is as real as a three-dollar bill.”

“A disguise,” Rose sighed. “But you went too far, dear, it looks as if you are about burst at any moment, and the ambulance will come for you.”

She asked him to wait and excused herself to use the ladies’ room, went into a stall, got rid of some of the filling, and returned a couple of months less pregnant. Rose asked if she had been followed and she replied that she hadn’t, and had taken precautions.

“We have to get out of here, right now,” he said. “I have the car in the parking lot, we need to talk, a matter of a clamp.”

“A clamp?”

“It’s complicated.”

“What if I’d rather go to the movies?”

“The movies? Are you nuts?”

“It’s been a long time since I went to the movies, I’d really like to. There are a bunch of theaters here.”

“You don’t understand; you have the entire police force after you and a clamp inside you. You have to have the clamp removed, it is very important. Your friend Mandra X told us about it, she saw the X-ray—”

“There’s too much noise here, I can’t really understand what you’re saying. Come on, Mr. Rose, let’s go to the movies, nothing will happen.”

Rose suddenly thought he saw enemies walking around everywhere, his paranoia in full force, but she insisted on going to the movies with such naive teenage-like enthusiasm that he began to give way, not sure why, perhaps because he had no other choice. At least during the movie, they would be more hidden, anything better than to remain there, exposed, in this very busy place.

“But what movie do you…?” It was the dumbest question.

“It doesn’t matter. Whatever is showing. Come on.”

So off they went, crossing from one end of the huge mall to the other looking for a movie theater, and she took him by the arm. She did it as naturally as a daughter would with her father, and that gesture just smoothed away any feelings of distance or distrust that may have lingered in him. He was very nervous, but he was there, holding on, somehow feeling supported, accompanied for the first time in months. He even managed to smile despite the tremendous tension, calibrating how suspicious they may have looked, checking out their reflection in the windows, the image that they must have presented to others. And what was it that he saw? He tells me he saw himself with a young woman, more or less his son’s age, a girl who could be his daughter, well, if Edith had been another ethnicity. There would have to have been some uncommon ethnic pairing to get a father so fair-skinned and a daughter so dark-skinned. That part was strange. In any case, she could have been adopted, the father an engineer working in Colombia who had adopted a baby orphan and brought her back. Rose supposed he looked like a father with his daughter in the mall taking advantage of the last days of her pregnancy to do some holiday shopping.

“Anyone who saw us must have thought we were out buying clothes for the baby,” Rose tells me. “I remember thinking if it was a boy, it would be called Jesús, because it would be born on the twenty-fifth, like the child in the manger, and you know how Latinos do things like that, christen the son with the name of God; it’s like the Greeks would name a child Zeus, or Muslims with Mohammed.”

“We should get at least one bag,” Rose suggested. “Everyone is carrying bags except us.”

“Good idea,” she said. “If you want, you can buy me a Christmas gift.”

“What about some chocolates? Look at those chocolates?”

“Alright, stuffed cherry bonbons. To eat at the movies.”

It was all so stunningly normal, in fact, amid the rampant abnormality, amid the unhinged situation, all so amazingly standard, Rose really her father, she really his daughter, and the baby about to be born fully his grandson, a scene to inspire tenderness even. That could someday have been my life if they hadn’t taken Cleve from me, thought Rose.

Because the rest of the movies were sold out, they went to see a horror movie, The Rite, with Anthony Hopkins and several demons, and there, in the dark and nearly empty theater, Rose tried to convince María Paz that she needed to have the operation to remove the clamp. She was more interested in the movie, screaming whenever Asmodeus or Beelzebub possessed Hopkins, who was playing Father Lucas. There was no way to get through to her. To María Paz the whole mess with the clamp sounded like a story. She just would not believe it, it was not the right time for it, and she would not hear of an operation that was going to put her on a spit like a dead cow right in the middle of her great escape. She had designed the plan and put it in motion, and she was ready to fulfill its purpose at any cost. She whispered to Rose that she’d just about had it with the hiding, and that all she wanted to do was to pick up her sister, Violeta, fly out of the United States together to Seville, and get there in time to see the orange blossoms bloom. For María Paz, it was a given that she would not see Mr. Rose again once they left the mall, because at any time after that night, she and her sister would take off on their own and go for broke.

“The die has been cast, Mr. Rose,” she said.

“I know. Maktub.”

“That’s right, completely maktub.”

“But where are you going?” Rose asked. He could not imagine what kind of country would receive a creature like her, without money and without papers, on the contrary, being pursued by as many problems as enemies, and to top it with a troubled sister. Not to mention the clamp.

“I’m going to get the hell out of here, Mr. Rose. So much for my American dream,” she said, and told him that she had made contact with a coyote who was going to help her cross the northern border, to get them out on the other side.

“Which other side, María Paz?”

“Across the world. To the Promised Land, milk and honey on the other side. I’m talking about that kind of other side.”

“One assumes that’s America…”

“Not anymore, I think.”

“And who is this Charon?”

“Who?”

“This thug who is guaranteeing your passage?”

“A coyote I hired, Mr. Rose, a professional who’s super into the whole racket. I could tell he was cyber-coyote because all his contacts were on a Blackberry.”

“This is crazy, María Paz.”

“As crazy and full of dreams as when my beautiful mommy came from Colombia to here.”

“You can’t go just like that. First you need surgery to get that clamp out, and when you recover, you have to help me find Sleepy Joe.”

“Sleepy Joe! Why Sleepy Joe? Sleepy Joe is an asshole, Mr. Rose, vile, heinous; that type is best forgotten. And I have no idea where he might be, I’m running away from him also.”

“We’ll talk about that later. First, you have to get that operation.”

“Forget it, Mr. Rose, no operation,” María Paz said bluntly.

The cyber-coyote had not given a fixed date, but she had been told they could take off for Canada at any time and she must be available at the drop of a hat, the five senses alert, with everything needed ready: backpack, snow boots, thermal underwear, thick socks, snowboard, lined gloves, and North Face ski jackets, as well as the $3,500 dollars per head she would have to give him personally for his services.

“Do you have the money?” Rose asked.

“I have everything. My friends have been generous. I borrowed money for the fee, clothing, and gear. I’ll see how I pay them after I get out of trouble. I just need to go to the school to get my sister, take her, and take off, dressed as for the Winter Olympics.” María Paz laughed. “I have set up two of everything, for her and for me. So I have to say good-bye to you soon, Mr. Rose, I can’t stay longer. I would love to stay. But this is all very complicated, very exhausting, you know, life-and-death circumstances. The good news is that Violeta will like Seville; it was she, after all, my sister, Violeta, who said Seville in spring smells like orange blossoms. And don’t tell me that I shouldn’t get my hopes up, sir, I know I shouldn’t, I know it won’t be easy, I’m very clear about that. Between here and that spring there’s a whole fucking winter in the way. ‘Winter is coming,’ so says the motto of House Stark in Game of Thrones. Have you seen it? Isn’t it the best? ‘Winter is coming.’ I guess that’s my motto too. Things are going to be fucked. I know that. Very cold, very scary, I know, with a whole bunch of motherfuckers breathing down our necks. Anyway, I wanted to come to say thank you, Mr. Rose, and tell you that the death of your son caused me a lot of pain. Your son was the sweetest, most beautiful person I have ever met. I came just to tell you that.”

“How did you find out about his death?”

“I was in your home when the accident happened, Mr. Rose, and I figured it out because of the dogs. They began acting very strange, running up and down those stairs like crazy, and I thought, what’s going on with these animals, why are they suddenly so unhinged? Then I took off the headphones, because it was nine or ten at night, and I was watching TV with the headphones and couldn’t really hear what was going on. I was up there, hiding in your son’s attic, hiding from you too, Mr. Rose, a detail for which I owe you a belated apology, because we did it behind your back and should have consulted you. I’m sorry. Your son had left for Chicago around four in the afternoon, but now it was well into the night, and I was just lying around watching TV with the headphones on. Your son had set it up for me so that you wouldn’t hear the TV when you were home and then have to come upstairs to turn it off. In any case, I took off the headphones, and I heard your screams. You, Mr. Rose, yours. Out of nowhere, you had started wailing, and I knew immediately that something horrible had happened. It was the most pitiful sound that I’ve ever heard. I peeked down the stairs to see what was happening, because you know, if you were hurting him, I was going to have to go down to help him, even if it was just scaring you to death with my appearance. I went down the stairs slowly, slowly, my heart pounding, and I could hear that you were on the phone with your ex-wife. Then I knew what had happened to your son, and I felt the world had been pulled out from under me. I sat on the steps and wanted to die. I thought, if I stop breathing, I’ll just die right here, and this hellish journey will be over. I was ready for anything, anything but that, that they would take him from me, Mr. Rose, my salvation, my only true friend. I swear that night I wanted to die, right there in the attic, to be found mummified one day. I almost came down to give you a hug, Mr. Rose, to ask you how such a fucking tragedy is possible, to cry with you. Of course, in the end, I didn’t dare. You had no idea who I was or what I was doing in your damn house. The following day, Empera came upstairs and told me what had happened. She said you were going insane because your son had been killed in a motorcycle accident not far from Chicago. She asked me what I planned to do, and I told her I was getting out of there. She made me some chamomile tea to calm me down and instructed me to wait until half past three, because she finished work at that time. When she was off, Empera pulled her car into the garage, hid me well in the backseat under a pile of blankets, and that’s how we slipped out without a hitch through that ring of patrol cars and police vans.

“I’ll never forget the horror within that car, Mr. Rose. After the death of my mother, that was the saddest and most desperate moment of my life, Empera crying while driving and me crying while huddled under those blankets, waiting for the car to stop where I would get out on who knows what corner of what town or what stretch of road, again no better than a stray dog, cast off by fate and unprotected. In the days that followed, I did nothing but mourn, terribly missing both your son and the dogs, especially the baby, Skunko, what a loving little dog. You should have seen how we hit it off because he reminded me a lot of Hero. Sometimes I even forgot that he wasn’t Hero and was surprised to see him run off without his cart. I called Skunko Hero and he kind of got used to that name, because he came running when I called him.

“I even missed you, Mr. Rose; although you may not believe it, I had grown fond of you even though you had never even met me. I watched you out the window when you went down to the garden to play with the dogs, or take them out for a walk, and it inspired me tenderly. I saw this and I thought, a man who cares for his dogs so much has to be a good man. How I wished I had a father like that. Now once again, Mr. Rose, the time of parting again, so goes life, one good-bye then another. What can we do?”

“For now, there will be no good-byes, María Paz. You can’t go,” Rose told her, the ring of command in his voice. “Don’t go before you take out the clamp. Then you have to help me find Cleve’s murderer. Tell me who killed Cleve.”

“Nobody killed him, sir.” Surprised at the undesirable twist that the conversation had begun to take, María Paz took a few steps backward, away from Rose. “Cleve was killed in an accident, sir. His bike killed him… Good-bye, Mr. Rose. Maybe someday we’ll see each other again.”

“You need some money?” Rose asked as a last attempt to keep her from leaving. “I can give you money, if you need…”

“No, Mr. Rose, thank you very much, I don’t need anything,” she started to say, moving farther away, but still facing him and holding his gaze.

Just at that moment, the air seemed to crackle in the mall and people moved to one side, sensing an approaching commotion ahead.

At first, it was just a rough perception without details: it filled the place with the acrid smell of stampede and violence in the making, still undefined. Seconds later, María Paz saw several policemen rushing toward her in a flash, pushing their way through. Were they coming for her? It unleashed a mad drumming in her chest. Yes, they were coming after her and this time she was trapped. How many times in recent months had she experienced the same feeling of having reached the end of the road? After so much forced immobility while locked up in Manninpox, she had not stopped running ever since she was released. Now the police were on top of her. Fear paralyzed her, and for a moment, the image of Violeta crossed her mind. She would not get to see her sister, Violeta. Things had to go to shit with only a few days to go. But were they really coming for her? María Paz was not going to wait around to find out. She overcame the momentary panic and set her mind to not surrender. Her survival mechanisms kicked into gear and within seconds her body became a type of getaway vehicle, strengthening its cardiac capacity, increasing blood pressure, intensifying metabolism, accelerating her mental activity, and increasing the blood glucose, which flows into the large muscles, particularly the legs, fueled and ready to run. María Paz was about to do it when something stopped her, a hand that grabbed her forcefully by the arm, like a vice that immobilized her.

“Do not run. That’s the last thing you should do,” she heard Rose telling her, his body pressed against hers. In that fashion, holding her, protecting her, Rose led her to a spot in the front row among the crowd that gathered to witness the police action as if it were live television, a little Sunday show for a mob thirsty for some excitement, everyone looking around trying to figure out who the cops were after — a shoplifter? a child molester? a credit card thief? — who would soon be smacked with a club across the head, or shot in the leg to be brought down, then handcuffed and humiliated before the eyes of all, with cell phones and security cameras catching every second of the shame. In the first row, as if part of an audience, Rose and María Paz stood with the rest of the spectators ready to enjoy the show. It hadn’t been since Greg, or Cleve, that she had felt protected in the arms of a white man, arms that lifted her from the risk zone and put her on the safe side of society.

“Take off that hat,” Rose whispered, without loosening his grip on her, “it’s too showy.”

As soon as she obeyed, he regretted having asked: from under the cap sprung her untamed mane of hair, even more eye-catching than the motley cap.

“You’ll have to cut it,” Rose whispered in her ear. “Or dye it.”

“Never,” she said. “Over my dead body.”

The policemen ran past and soon were out of sight. With the show disrupted, the crowd dispersed. After realizing that the cops had not been after her, María Paz suffered from a crash of adrenaline that left her limp and docile as a rag doll, and Rose took advantage of this to guide her toward the parking lot.

“From now on you’ll be better off with me,” he told her once they were in his Ford Fiesta.

“I was scared shitless when I saw the cops running toward us,” Rose admits to me. “But I found the courage somewhere to take María Paz into my arms to protect her, knowing that in the eyes of the law this gesture could send me to die. Not that she was very grateful later, hardly said anything about it, but things changed after that. From that moment on, she accepted me as an ally. I just had to show her what I was willing to do for her.”

As they fled Garden City, María Paz said she was starving and they stopped in a nondescript, out-of-the-way restaurant in Deer Park, one of those “all you can eat” places, where Rose only had a coffee, because he had eaten lunch shortly before, and she had a plate of fried eggs with bacon, a green salad, and potatoes with melted cheese, plus a slice of obscenely rich chocolate cake, with two Diet Cokes.

“Jesus Christ, girl, you were famished,” Rose told her as they cleared the table.

“You have to take advantage when it’s offered; you never know when the next big meal will come.”

“Are you full?”

“About to burst.”

“So let’s talk seriously. You have to understand. They left a clamp inside you, that’s the cause of the bleeding.”

“Don’t worry about the bleeding; it’s gone down a lot. Maybe because there is no more blood inside. I’ll put the clamp thing on hold until Seville.”

“Don’t you believe me?” Rose pulled out a pen and drew on the paper tablecloth — a drawing similar to the one Dummy had sketched on the table in the conference hall, back in Manninpox. “There you go. This is your uterus, and this is the clamp. Look at it. It’s metallic, and it can be very dangerous.”

“But it’s soooo tiny,” María Paz said. “A little shit clamp. The truth is, Mr. Rose, of all the problems that I have, those little tweezers seem like the least of them.”

“But it’s not, and we’ll remove it. Don’t worry about anything, I’ve got it all planned out. You’ll need a week to recover. Your cyber-coyote can wait; call his Blackberry from the pay phone here and tell him things need to be postponed. Did you pay him all the money?”

“Only half.”

“Then no problem. Money makes the dog dance.”

María Paz went to the pay phone by the bathrooms, and from the table, Rose watched her call and then talk and gesticulate wildly.

“He says he gives me eight days,” María Paz told Rose when she came back to the table. “Eight days, Mr. Rose, and after that, come what may, I’m out.”

Good. Rose had it all planned. He had his ex-wife’s ID in the car and her health insurance documents that he kept updated, never a month late with payments, not really sure why. An unhealthy fixation, if you will, paying health insurance premiums year after year for a woman who abandoned him, perhaps because he still believed that when he least expected it, she would return and would need health insurance. Maybe that was the reason, or even simpler, the act of not paying the fees anymore would have been like a permanent separation, as if he were burying Edith. Whatever the explanation was, the futile effort now could prove useful; it would help with María Paz’s operation. Edith was young when the ID picture was taken; both women had dark hair and eyes, Edith a more pronounced nose, María a rounder, brown face, but smudge the date of birth with a coffee stain and force things a bit, and they could be the same person. Not that Rose didn’t want to pay for the operation; he would have done so willingly; it was more for reasons of security. Shielded by Edith’s identity, who would imagine María Paz in the operating room of a good private hospital?

Rose told her of his master plan, and she fiercely refused to participate. She said it was a crazy and absurd idea, a risk they shouldn’t take under any circumstances. Someone would catch them and turn them in. She didn’t look like the woman in the picture, at all; there was no chance.

“You’ll see, Mr. Rose. I know a better way. Have you ever wondered how the thousands of illegals in this country go to the doctor?” she asked Rose, and he admitted that he hadn’t. “Do you think we don’t get sick?”

“I guess you do.”

The following day, after spending the night in the studio on St. Mark’s, María Paz and Rose went to a building in Queens. Nothing too unseemly about the place, a couple of dour-faced porters not wearing uniforms, people coming in and out, the smell of air-conditioning with a tinge of bleach and vinegar. Rose looked around and noticed that everyone looked like immigrants; perhaps the only discordant note was an occasional white person in the mix of dark people coming in and out. In the badly lit lobby, there was an ATM, vending machines, bathrooms for men and women — nothing that would draw attention.

“Comadre!” María Paz told the receptionist. The two embraced effusively, bemoaning how long it had been since they last saw each other. And how is your sister? And your husband, still unemployed? And remember Rosa, from Veracruz, what a tragedy, and this and that and that and this, until the receptionist passed María Paz off to another comadre, who also hugged her excitedly and made her fill out a questionnaire. What happened to you? And María Paz explained about the clamp, carefully avoiding any mention of Manninpox. Can you imagine it was just a simple curettage and such and such? Who’s the gringo with you? Two other nurses, or assistants, or just gossips flitting about wanted to know. He’s like a father to me, María Paz informed them. Ah, well, okay, he can be trusted then. Yes, no worries, very nice people, helped me with everything, no drama there. Ah, well, good, then the coast is clear.

María Paz was eventually whisked off by the gang of comadres, and Rose was directed to a waiting room with a dingy gray carpet and an old TV with a fuzzy image. “Everything has been arranged, sir,” they assured him, “don’t worry about a thing, they’re going to treat her like a queen, she’s like family, like a sister. Relax, relax, María Paz. Everything is good, mija. Good ol’ Dr. Huidobro will do that procedure in the blink of an eye. Who is Dr. Huidobro? Oh, you don’t know him? An Uruguayan — new, marvelous. You’ll see what a doll he is.”

“Let’s get out of here before it’s too late,” Rose managed to tell María Paz when he checked on her, or rather he begged her. The whole thing made him horribly uneasy. What kind of place was this anyway, a clandestine clinic in the middle of New York? They should just go; she was adding one more illegal act to the many hanging over her head. But she had already changed into the green robe tied in the back that left her butt exposed, and they were taking her to radiology.

Rose went back to the waiting room, uncomfortable and frightened, staring at the carpet stains, not knowing where they stood and feeling as if his apprehensions were multiplying like rabbits.

Never in his life had he been in such a suspicious place. Holy God, he thought, this really is the third world in all its glory. He was mulling over all this when he saw María Paz in the hallway, accompanied by a tall, sharp-looking guy, a telenovela hunk, in coat and tie and wearing a white surgeon’s cap. He spoke Spanish to Rose, introducing himself as Dr. Huidobro when Rose joined them. Judging by the accent, he was from the Southern Cone.

“Are you from Argentina?” Rose asked, and María Paz opened her eyes wide to indicate that he was committing a faux pas, that those kinds of questions were not asked in this place.

“More or less,” the man said. He held on to one of María Paz’s hands with his left hand, and with the right held up an X-ray.

Not letting go of María Paz’s hand, this Huidobro pointed to the clamp on the X-ray, on the right side just as Dummy had indicated. He informed them that the operation would be performed the following morning at 7:30 a.m. It had to be done as soon as possible, but it was a simple procedure. It would be done under local anesthesia and María Paz would be released the same day.

“Will you perform the operation?” Rose asked in a somewhat aggressive tone, because what he really wanted to say was Let go of her hand, motherfucker, who the hell do you think you are?

“I’ll perform the operation, of course, not to worry, me personally,” Huidobro assured them, and immediately afterward presented him with a bill of $2,500, which Rose ran to the nearest bank to withdraw. Without providing a receipt, Huidobro grabbed the wad and in the blink of an eye, it disappeared into the pocket of his pants.

A pig, thought Rose, nothing but a pig, I hope he washes those dirty money-grubbing hands before operating, and that he is as handy with the scalpel as with the cash. Rose didn’t trust him at all, with the look of a tango singer or a soccer player more than a surgeon. But there was nothing Rose could do. María Paz had already decided to put herself unconditionally in his hands and behave with the docility of cows to the slaughter.

“You’ll be fine, we’ll take good care of you,” Huidobro told her, holding her hand again, and explained that they would take her blood pressure, draw some blood, and put in her IV.

“Don’t be worried, Mr. Rose,” María Paz told Mr. Rose when they were alone again. “Dr. Huidobro is very good.”

“Very good? That soccer player with a baker’s cap? Listen, María Paz, this is a dive. There isn’t the least of sterile procedures that I see; no appropriate medical equipment. You are making a serious mistake. Staphylococcus aureus must be rampant around here. You’ll get an infection that will kill you. This so-called doctor, this Huidobro, is an impostor, an abuser of women. I’m asking for the last time that we go to a decent hospital, a place where they will care for you as a human being, attended by professionals.”

“Dr. Huidobro has all the qualifications and specializations he needs. Don’t worry, Mr. Rose. What happens is that because he’s South American, they don’t give him a license to practice in this country. Don’t be insulting, Mr. Rose, I’m telling you, a lot of gringos come here too, full American citizens, to have surgery, more than you suspect, just as white as you, only without insurance or money to pay for a regular doctor.”

Rose didn’t dare go back to the East Village for the night. He had to remain nearby, just in case. So he stayed in a hotel not far from the hospital. He didn’t sleep a wink, hour after hour tossing and turning, disturbed by all kinds of dark musings. What if the police were tipped off and they rounded everybody up, including him? What if María Paz died on the operating table, which was actually nothing more than a kitchen table, probably? What would they do in such a case with the body? What guarantees could they offer in that hole, what insurance or permits? Rose couldn’t understand how he had come to accept all this, how he had allowed them to stoop so low, and the worst was going to come if something happened to her. He and the tango singer would be jointly responsible for her death, and he already saw himself sharing the death row with the Uruguayan impostor and Sleepy Joe.

Early the next morning, he dressed without showering and showed up at the place determined to get her out of there, his alleged daughter, or wife, or daughter-in-law, whatever she was, though he didn’t really have any way to prove his relationship to her or to assert any authority over her.

“You can go in and see her. The operation went well. She’s stable and already in recovery,” one of the comadres from the previous day told him. Rose followed her down a narrow corridor, still full of misgivings, bringing María Paz a macchiato and cookies from Starbucks.

After going through the back door, the offices, desks, and gray carpet vanished. The dividing walls also vanished, and suddenly Rose found himself in a wide-open space — clean, white, and well lit, with a row of hospital beds behind screens. An entire secret hospital in the heart of New York. Good God, thought Rose. Who would believe the country had grown into a gigantic strudel cake with layers hidden upon layers beneath the surface? All you had to do was dig a little bit to discover the most unexpected realities. How had it come to this? American society, solid and unquestionable until yesterday, was now an empty bread crust eaten by weevils. Rose approached María Paz, who was resting in one of the beds, still wearing the disposable green robe and a bit pale, but smiling.

“Look at it, Mr. Rose! Here it is!” she said, making a noise with the jar that held the little clamp they had just extracted and displaying it proudly, like a child showing off some strange bug.

Rose tells me that he took María Paz to the mountains to recover from the operation, and that when they got there, Empera greeted her with a hug, and the dogs leaped all around her as if she were an old friend; of course they did, since they knew her so well from before. “That’s life,” Rose tells me. “All that time I was looking for her, and she had already found me. I was searching for her all over the place, unaware that she had been in my own home. As soon as we entered, she wanted to look around the ground floor and wanted me to start a fire. She said that during the week she had been hiding in the attic she could tell when I lit a fire by the smell of pine burning. Then I walked with her, taking little baby convalescent steps, to the place where Cleve had buried the ashes of her dog Hero, and I confessed that they had been dug up but quickly agreed that we should bury them again in the same place, and we did. So that she did not have to walk up and down the stairs, I suggested that she stay in my room, and I’d move to Cleve’s room, but she said no. She preferred to stay upstairs, because there were so many treasured memories.”

Together, they spent some time without mishaps, Rose taking care of her and María Paz allowing him to do so, alone in the house with the dogs, because Empera had gone on her annual pilgrimage to Santo Domingo to spend the holidays with family, trusting she could return to the United States in late January, probably violating for the umpteenth time in her life the rigid border controls against undocumented immigrants. On top of that, there was a heavy snowfall in the region that almost completely isolated them; no one could come into or leave that area of the Catskills without running the risk of encountering some dangerous road conditions. In that sense, María Paz felt safe and could relax; it helped her to calm down and recover. For Christmas she wanted to make a Colombian ajiaco and was pleased to find out that Rose had already tried the dish during his family’s stay in her country, and he had liked it enough to dare to brave the elements and go get the ingredients, insofar as it was possible, because the local corn was too sweet, and forget about finding the three kinds of Andean potatoes, which had to be replaced by Chieftain, Dakota Rose, and pale Idaho potatoes. There was also no way to get the herb called guascas, so they used marijuana leaves instead as she had when she made the ajiaco for Greg, which they plucked from the emaciated and yellow plants Cleve had grown in the garage and that since his death nobody had cared for.

“For some reason, making that soup was very important to her,” Rose tells me. “It wasn’t like the original in Bogota, only remotely similar, but it didn’t matter to María Paz. She was really happy when we set up the Christmas Eve table.”

They were very easygoing days for the most part, Rose tells me, even enjoyable, because the girl was really smart and charming, and they had a common topic that brought them together, Cleve. The admiration and affection with which María Paz spoke about Cleve brought Rose to tears. But there was another topic that set them against each other, with each standing at opposite ends and neither of them ever completely lowering his or her guard, generating between them a kind of double-sided game, never fully resolved, and leading them to constantly oscillate between familiarity and mistrust. That other topic was Sleepy Joe. Any hint about his criminal nature turned the tide against Rose. María Paz was closed to such discussions, defending her brother-in-law with an irrational stubbornness that he couldn’t understand. He tried to make her see that Sleepy Joe was responsible for Cleve’s death, but he had no hard evidence, and she refused to accept even the possibility. At the most, she called him the bastard brother-in-law, or a bully and thug, euphemisms that hurt and wounded Rose, because they suggested a solidarity that was intact between María Paz and Sleepy Joe, and this was too much like a betrayal.

Rose realized she contacted other people with a lot of whispering and mystery, in the rare and brief calls she made from one of those prepaid cell phones. Rose was watching, it could be said spying, and through those calls he learned that although she had postponed her trip in no way was it canceled, and she remained in contact with the cyber-coyote who would help her escape the country through the Canadian border. Rose didn’t ask her too much; he let her be, but occasionally she let some of the specifics seep out, and they sounded to him like details of a delusional and crazy plan, crossing the forests of Indian territory in the middle of winter, traveling by boat on the lakes, with the native people of the area guiding them and providing them with food and accommodation. Regardless, Rose remained vigilant, hoping that sooner or later she would lead him to Sleepy Joe. He was sure the guy was following them systematically. He could sense his closeness and imagine his stalking.

“During all this, Pro Bono came back from Paris,” Rose informs me, “and he started calling me to see if I had news about María Paz. I dismissed his inquiries, making believe I was disgusted by his desertion. I told him I didn’t know anything about María Paz and didn’t want to know anything about her. You see, I had my own plans in mind. I was following my own game plan, an uncertain one, of course, but I was very stubborn about sticking to it, and I did not need Pro Bono getting in the way. Better to mislead him and keep him away. In one of those calls, Pro Bono told me that several days before, a former New York police officer had been killed in Queens, on 188th Street and Union Turnpike. Interestingly, according to Pro Bono, the deceased had belonged to the same unit as María Paz’s husband and was being investigated for alleged involvement in a string of arms trafficking within the institution. There must have been something there connected to Greg’s murder. That was more than evident, but Pro Bono did not know exactly what. I asked him about the crime, particular details about it, that is, if it looked like a ritual thing. He said he didn’t think so. The report spoke of two shots to the head fired from a motorcycle, nothing that sounded very peculiar.

“I didn’t say anything to María Paz about the reappearance of Pro Bono and his calls, especially that last one, not a thing. I don’t know if you get what I mean, but every day I grew more and more fond of the girl, and I was sure she was growing more fond of me. Still I couldn’t trust her completely. She did not quite feel like an accomplice.”

The appointed day of departure arrived quickly, and María Paz seemed as if she was fully recovered by then, or that’s what the pirate surgeon Huidobro told them when they went for a checkup. But before leaving the United States, she had to go to Vermont to pick up her sister, and asked Rose for one favor, the last one, she assured him: to take her to Vermont. After that, the two sisters would continue on their own, under the aegis of the cyber-coyote, and Rose could return home. Those were her plans. They didn’t quite match Rose’s plans. If he stayed with her, he thought there was always the possibility that they would find Sleepy Joe. He wanted to find the bastard at any cost. He needed to settle accounts with him. Yet, something told him that this was not the time to undertake such a mission, just now, when he had started to feel calm and make peace with his memories. The pain of the death of his child, that hurtful little blade of burnished metal that had been stabbing at his flesh and cutting his bones, was losing its sharpness.

Instead, a new presence had been surging, less intense but in some ways more real: the memory of Cleve when Cleve was alive. Every day, Rose cried a little less and remembered Cleve a little more, as if he were finally recovering his son: Cleve at eight wearing one of Edith’s sweaters, enormous on him; Cleve at fifteen riding a camel during a walk along the Nile Valley; Cleve going to his first school dance with Ana Clara, the Portuguese girl next door; Cleve reading Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra in a hammock on a hot day; Cleve very small, playing in a corner of the room with his dolls Skeletor and He-Man; Cleve in early adolescence, his face dotted with Clearasil acne cream; Cleve at three, emerging miraculously unscathed after a cabinet toppled on him; Cleve going down the slopes in Aspen on a snowboard; Cleve fleeing his mother’s house after a fight with Ned. And especially Cleve asleep in his bed with his dog, and what Edith had said when she saw them: “This boy will never be as happy as he is right now.” These and other memories from the life of his son returned in droves and with a decisive element in common: in all of them Cleve was free of his own death; Cleve’s death still had nothing to do with Cleve.

Even the incident of the jump into the empty pool had begun to be seen in more positive light by Rose, the tragedy that could have been but was not. No, definitely not a good time, this was not a good time to go with María Paz on this crazy adventure, even if she was the only path toward the retaliation that Rose believed was necessary.

“What he had done to my son made my blood boil and I couldn’t wait to get my hands on the culprit. At the same time not so much, not so much, if you know what I mean. It just wasn’t me, chasing a murderer with a pistol that had belonged to the bodyguard of Pancho Villa, or whatever other pistol I had chosen. Every day that passed I saw just how contradictory the whole scenario was, and certainly I was not a professional avenger, no matter what ups and downs I had suffered. I have to admit all this to you, even though I’m afraid that’s not what you’re looking for. Perhaps you were hoping to get this spectacular story about serial murderers and superdetectives, like those that run for five seasons on television, where everyone is clear about their roles and the rest is pure action. Maybe that’s what you expect, so sorry to disappoint. This is a true story about ordinary people, full of doubts, mistakes, improvisations. There are dates that do not square and loose ends that may never be tied up, a poor father and a poor murderer: not much more than that, actually. This is not one of those heartless stories; those who have lived through it have left behind a little bit of our lives at every step.”

Rose mentioned to María Paz an insurmountable obstacle regarding the proposed trip to Vermont: the three dogs. They could not be left at home because Empera was on vacation in her country and there was no one to care for them.

“Not a problem,” María Paz said, “we’ll take them with us. A little trip with everyone.”

“Are you out of your mind?” Rose said. “In the middle of winter?”

“It’ll be wonderful, with all the snow.”

“How the hell are you supposed to fit three animals in a Ford Fiesta?”

“Good Lord, Mr. Rose, it’s like you create a problem for every solution. We won’t fit in the little car, but we’ll fit in the Toyota.”

“The Toyota? No! The Toyota belongs to Edith.”

“It used to belong to Edith. Anyway, it’s perfect for us.”

“But that car is practically an antique.”

“The dogs don’t care about that.”

There was no winning against the stubbornness of this woman. Rose ended up bringing the car to the mechanic for a new battery and tires, and to check the brake fluid and change the oil. They took off on a Saturday morning, packing a bundle of Eukanuba, a few jugs of water, and thick blankets on which Otto, Dix, and Skunko could sleep in the back. Ming’s grandfather’s Glock 17 was hidden among Rose’s clothes inside a suitcase. Violeta’s school was almost on the border with Canada, near Montpelier, Vermont, and although María Paz was anxious to arrive, Rose was more than willing to go slow. He took the chance to drive her through the forests of the Adirondacks, a northbound journey through snow country, through the high mountain terrain and lakes of a landscape that the mist turned blue, stopping from time to time to contemplate the wonder, getting out here and there to let the dogs run loose as if they were wild horses on their native land.

Impossible not to talk, not to let the tongue loosen and fall into the confessional mode, with María Paz and Rose sitting close to each other, protected from the icy expanses by the warm and fragrant condensation of humans and dogs packed inside the car, motivating María Paz to trace something on the foggy window with her index finger.

“What? What was she writing?” I ask Rose, too tempting a question to pass up.

“Well, there were three letters forming a word, or so she told me, because I asked. I remember because I noticed and became curious. Like you just did. The letters were AIX. María Paz said that it had to do with something between her and Cleve, a kind of inside thing between them. But she left it at that.”

Rose wanted to know what she expected when she crossed the Canadian border. “They are frightening, the Canadians,” he said. “The Royal Canadian Mounted Police are famous for being real bastards, more animals than the horses they ride.” María Paz said she wasn’t worried, that for them Canada would be just a stopping place, the important thing was to get through the border completely undocumented, with no trace of her identity or her history in the United States. So no one would know that Violeta was crazy and that she herself was a bail jumper.

“What if you get caught?” Rose asked.

“The idea is to get caught, but in Toronto or Ottawa, only when we have crossed and are rid of the past. But not before that, no way. Look, Canada has signed treaties and conventions in which they adhere to UN policies. The coyote explained everything to me in detail, and according to these conventions, refugees are provided protection, shelter, and food.”

“And if they don’t do it?” Rose asked.

“Even better, because then we’ll be deported. Let them deport us, not a bad thing, wherever we end up is not important, it’s just a stop on the road to Seville. Because if I stay here, it’s to die.”

“What if they find out who you really are?”

“They won’t. We’ll put on the poor Latina act that we don’t speak English and just dream of sneaking into the US. It’ll be easy. They are convinced that all Latinos will give their lives for that. They can’t imagine the opposite. They go hunting for people desperate to get in, not determined to get out.”

Once parked outside the school, María Paz gave Rose some directions. He should be the one to go in and ask for Violeta. She couldn’t, afraid that the school may have heard about her troubles with the law and alert someone, or prevent her from seeing her sister; who knew what could happen. It was better not to risk it. It was a semi-open confinement, anyway; those who lived there were considered guests and not patients, and as guests, they were free to have any visitor they wanted, and even go out for a walk to the neighboring village. They managed their own spending money and could buy things at the local drugstore or 7-Eleven, or have lunch at one of the restaurants. They could leave to spend weekends and holidays with their families, provided they notified the school first. All Rose had to do was ask for Violeta at the reception desk and bring her outside.

“But she doesn’t even know me,” Rose objected. “It’s a crazy idea, like all the rest of them. She won’t come with me.”

“Show her this,” María Paz said, removing the necklace with the one-third-coin pendant and giving it to Rose. “It’s like a password. She knows what it is. She has a third of the coin also. Tell her that I’m waiting outside.”

“I won’t even know how to deal with her; you said she was a little weird…”

“Not a little, she’s weirder than a square-headed dog. But you have people skills. Just don’t talk much, and especially don’t touch her. Sometimes she bites when people touch her.”

“Same as Dix. That I can deal with. But just tell me specifically what she suffers from.”

“Some kind of autism, but I don’t really know. No one knows, not even her. If she does know, she hides things from the doctors. She’s always playing games to see how she can confuse them, so it’s not their fault if they can’t hit upon a precise diagnosis. What mental disorder does my sister suffer from? All of them and none of them.

“What do you want to know? Let’s see, Violeta likes to make her bed perfectly, smoothing it out and leaving not even a little wrinkle in the sheets, as if she were in the army, and at night, she barely moves so not to mess the sheets up. She has very sensitive skin, and hates when clothes scratch her or are too tight. She only eats white food — milk, pasta, bread, and stuff like that — and will vomit if she tries food of any other color. She speaks gently and prefers not to raise her voice, and she is also hypersensitive to noise. She calls me Big Sis and I call her Little Sis. Let’s see… What else is there? Don’t try to be sympathetic with her, or make any jokes, because she never understands. She likes to exaggerate, like she says she’s dying of hunger because she thinks she really is dying. Definitely do not ask her what she has done lately, because she will feel compelled to tell you everything she has done from morning to night during recent months. If it is small talk, do not ask her to shut up, or tell her, for example, that she’s talking up a storm, because she will become very frustrated and confused, trying to understand how someone can start a storm just by talking. One time, our mother was calling her to come and eat, and Violeta just ignored her. Our mother kept calling her but nothing, so she said, ‘This little girl is deaf as a post.’ Violeta was very offended because she said posts didn’t have ears. You know what I mean?”

“Sort of. I think I know what I have to do.”

“Just don’t do much; that’s the best way with her. Just show her the pendant and tell her I’m waiting outside.”

Rose reluctantly agreed to comply with the assigned task, or at least try, but when he was about to get out of the car, María Paz grabbed his arm.

“Wait, Mr. Rose. Wait a minute,” she begged him. “Let me take a breath. You have to realize, I haven’t seen Violeta in a long time. Since before Manninpox. My heart is pounding. Let me settle down a bit. Wait, I need some water. That’s better. Help me, Mami. Help me, Bolivia, up there in heaven, let everything go well today, I beg, I beg you, for God’s sake I beg you. Okay, I’ll be fine now.” She closed her eyes for a few minutes, then she sighed and said, “I’m ready. Go, Mr. Rose. Go and bring her to me.”

Rose was surprised with the look of the school. He had imagined something depressing and gray, but it was a Georgian house in the middle of a forest of maples and conifers; it had a Dutch roof crowned with a brick chimney, white pine siding, a double row of sash windows, and a central front entrance. There was no one outside, as to be expected because of the harsh cold, but Rose could imagine that when the weather was milder, visitors could relax outside with the kids. The interior was spacious and clean, rather empty except for what was necessary: function over form. Alright, thought Rose. Definitely a good place. Must cost a pretty penny to keep someone in here, though. Everything seemed great. Or maybe not everything. Something seemed off, as if the promise of the exterior was not fulfilled within, where the air was muggy with the breath of frustrated expectations. Every detail of the place seemed an attempt to convey the appearance of familiarity and normalcy, but for some reason this aim was never quite achieved. In spite of the marvelous house, inside there was an emptiness reminiscent of the halls of public school during after-school hours, giving rise to the feeling that the world went on ceaselessly outside while the hours remained stagnant within.

He was greeted immediately and cordially, and then offered a chair and some brochures so he could sit and read while waiting for Violeta. Thus he learned about the different types of rehabilitation programs, winter and summer therapy sessions, and special courses for families of autistic children. All this seemed very sophisticated, thought Rose. And yet, none of it stopped it from seeming like a sort of imprisonment. A benign Manninpox. A ghetto, an orphanage, a sanatorium. The Colombian sisters did not seem destined to enjoy the privilege of free and open spaces, at least not in America. While in the waiting area, Rose made an effort to stay focused on reading the pamphlets and not looking up, to avoid seeming nosy or rudely curious, but he could not help but sense the tension surrounding the troubled youngsters who happened to walk by, the feeling of misdirection and broken harmony, the impersonal metallic ring of their voices, the sour smell of their fears. Rose sat straight and stiff in his chair, as intimidated as one who had entered a temple of alien religion, and he startled when the receptionist announced Violeta’s arrival.

“Something utterly striking about that girl,” Rose tells me. “I don’t think she even noticed me. She definitely didn’t look at me, avoiding eye contact even after I said hello, which she completely ignored. Yet, when I showed her the pendant, the broken coin, she immediately realized that I somehow was connected to her sister. She became certain and assured, and walked out to the car with me, without me having to ask twice. She didn’t even put on a coat; despite the cold, she went outside with what she had on, jeans and a wool sweater. She showed very little emotion one way or the other about the fact that María Paz had come looking for her. Or I should say, she showed none at all. Never in my life have I seen such a beautiful face as expressionless as hers.”

“Can you describe her?” I ask Rose. “Violeta. What was she like that first time you saw her?”

“María Paz had told me about her long hair that fell almost to her waist. But that was gone. Her hair was the opposite, in fact, defiantly short, almost buzzed, at the most half an inch long, like a private in the army. It actually didn’t look bad on her. On the contrary, it helped call attention to the perfection of her features, especially her eyes. Huge eyes, intensely green, like a big cat’s, or in any case not very human. Humongous and green but shallow. I’m not sure how to describe it. Her whole face had a flat overall expression, as if there were some final connection missing. An expression that had no resonance. That’s it. No feedback, no echo. I couldn’t tell you anything about her nose or her mouth, because I’m not sure I even noticed them, lost as I was in her eyes. She was definitely tall and slender, and not dark-skinned like María Paz, but fair. By just glancing at them, you would never guess they were sisters. It’s only after interacting with them for a while that you begin to grasp a resemblance. If you want, I can tell you more about her eyes, because I focused almost entirely on them. The whites were clean, pure, liquid, and the irises were made of concentric circles of revolving lemon green and green gold, a pair of psychedelic, painfully expressionless buttons and yet very beautiful, like those of an antique doll. I’d say she’s a girl of disturbing beauty, but also a bit disturbed herself. Also very sensual, yes. I noticed that even though at first I could only look into her averted eyes. A lustful virgin, perhaps, or rather a young fairy, a somewhat mischievous one. And something told me that this was a lost child for the world, but more lucid and intelligent than other mortals.”

Rose kept his distance from the sisters when they first saw each other again. It seemed too intimate and too emotional to intrude. It was clear that at that moment María Paz was putting it all on the line, double or nothing, that she was making a definitive decision even as she took part in the exchange that Rose observed from a discreet distance, the figures blurred by the viscosity of the cold air. He tells me that there were no hugs or any other physical contact. Violeta would not look directly even at her own sister, and María Paz seemed wary of not slipping up and getting too close, even when she pulled a blanket out of the car because Violeta was so underdressed for the cold. She tried to hand her sister the blanket, Rose says, but Violeta didn’t take it. Instead, she pulled down the sleeves of her sweater, stretching them to cover her hands, which must have been freezing. María Paz cried. That part of it Rose was able to figure out later. Violeta seemed hypnotized by the dogs; all her attention was focused on the three animals. Then María Paz gave her a bag with some gifts, quite wrongheaded it turned out, because the gifts were a few sets of barrettes for her hair, the kind you can get at any drugstore. But what hair? Violeta put them back in the bag after she looked at them and handed them back to her sister.

“Look, Violeta, this is Mr. Rose,” María Paz said, gesturing for Rose to come closer. “He is a very dear friend who’s going to help us with everything. Say hello, tell him your name.”

“He’s your boyfriend,” Violeta said.

“No, he’s not my boyfriend, not at all. He’s a good friend but he’s not going to live with us; no worries, Violeta. He’s not my boyfriend.”

“Your old boyfriend. Like Greg, old.”

“No, Violeta,” Rose said, “I can assure you. I’m leaving in a little while, and you will stay with your sister, just the two of you.”

Violeta finally seemed to understand the situation, and she let out a little speech that seemed memorized, addressing Rose, but still not looking at him.

“I’m autistic,” she said. “Sometimes I seem rude, but only because I’m autistic. I don’t kick or spit on people. I just have autism. Autism. At school, they are teaching me to manage my disease. To laugh when I’m touched. They also teach us music and math. Music and mathematics.”

“Go get your things and come back,” María Paz said. The moment had come.

“Go get your things and come back,” Violeta repeated.

“Just pack a small suitcase, very small, but you have to be quick.”

“Have to be quick.”

“Go, love, don’t you see? I’m taking you with me. Just like I promised. Together! Just us, without Greg, without this man, no one. You and me, no one else: Big Sis and Little Sis. Then we’ll no longer be alone. Do you understand me, Violeta?”

“I can’t fit my stuff in a tiny suitcase.”

“Bring only what you like the most. I brought clothes for you. New clothes, you’ll see. It’ll be great.”

“I don’t think the new clothes will fit me very well.”

“Come on, Violeta, we don’t have time for this. Bring your things. I’ll wait here.”

“It was all very strange,” Rose tells me. “A difficult moment, surreal, very tense, and there I was, right in the middle of it.”

Violeta was gone for roughly fifteen minutes. When she returned, it was without a bag or suitcase, just a stuffed animal. A giraffe. María Paz later told Rose that it was the same giraffe Violeta had brought on the plane to America when their mother had sent for them.

“Good job, Little Sis!” María Paz congratulated her. “You brought your giraffe! Now hop in, we’re going on a trip with the dogs.”

“With the dogs,” Violeta repeated, but she did not move.

“Come on, Little Sis,” an anxious María Paz said. “Come, we’ll be together from now on. I promise. Always together.”

“Always together.”

“Didn’t you miss me all this time?”

“All this time.”

“Listen to me, Violeta, I beg you.”

“Listen to me, Violeta, I beg you.”

“I came all the way here for you, Violeta! Come, get in the car so we can go.”

“Big Sis goes,” said the girl. “Little Sis stays.”

“Don’t you want to go to Seville?”

“Go to Seville?

“We’ll go together, my sweet, together forever. Isn’t that what you want?”

“Big Sis is going to Seville. Big Sis is going to Seville. Little Sis stays here. Little Sis is fine here,” she said with a tremulous, metallic voice that sounded like the clatter of a typewriter. Then she handed the giraffe to her sister, ran toward the school, and disappeared through the door, without even looking back.

“I had never seen María Paz as defeated as she was that day,” Rose informs me. “It was as if someone had taken a sledgehammer to her head, as if all the lights had been shut off. I tried to comfort her, saying that the next day was Sunday, also a visiting day, and we could try again. But she said there was no point, that Violeta was the most stubborn creature on the face of the earth. Once she got something into her head, no one could get it out of there. She had made her decision and there was no turning back, María Paz insisted, and I knew she was right. Then I tried to tell her what I had been thinking all along, what to me was more than obvious. I talked honestly with María Paz and told her that I thought Violeta was right. It would without a doubt be better for her there, at that school, an appropriate place for her, where she was clearly nurtured and protected and made to feel good about herself. Much better than scampering around the world with a fugitive sister whose fate was as unpredictable as the winds. I asked her if the pension that paid for the school was secure, because it had to be expensive as hell, and she said it was, that Socorro was in charge of that. Socorro had promised their mother that she would serve as executor of the trust and so far had remained true to her word. I promised María Paz that if at some point Socorro could no longer perform her duties, I would take over. Pro Bono could help me set this up. I’d make payments to the school on time every month, so María Paz shouldn’t worry. I insisted on how much good such an institution did for her sister: it protected her from the constant change that so negatively affects people with her condition, and built confidence with good routines, free from the anxiety and loss of control brought about by new and unforeseen events.”

“Fuck,” María Paz said, “where are you pulling all that from, Mr. Rose? This morning you didn’t know a thing about such conditions…”

“True, but I read the pamphlets they gave me at the reception desk. I even brought one. Take it,” Rose told her, handing her a booklet with a yellow cover titled Interested in Learning and Sharing About Autism? And then he repeated that when it came to the execution of the trust, she had nothing to worry about.

“It can’t be, thanks, but no,” María Paz said flatly. “I can’t leave my sister behind, because Sleepy Joe will hurt her.”

So then they went back into their endless and wary conversation about Sleepy Joe, who he really was and how much harm he could do to Violeta.

“You’re the one who told me he was harmless,” Rose pressed.

“I never said he was harmless. I said he was no murderer; it’s different. But he is pissed because he thinks I stole his money. Why is that so hard for you to understand, Mr. Rose? Sleepy Joe is frantic, and he’s going to get even more nuts when he finds out I took off, according to him, with his money. If he can’t get to me, he’ll get even by hurting Violeta. You can bet the house on that. Today, I knew as soon as I saw her that things weren’t going to work as planned. I realized right away that I could not count on Violeta. She has to make a scene about everything. Do you know what I mean? Always. A fucking scene, that’s what she does, throws tantrums whenever she doesn’t get what she wants or if she feels as if she is being forced to do something. Not so bad this time, actually, she remained calm. She didn’t whine, didn’t cry, didn’t let loose with a list of maddening questions like she always does, sometimes the same question, over and over and over again, until you think that your head is going to explode. But there was none of that this time because her mind was made up. And like I said, no one in this world is as stubborn as she is. Just gave me the giraffe. The giraffe, her dearest possession, the thing that keeps her sane. Like Linus and the blanket he can’t part with, that’s the giraffe for my sister. Yet she gave it to me, and that means she was serious. She knew exactly what she was doing. A willful act, Violeta condemning herself forever by deciding not to come with me. I get it — all the other stuff — I’m not blind. It’s true what they say in the brochures, Mr. Rose. She is terrified of the unknown, takes refuge in her routines, and I was offering the most uncertain and risky adventure. The worst thing for her. I thought she would be excited just to be with me. I thought the best thing for Violeta was always to be with me, by my side. Until today, that’s what I felt and believed. From the time Violeta was a baby, she was fine if she was with her older sister, Big Sis. Apparently that’s not the case anymore. But I can’t leave her here; you have to understand that, Mr. Rose. I have to take her with me, even if I have to kidnap her.”

Rose tried to suggest that wasn’t the greatest idea, but María Paz’s despair was a solid wall that common sense could not penetrate. At least he was able to convince her to go to a little motel hidden in the woods, where they were able to reserve a couple of rooms without questions about the dogs or having to present IDs.

Despite its plainness, the place had a cosmic name that Rose remembers well: North Star Shine Lodge. He had learned from Pro Bono about the importance of the names of the motels. They had something to eat at the motel cafeteria, drawing the unwanted attention of the few other diners because of the three dogs sprawled under the table, and because María Paz couldn’t stop crying as she clutched the stuffed giraffe. Rose tells me that everybody there was just as suspicious. He was sure they were in the operations center of who knows what types of illegal activities. At the other end of the room sat three Asian men dressed in black, wearing sunglasses and thin, shiny ties. On the table in front of the men, in plain sight, there were stacks of bills wrapped in plastic.

“They must be Yakuza,” María Paz whispered, but she had no head for anything but her own tragedy, the unexpected and insurmountable obstacle casting an ominous cloud on her survival mission.

Fortunately, they were in agreement about one thing, Rose tells me. Violeta would be toast if she were left behind. Sleepy Joe had pounced on Cleve and he would pounce on the girl; that was as clear as daylight. But Rose could think of no solution for the impasse and didn’t have the means to comfort María Paz. It would be best to let her rest so he could calm down and brainstorm. At that point, they were approached by the motel clerk, a fat lonesome figure in a baseball cap, who invited him to a game of miniature golf, the only entertainment in those parts, other than a bar with a pool table in a neighboring town.

“No, thanks,” said Rose after María Paz went to her room, “I’m going to take the dogs outside, set them up for the night.”

“Don’t even think about it,” the man said. “They’ll freeze their asses off, won’t last ten minutes, noses turned to ice and throats freezing inside. Come on, a little miniature golf, my friend, it’s indoors. Have you ever played it? Much more fun than it sounds. You’ll go nuts in these parts just staying in your room.”

“He insisted so much that I finally said yes,” Rose tells me. “Better than being locked in my room staring at the TV. So I stumbled down a long hallway behind the fat man, brandishing my toy putter. This was no mini golf course, though, maybe mini-mini golf. The fat man said we could do half a course, nine holes.

“There’s only three,” Rose said.

“We do it three times,” the fat man responded.

The guy was very chatty, so after a while Rose asked him about the three Asian men in the cafeteria.

“What about them?” said the fat man, removing his cap to wipe the sweat from his head and face.

“Are they Yakuza?” Rose asked.

“Why don’t you ask them? And keep an eye on that pretty girl you got with you. I play the fool: see no evil, hear no evil, but you can tell she’s illegal from a mile away. Careful the Yazuka don’t snag her.”

“A lot of weird business around here?”

From hole to hole, one, two, three, and around again, the motel keeper explained to Rose that trafficking of migrants was one of the most lucrative types of global businesses. He told Rose about the Onondaga and the Iroquois League, as well as about other important figures who were capable of moving anything illegally across the border, even a herd of elephants if they had to. The Onondaga went through the Saint Lawrence River by boat — during the wee hours in the dead of winter. That’s when it was best to leave, because the weather was usually the most clear. They were strong rowers, so the Onondaga avoided the noise of motorized boats, but that did not mean that they were not technically advanced, equipped with night-vision binoculars and every other kind of useful gadget. In the bottom of the boat, they crammed illegal Chinese, Pakistanis, and even Muslims who kissed the ground when they arrived. People came from everywhere to cross the border, and there were the Onondaga, waiting, their lands overlapping the frontier, thirty acres of islands and coves hidden in the woods. They were capos of the leather trade in previous generations, then cigarette smuggling, and now they used the same routes for human trafficking.

“Just watch closely and you’ll see,” the motel keeper said to Rose. “Two thousand US dollars per head, and they can get six heads across in a single trip. One of them always stopped by the North Star for drinks. His name was, or he called himself, Elijah, and he was so ingenious that he had built a false bottom on his aunt’s Buick LeSabre with enough room to accommodate up to six humans.”

“You can’t fit six humans in the false bottom of a Buick LeSabre or any car,” Rose said.

“You can if they are Asian.”

“And how does the Buick handle the roads, with all the snow?”

“If there is a lot of snow, they use a snowmobile. That’s a big part of the problem, the cold. Most of the clients come from warm climates, cotton dresses. Elijah wraps them in blankets, so they don’t die on him. Once they’re on the US side of the border, he literally leaves them out in the cold to fend for his own. He is a hell of a snakehead.”

“Snakehead?”

“Those on this side are called coyotes; the other side, snakeheads.”

“Cyber-snakeheads,” Rose said.

“If you could see all the little people that sneak into this country. They pass under the McDonald’s arches and touch the sky with their hands.”

Rose soon grew weary, as bored with miniature golf as he was with tales about the Onondaga, and there were still a few holes to go to complete the nine. Rose didn’t know how to get out of his commitment with the sweaty, fat man, who sweated so much in winter that he must have caused floods in the summer. Add to it his mouth: now there was someone who could talk up a storm. It was at that point that María Paz came running, waving the stuffed giraffe.

“Come, Mr. Rose! Come see!” she shouted.

“Shhhh!” Rose tried to signal her to be a little more discreet, but she was too worked up to notice, in a frenzy almost. “Come on, Mr. Rose! To the room, come, come, quickly, sir, don’t drag your feet!”

A few hours earlier, María Paz, disconsolate, had gone to bed still dressed, hugging the stuffed giraffe her sister had given her in the front of the school. Her life had suddenly become impossible, the crossroads not crossable. So much waiting, holding on, pedaling in place, just to get to this. If she didn’t get out of the country very soon, they would catch her. If she left, she would be leaving her sister at the mercy of Sleepy Joe. Neither option was acceptable, and no other choices seemed possible. María Paz couldn’t even cry. She didn’t even have that consolation, because crying comes from a broken heart, but here there was nothing, not even that, just a dry heart, lack of responses and hopelessness. In the dark, because she didn’t even have the energy to turn the light on, she curled up like a snail in the motel bed, the bed that so many had passed through, at once such a beautiful and sad thought, that transitory bed. She pressed her chest against the giraffe, which, by the way, smelled horrible, like it had soaked in piss, making it clear that Violeta was still peeing anywhere she chose and using the giraffe as a sponge. María Paz hated that her life had just been going around in circles, that she was chasing her own tail, sticking it in front of her face every time she was ready to take a new course so that it just kept her going round and round. Once again, she was clutching the giraffe, just as she had years before on the flight to America, when she had snatched it from Violeta because the girl had just peed on it. Only the giraffe wasn’t that cute, faded toy anymore, but a filthy and disgusting lump, amorphous, eyeless, earless, looking more like some prehistoric bug, half the stitching undone, missing a leg, but just as smelly as before.

It was an amazing coincidence, or rather terrifying: the stuffed animal that marked that long-ago trip they took together, the arrival, loomed again now, on the eve of another journey, the farewell one. A sudden fear of that object that somehow had appeared and reappeared at these critical moments struck María Paz: Was it just a simple fetish or something more like magic? María Paz thought all this had to mean something. But what? There was some message from destiny, but she couldn’t figure it out. It could not be that she would trip up right before the finish line, all the escape planning, the heartache, just to fuck it all up a few steps from Canada. And there was nothing she could do because she had tripped up almost within reach of her goal, and there was no going forward or backward, no going alone or accompanied, no going north nor south, so it was best just to be there, quiet and in the dark, hugging the stinking giraffe.

And to think that Violeta had given her the thing she most treasured, which she had lugged around with her since she was a baby, her strongest emotional anchor, so much so that she would become nauseated whenever someone took it from her, as happened to Linus when his sister Lucy wrestled his blanket away. But despite all this, Violeta had willfully handed the giraffe over. It was a selfless gesture of love that María Paz had never before experienced from her sister. Then had come their parting without hugs, because Violeta did not tolerate any kind of physical contact, and the way she said good-bye sounded so final and definitive that she may as well have said good riddance.

Outside it was completely dark, and the room was still dark, when María Paz, unable to withstand the smell of the giraffe anymore, got up to go to the bathroom, thinking that she would give it a good wash and scrub. If this whole episode was indeed proving to be some kind of ritual, if Violeta had wanted to suggest that their lives were indeed circular, and if she did say through this gift what she couldn’t express in words, if all that was so, then María Paz was going to make an effort to show respect to the love she had been shown. The North Star was a shoddy motel that offered no amenities such as shampoo, and the bathroom was equipped instead with a previously used chunk of pink soap that was stingy about creating foam. But there was warm water from the tap and María Paz filled the sink to dunk the giraffe and give it a good scrubbing.

“I abandoned the fat man in the middle of our game and ran after María Paz, expecting the worst,” Rose tells me. “Now I’m going to try to describe my shock, there in the room of that fourth-rate motel, during one of the harshest nights of the coldest winter of the last five years, well beyond a hundred miles from Montreal and more than three hundred miles from New York City. It was dark inside, except for the glow of one bulb coming from the bathroom. I mean, the light was off in the room itself when María Paz led me in, and when I tried to turn it on, she stopped me. It was the first thing that occurred to me: turn on the light — what anyone would do upon entering a dark room. But she wouldn’t let me. And there was something inside that room that glowed like a will-o’-the-wisp; it emitted the kind of halo of brilliance that have shone from other treasures — the Amber Room of Catherine the Great, the Ark of the Covenant, and the cave of Ali Baba. What I saw there with my own eyes on María Paz’s bed had a mythical luminance. It sparkled, I’m telling you, like a nest of salamanders or a stack of gold coins. At least that’s how I remember it.”

“How much is there?” María Paz asked Rose, ensuring that the blinds of the room were completely drawn and that she locked the door. “How much?”

It was impossible to calculate, Rose tells me. How could he add all those hundred-dollar bills strewn on the bed, some wrinkled, others bound into stacks, others tied into larger bricks? All wet, though. Rose could not say a word, not even a murmur. The shock had left him speechless. But María Paz responded to her own question.

“There’s one hundred and fifty thousand,” she said softly. “Can you believe it? One hundred and fifty thousand dollars, Mr. Rose. One hundred and fifty thousand. I counted every single bill. They were inside Violeta’s giraffe, all stuffed tightly in. I found the bills when I wanted to wash it.”

“One hundred and fifty thousand, eh?” Rose managed to say.

“It has to be something connected to the people looking for Sleepy Joe,” María Paz said.

“Well, the figure matches, but how did it end up here?”

“Violeta found it, no other explanation. She digs through everything. Rummages through drawers and discovers hidden things. There were a lot of fights about that. Greg got enraged because she hid things or took them. Sleepy Joe swore to me that he had hidden one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in my house, and she found the stash and took it. Found the loot and hid it inside her giraffe. No other explanation.”

“They say that women are unpredictable,” Rose tells me, “that men can’t follow their logic. Not sure if that’s true overall, but I can attest to one thing, nothing is as maddeningly simple as María Paz’s logic. When she took me to the room to show me the pile of bills, she had everything perfectly figured out, in that gray labyrinth of her head. It was like reinforced concrete; that’s what it felt like when she made up her mind. Even God would have trouble changing her mind.

“You know what a syllogism is, right?” Rose asks me, and responds himself. “Of course you know, you’re a writer. Well, I’m not exactly sure of the nature of the damn syllogism that María Paz had come up with before she came to get me, but it was all very clear in her head. It’s been a while since my college philosophy courses, so don’t blame me if it doesn’t sound quite Aristotelian. It’s her syllogism, not mine:

“First premise: If Sleepy Joe is going to kill anyone, he will only kill to get his money.

“Second premise: If María Paz has his money, she can give it to Sleepy Joe.

“Conclusion: If Sleepy Joe has his money, he will not harm Violeta.

“And from that conclusion there most elegantly emerged, as if she were dancing a waltz in the labyrinth now, another series of equally absurd conclusions, namely: If Sleepy Joe was not going to hurt Violeta, then María Paz could go to Canada, assured that Violeta would be cared for and safe in her school, where she would rather be, as she herself had made very clear. The finale, the mother of all conclusions? All we had to do was get the money to Sleepy Joe, and the problems of humanity would be solved.”

Rose tells me that the events that followed the discovery of the loot were crazy. There they were, the two of them in that dark in that hotel room, huddled beside the bed, whispering so that the Yakuza wouldn’t burst in with their pistols for the money. They locked themselves in for the night, using a hair dryer to dry the money, counting it and counting it again, then stuffing it into María Paz’s Gucci bag, which fortunately was roomy, all the while mired again in their eternal debate about whether Sleepy Joe was a murderer or had just spun out of control because of his lost loot.

“Listen to me, Mr. Rose,” María Paz told him. “You’re very annoying about this, stubborn as a mule. I know Sleepy Joe, you don’t. I know more about this than you do. Sleepy Joe is not a murderer. He’s a bad guy, but he is not a murderer. Sick in the head, that’s for sure, very sick in the head, I won’t argue that. But not a murderer.”

“He murdered my son, Cleve.”

“That’s just a guess.”

“Are you saying he didn’t kill your dog, María Paz?” The bubbling outrage and indignation was evident in Rose’s voice. “Do you not know for a fact that he killed your dog? Or is that just another assumption?

“Shhhh, please,” she told him, “don’t get all riled up. Yes, yes, he killed my dog. And I loved my dog. And I know you love your dogs, Mr. Rose, but forgive me, a dog is not a person. Killing a dog is a fucking terrible thing that you pay for in hell, but killing a dog is not the same as killing a person.”

“Alright. So if the dog is not enough, here is something more serious for you. I think Sleepy Joe had something to do with the death of his brother, Greg. I can’t prove it yet, but I’m sure he had something to do with it. And why would he do such a thing, if he adored his brother? Well, why do you think he would, María Paz? To get rid of him. So he could keep the money and incidentally also keep you. Can’t you see it?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You’re not sure about what, that it was him?”

“Who knows, maybe it was.”

“Are you saying that you think he was involved?”

“I’m saying I don’t know. He told me he had nothing to do with it.”

“Who told you?”

“Sleepy Joe himself.”

“And you believed him?”

“People have to believe people, Mr. Rose.”

It was impossible, Rose tells me. Reasoning with María Paz was downright impossible. She did not show any interest in whatever his opinion was about the matter. She had created a narrative in her head to which she clung with everything she had, and Rose was not going to move her from there. The only thing that worried her at the time was not knowing where Sleepy Joe was, and because she didn’t know, she couldn’t give him the money.

Rose tells me that before this he had always suspected she was lying about her knowledge of his whereabouts. That she knew exactly where he was.

“But at that moment, I realized she really didn’t know,” Rose tells me. “It became clear that she was not lying, at least not on that point. So what did she want to do, what was her master plan? We would find Sleepy Joe, deliver the money, and neutralize the situation. That was her plan. It seemed to me like the stupidest thing in the world, but that’s what she believed was best. And when you think about it, rather curiously, we were finally doing what I had been hoping for: we were set directly on Sleepy Joe’s trail.”

The next day, Rose got up early and went out into the field. He wanted to take in the vast solitude of those lands not owned by anyone to let his dogs run around for a while, and he especially wanted to practice some target shooting, there in the woods, where nobody could hear. “This is for you, Claro Hurtado. This will be your revenge!” Rose screamed into the air and let off a few shots into the trees. “A good weapon, this Glock, excellent! Clearly, my friend, you need not worry. Your Remington was rubbish but my Glock is top of the line. Let’s give the motherfucker his due.” Now, Rose was set for some payback on the murderer of his son. Now, the adrenaline shot through every inch of him, and a vengeful euphoria took hold of him, arousal at the smell of gunpowder, so he pumped a round of lead into a poor tree, pretending it was Sleepy Joe. “Right there, right where I want you, you fucking little punk, you loser playboy, now it’s your turn to grow pale! Right there, you son of a bitch.” And pum, pum, pum, Rose emptied the Glock on the tree.

“After I did this, I had to go searching for the dogs, because Otto, Dix, and Skunko had stampeded out of there, every dog for himself, terrified by the shots,” Rose tells me.

That same morning, a few hours later, Rose, María Paz, and the three dogs crossed from Vermont into Upstate New York. They had a prize with them in the red Toyota: one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

“This car is like Napoleon’s famous horse carriage,” Rose commented to María Paz and immediately regretted it because it wasn’t the kind of thing that he could mention to her without unleashing a barrage of questions. In that, she was a lot like Violeta, which even María Paz herself acknowledged. What horse carriage? Why Napoleon? Who won at Waterloo? And so on, not letting up until Rose was in full teaching mode, telling the story of how, in the Prussian offensive, Napoleon had to retreat on horseback, abandoning the carriage in which he always traveled, which moments later was seized and looted by the Prussians, who found a most precious treasure trove, Napoleon’s mythical cocked hat, his trademark gray cloak, the silverware he ate with, and his many awards, which were made of gold and embedded with precious stones.

“So a humongous treasure in the carriage,” María Paz sighed, “just like in this Toyota. What a mess you’ve gotten yourself into, Mr. Rose, running around with an escaped fugitive and a stolen treasure.”

“It was comical to an extent,” Rose tells me. “When we wanted to brush our teeth, we had to find the toothpaste under the bundle of bills.”

“Were you going back to the Catskills?” I ask.

“No. With María Paz directing, we were heading for a roadside bar called Chikki Charmers, where one of Sleepy Joe’s girlfriends had worked. The one who had drowned in the Jacuzzi.”

“Maraya,” I say. “The one who was skinny in all the right places and full where it was best to be full.”

“Yeah, well, that was a while before, as I came to learn. Near the end of her life, she was as emaciated as an old alley cat, skinny all over from her addiction.”

“Cocaine?” I ask.

“Heroin. She was overcome with these itching attacks that could only be relieved by submerging herself in the Jacuzzi.”

“Like Marat.”

“María Paz thought that Maraya’s coworkers may have known the whereabouts of Sleepy Joe. So we headed down there. Seeking information, you know. She intended to give the man his money. I wanted to burst his liver with a kick to the gut.”

Meanwhile, her relationship with the cyber-coyote had begun to deteriorate. Whenever María Paz postponed departure, the guy delivered a whole sermon about time schedules and agreements and tacked on four hundred additional dollars for each modification of the original plan. Every so often, on the highway, María Paz asked Rose to pull over and stepped out of the car to try to find a signal for her cell phone. Rose watched her arguing into the phone while walking up and down and up and down the shoulder of the road, and coming back either enraged or depressed because she had had another nasty fight with the guy.

“It must be true what they say about coyotes,” grumbled María Paz, “mysterious but stupid creatures.”

“What if he’s not so stupid? What if your cyber-coyote has turned into a bounty hunter?” Rose asked. “What if he already found out who you are, and is simply helping them capture you?”

“It may be,” she sighed. “I don’t know if he’s become a bounty hunter, but I know for sure he’s a thief. Can you believe it? Now he wants another four hundred dollars.”

“There’s more than enough in that bag for that.”

“No, what are you saying? That money is Sleepy Joe’s.”

“Sleepy Joe’s, my ass. That money is now yours, and before that it was your sister’s, and even before that your husband’s, and before that the police’s, and before that the state’s, and ultimately before that it belonged to the taxpayers, that money belonged to me and millions of other idiots like me. Sleepy Joe? Fuck him. I don’t see how he belongs in this chain at all. Your loyalty to him sickens me, María Paz, makes me suspect your own value scales.”

“Value scales! My value scales! I have plenty on my scales. Well, who would have thought it, Mr. Rose? That you begin to lecture me as if you were my father.”

“In some ways, I am.”

Chikki Charmers was supposedly located about twelve miles north of Ithaca. Rose had gotten the information online, and María Paz said she had memorized it. But heated as they were by their arguments, they passed it more than once without noticing, and before finding it they must have driven the same stretch of twenty miles for over an hour, arguing this way and arguing back that way too.

Judging by its outward appearance, the place was a bar for truckers, a dingy spot with a parking lot out front that was four times the area as the spot the structure took up. Since it was early afternoon, the place was closed and deserted, and they could not interview the employees. Instead, they contented themselves with making out the information on the neon billboard that was turned off, where the silhouettes of a couple of naked women in a frozen dance and wearing only boots, announced the following:

CHIKKI CHARMERS, EXOTIC BODIES IN MOTION.

OPEN 8PM-3AM.

IT IS FORBIDDEN TO TOUCH THE DANCERS.

NO ALCOHOL. NO SMOKING. NO CELL PHONES, CAMERAS, OR VIDEO.

MANDATORY GRATUITY FOR STAGE SEAT.

IF NUDITY OFFENDS YOU OR YOU DISAGREE WITH OUR RULES DO NOT ENTER.

VIOLATORS WILL BE REPORTED OR KICKED OUT OR BOTH.

THANKS FOR YOUR SUPPORT.

There wasn’t much to do but wait until Chikki Charmers opened. Then they might be able to get some information from someone who had known Maraya, or more specifically Maraya’s boyfriend, a certain Sleepy Joe, a tall, handsome blond, although a little weary looking. He chewed on spicy candies, and often wore a retro nylon satin jacket with Castrol and Pennzoil patches on the sleeves. That’s how María Paz would put it, feigning complete ignorance to elicit information. And if they asked what she wanted with him, she would say she wanted to make good on some money she owed him. The message would get to him, and Sleepy Joe would be motivated to come out of his hole.

They were no longer in a forested area, though the surroundings were still very rural, with barely any trees, trailers half-buried in the snow, impoverished fields, fallen fences, miserable-looking farms abandoned to the harsh winter. They passed a rotted wood barn with some signs of flaking red paint. Rose told María Paz that a long time ago, barns were painted with animal blood, and she grimaced in disgust. They spotted a café and decided to stop there for something to eat, but Rose wanted to sit back and observe so he could figure out what kind of enemy territory they had crossed into. From the moment he noticed the beat-up pickups parked near the entrance, heard country music coming from the jukebox, and saw cheap paintings of hunting scenes decorating the interior of the premises, Rose considered himself warned. Then he felt the tactile stress that María Paz unleashed among the cluster of rednecks seated inside, making them shoot jets of racist adrenaline even to the tips of their ears. They were typical poor white field workers with necks permanently blazed by hours working in the sun, and ultraconservative, immigrant haters. Rose knew this class of individuals well. It was not the first time he had associated with them, the type of people who did not look you in the eyes when you talked to them, but rather stared at an area somewhere around the mouth as a silent warning that you should watch how you talk. Any of the men who congregated there, silently bent over mugs of beer, sausage dishes, and oat porridges, any one of them, thought Rose, would more than willing to denounce an illegal alien, beaner, wetback, brown fucking bitch to the authorities. If they decided not to go with direct aggression, which could also happen, all it would take was one spark to unleash a hellfire. Hence, Rose suggested that María Paz return to the car to avoid trouble; he would get hot dogs to go and they would eat where the winds blew cooler. Besides, no one was watching the Gucci bag; it hadn’t been wise to leave that kind of money within the reach of the white rabble.

“Prussian rabble,” she said.

“I did bring the dogs with me, though,” Rose tells me, “placed them by the entrance, and gave them the order to stay. Just in case. The presence of my dogs is very intimidating. They have that mean appearance of hang dogs, especially Dix, who can be very friendly, but also can put on a dark disposition, and is strong and black, crisscrossed with scars, the trophies of old battles. They can play it ugly, that’s for sure, and if someone ever tries to threaten or hurt me, they will tear him apart. These rednecks were no fools. They quickly got the message, or were not interested in pursuing any litigation. Maybe it was just my anxiety playing tricks on me. I really don’t know what may have been the reason, but they didn’t mess with us, and we walked away without an incident.”

They took a room at a Budget Inn. Rose had insisted that they get two separate rooms, as in the previous motel, but María Paz thought it was a waste of money and suggested it would more practical to get one room with two single beds; they were a team on a mission and should adopt a more agile and warlike attitude. They holed themselves up in the motel against the afternoon snowstorm, which according to the Weather Channel was a bad one, lashing the roads with high winds and creating zero visibility conditions. María Paz washed her hair and made use of the hair dryer. The dogs sniffed every nook and corner of the room, and Rose set up shop at a desk with cigarette burns at the edges. There he painstakingly set his notes in order, the articles he had printed after various Google searches, an issue of a magazine called Very Interesting that he had just bought at a drugstore, a Bible, and other texts. He wanted to try to tie in all his previous elucidations on the criminal behavior of Sleepy Joe to reach some general conclusions. He devoted the afternoon to it, ignoring the noise of the hair dryer and the bustle of the dogs, who had begun to bark.

In neat letters and using an impeccable script, attempting to remain objective, and with a little dash of hard-learned wisdom and a stack of criminology manuals, Rose had managed to land that first insight using the photos of the Ponte Sant’Angelo, until his discussion turned into a technical report on the strength of materials. He had written his observations on a yellow legal pad, which he lent me so I could transcribe it.

First constant: How does Sleepy Joe kill? He follows a strict canon. For X reasons, he needs his victims to know that he is in control of the Stations of the Cross, and that they are on their way to martyrdom. He chose this ritual process, but he may as well have chosen any other, from training Mesoamerican peoples for the Florida wars to the symbolic acts of Helter Skelter with Charles Manson and the Family. Any preset structure would have worked as long as it meant a sequential progress that would allow him to undertake the ascent of what might be called the conductor’s steps. Sleepy Joe must see himself as the executor of a directive that leads him to kill. Now, that didn’t mean he always killed. Sometimes he just mortified the victim, like in the Corina case. Occasionally, as in the case of my son, Cleve, the victim will die before he completes the ritual. Sometimes the torture gets out of hand, and the victim dies prematurely. Second constant: He chooses his victims. When he feels he needs to kill, or offer up sacrifice, he looks around and chooses the weakest link in the chain: disabled (Hero), abused (Corina), insignificant individuals (John Eagles), drug addicts (Maraya). The disabled and the weak become his favorite targets, because they exacerbate his criminal instincts and sharpen his perversions. But we have to be careful, here there’s a jump, a parallel plane has to be considered, because the victims need to meet dual requirements. Aside from the characteristics mentioned above, the victims are all connected in one way or another to María Paz. It can be said that they are people who stand in his way to reach her, and therefore he needs to eliminate them. So he combines the sacrifice prerequisite with the extermination of an opponent. That is, an adversary, as my son, Cleve, must have been — a rival male who stirred his jealousy. Third constant: What weapons does he use? Several, as suggested by the Via Crucis, but he gives himself freedom to improvise. He is creative, resourceful, as he has shown. Take into account: daggers (Greg), nails (Hero), broomstick (Corina), thorns (Cleve), drowning in a Jacuzzi (Maraya). Fourth constant: Why do it? Possible answer: To feel God. That’s how Edward Norton puts it in Red Dragon.

That’s as far as Rose had gone with his notes on the yellow legal pad. He tells me that afternoon he wanted to focus particularly on Maraya, one of the first victims, who, according to the scheme Rose had uncovered, would have been involved in the ritual of the gambling for the tunic. He needed to learn more about this relic before they went to Chikki Charmers that night, but other than the controversy over the authenticity of the item, in the end, he found nothing about it he didn’t already know, except for the full quote from the Gospel of John, which he had been ignorant of: “Then the soldiers, when they had crucified Jesus, took his garments, and made four parts, to every soldier a part; and also his tunic, which was seamless. Then they said among themselves, ‘Let us not rend it, but cast lots for it, to decide whose it shall be.’”

When the time came to go that night, Rose shook María Paz’s shoulder. She had done her hair and then dropped on the bed like a rock, surrendering to exhaustion from not having slept a wink the night before. Her head drooped when she responded, not yet fully awake, so it was easy for Rose to convince her that he would take care of the investigations at Chikki Charmers on his own.

“You know what the crowd will be like at that place?” he warned her. “Just like the one we saw today at the café, either those same people or others identical to them, only now they’ll be rowdy and drunk. Besides, I don’t think women go there unless they are working. You’ll attract too much attention, the last thing we need.”

Ignoring the recommendation of local newscasts to avoid driving during the storm, Rose steered the Toyota into a road painted with ice. But the motel was near the bar, so it was only a few minutes before he sighted, somewhere just beyond the curtain of fog, the neon sign for Chikki Charmers, the letters illuminated in pink and green, and the pair of dancers, who before had been static, now brought to life with electricity, and they flapped their arms and hips spasmodically. Three hours later, Rose returned to the room at the Budget Inn, opened the door, and complained that the dog smell was getting unbearably thick inside.

“What do you expect?” María Paz asked. She was watching Doctor Zhivago, the scene in which Pasha gets cut in the face by a saber. “Did you want me to let the dogs out so they froze to death? Look at poor Omar Sharif, how frost clings even to his eyelashes. Anyway, the whiff of drink on you could light a torch, so don’t be talking about smells.”

“Tonight’s theme was Oriental Night,” Rose said from the bathroom, furiously rinsing out his mouth and washing his hands.

“Mother of God,” she said without taking her eyes off the screen. “Oriental Night? Is that at the place, the Chikki Charmers? And what did they do to bring out the charmers, the dance of the seven veils?”

“Yes, exactly. The seven veils. There were five women, each wrapped in seven veils. I had to cough up a dollar for each veil that hit the floor, plus the five table dances I ordered later to get close enough to the girls.”

“Jesus Christ, our life is full of strippers.”

“You know, one table dance for each girl. To get a chance to speak with them, have a little face-to-face time.”

“You mean cunt to face.”

“I wasn’t worried about the money, but they gave me a senior discount, twenty percent. Can you believe it? Very humiliating.”

“So? Did you get directions to Sleepy Joe’s place? Phone number?”

“Basically, they danced on me; that was it. None of them knew anything of Sleepy Joe’s whereabouts. Of the five, only three had met Maraya. The staff has a lot of turnover, not many of the same dancers as before. Of those three who knew Maraya, only two had ever seen Sleepy Joe. Of those two, one told me that she was not there to chat with old men, and the other told me some things.”

“What things?”

“Her name is Olga, Russian, I think. On Saturdays she comes out as a Cossack.”

“But tonight was Oriental Night?”

“Yes, tonight Olga went on stage wearing the veils like the others. The Cossack thing is only Saturdays. She did know Sleepy Joe, and believed he was crazy. A bastard, mad as a fucking goat. I told her she was right. She saw him after Maraya’s death, but swears she has no idea where he is now. I believe her, because it is clear that she detests him. I asked her about the clothes raffle, you know, the dead woman’s clothes, and the issue of the dice on the eyes, all that crap organized by Sleepy Joe during the wake. Olga said it was a fiasco. First, because nobody wanted the clothing, those old-fashioned things in Lycra and spandex, which didn’t fit anybody well because Maraya had become a skeleton. And second, because there was no longer a seventies night at Chikki Charmers. It was canceled for lack of interest and because the recession forced management to cut down on costumes.

“Olga said Sleepy Joe insisted on the weird ceremony very much against their will, or at least against the will of Olga, who just wanted to show some respect for the deceased, and particularly against the will of the owner of Chikki Charmers, who just wanted to bury Maraya as quickly as possible, because the poor man had been in a state thinking of the Jacuzzi boiling Marya. The whole thing was a mess. All the owner wanted was to wrap things up and leave the whole disturbing episode behind, which of course was already affecting his business and starting a lot of gossip. But he couldn’t stop Sleepy Joe from getting his way. In the end, Sleepy Joe was the only family member or close friend who had immediately shown up at the morgue after hearing the news. I asked Olga if she believed Sleepy Joe had anything to do with what had happened, I mean, with the death.”

“What’re you asking me, Papi, if he killed her?” Olga said. She stood on the table in heels and snuggled up to Rose so his face was against her navel as the fluttering veils began to come off. “No, at all, Grandpa, not at all involved. Her vice killed her, my love, a cocktail of tecata, boozy fried heroin. Smack, Grandpa, smack, see if you can pinch yourself, right? Horse, my good horse. Giddyap, horsey, giddyap. That was a Sunday morning. Sunday night she didn’t show up for her shift, and because this place is closed on Monday, it wasn’t until Tuesday night that her absence became suspicious. It wasn’t until midday Wednesday that we found out what had happened, and it wasn’t until later that afternoon that the police came to remove the body, or I should say came to get Maraya out of the Jacuzzi. No, Granpapi, Maraya’s boyfriend is a flea-bitten dirtbag of the worst kind, a cockroach with a tyrannical streak, what they call a dark spirit. He dropped by here every so often, each time with a different truck, hitting Maraya up for money. As it is common with these players. Until he was no longer able to compete. I don’t mean because of another man, I mean the horse. Giddyap, horse; you understand, old man? I mean the tecata, the white lady, lover, she of the long fangs that she plunges into your neck. Pleasures you have no idea about, Grandpa, my little old man. And that’s when things went really awry: Maraya’s boyfriend not only hated the white lady, he had forbidden Maraya from going near it, not because he was a puritan, not that, or moralistic, but because the horse was stealing his money, you know? She was spending all her money on the drug. When she tried to come back, the owner had to tell her they didn’t touch or deal with leftovers. That woman was killed by her vice, and that detonation took place deep within her. The contribution of the groom was only the slapstick at the end, the gambling of the clothes, the dice in the eye sockets, and the desecration of the corpse. He didn’t kill her. But who are you, Granpapi, a cop? Why do you ask so many questions?”

“Didn’t I try to tell you, Mr. Rose?” María Paz told him later that night in the motel room. “He’s not a murderer.”

“How long ago was that with Maraya, two years, three?” Rose continued their old argument as a response.

“Three… around.”

“That’s right, then, three. Sleepy Joe was just beginning. Barely warming up. Today the situation is totally different.”

“It looks that way, Mr. Rose. It looks that way,” María Paz said with a dismissive wave of her hand, as she stared at the television screen. “In the end, we solved nothing by coming here.”

“Well, Olga says that if we want she can take us to Maraya’s grave tomorrow.”

“Incredible — is it true that someone can commit suicide swallowing iodine?”

“What?”

“Lara’s mother,” María Paz said, pointing to the television. “Watch, she is supposedly going to commit suicide taking iodine because her daughter became Komachosky’s lover, or Komarovsky, whatever his name is, the lawyer…”

“It’s impossible to talk like this. It’s just an old film, some melodrama without any scientific accuracy. Turn that off, María Paz, and let’s talk.”

“I can’t turn it off; it’s pay-per-view. It cost seven dollars. It’s a medical drama.”

“I wish you would tell me what’s next. I mean, I’m just wondering what awaits us. You and me, and three dogs. Is there any way you can inform me?”

“Wendy Mellons. Another one of Sleepy Joe’s girlfriends. Maybe she knows where he is. We should find her and ask her. The only bad thing is she lives in Colorado.”

“Colorado? Are you nuts? Do you know where Colorado is? On the whole other side of the fucking country! This is not Monaco, Princess Grace. You can’t circle the kingdom in a couple of hours.”

10. Interview with Ian Rose

“The whole Colorado chapter was completely insane,” Rose says after three hours of talking. “Miles and miles of road, going round and round to the last circle of Hell, with snow falling diagonally, the flakes striking the windshield like coins. The three dogs in the back, drunken with so much sleep, and me at the helm following the instructions of María Paz, who in turn was guided by the stories she had heard about Sleepy Joe’s other loves.”

They were sometimes gruesome secrets and sometimes pornographic ones, some likely real, others undoubtedly invented, and they snared María Paz in a spiral of jealousy and of wanting to know more. One of the recurring characters in these tall tales was Wendy Mellons, owner of a tavern called The Terrible Espinosas. Looking for that woman, Rose and María Paz had gone from bar to bar in the hunting lodges of the hamlets in Cangilones on the old bed of the Huerfano River: Animas, Santo Acacio, Ojito de Caballo, Purgatorio, and Garcia Mesa — little more than ghost villages bathed in the dust of the dry river to reach the ravine where once the legendary Chavez Town had stood.

In Chavez Town, they found only ashes, pieces of broken pottery, and a chilly silence. It was a cold but sonorous silence, according to María Paz, who immediately sensed that something was resonating, and although she could not tell exactly what it was, it most clearly made her break out in goose bumps, and her eyes welled with tears. Echoes? she thought. Rather a thread of smoke far in the distance that clutched her heart.

“Makes one feel like praying,” she said.

“Can’t hurt,” Rose responded.

The few people who had crossed their path had warned them that in those parts it would be difficult to find someone, because the dead were the only ones who had not gone off at some point. Along with the dead, the shadows of the Penitent Brothers haunted the place, they who once had flayed their own backs with whips in their own Via Crucis, climbing the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo, those mountains studded with sharp boulders that they had christened themselves after. María Paz let out a long sigh. She mentioned how much she loved all those old Hispanic place names: Alamosa, how pretty, and Bonanza, like on TV, Candelaria, Lejanías, Animas, Perdidas, and Culebra Creek. She blurted out that when she had a son, she would name him Íñigo or Blas. Rose listened and remembered what Dummy had told them — that María Paz would never have children because of damage they had done to her insides in the prison hospital. Every cloud has a silver lining, Rose thought. At least no child would have to suffer the name of some ancient swashbuckler.

“This is where Sleepy Joe is from,” said María Paz, standing on a promontory overlooking the vast emptiness. Her hair flowing in the breeze caught a cluster of snowflakes and made her seem like a cherry blossoming in the wrong season. “This is his land,” she said. “Born and raised here. It’s no wonder he’s like that.”

“Like what?” Rose responded sharply, the harsh tone he used whenever she talked about her brother-in-law with a nostalgic air. “Like what?”

“Like he is, always chasing echoes.”

Night was beginning to fall over the Sangre de Cristo, and they began searching for a motel that would take them and the dogs — although it would be wrong to say that night fell, as if in a single stroke of a guillotine; rather the darkness appeared early and made headway slowly, almost moment by moment. According to Sleepy Joe, the fame of The Terrible Espinosas was so widespread that it reached New Mexico. It was the most amazing and jubilant tavern, no better party around the San Luis Valley, with live music by Los Tigres del Desierto and at dawn, a serenade by the trio from yesteryear, Los Inolvidables. Relying on these stories, María Paz encouraged Rose not to give up. Such a famed place couldn’t escape them. All they had to do was keep asking until someone gave them a clue.

“A most exclusive brothel, according to María Paz, but no one had heard of it,” Rose tells me. “As it was, we caught up with Wendy Mellons in the office of a Reiki practitioner, where she waited among other patients to be attended. She told us later that she visited the place every two weeks for an energy alignment and hands-on therapy for her swollen legs.”

She must have been pretty in her youth, but old age had snuck up on her, and she was wrapped in a thick winter coat, making it impossible to guess at her physical appearance, if not to say it was a bulky package that still may have been consistent with someone who in her heyday had wreaked havoc. It was no accident that her fighting name was Wendy Mellons. But the years had passed, the law of gravity prevailed, and when things had started to collapse, Wendy Mellons had abandoned that nickname, apparently abandoning her old ways also. She quit her job and moved to Cañon City, where she had lived for years working as a teller at the box office of the Rex Theatre. Rose could see plainly why Sleepy Joe would cling to that woman, who must have been for him like a second mother. The second mother, the coveted breast, the homeland, childhood, days gone by, memories, the first landscape, possibly first intercourse, ultimately, the only roots. In fact, Wendy Mellons told them that she was exactly the same age as Sleepy Joe’s mother, who had died young. She received them in her current home in the outskirts of the village of Santo Acacio, which itself was on the outskirts of everything.

“I thought it would be more like the boudoir of a madam, but the place was rather like a cemetery of tires,” Rose tells me.

Past the stacks of tires, they came to a habitable room with an attached shed, in which the snow came through a crack in the roof. Past this, there was a backyard with a small melting furnace, disposable pieces of junk chucked here and there, and a pair of skinny dogs scurrying around like rats. Wendy Mellons lived with a son, Bubba, a drug addict and thief of manhole covers that he hammered, pounded, tossed in ashes, and sold as antique iron pots to tourists. A wood-burning stove heated the habitable part of the structure. Clothing was piled on a rickety rocking chair, dishes with crusted leftover food were stacked on a table, and a bolt-action rifle hung at the head of a bronze cot. A variety of other objects covered with smoke and grease lingered in the corners of the room, including a pair of deer traps, a tricycle, a washing machine without a door, a box full of used windshield wipers, a blacksmith’s bench, and other tools.

Wendy Mellons wore a camisole, so now Rose could examine her in detail: her eyes were rimmed with kohl like some Babylonian whore; her rings were so embedded in her fingers they could probably never be pulled off, even with heavy greasing; she had chipped red nails, olive skin, and what could only be described as a heavy-duty body. There was no sense that anything about her had dried up from lack of use, but rather as if everything had been steeped in oil, smelling of incense and reminiscent of a sacred Mass. Rose could not take his eyes off the ripples of her skin, which created folds where moss could germinate. Impossible not to be reminded of Mandra X. According to Rose, both were heavyweights, each in her own style, and if placed face-to-face in the ring, you would have to bet on a draw.

The walls of the house were coated in newspaper, presumably to conserve heat, and few pictures hung from nails.

“The family of my comadre,” Wendy Mellons said pointing to a small photograph faded by age and sunlight.

“It was Sleepy Joe’s Slovak clan,” Rose tells me. “And there in the family portrait, in that old photograph, there he was, Sleepy Joe, the guy who killed my son. It was the first time I had seen a photograph of him. It’s a kick to the gut, let me tell you, to finally see the face of the man who killed your son. But there was something off; the person in that picture was not a man but a child. In fact, he was the smallest of the seven siblings. Don’t ask me why, but the image of that child got all jumbled in my mind with the memory of Cleve as a child. A very emotional fusion that completely upset me. I couldn’t channel all the hatred and urgency for vengeance toward the child in that photograph. I can’t really explain it. My hatred bounced off that child and boomeranged right back to me, forcing me to swallow mouthfuls of my own bile. So I stopped looking at the child and focused on the father, who was behind him, a gloomy man with drunken eyes and a cauliflower nose. I was able to hate him right away, wanted him dead. On this man, I could unleash my rage, perhaps because I saw Sleepy Joe as an adult in him. Moreover, at that moment, I could also wish for the death of the child Sleepy Joe, for the sole purpose of hurting his father. I had been robbed of my son, and from the depths of my soul, I wanted to rob him of his.”

When María Paz and Wendy Mellons chatted with their backs to him, Rose took a photograph of that picture, and now he hands me a copy. I hold it in my hand and scrutinize it, knowing that in it are encased the seeds of everything that would happen later: the germ of this story. In the picture of the picture, there is a large peasant family, Caucasian, mired in poverty and foreigners to joy. The father dominates the image of the group, with his broad shoulders and stony expression. He wears a turtleneck and has a biblical beard, looking like a middle-aged Tolstoy, but rattier. The mother is sitting in the foreground. The dark scarf that conceals her hair and neck makes her seem an almost monastic figure. Surrounding the couple and not counting Sleepy Joe, there are six children, all of them hardened by work. They’re not really children but short adults — have never known childhood. They have golden hair parted in the middle, the girls with braids and the boys with bowl cuts. Two people seem out of place in the group, the mother and the youngest son. Both seem separated, isolated, as if enclosed in an invisible bubble.

There is something beautiful about them, both in the woman and child, and that also sets them apart from the rest. But what’s different about them? Almost nothing, some minor detail, a slightly higher arch of the eyebrows maybe, or cheekbones that are an iota more pronounced, the brow a few millimeters wider, the chin a few less. Or perhaps what is perceived as beauty is only a matter of contrast. There was something lacking in the flat humorless faces of the others that failed to mask a general vacuity, the larger fossil of the angry father, the smaller fossils of the resigned children.

There was another suggestive detail, similarly revealing. To be able to fit everyone in the photo, members of the family had bunched together. Yet none of them touched another; instead they were separated by tiny spaces that signaled the harsh loneliness of each figure. The exception again was the boy Joe, resting confidently on his mother’s knees. That child was not afraid of his mother; on the contrary, it would seem he took refuge in her against the others.

“No doubt there was something lovely about the woman,” Rose tells me. “A battered loveliness, almost destroyed by the husband’s merciless beatings, the marks evident on the children as well.”

According to María Paz, the woman was just someone who lived murmuring prayers and rarely bathed, but her character gained some depth with the details supplied by Wendy Mellons. Her name was Danika Draha, and she wore her hair in a braid tight and stout as a rope. She was perennially pining for the mountain country she had left behind in her homeland, because she was convinced that it was through those forests that one reached heaven. There were no signs that she missed her parents or her siblings, but the longing for those mountains often made her weep, and it was impossible for her to adjust to the landscape of Colorado. Since coming to the New World, everything in her life had been vulgar, sad, and ugly. Everything except her youngest son, the bright and beautiful boy whom she had not named Joe (that nickname came later, and she had never approved of it) but Jaromil, which in their language meant spring. In that creature, she invested all her affections, and she lived to please him. According to Wendy Mellons, little Jaromil was the only green branch in the withered tree that Danika Draha had become.

“Jaromil. That was Sleepy Joe’s real name,” Rose tells me. “And no doubt how he must be listed as such in his official documents.”

Mother and son prayed together, visited the church daily, fasted, painted Easter eggs, in December put up the Nativity scene, and during Holy Week were always in the first row for the reenactment of the Crucifixion that the Latinos in town put on every year. Liturgy by liturgy, they forged a religion in common as a sort of homeland in common, apart from the rest of the tribe — a world of its own made of candles, silicon, cassocks, confessionals, prodigious saints, sacrifice and redemption, blood, miracles, alms, and chanting. The mother was so attached to the child that she breastfed him until he was nine years old. “You’re sucking the life out of her,” the father said to his youngest every time he saw the boy latched on to the breast, and beat him away. On the death of the mother, the father laid the entire blame on the coddled child, the favorite, the spoiled one. The youngest. “He sucked the life right out,” he told anyone who would listen, “this dastardly child sucked and sucked on my wife till there was no life left in her.”

“The tragedy for Jaromil began with her death,” Wendy Mellons told Rose. “Imagine the loneliness of that child who went from being the light of his mother’s eyes to the most insignificant one in the home, which was no longer a home, because no one ever again provided or cared for the children or hardly fed them. One by one, the sons soon disappeared to find work and a life in the world. None of them could tolerate the drunkenness and anger of the father for long. The daughters also left as they quickly married, which wasn’t hard since white healthy flesh was coveted and in demand. Greg, the oldest, stayed behind to watch over the youngest, until he too eventually left. He went off to become a cop and did not reappear till years later. And Jaromil? Under the bed, in a ditch, in the top of a tree. He learned to hide every time the father came home, to avoid the ridiculing and the beatings.”

At some point in his childhood, Sleepy Joe understood that he could use the mystical to protect himself, or maybe he immersed himself in the mystical traditions learned from his mother. He went into a trance every time the priest raised the Host at Mass. His eyes rolled back in his head during these outbursts of love for God. He remained in the trance for minutes; no one could shake him or pinch him out of it, hence the nickname he acquired about this time: Sleepy Joe, in tandem with the reputation that came after a handful of these episodes. His looks didn’t hurt. From the time he was a little boy, he was pretty and alluring, like a little Jesus, people said, especially because of the blond curls cascading on his shoulders. His father, however, was not moved by his curls, and he made Sleepy Joe’s life impossible, telling him he was nothing but a prissy little girl. The townspeople’s reactions were very different, though. A few of them began to whisper that he was a holy child, others that he was suffering from some mysterious illness. Eventually most of them began isolating themselves from him, because they believed he was an instrument of bad luck.

“One thing is for sure,” Wendy Mellons told Rose, “if they had not ruined that boy’s religious career, he would have become the pope, because he did not lack fervor and dedication, which he still has to this day. But they blocked him from his destiny and messed everything up. When the whites cast him aside, he sought to ingratiate himself with the Latinos, but they too rejected him. In the end, the only ones who remained true to him were us, the whores, and he grew up among us.”

The brothel became his refuge. There he could be king again. Because he was so pretty, the girls fought over who would tend to him, comb his hair, hand feed him. They didn’t charge him when he was old enough to have sex with them and even provided him with spending money, because he was their pet, their precious doll, their pretty little boyfriend. And what else could come of such coddling? Joe got used to living off them, sweet-talked them to get what he wanted, threw temper tantrums if they denied him something, always knowing that in the end anything he did would be tolerated. Wendy Mellons explained that Sleepy Joe’s gift was to take from others as if every day was his last day on earth. Eventually things got complicated. The girls started to complain about his brutality and the cruel names he called them; they tired of hearing that they were nothing but sows and scavengers and evil bitches. He accused them of living in sin, and hated them for making him sin. He adored them and loathed them, and could only resolve this contradiction by resorting to threats and violence. The last straw came when he put a match to the translucent and highly flammable nightgown of one of the girls named Tinker Bell, who wasn’t burned alive, by the grace of God, but it left her with permanent scars.

“He’s a horrible man but at the same time always very repentant about his actions,” Wendy Mellons tried to explain to Rose. “He didn’t want to sin — not out of love for his neighbor, but because he was terrified of the eternal punishment. Always very angry, that’s for sure, at everything and everyone. There is a very sick side in him. Disturbed since childhood. And yet, I still love him like a son.”

“So are you still close to him?” Rose ventured, intuiting that this woman could serve as bridge to him.

“Close? Yes,” she said. “As close as he allows anyone to get to him.”

“Are you in touch with him? Do you see him?” María Paz blurted out, perhaps out of jealousy.

“Do I see him in person, you mean?” Wendy Mellons countered, and to prove her case without having to answer these questions, she pulled out a photograph from a drawer. “Taken very recently,” she said.

It had been taken with a Polaroid and, as she said, had to be somewhat recent, because Wendy Mellons did not seem any older than she was that day, even if in the picture she wore a sunhat festooned in flowers as if she were British royalty. It was a full-body shot, and she had her arms around a drifter type in jeans and a tank top, his face half hidden under Ray-Ban Aviators and a ten-gallon hat. The exposed portion of his face showed bruised lips and an imposing square chin. Rose could not connect the little Sleepy Joe in the first photograph they had seen with this moron in sunglasses with the brim of his hat pulled low. But María Paz said in an assured voice, “That’s him.” The couple in the picture leaned on the hood of a medium-size yellow truck, maybe a Dodge Fargo or a Chevrolet Apache. On the top part of the windshield, there was a transparent sticker with a message in iridescent letters. It read “Gift from God.”

It was just the kind of clue that Rose and María Paz needed. Rose still had not confessed to Wendy Mellons the purpose of their visit, wanting to go slowly, not rush. Since they were throwing away that much money, the least they could do was make sure it arrived in the hands of Sleepy Joe. For the moment, they observed the woman and asked questions, letting her tell them about the life and work, address, real name and surname, and any other pertinent data about her surrogate son. They needed some time to discuss things among themselves, so they excused themselves and promised they’d return the next day.

“You couldn’t invent a more absurd situation,” Rose tells me. “I never would have imagined I’d end up there. Amazing woman, María Paz. I think that’s when I really started to admire her. Her clarity of purpose, delusional in my opinion, but maniacally persecuted. She was convinced that this would ensure the safety of her sister, and nothing was going to stop her. And we’re not talking about some millionaire. Imagine the situation: a fugitive from justice, about to cross one of the most guarded borders in the world, launching into the unknown without a penny in her pocket. Admirable in some ways.”

On the way to town to get something to eat, María Paz stopped to read a poster on a wall. “Concert: Molotov, tonight in Monte Vista,” she read. “Great. Not that far away,” she said.

They drove into the desert toward Monte Vista, Colorado, and parked in front of a large tent that had been assembled for the event. “From the moment that we got out of the car,” Rose tells me, “we didn’t see another white person or hear anyone speak English.”

It was as if clusters of brown people had crawled out from under the stones, what is known as the bronze race in spades, mostly men, almost all of them taking up a lot of space, robust, tattooed, with their hair nice and stiff and shiny black with hair gel, workers, gamblers, some in denim jackets and others in shirtsleeves in spite of the motherfucking cold, Aztecs, Nahuatl, Tepehuans, Mayans, from Mexico City, from the mountains, that is, what is better known as la raza, Benito Juárez’s raza, Cuauhtémoc raza, the whole damned raza, as if meeting up for a general conference, the big showing of the little bronze race, a hundred percent chicanos, truckers, Macheteros, mestiza chicas, chicos with straight hair, wetbacks, hombres, dudes, indigenous, maquila workers, mariachis, youth bands, Comanches, from one mother, from all mothers, druggies, fathers, pissed-off, shit-upon, dudes, suckers, field hands, evangelists, and beautiful nobodies. The raza, then, all of it, there in that tent. Long live the dark-skinned Virgin of Guadalupe and long live Mexico, you fuckers!

María Paz and Rose buy their tickets and push their way into the expectant crowd, as restless and charged with energy as caged tigers, and watch your back because now begins the tug of war of everyone against everyone else, an all-out tugfest, shoulder to shoulder, and everyone cracking up, till the catcalls build up in an unstoppable wave aimed at the stage, summoning the band of the hour, the kings of albura dance and scourging humor, the bad guys of the border, with their expansive explosive alterlatino rock, cumbia, rap, funk fusion, and everything in between, and now, Molotov! The group appears under a barrage of applause and lasers, and to start things off, the leader lets loose with a merry greeting: “What’s up, you horde of illegals!” And the raza roars. The response to the greeting is a symphony of pure howls: the horde rises. And the tent reverberates with the heat and tension, and a thundering noise that could burst eardrums and unleash libidos till they become wounded, full-throated cries, and up there on stage there is El Gringo Loco at the drums and Miky Huidobro at bass guitar and Paco Ayala at the other bass, with lead singer Tito Fuentes, and now it begins, here comes the national anthem: “Yo ya estoy hasta la madre de que me pongan sombrero. No me digas frijolero pinche gringo puñetero.” And then, “Don’t call me gringo, you fucking beaner, stay on your side of that goddamned river.” María Paz fuses with that mass that is now all raw nerves, marinated in adrenaline, stewed in want, the shit happens and then more shit happens, and she rocks the Mexican power. Feel it! Feel it! All one as brothers! And Rose does not get it, and he can hardly believe his eyes. María Paz, who could tell he is a little freaked, elbows him and yells in his ear, “Easy, my mister, no need to panic, you’re not the only white one here. Look at the drummer!” And he’s up on stage, blond and rosy-skinned, born in Houston, Texas, and nicknamed El Gringo Loco, author of the famous anthem “Guacala que rica,” and the Latino fans love him. Now things begin to warm up and this mishmash comes together into a grand ritual of lowlifes, a baptism of wetbacks, those who had to put up with everything out there and hang their heads, in here are possessed by the will to rave and riot, “Dame dame dame todo el power para que te demos en la madre, gimi gimi gimi todo el poder.” On the stage, Tito Fuentes grabs the mic and screams in jest, “Fuck, hit the ground, someone called Immigration!” And the crowd hits the floor, laughing riotously, hiding under the chairs like children at play, because here la raza is an insurgent, mocking, and powerful race. This is free territory, blue skies! For no one can stop this devilish mass, and there is no better mantra than those frightening words, and here many who had never amounted to anything would climb mountains, here they reach for things higher than the Alien Registration Number. Immigration Control, the Border Patrol, the Minutemen, and all the other racist mobs could go straight to hell, and bring with them the treacle of political correctness. Bring down the walls: as Pink Floyd said. The Berlin Wall, the Great Wall of China, the wall in Palestine, and the wall of Tijuana. “And down with the walls of Manninpox!” María Paz screams, though no one can hear her amid all that commotion, and as she rattles and shakes, she lets out a tear for Mandra X and all her other fellow captives. “Yes, yes, this is life, girls, and tonight you are all with me!”

Outside, the desert glowed under a full moon.

“Imagine the Three Stooges planning a coup d’état,” Rose tells me, “and that should give you a good sense of how María Paz, Wendy Mellons, and I spent the two days fumbling with ideas about how to get the money to Sleepy Joe. If yes this, then not that, not here but then where is here, and who can we and how.”

Not that it was a complicated operation, more like a lottery: they were calling a guy to give him one hundred and fifty thousand dollars and asking nothing in return. But as Rose asserted, there was only one deck of cards and everyone was playing a different game, and betting accordingly. After the night of the concert, Wendy Mellons was finally able to get in touch with Sleepy Joe, and she made arrangements for María Paz to call him from a pay phone and make plans to give him the money, with the tacit understanding — very well understood by everyone — that he would not harm her sister, Violeta. Sleepy Joe, who had never had the desire to understand things that are well understood by everyone, immediately suspected it was a trap and thus insisted on his own conditions, principally, he wanted to see María Paz alone: he wanted the money and the girl. Twice, María Paz was forced to finish the call without having reached an agreement. The conversation that followed this one was short and sharp, and she gave him an ultimatum in regard to how the money would be transferred to him: “It’s like the lentils in the soup,” she told him, “you take it as it is or you leave it.” He’d take it, he said, he was no fool. He had succumbed to the jingle of coins: down the hatch with the lentils. If he had to drop his demand to see María Paz, then so be it; Wendy Mellons would hand over the money. “No problem,” he said. “I would trust her with my life, Wendy Mellons is my soulmate.” Hearing that, María Paz felt a pang of despair. But she kept her composure, she wasn’t there to be lovey-dovey, too much was at stake. There was one final condition: Sleepy Joe had to scan and e-mail to María Paz a receipt with his signature, stating and confirming that Wendy Mellons had completed the delivery of the full amount.

“What is going to be the name of your e-mail address?” Rose wanted to know.

“What name?”

“The address you have to set up so he can write you, somethingorother at gmail dot com.”

“That’s perfect.”

“What’s perfect?”

“What you said, somethingorother at gmail dot com,” she said, not giving it a second thought, because she was hurrying to town to buy something.

“You’re kidding me,” Rose said flustered. “Do you need to go shopping at this moment? What the hell do you need?”

“Just this thing.”

“And you need it now? Are you nuts? This is no time for shopping.”

But she insisted, got her way, and took the Toyota to do her errands, leaving Rose time to return to Wendy Mellons, which didn’t turn out to be a horrible thing, after all, because he learned a few things that would come to be very helpful soon.

“It was an intense experience,” Rose tells me during our interview. “This getting closer and closer to the murderer of my son. Very hard, getting to know the people who were part of his life, seeing him in photographs, knowing he was on the other end of the telephone line, almost within reach.”

When they were alone in the car again, Rose asked María Paz what the big deal was, what the hell she had to buy so urgently at such a moment.

“A cheap backpack or something like that. And look, I found just what I needed, a red knapsack. You didn’t think I was going to hand over my Gucci bag to that old woman. No way! I put the money in the red knapsack, I’m keeping the Gucci.”

What did Wendy Mellons hope to get from all this? Basically, she would do a favor for a close friend, and maybe get a tip as gratitude for her services. As for Rose, his shameless purpose was to use the money as bait to get close enough to Sleepy Joe and bombard him with bullets. Up to that point, he had meekly gone along and approved whatever María Paz wanted, ceding the reins to her and playing dumb, the “ignorant old gringo” of the Molotov. But he had grown wary of that role. Now he needed to break out on his own and take firm steps. To begin, they snuck out of Wendy Mellons’s place, and he took María Paz to Monarch Mountain, a safe distance away. Their lodging was a ski resort that he had visited in the past with Edith and Cleve.

“I chose Monarch Mountain for a few reasons,” Rose explains to me. “First, I was sick and tired of driving all day and spending the nights in lousy motels. The plight of undocumented immigrants and the lower classes was no doubt interesting and very sad, but I had had enough. I wanted to sleep well, relax, eat well, and enjoy beautiful views from a hotel window. I was seized with a desire to spend my money liberally those last days, as simple as that.”

“I don’t understand,” I say. “You were about to murder a man…”

“Exactly.”

“Exactly?”

“Let me finish breaking it down for you. You asked me why I chose Monarch Mountain, and I told you the first reason. Second reason: I needed to keep María Paz distracted and clueless while I did my thing. More than once, she had told me she had always dreamed of going skiing, and I wanted to make sure that such a dream was fulfilled — so she would have at least one good memory of America before she left. Third reason: a guest is much safer and better protected in a five-star hotel than in some fleabag place by the side of the road.”

They checked into the best chalet available at the San Luis Ski Resort, a large Alpine hotel complete with cheese fondue and cuckoo clocks, fireplaces in the individual chalets, and yodeling and accordion performances on Saturday nights. A minibus shuttled guests to the slopes, which were fifteen minutes away. Lying on the bed of their room, there was a spectacular view of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and of the surrounding forest crisscrossed by paths, on which they could take strolls with Otto, Dix, and Skunko. So there, in that ersatz Alpine hideaway, María Paz and Rose bided their time and waited for the handover of money, which would take place at some unspecified time whenever Sleepy Joe arrived in Colorado from wherever he was coming.

“The hotel offered dog care,” Rose tells me. “A crucial detail because it allowed me to leave the dogs in good hands while I took care of my business.”

Rose rented a full set of ski gear, clothing, and accessories for María Paz, reserved a whole set of private classes with a personal instructor, and while she took her first tentative steps on the magical white carpet, surrounded by the children also learning, he watched from the deck of Los Amigos Bar, seated under the outdoor heater, sipping on a frosty mug of beer, and picking at a plate of chorizo quesadillas with red sauce, because although the hotel was Swiss, the cuisine of choice at the food lounges was purely American-Mex. (“How fake can you get?” Cleve would have snipped.)

“I had never seen María Paz so happy,” Rose tells me. “Those endless expanses, with her hair blowing in the wind, must have felt like the opposite side of the world compared to Manninpox.”

“And were you also feeling good?” I ask. “Had you abandoned plans to off Sleepy Joe?”

“No, I never said that. What happened was that once I had dealt with the practical technicalities of the situation, it was simply a matter of waiting.”

“But you must have been twisting yourself into knots with fears and scruples and doubts.”

“None of that. Not even a little bit, actually. More like an astonishing sense of peace, quite astonishing, as the editorials said after Mandra X had told reporters about experiencing a similar feeling right before she murdered her children.”

Rose is careful to stress that those days were quite peaceful for him. He read the papers, was endlessly amused by the antics of María Paz on the small hill with the other beginners, enjoyed every sip of his frosty beers. Today, a couple of years later, as I interview him in the dining room of the Washington Square Hotel in New York City, I ask him to elaborate on why he thinks he was overcome by this astonishing sense of peace, as he calls it, because it is both a general and hyperbolic assertion that I’m just not buying. He replies that it was simple: Sleepy Joe had to die, he would die, and Rose did not feel there was anything wrong with that at all. He felt only relief, as if the air had become milder. He even came to the conclusion that the most burdensome aspect of committing such an act was physical and not moral at all. When it came down to it, it was almost natural to kill another person, something that was almost inconsequential: a few days before, he would never have suspected this, so he felt it was some sort of revelation. Despite the cold, the Colorado skies were radiant. A splendid dome of the purest blue was suspended above him, and he says he remembers thinking, there on the deck facing the slopes, that if all people had to do was push a red button to eliminate anyone who annoyed them, the human race would have perished.

I try to follow his reasoning, transcribing every sentence in my notebook word for word, so as not to distort what he is saying. I’m paying a heavy price for acceding to his request not to use a recorder; my hand is numb and swelled from all the frantic scribbling. But I can’t stop now; I don’t want to miss a single word, not at this stage. We are moving into delicate ground with damning revelations, and although Rose knows that I will not use real names or compromising details in my book, he begins to grow more evasive and restless. His responses, which up to this point were plentiful and flowing, suddenly seem to come as if carefully measured from a dropper. I have to extract them from him with my journalistic forceps. It is almost as if we have decided to switch roles, because now he is asking questions and I am responding — a technique we settle upon so that he can say what he has to say without saying it.

“Let’s see,” I say, veering the conversation back to the proper topic. “You had decided kill a man, had found a method that you thought would be most effective, and it was as if your conscience had completely divorced itself from this matter. Is that a fair way to put it? But let’s leave that and move on to this method that you had settled upon as the most efficacious.

“I’m guessing you intended to shoot him at close range as soon as he showed up for the handover.”

“It wasn’t as simple as that. Like I said, the physical part is what can trip a person up. How in the world was I supposed to figure out where and when Wendy Mellons would meet Sleepy Joe? And even if I did figure it out, how would I get there without being noticed?”

“What about hidden in the trunk of her car…”

“I fantasized about that possibility at first. I played flawlessly edited films inside my head in which I surreptitiously snuck into her car, or I lay camouflaged among the piles of trash in Wendy Mellons’s backyard, until I leaped out like a superhero, Ming’s gun in hand, professionally spraying my target with bullets. I imagined dozens of variations of this, all equally infantile. Until I stopped messing around and settled on the safe bet, which in this case also happened to be the easiest option.”

“I would wager that you found a red button,” I say. “That’s clearly where this thing is heading? But don’t tell me… You bribed Wendy Mellons!”

“Your words, not mine,” he responds.

“But am I right? Wendy Mellons does not seem like the type with impeccable principles. So a simple bribe would not have seemed far-fetched at all.”

“No, it didn’t seem far-fetched in the slightest.”

“You could easily have gone behind María Paz’s back and had a little chat with Wendy Mellons. ‘Listen, Wendy, just forget about this guy and keep the money, one hundred and fifty thousand dollars all for you.’”

“Well, there was not quite one hundred and fifty thousand left in the stack anymore,” Rose corrects me. “María Paz had put only about one hundred and thirty-three thousand in the red backpack.”

Of the seventeen thousand or so she had taken out, only a small fraction was for her to keep; the bulk of it was to pay the coyote. She had already postponed her departure date a few times, and now she annoyingly insisted on abandoning the crossing into Canada and trying to cross into Mexico instead, so the guy was justifiably pissed off and charging her additional penalties for anything he could come up with. Six thousand dollars was to compensate Rose for all the money he had spent out of his own pocket to help her, but he refused to accept any of it.

“Okay,” I tell Rose. “So I was wrong about the one hundred and fifty thousand, but still one hundred thirty-three thousand and whatever was not something to sneeze at. Wendy Mellons could not have refused such an offer…”

“Well, that’s where you’re mistaken. Wendy Mellons was actually very levelheaded. And she would indeed have refused such an offer.”

“At first, perhaps. Maybe she would have even been outraged at first, and would have yelled at you. How you can think such things? That she would help you murder Sleepy Joe? Were you crazy? This boy who yearned to be her son! Am I right, Mr. Rose?”

“You should know,” he tells me, “you’re the novelist.”

“So I’ll go on. You have suggested to Wendy Mellons that she not be so rash, at least to give it some thought and not refuse the offer outright. Look, Wendy, you would have said, your real son is this boy Bubba. Sleepy Joe is your lover, let’s not mince words and instead call things what they are. And how many manhole covers would Bubba have to steal to make anywhere near such an amount of money, and how many pots would he have to forge? Not to mention that sooner or later your little Bubba will be nabbed and sentenced to jail for stealing and destroying.”

“There is no doubt that Wendy Mellons would have been receptive to such an argument,” Rose admitted.

“It’s amazing what people may be receptive to when money falls out of the sky like that. But I haven’t resolved one problematic detail, Mr. Rose, the receipt that María Paz demanded as proof of delivery. If Wendy Mellons became your accomplice in killing Sleepy Joe, how could you produce the receipt?”

“Good point.”

“I would say you gave Ming’s Glock to Wendy Mellons and said, here, take this, Wendy, and do what you have to do with it, but first make sure that you get a signature. And then bring me back the receipt and the gun, but please, not a word to María Paz about our little agreement.”

“Do you want to see it?” Rose asks, and hands me a sheet.

“What?” I ask.

“The receipt. Well, it’s actually more than just a receipt. Read it, if you can decipher the writing. It’s worth it. It’ll clear up a lot of things before we go on.”

The following is the transcript of the famous receipt. To make it understandable, spelling has been corrected, some punctuation has been added for clarity, and lines that were downright impossible to make out were omitted. Hot Ass is Sleepy Joe’s nickname for María Paz, and Cuchi-Cuchi the nickname he uses for himself.

My Beloved Hot Ass, I didn’t want to kill your puny, sickly dog, although he deserved to die, I really had no intention of killing him. I just wanted to make him wail and howl a little bit so you would confess where in the hell you were hiding that money that today you have so kindly sent my way through the help of our mutual friend Wendy Mellons, but that before you had arbitrarily refused to share with me for no good reason without realizing that there was enough for both us and that with it we could have lived together in a safe place if you had not been so vicious and resentful. How happy we could have been if you had known how to forgive instead of being such a treacherous bitch, you preferred to be with others instead of accepting the proposal I made to you to live together as we knew how and love would wait for us, maybe not tomorrow or the next day because I had some pending cases on the side. This would have been possible only if you forgave me, and you had to accept the fact that I did not kill my brother, you of all people knew best how much I loved him and was in his debt because he was the only one who could be bothered to care for me during my difficult childhood with a dead mother and a father who never knew how to love me. I saw Greg’s murderers, saw them with these very eyes that God gave me, and you have to believe and have faith in me because I recognized them. They were former police officers like Greg, his partners in the arms sales business who learned God knows how that he was going to rat them out, and it was very possible that the FBI itself had passed on this information to them, because it goes without saying that those fuckers are loyal to no one, not even their own mothers, in other words, motherfuckers through and through. What I mean is that when Greg’s partners learned that Greg was turning on them, they pounced immediately and resolved the issue right then and there and I saw them, Hot Ass, I saw them kill him because that night I was on my way to meet him, the night of his birthday, remember, and he went out to meet up with me, and I had even brought him a gift, a Blackhawk Garra II knife that I had gotten secondhand but looked new. I was carrying the gift with me, and when I saw that those guys were going to shoot my brother, I immediately tried to stop them, I was not going to let a vile murder be committed against my own blood, especially against an unarmed man like Greg was at that time, that’s the kind of person I am, as you well know better than anyone. But they overpowered me. They were armed and it was three against one, and all I had was the Blackhawk Garra II knife that was no more useful than a butter knife in a situation like that. Or I could say I didn’t stop them, I failed miserably, and those bastards killed my brother right in front of me, which is why I waited around until they left, and came out of the hiding place I had found after they tossed me aside and I went to my brother, at least I wanted to prevent that he die right there on the street like a dog, but he was already dead and the only thing I could do was honor his death and let him die with Christ as he would have wanted. I shut his eyes and performed the last rites in the tradition of our culture before I got out of there. I wanted to tell you all this the night after our reunion after you got out of prison, so that you would have all the facts and not blame me for his death. I wanted to tell you everything on that night that started off so beautiful, a night of love that unfortunately ended in the unnecessary death of the doggie. It was all because of your stubbornness, Hot Ass, because when I ask you to do something, you do exactly the opposite, and that just brings out the worst of me and I lose my patience and it is impossible for things to get done properly, on the contrary, everything goes to hell simply because I respectfully ask you to watch how you act with me. The fuckers who killed my brother Greg owed me, they would shed tears of blood, and maybe you have heard that two of them have already paid dearly. But there are still critters scattering about, hiding in holes like cowards, meaning that I still have certain commitments I must keep before we run off together with this money, you and me together to wherever we end up, if you still love me, that is. But I should tell you that this dream life isn’t possible yet, because like I said, I still have some unfinished business to take care of. I knew you had found the money there in the nook between the bricks of the grill on the roof where Greg and I had hidden it. Hot Ass, do you remember when my brother and I told you that we needed to enlarge the old brick grill on the roof so that we could grill more burgers and corn for the Sunday family dinner? But the truth is that we only wanted to build an extension for the grill to create a perfect nook to hide our stash. I still remember and laugh about how you wanted us to grill this huge roast and we nearly burned our stash to a crisp. We thought that it all had been an innocent coincidence on your part, since you could not have known about the stash, but now I realize this wasn’t the case, you had figured out where we hid the money and you wanted to make us sweat, you cunning little fox. On the night of Greg’s murder I wanted to grab the stash of money from the grill for us to live the beautiful life we had dreamed about together, but you had beat me to it, you bitch, you had already betrayed me and the hundred and fifty thousand was gone, and you had already set all the bricks back in place as if nothing had happened, you fucking bitch, and then the FBI burst in and everything went to hell. Fortunately you have repented for your misconduct and ingratitude toward me and I hereby acknowledge receipt of the sum of one hundred thirty-three thousand and five hundred dollars ($133,500) that I just received from Wendy Mellons. This is a very generous gesture on your part, Hot Ass, but I nevertheless will not ignore the fact nor fail to always keep in mind always that you skimmed the missing $16,500 from the top. All this does not mean I have forgotten about you, my beloved Hot Ass, nor about the beautiful moments that in spite of everything we shared, some of the most beautiful of my life, although I admit that there were other times that were not so beautiful and if I made you suffer you should forgive me and I apologize for any such actions, sometimes we just have to accept that life can be as sweet as it can be bitter. Again, I thank you for this gesture, but don’t forget that money is not everything in life and love comes first. I will continue to pursue what I need to finish settling accounts with those that did me harm, teach them a lesson they will never forget, already they are falling one by one leaving nothing but birds flying above them. They say even in hell you end up chasing memories and I swear by my mother, Hot Ass, that even there they will suffer eternal torment as consequence of their actions. And as far as you’re concerned, you know what happens if you do not come with me, Hot Ass, don’t shatter all my dreams and hopes, I have given my heart and you will not be able to simply walk away and neglect it, if there’s something I simply abhor it is treason, you know that, Hot Ass, you’ve experienced some of the repercussions, remember that I know both your weak points and your not so weak points very well. I yearn for your kisses and all your other womanly delights in bed. Consider yourself warned, do not deny the love that awaits you in my arms. Yours forever, Cuchi-Cuchi P.S. Sorry again about the dog, Hot Ass, I really did not intend to let it go so far, but when we’re finally together wherever we end up, I promise to buy you a better and prettier pet that will be yours forever. I would have preferred to tell you all this in person but because of your ingratitude this has not been possible.

“There’s definitely a problem with my theory,” I say to Rose, after reading that novella masquerading as a receipt. “There was no complicity from Wendy Mellons, clearly. Nobody writes such a document with a gun to his temple. So I’m completely lost. I need some hints.”

“Wendy Mellons does not live alone.”

“Bubba! How could I have forgotten about Bubba? At some point, Bubba peeks out from the hovel. Or tucks himself between the stacks of towers, to prick himself with syringes. You see him out there, and tell yourself, that is my ticket.”

“Not bad,” Rose encourages me.

“You need to know when and where Wendy Mellons plans to meet Sleepy Joe. So you approach Bubba and offer him cash in exchange for information. Two hundred dollars. Maybe five hundred. Bubba knows who Sleepy Joe is because he always comes back to that house that is like his mother’s house. And an easy task for Bubba. You arrange a method of communicating with him, a daily appointment, or every other day, at a certain time in a certain pool hall, or bar, or even street corner.”

Two days later, Rose is there at the pool hall, or bar, or street corner. Bubba also gets there on time, but has nothing to report. He knows nothing about Sleepy Joe or his mother, who has left home and has not returned. Perfect, Wendy Mellons and Sleepy Joe are already together, Rose deduces. The beast approaches, and its breath is heard.

“Don’t underestimate Bubba,” Rose warns me. “He may be a junkie, but he’s not daft.”

“Bubba is not daft? Well, that means that he is perceptive. He notices things. What would Bubba notice? Let me think. I got it. He puts two and two together, and he realizes that you aim to kill Sleepy Joe. It’s the only thing that makes sense from the way you have relentlessly and secretly engaged his services.”

“Bubba is insightful, but he is also a drug addict.”

“Precisely, and he would do almost anything for a few bills. So during that first meeting, Bubba just comes right out with it. Save yourself a few steps, mister, for X amount of dollars, I’ll take care of the deed. You don’t hesitate for a moment about taking that offer, and leave the dirty work to Bubba. Maybe you lend him Ming’s pistol to move things along… No, wait, that’s wrong. Rewind. You don’t lend him Ming’s gun, that would be a blunder, and why would you, there is no need. Bubba lives among tools that may be used for murder, at least one carbine, two deer traps, a steel deck, a heap of dangerous tools…”

“Bubba turned manhole covers into pots,” Rose reminds me.

“That’s right, so he owned a collection of blacksmith tongs. A blow from Bubba using one of those things would have devastating consequences. This satisfies you enough to pass on the responsibility for the doing of the deed to him, and you sit back and enjoy your cold ones.”

Enjoy them, sure, but not for long. Rose must also man the second surveillance center, the business office of the hotel, where he checks the e-mail address that he and María Paz had created for the sole purpose of receiving proof of the receipt that Sleepy Joe had agreed to send, and eventually did send: the famous epistle to Hot Ass, which Rose printed and brought back to the chalet for her to read. First goal met. Sleepy Joe had the money, and María Paz had the receipt. Now two things needed to happen: the cyber-coyote had to give the green light for the border crossing, and Bubba had to put those heavy tongs to good use. Rose started making a trip to the pool hall, anxious to know the outcome and carrying in his pocket the six thousand dollars that he had promised his partner when the job was completed. But a week went by, and there was no sign of Bubba. A week and a half, and nothing.

Meanwhile, María Paz was making great progress in her skiing classes. She had passed all the tests and graduated from the beginner’s level, which came as a surprise to Rose, and now fearlessly hit the green trails from nine in the morning until five in the afternoon, when the chairlift stopped. With a rather inelegant and suicidal audacity, she plummeted down the slopes over and over again, like Atom Ant, or as if she were desperately fleeing from something. She did in fact ski with that kind of frenetic style of those who are fleeing everything and everyone. As night began to fall, she returned to the hotel, radiant and exhausted, pulled her gloves off, took off one boot, then the other, took off her sweater, her thermal underwear, and left all her stuff, neatly piled up in a corner. Then she quickly drank the hot chocolate that Rose brought her, took an oceanic shower, applied liniment to the bruises all over her body caused by the blows from her spills, took two aspirin, slumped into bed, and fell into a dreamless sleep until the next day, just in time to be on the slopes again at nine.

“How nice, María Paz, you really love skiing!” Rose ventured, suspecting that her hyperactivity was just a camouflage for the riptides that were forcefully flowing inside her. “Really, congratulations, it’s amazing how fast you have learned.”

“Yes,” she responded. “I have the whole shit down.”

The cyber-coyote, meanwhile, has come to the conclusion that this María Paz was a quarrelsome, unbearable, and unpredictable client, more annoying than a poorly tuned piano. He retaliated by charging her exorbitant fees every time he had to change the details of the border crossing, and let her know that he was gathering his current group somewhere near Sunland Park, New Mexico, en route to Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico. She would need to go there very soon, as soon as she got the signal from him. She would make the crossing along with other outlaws and fugitives like her, and like almost anyone else who was smuggled across the border not from south to north, but from north to south.

“What do you really know about this guy the cyber-coyote?” Rose asked María Paz.

“Really know?” she replied. “Almost nothing. That he is an evangelist and owns a Blackberry.”

“But yet you are putting your fate in his hands.”

You had to be a good deal two-faced to say that last sentence aloud. What did Rose know about Bubba, on whom he had placed his complete trust? Nothing, or worse than nothing: he knew all the bad parts, that he was a devious and timorous scoundrel who would do anything for money. And that he had not shown up for any of their recent meetings. Something very weird must be happening. Deeply concerned, Rose began to lose sleep and his appetite, became sullen, silent, and irritable. Because she had thrown herself headlong into the physical aspects of her new sport, María Paz did not register the subtle changes in his mood, but the dogs noticed, and they grew restless. They scrutinized their master with long looks and licked his hands as if to console him: they also sniffed that something was horribly wrong. Rose returned to the pool hall, and again nothing. The following morning, after hours of insomnia, he remembered that he had not erased Sleepy Joe’s e-mail message. This was an unforgivable mistake, to leave such incriminating evidence floating in cyberspace. How could he have been so neglectful? Without even waiting for the sun to come up, he threw on some clothes over his pajamas and hurried to the business office, to remove the body of the crime-to-be with a tap of a key. After logging in to the account, he found there was a second message from Sleepy Joe. He hesitated a few seconds, letting his heart quiet down, finally daring to look. This time it was only an image. In a fuzzy snapshot, a stack of tires around a post is aflame. The fire is just a little flash of light, the flames leaning left from the wind, but the smoke that rises from it is thick and black and distorts most of the rest of the picture, forcing Rose to put on his reading glasses and move closer to the screen. Tied to the stake and in the middle of the tires, Rose discerned the figure of a naked man, half-burned, perhaps still alive.

Rose managed to figure out the mouse well enough to enlarge the image. The blackened and blistered skin had disfigured the features of the face, but there was no doubt that this was Bubba. The ritual had taken place in the backyard of his house. On a piece of wood nailed to the post about one quarter of the way up above the head of the figure, the initials INRI are visible.

A rush of fever bathed Rose in sweat. Sleepy Joe was alive. Not only was he alive, now he was very well informed about who was trying to kill him. Just thinking about the magnitude of the disaster that he himself had unleashed, Rose sank inside his own body. His eyes clouded over, the blood dropped from his brain, and his whole body weakened. I’m going to die, he thought, and that feeling flooded him with lethargy, a momentary sense of relief. But he did not die; he remained suspended and conscious in that intolerable moment. The extreme suffering of the dying man became an alarm that Rose felt would burst his ears. Rose sensed Bubba burning like mustard gas on every one of his nerve endings. The guilt overpowered him. Any logical thought escaped him, knowing he was responsible for the horror that occurred, and the horror to come. Blinded by stupidity, naive as a child, he had been waving a red cloth at the beast, gibing it, and now the beast responded. Rose covered his face with his hands not to see: he needed to save himself from his own anguish. But the martyrdom of Bubba had made its way inside and now took the form of others — those in line waiting their turn. That girl Violeta would be next. And María Paz. And Rose himself, although this last possibility did not bother him.

It’s the others. The girls. Because of Rose, they had been exposed, and now he needed to make a superhuman effort to think, to think well and thoroughly, and then act, trying to prevent the chain of atrocities he had set off. But how, when he couldn’t even regain control of himself? He couldn’t even get up from that chair. He could not even digest and expel that calcified being inside him that radiated with an unbearable intensity, forcing Rose to cross the limits of his own endurance. The sacrificial victim was raw, in the flesh, poisonous and contagious. And it wasn’t the wretched Bubba incarnated inside him. Now it was Cleve, crowned with thorns, stuck to the inner membrane of Rose’s eyelids, preventing him from opening them. A fog blanketed his thoughts before they could rise.

“I have to think,” he said aloud, and the phrase reached him from afar, as if an echo. “I have to think,” he said again, but he was sure he was falling asleep.

He wasn’t quite sure how he managed, but he was at the door of his chalet, holding the key in his hand. He was about to go on, but didn’t have the strength. The dogs soon sensed his presence and started going crazy, scraping the door. They wanted to go for a walk, but Rose didn’t dare. He had to warn María Paz, but wasn’t sure how. It’s my fault, he thought. That’s all he could think about, the fault he bore. What happened had happened because of him. Not just that, also what would happen. He had to prevent it, go back to Vermont right now to protect the girl. But before this, he had to face María Paz, show her the picture of the man burned, confess everything; she needed to know. But how could Rose confess something as unmentionable as his plot to murder Sleepy Joe behind her back? And to cap it off, relate to her how the murderer failed? He would have to admit his mistakes in pursuing the plot, his systematic deception, his selfish machinations, his grand stupidity, his poor old fool’s ignorance, his despicable uselessness, his pulp fiction avenger charade woefully mocked.

Sleepy Joe did not know the whereabouts of María Paz; as ardently as he searched for her to kill her, it would be a while before he found her, if he found her at all. But Violeta was a fish in a barrel within easy reach of his claws. They should be leaving for Vermont at that very moment, but Rose’s legs were leaden, his will deadened, his soul entombed. The dogs were going to destroy the door with their clawing, and Rose pushed it ajar. They stampeded out and jumped up to greet him. Then they stopped, all three at the same time, dazzled by the sheer whiteness that had blanketed the countryside. Then, slowly, they moved away, each on his own, sniffing and peeing here and there. Rose closed the door without going inside. He leaned against the wall, took in the divergent lines of the paw prints left behind in the snow as the dogs moved away from each other, then crossed.

“Sometimes you do things,” Rose tells me. “When you’re at a loss, you do funny things. I remember overhearing María Paz inside the chalet finishing in the shower. Then I heard her moving around on the creaky wooden floor. I should have gone in and faced her. And yet I walked away. I took refuge in the laundry room, practically hid between machines. I sat on the floor next to a running dryer. I still remember feeling the heat and vibration against my forearm. I thought of nothing, or only of Effexor pills. I had stopped taking them a long time ago, but at that moment I would have taken two, three, the whole bottle.”

Rose managed to emerge out of his well of anguish and return to the chalet, but there was no one there. The dog-care service left a note informing him that it had the dogs, and María Paz had left with all her ski gear. Already on the slopes? It couldn’t be; they weren’t even open yet. He went searching in the dining room and found her there, but she was having breakfast with some friends she had made, and Rose did not dare interrupt. As much of a hurry as there was, it wasn’t smart to make a fuss. Stay under the radar, and keep the police at bay. Rose decided to wait for María Paz to come out of the dining room. He would take her by the arm, and tell her what had happened, or maybe not everything, not now. Only the essentials: he would inform her that something very serious had happened and explain the details later. For the moment, they had to fly out of there. They had ten minutes to gather all their things, pay the hotel bill, and hit the road.

At the far end of the dining room, María Paz laughed with her new friends, ignorant of everything. Rose observed how she drank her orange juice, smeared butter on her bread, and brought the fork to her mouth. Suddenly she stood and walked toward the buffet. This is it, Rose thought, and prepared to move, but her friends followed her and were with her at once. María Paz served herself a bowl of granola and milk and returned to the table. This is taking way too long, thought Rose. Jesus Christ, the horrors that could unfold while this woman finished a bowl of granola. He could make better use of this time, he decided, and went looking for the concierge to ask about his dogs.

“Not to worry, sir, they’ll have them back by noon,” he was told. “Today they were taken mushing.”

“Taken what?”

“Mushing, sir.”

“Mushing?”

“It’s a sled sport, sir.”

“They make my dogs pull sleds.”

“No sir, how you can say such a thing? They go running alongside.”

While Rose was trying to find out where his dogs were, María Paz finished breakfast and left the dining room with her new friends, catching the shuttle that took them to the slopes. Rose got there just as it left and chased it in vain: the minibus moving up the road and out of sight.

Rose returned to the chalet. He was not concerned at all about his unshaven face, his putrid breath, or the fact that his pajamas were poking out from under his clothes. He just needed to switch his shoes for boots, get his wallet, car keys, identification documents, and fill their bags with their things. He bolted to the reception desk. He wanted to check out, he begged a methodical receptionist. An urgent matter had come up and it was imperative that he settled his account, he told her. “Please, miss, if you can hurry, this is urgent.” Because he didn’t cancel in advance, she charged an extra day. He paid without protest and returned the keys. He loaded the Toyota with the suitcases, stacking them in whichever way, and was about to take off when he remembered Ming’s gun. He had hidden it in the chalet, on top of one of the rafters in the ceiling. He went back to the reception desk, asked for the key, waited an eternity for it, got the gun, and then headed for the slopes lost in thought. He would pick up María Paz, do a drive-by to get the dogs, then retrace the marathon journey that got them here, but in reverse. The only difference would be that before they had the luxury of devoting five days to the trip, and now the days were numbered minutes.

Rose hurried to Los Amigos Bar and got a table on the deck. From there, he had an ample view of the slopes, and he would be able to locate María Paz. But the minutes passed and she was nowhere to be seen. The one who appeared was the waiter, brandishing a menu.

“Nothing, thank you,” Rose said, trying to dismiss him.

“Sorry, sir, if you don’t order something, you can’t sit at these tables.”

“Then a coffee.” The waiter was standing in front of him, blocking his view.

“Would you like something to eat with that?”

“Anything.”

“The chorizo quesadilla like before?”

“Fine.”

“With red sauce?”

“Perfect.”

The ribbon of skiers glided down the mountain rhythmically, weightless and silent, a gentle, lunar undulation. Then they sat in the chairlift, went up in the air, and came back down, because it was not a linear ribbon but a Mobius strip, and they all advanced within it in an eternal procession. All but María Paz, who at some point had exited the circuit and did not appear. Soon it was ten thirty.

“I was dehydrated with anguish,” Rose tells me. “I felt I was losing weight every minute. I rejected any plan to contact the authorities or to go out and search for her with dogs, and paramedics on snowmobiles, because I didn’t want to draw any attention to her. So far, we had slipped by completely clean, no evidence or even suspicion that we were being trailed, and it was essential that it remain that way. On the other hand, every hour that I let pass could be fatal.”

Rose decided to figure out how long it took to go up in the chairlift and ski back down. He zeroed in on one specific lady, clearly a beginner, wearing a particularly bright orange suit. He would time her and use her to set parameters. The woman in orange passed by him, turned at the end of the slope, took the chairlift, disappeared at the top, and in exactly twelve minutes came into Rose’s view again. She went back up, this time reappearing in less time than before. Rose averaged the times and estimated that in the time he had been waiting, María Paz should have passed by him five or six times. Yet nothing. There must have been an explanation, and Rose could only imagine the worst. What if she had broken a leg and been taken to the hospital? What if she had smashed against a tree and cracked her skull? Or if the police had found her and stopped her! Take it easy, Rose told himself, or at least breathe, and try to keep a smidgen of calm. First of all, he couldn’t despair, even if the situation was pretty desperate.

To quiet the machine inside his head that predicted disasters, he spread open a napkin, took out a pen, and sketched a makeshift map as he tried to concentrate on planning a whirlwind trip to reach Violeta. They were about two thousand miles from Montpelier, Vermont: thirty-six hours behind the wheel. María Paz was a horrible driver, as Rose had already seen, and if the highway patrol stopped them and asked for a driver’s license, they were fucked. But they would have to take turns. Eight hours each, while the other rested and slept. He had to schedule in stops for going to the bathroom, refueling, grabbing a few strong shots of espresso, and letting the dogs stretch out a bit. Rose plotted pit stops of one or two hours, in such places as Winona, Kansas; Topeka, Kansas; Caseyville, Illinois; Dayton, Ohio; Harborcreek, Pennsylvania. And one last one in Wells, New York. And yet, pushing it to the limits, assuming no problems arose, it would take them two days and nights. Or three, if at any time they were overcome with exhaustion. He didn’t even want to think of all that could happen to Violeta in two or three days and long nights. They couldn’t take such a risk. What if María Paz took a plane? She would have to present documents to fly. What if Rose just went ahead? No good either, he couldn’t abandon María Paz and his dogs like that.

Because María Paz was still nowhere to be seen, Rose made a decision. It was reckless, but at least it was a decision: he would call the police, notify them of the danger, and say that a serial killer was headed for Montpelier. He would ask them to put the school under surveillance around the clock and tell them about Violeta, a sick and very vulnerable girl who was in mortal danger. Violeta who? That’s the first thing they would want to know. And Rose didn’t even know her last name, not to mention everything he would have to remain quiet about, or justify, if they were to interrogate him. But above all, who was going to listen? Why would they believe him? And if they did believe him, it would be even worse, the area swarming with police, so María Paz could not even get close to her sister.

Have you not learned your lesson, you fuck? Rose chided himself. Under no circumstance should he continue to make decisions on his own, at his own discretion, veering this way and that without consulting her. That’s just how he had been doing it, and the result had been disastrous, criminal, unforgivable. No, he decided he could not make such a move behind María Paz’s back, particularly one on this scale, which could save them, but could also just as likely doom them. At that moment, the waiter approached the table again. He butted into the scene so often, Rose thought, that by this point he had earned a supporting actor role. This time, he brought Rose a copy of the New York Times, which he knew Rose liked to read, although in that area of Colorado, the editions were always a day behind. Rose, who was certainly in no mood to read anything, pretended to peruse the outdated paper, more than anything as a gesture of good will to the good man who was insistent on offering top-notch service, and who now asked if Rose would like some more coffee.

“No,” Rose said. “I’m good, nothing else.”

And that’s when he saw one of the headlines. “Prominent Lawyer Brutally Slain in Brooklyn.” From a picture spread across two columns, Pro Bono looked him straight in the eyes, still very much alive and with a dandyish air. It was not a crime-scene picture, but a studio shot, taken years before, cropped so he appeared only from the neck up. Nobody would guess that he was a hunchback, Rose thought as he gazed at a white, empty point in the distance and the woman in orange passed by once, then a second time, and a third, and perhaps a fourth time before Rose emerged from the depth, breaking the ice that sealed him in his reverie, and dried his tears with the napkin on which he had drawn the map. Good-bye, my elegant friend.

After talking with Buttons on the pay phone, Rose returned methodically to his table on the terrace and sat down again. “And where the hell have you been?” Buttons admonished him, and Rose had to lie: “I took off to get as far as I could get away from everything.” The waiter approached to ask if he was okay. He nodded his head, but he knew that he was showing fifty years on his face that hadn’t been there fifty minutes earlier. Suddenly the still air stirred, and a pair of gloved hands grabbed him from behind.

“I wasn’t surprised or frightened,” he tells me. “I just thought my time had arrived as well. It seemed only logical.”

“Where have you been? I’ve been looking for you for ages.” It was María Paz’s voice. She had playfully snuck up behind him and covered his eyes with her mittens. She plopped down into the chair beside him; took off her hat, scarf, and mittens; unzipped her coat down to her waist; and shook loose her long hair. With a radiant face and a high voice full of pure joy, she asked the waiter for one Cola-Cola with a lot of ice, and started babbling about the new runs she and her friends had been exploring that morning.

“Can you believe it, Mr. Rose!” she said, tugging on his sleeve. “I went down a blue, me, María Paz, Ms. Troublemaker. Did you hear what I said? What’s wrong with you today? Why’re you so out of it? I just went down a blue run, and you’re like nothing? Do you know how stupid steep that is? That’s suicide on sticks, Rose.”

Rose stared off into the distance.

“Hey, Earth to Mr. Rose. What happened, you’ve been drugged or something?”

Rose left some money on the table and started walking toward the parking area. They had to leave Colorado immediately was all that he told María Paz, without turning to look at her, he would explain later.

“Hey, silly.” She ran after him, not understanding an iota of what was going on and carrying her skis, her boots, and her ski poles. “Don’t we have to return all this stuff? And the jumpsuit? Wait for me, hey, help me with this…”

They picked up the dogs, who were exhausted after running all morning behind a sled, and headed northward with Rose at the wheel, and at such absurd speeds that María Paz held on for dear life; Otto, Dix, and Skunko tumbled over each other at every steep curve; and the old Toyota trembled to the very edge of disintegration.

“Let’s stop, Rose,” she asked him. “Stop and tell me what’s happening, why we’re driving off like crazy.”

“Not now, later.”

“Tell me where we’re going…”

“To Vermont, to get your sister, before the beast of your boyfriend kills her,” exploded Rose, without making excuses or trying to soften the blow, showing María Paz the photograph of Bubba in his pyre and the New York Times with the news of the murder of Pro Bono.

He was glad it came out that way. It felt good: the death of Pro Bono had melted his mountain of guilt, transforming it into pure anger, and he was not affected by the horror of her astonishment, nor the deathly pallor of her face, nor her crying fits, because all Rose felt then was rage. Rage against her.

“The death of Pro Bono was the appalling proof that I had been right, that her boyfriend was a monster, a filthy murderer, something I had always known,” he tells me. “But not her, she insisted that no, that deep down the guy was harmless. My God, how could she have been so blind, and the death of Pro Bono had done me in, really done me in, and what I felt inside was anger.”

“Anger as the opposite of guilt,” I ask. “Or you had to stop hating yourself in order to hate her?”

“Either one,” he tells me, “but I was especially eager to hammer her with an ‘I told you so’ the size of the world.”

“There you go. Take a good look. Open your eyes for once,” Rose told María Paz, tapping his index finger on the papers he had just handed her. “Come down from the clouds. This is your boyfriend, so you know. This is your Sleepy Joe. The wolf that doesn’t bite, the poor little boy who’s so good we have to send him money. Are you looking? Burned one alive, and whipped the other one to death. Your lawyer. Whipped that poor old man who helped you so much to death. And my son, Cleve, knocked him off his bike and crowned him with thorns. Do you see anything in common between them, eh? I’m talking, María Paz, answer me. Do you see something in common among these poor people? You, girl. You. You are the only thing these people have in common, besides having been tortured to death by your beau. So he doesn’t kill, your macho asshole? Doesn’t kill, eh?”

“Who is the one burned, what does he have to do with me?” María Paz tried to protest.

But Rose did not even hear her; he was so busy trying to hurt her. He was aware of the pain he was causing with his words, but he could not stop himself. They had been stored for too long, and they now emerged from him with a rancor and ease that surprised him.

“A justified revenge?” I ask Rose.

“It’s possible, yes,” he responds. “Maybe I was making her pay for having loved that monster more than my son. Or who knows. All I can say is that I spoke to her like that to punish her. I noticed that her mouth had gone dry, saw the throbbing in her temples, and she shook as if it had suddenly become very cold, yet I continued, as if enjoying it.”

“So Sleepy Joe was abusive just because of money, is that still your theory?” Rose screamed at María Paz. “Well, he murdered Pro Bono three days ago, woman, three days ago, more than a week after he was handed the money that you sent him. Actually, maybe with the money you sent him, maybe that’s what he used it for.”

“Sleepy Joe did that?” María Paz asked in barely a whisper, enraging Rose even more.

“Oh, my God, girl, are you still defending him? Get out of the car, damn it. Now, get out, I can’t stand to look at you.”

Eventually, things calmed down a bit. Rose knew such a brawl between them made little sense when Violeta’s life was at stake. It would do little good for them to kill each other, when the real murderer was loose.

“Who is this man?” asked María Paz again, now more forcefully. “The burned one. Why was he burned?”

“That man is Bubba, Wendy Mellons’s son. Do you recognize him? No, of course not, he’s burned beyond recognition. Do you know of any fucked-up pyromaniacs who may have been responsible?

“Sleepy Joe did this?” María Paz insisted on asking. “How do you know that?”

“How do I know? Don’t start with that again. What are you, stupid? Sleepy Joe burned him and sent that picture to your e-mail address. A message for you to know what he’s going to do to your sister. And to me, of course. Why did he burn him alive? Is that what you’re asking? Why did he whip Pro Bono to death? Why did he murder Cleve? Why did he crucify your dog? I have no idea, but surely you do.”

“Calm down, Rose, and answer me,” she said.

“Sleepy Joe burned that man because that man was going to kill Sleepy Joe. And that man was going to kill Sleepy Joe because I paid him to do it. But things went wrong. The only bad thing was that, how I screwed up, and Sleepy Joe walked away a man possessed instead of being dead. Let’s just stop talking about it, alright? No more arguing, no more questions. Stop crying and clutching that bag. Concentrate on the map, and I’ll concentrate on driving. All we have to do is reach Vermont before him.”

Pro Bono had been murdered at night, around eleven, the lawyer still looking very formal, as usual, even though he was alone at home. He had been about to brush his teeth: a fact known because they had found his toothbrush on the bathroom countertop. Apparently, Pro Bono wore a velvet robe with a lace cord at the waist, white pajamas with a monogram on the breast pocket, a silk scarf around his neck, maybe even a carnation on the lapel: such bombastic elegance, à la Oscar Wilde, through which he always concealed his birth defect.

Buttons had told Rose how Sleepy Joe had snuck into the apartment at that time.

“Do you want to know how?” Rose asked María Paz, a rash of anger again burning in his throat. “You’re not going to want to hear it, because it very much has to do with you. Buttons told me Pro Bono had been looking for you for a while. The trip to Paris had not gone well. The Marriage of Figaro fizzled because Pro Bono was in no mood for Mozart and had spent his second and final honeymoon making long-distance calls asking about you. He wanted to know if someone had been able to warn you about the clamp. And when he got to New York, he went right back to looking for you. So steeped was he in the task that, being told the visitor was connected to you, he had no qualms about letting a stranger into his house late at night.”

Afterward, the doorman said he had been suspicious. It was late, no time to be bugging residents, especially a guy like that, very shady, demanding to see the lawyer, all arrogant, telling him he needed to see Pro Bono, “I’m Paz’s cousin, he knows what it’s about.” Very strange, the whole thing. But the doorman had learned to be discreet, had mastered his trade for years, and knew that sometimes the residents of the building had contact with unusual people, drug dealers, for example, or prostitutes even, and who was he to butt in? So he rang Pro Bono. “Excuse me, sir,” he said quietly, “I hope I didn’t wake you.”

“Tell him to come up to my office,” Pro Bono had ordered. “Better yet. Hold on.”

For some reason, Pro Bono changed his mind about receiving the visitor in his office, although it was just a floor above. Maybe he didn’t deem it appropriate to do so in robe and slippers, a matter of principle, because the offices were empty, the last worker having left hours before. Or maybe Pro Bono didn’t want to catch a cold, or couldn’t find the key: one of those simple twists of fates, minor in and of themselves, but of great consequence. Whatever the reason, Pro Bono did not want to go up to the office. He must have thought it better to attend to the man at the door of his apartment. It would be a matter of a few minutes, and he could ask about María Paz. That’s what the man must be here for, with news about her.

“Send him up to my apartment,” Pro Bono directed the doorman.

If the visitor had gone up to the office and not the apartment, the doorman would have been required to ask for identification, which would have confirmed his suspicions. But since it had become a private visit, he let the visitor in without asking anything of him. The image of Sleepy Joe was there in security cameras, and despite the winter gear, his face registered clearly: a white male, young, about six feet tall. The time stamp on the security camera video showed him entering the building at 23:05 and leaving twenty-eight minutes later.

During that time, Sleepy Joe sealed Pro Bono’s mouth with duct tape and forced him to strip — to expose what he never exposed, not even to himself. He robbed the old man of his shell, leaving him as naked as the day he was born, forcing him to look at himself in the great antique mirror with a silver frame hanging in the foyer. Or maybe not. There was likely no mirror in that foyer. Pro Bono would not have wanted to undergo the daily tyranny of that object waiting for his arrival, dismissing him as he left — like a black hole, pulling him into the void to confront the naked truth of his pink and twisted anatomy, thus vanquishing the perfect image he had managed to build of himself as a defender of just causes, a loving husband, an admired, rich, elegant, and cosmopolitan man.

The ceremony must have taken place then in Gunnora’s bathroom, where there were plenty of mirrors, yes, and which, facing each other, must have endlessly multiplied the derision. And that, not what came later, had to be the worst part for Pro Bono: this presentation of the evidence, that his monstrosity was not in the distortion of the mirror or in the eyes of the observer, but painfully embedded in his very nature from the day he was born and until that night, which would be his last. That was the real knockout punch. In the truth of his nakedness, Pro Bono succumbed to the perpetrator. So it could be said that Sleepy Joe lacked subtlety in his cruelty. He did not realize that Pro Bono was suddenly no longer Pro Bono but just a shadow of the man whom Sleepy Joe bent over and tied to a column. He made fun of his hump and mocked his luxuries, put the silk scarf around his neck, hobbling and crouching like an ape, and when he grew tired of monkeying around, he pulled out the whip he had hidden under his coat.

The rest was predictable: the procedure of flogging a poor old man is routine, harder and harder, over and over again, taking it beyond pain toward death. The true sacred flash, the epiphany, the mystical spark was in the whip itself, this fetish with a life of its own that whistled like a bird when it shattered the air with its crack, being, as it was, the first object created by man to break the sound barrier. Ian Rose knew something from Wendy Mellons that the investigators of the case would never hit upon: for years the murderer had been exploring the infinite ritualistic possibilities of the instrument that he had used for the first time in the Morada of the Penitent Brothers on himself. To officiate over the person of Pro Bono, Sleepy Joe did not just use any old whip, but the quintessential one, the so-called Roman flagrum, which had been used in Judea, in the palace of Pontius Pilate, to whip the Son of God. The Roman flagrum has three straps with metal nails embedded at the tips that break off the skin with each stroke, that is, opening it into wedges, creating furrows, a fact that became more common knowledge because of Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ.

The body of Pro Bono, still gagged and tied to the column, but long bloodless, was found the following day by the cleaning lady.

“Stop at the first service area we come to,” María Paz asked Rose, only an hour into their journey to Vermont.

Rose protested: they couldn’t stop, that rest time had not been programmed into their plan. They couldn’t go stopping every minute. They would have to wait at least until Kansas. “Do you have to pee? Can’t you hold it, María Paz?”

“There, a mile away, stop at the service area,” she ordered. “Keep an eye on the signs, Rose. There must be a phone there somewhere. We have to call Violeta to warn her.”

In the Food Mart, they read through the daily newspapers and listened to the TV news broadcasts. Everywhere there were bursts, like wildfire, of the commotion created by the felon of the moment, whom journalists had poetically christened The Passion Killer. And not passion as in love, not love for María Paz, who apparently had not surfaced in the investigations. Nor love for Maraya, or Wendy Mellons, or anyone. Rather Passion with a capital P. And while Rose let the dogs out to pee, and María Paz did the same in the bathroom, the world was shocked at the sight of Sleepy Joe, this serial killer who was so beautiful. Amazing, how could someone so pretty and so blond be so evil?

“Look, María Paz,” Rose said pointing to one of the newspapers, “looks like your Hero was not alone.”

“Don’t tell me the bastard killed other dogs.”

“None that are known, but he crucified other people.”

The Passion Killer had been linked to at least nine serial murders committed in different parts of the country but employing similar methods, and most of the victims were people that neither Rose nor María Paz knew. Two of them had been crucified over the past year, one nailed to a door and the other to an armoire, with all the trappings of incense and candles that were considered the trademarks of the killer.

From a pay phone, María Paz called her sister’s school. She knew it would be a difficult, short exchange, but a crucial one on which the girl’s life could depend. María Paz would have to say the right words, so Violeta would act accordingly. She could not scare her with generalities, or create abstract fears, or pretend she could clearly explain the whole thing. Each sentence had to be short and to the point. And there was Violeta, on the line.

“Little Sis, it’s me, Big Sis,” María Paz told her.

“Not Big Sis, it’s the voice of Big Sis.”

“Listen to me, Violeta.”

“Listen to me, Violeta. I saw Sleepy Joe and I got scared. Sleepy Joe. If he comes near me, I’ll bite him.”

“Don’t leave your school, baby!” María Paz felt the blood empty from her head. “Do not go to Sleepy Joe. Do you hear me, Violeta? With Sleepy Joe, no. Sleepy Joe does bad things, very bad, and Violeta should not go with him.”

“Sleepy Joe was on the news.”

“Think hard, Little Sis. Think hard about what you’re telling me. Did you see Sleepy Joe, or did you see a picture of Sleepy Joe on the news?”

“On the news.”

“Good, Violeta, good.” María Paz felt as if her soul had returned to her body. Sleepy Joe was still not there, and Violeta was somewhat aware of what was going on, so it wasn’t necessary to go into endless explanations that would do nothing but lead to terrible confusion. “You heard about the bad things that Sleepy Joe has been doing. So you should not leave the school. Do not leave the school. Wait there, Little Sis, I’m coming for you.”

“Don’t come, Big Sis. The police came asking about you. I said nothing to the police. The director didn’t let them speak to me.”

Shit, María Paz thought. Shit, shit, shit. That’s all they needed.

“Now, just stay by the phone,” she told Violeta, after carefully weighing what to do. “Don’t go far from the phone. Big Sis will call you in five minutes.”

“Why twice?”

“Just listen to me. Stay by the phone, I’ll call back.”

María Paz hung up, and then started quizzing Rose in the same tone she had used with Violeta, uttering short and precise instructions and queries, emphasizing each syllable.

“Listen, Rose. Do you know anyone in New York or nearby whom you can trust absolutely?” she asked.

“What?”

“You heard me. A friend, a smart, clever, and good person you would trust with your life.”

“Let me think… hold on. Yes, there’s someone.”

“Good. Do you have your friend’s number here?”

Rose told her it was Ming, and María Paz already knew more or less who he was through Cleve, who had mentioned him a few times.

“Will Ming be able to deal with Violeta?” she asked.

“Ming deals with himself, so he can deal with anyone.”

“Great.” María Paz gave her approval. “Then call him. Call him immediately. He must have heard the news as well, so you don’t need to go into long explanations with him either. Tell him to go to Violeta’s school today. Give him the address of the school and directions. Today is Saturday, visiting day, so it shouldn’t be a problem. Where does Ming live?”

“New York.”

“How long does it take to get from New York to Montpelier?

“About five hours.”

“It’s one now. Five hours, it’ll be about six thirty. Perfect. Tell Ming that he has to be there by six thirty. Have him ask for Violeta at the receptionist. Tell him to take her out of there right away, and wait two or three days, whatever it takes, in that motel where you and I stayed when we were in Vermont, North something…”

“The North Star Shine Lodge,” Rose said. Since he had befriended Pro Bono, he made sure he remembered the names of all hotels and motels where he and María Paz stayed.

“Yes, that one. Can you tell Ming where it is?”

“Right off I-89, about fifteen minutes before Montpelier. He’ll see it advertised on a large billboard, indicating the exit. From there, he just has to follow the signs.”

“Good, Rose!” María Paz hugged him. “And I did love your son, do you hear me? I loved him very much. And I love you too, when you don’t scream at me. Now, call Ming. Give him directions, and be very concise.”

“Ming is not autistic, María Paz, and neither am I.”

“We are all a little autistic. Tell your friend to speak softly to Violeta, keep his distance, don’t put any music on in the car because she is very sensitive to noise, don’t make any jokes because she won’t get them, but definitely laugh at the jokes she makes. Warn him to be careful, because the girl bites. And very important: he must introduce himself very simply. ‘I am Ming.’ Very clearly, ‘I am Ming.’ Advise him that he should not seem anxious or in a hurry, because she freezes up. Go on, call your friend.”

Rose made the call and Ming accepted the assignment without hesitation, glad to know that Ian Rose was alive. Then María Paz called the school again.

“It’s one in the afternoon, Violeta,” she told her.

“No, it’s one and ten minutes.”

“You’re right. At six-thirty today, a man named Ming will pick you up in his car.”

“A man named Ming.”

“Good. What’s the name?”

“My name is Violeta.”

“Listen, Violeta, this is not a joke. The man who’s going to pick you up. What is his name?

“His name is Ming.”

“Very good, Little Sis. Ming is a good person. You go with him. Ming will pick you up at six thirty. Ming will take care of you.”

“What a nag you are, stop repeating things. Ming will take care of Violeta, Ming will take care of Violeta, I know, I know.”

“Alright, sorry, Little Sis. Sorry to repeat. Just one last time: Ming take care of Violeta, Violeta leave with Ming.”

“Yeah, María Paz, please don’t talk like Tarzan. And if Sleepy Joe comes, I don’t go with him.”

“No! Not with Sleepy Joe, no, for God’s sake, Violeta!”

“I said that, not with Sleepy Joe.”

“Not with Sleepy Joe, no, Violeta. Sleepy Joe does bad things. Who are you going with?”

“With Sleepy Joe,” Violeta said and laughed.

“You’re playing, right? You’re teasing your sister. You go with Ming. At half past six. And don’t bite.”

“No more, Big Sis. I get it,” Violeta said, and hung up.

Toward the end of the third day of their trip, María Paz and Rose finally arrived at North Star Shine Lodge and found that despite the general chaos of things, everything was more or less under control. Ming had done his job to the letter; Sleepy Joe had not attacked, not even a sign of him; and Violeta had behaved herself, as far as things went. And now everything was on hold.

There, in that motel, the threads of this story come more or less to a dead end, or at least a neutral end, with everything quiet, perhaps falsely quiet, just like this winter of their discontent they are traversing. María Paz, Ming, and Rose entertained themselves by playing endless rounds of miniature golf, tapping the ball with the putter to make it roll on the dirty green felt. While Violeta ran after hers, picking it up and placing it in the hole. Then they ate Kentucky Fried Chicken. What else could they do? It wasn’t as if the range of possibilities was wide open. Outside the cold roared and cops were everywhere. They heard the wail of sirens; although the motel was out of the way and hidden, it was in the same area of the school, but on the opposite side of the mountain. And they didn’t know exactly what all the hullaballoo was about, or who the authorities were after. Whether it was Sleepy Joe, whom everybody was looking for, or María Paz, the fugitive, or even the girl, who had left the school without telling anyone she would be spending some nights away.

It seemed that life had pushed them to the limit, without leaving them anything other than their little golf games, old episodes of Friends, and fried chicken. Ming was worried about Wan-Sow, his prima donna finned dancer with piranha teeth, who got very agitated if it was not fed mosquito larvae every twelve hours. And yet, how could he return to his noir comics and his betta, and leave his friend’s dad in such a bind? Violeta, meanwhile, had become very obsessive-compulsive about miniature golf, breaking down every time anyone dared to suggest it would be appropriate to end the game. And the three dogs were simply happy to be dogs and to be there, or at least ignorant of the fact they could be anywhere else.

Ian Rose thought about the pipes in his house in the Catskills, which had likely frozen and burst, as had happened during other winters, and meanwhile he was stuck, far away and unable to do anything about it. But there was no abandoning these women, who in the end were the only thing he had left aside from his dogs.

María Paz seemed disoriented and perplexed to him, sandwiched between nothing and nothingness, unable to stay in the United States, unable to call for a new cyber-coyote to change her escape plan again. Because how could she just take off forever, leaving Violeta in that school she was so fond of, at the mercy of the murderer? And at the same time, what could Rose do about him, The Passion Killer, given that after the fiasco of his role as a vigilante, he no longer had any hopes of sneaking up on him commando style with Ming’s Glock?

In fact, they could describe their current situation with the same words that Pancho Villa uttered to Claro Hurtado, on that night in Parral, Chihuahua: “We’re cornered.”

María Paz got to thinking about Cleve, about how terribly she missed him, and even laughed, remembering the advice he had given as her creative-writing teacher, when she asked how to end a story she was writing, one almost as tangled as the one they were living now. “Write ‘And everyone died,’” Cleve had said. “That should solve everything.” In short, this was a sublimely dramatic moment, while stagnant; they were neck-deep in water, suspended in the eye of the hurricane, as they say, or floating in a dead calm, while all around them the murderous winds howled. It seemed as if nothing they had done had done any good, and now there was nothing else to do. So they did nothing.

They decided not to decide. Soak in a good bath, remove their watches, leave things to fate, with the brightness of North Star shining. They just were. There. Keeping each other company, trying to pass the time, this time, what was left of it, as best they could.

“The next day, I rose at dawn, still dark, to take the dogs out,” Rose tells me.

They had been trapped like sardines in the car for days. The three dogs endured the journey bravely, and it was time to give them the reward they deserved. Whatever happened, Rose was not going to deprive them of their walk in the woods. María Paz, Violeta, and Ming were still asleep in the North Star, and Rose figured he would return in time to have breakfast with them and make some decisions. Although who knew what kind of decisions — that was not so clear. Just then he decided it was best not to overthink the situation, and he took off toward the same uninhabited area he had gone to weeks earlier when he had emptied the Glock on the tree trunks. The temperature had risen a few degrees and the air was tolerable. Some of the snow had melted and an otherworldly blue glow surrounded the mountain. He could smell the fresh pine from the dripping stalactites on the branches, and Rose felt at home in the silence of his newly recovered solitude — that is, until he heard the faraway wail of a siren, reminding him that things were not so idyllic. Quite the contrary, there was an intense police presence all around and this time all hell would break loose if Rose were to shoot the Glock. Which reminded him, he had the gun with him in his backpack, a big mistake under these circumstances, and he thought about returning to the motel to put it away. But the dogs were already way uphill, happy and liberated, and Rose decided to follow them. In the end, all the bustle was down below and no one was going to wander up here.

They took about an hour climbing a little quiet road, their lungs heaving, their breaths steam, the four old friends, the clan, and Rose estimated that it was high time to start back when he came upon it: the Gift from God.

“Or gift from the devil, maybe,” he tells me. “I swear, all I thought was, oh, no, please, no!”

It was a yellow truck, old model, parked on the right shoulder, with no one inside. Nothing striking, and it would have gone completely unnoticed by anyone but Rose, who recently had seen a photo of an old prostitute hugging her pimp, as they leaned against the trunk of a yellow truck exactly like this one with the same sticker in iridescent letters on the windshield: Gift from God.

“It had to be the same one,” Rose tells me. “When I saw it, I accepted the fact that fate comes to meet you wherever you are.”

There were footprints in the snow, large boot prints through the barren undergrowth. It didn’t take a basset hound to track down the owner of the truck, and Otto, Dix, Skunko tore off quickly, zigzagging, noses to the ground, in a pattern tight as violin strings.

“I did not want to follow,” Rose tells me. “Didn’t want any part of it. My failure as an avenger had already been confirmed, and at that moment, my legs grew wobbly at the mere possibility of a face-to-face encounter with this man. At the same time, a spark of anger against this vermin suddenly flared again, and I followed the dogs. Revenge is like a hormone, which irritates you and emboldens you and makes you believe that you have cojones as big as a house. That’s what I discovered that day.”

The footprints went along the hillside, vanished for a bit, reappeared on the other side of a stream, meandered, deeper and deeper into a thicket of branches, reaching a peak that crowned the surrounding area, and then descended into a ravine, where the forest came to a clearing. The dogs had stopped at the top of the peak, and they remained alert beside Rose. From this vantage point, Rose had a clear view of the man below. It had to be him. The man was nearly naked amidst all that snow, wearing only underwear and a pair of yellow boots. His back was to Rose and he knelt on some rags or cloths, likely the clothing he had taken off.

“A humongous guy, actually,” Rose tells me.

A grifter, as they called them. And very white too. More so a slight shade of blue, like the snow that day. Rose immediately recognized him. He knew it was Sleepy Joe, although he could not see his face. Who else could it be, with that truck and in that trance? And it wasn’t really as if Rose knew the face. He had only seen pictures of him as a child, or hidden behind sunglasses. It seemed that Sleepy Joe had been there for some time, in the clearing, preparing his mise-en-scène. He had carved a notch high in the trunk of a large tree, and on that notch had placed a thinner trunk, binding it tightly with rope. He had painted the whole thing white, giving it a grotesque air. Rose remembered María Paz’s story about the Slovakian child and the insomniac nights because of a picture of another child, the Nazarene, who bore a white cross, sized especially for him. Shit, thought Rose, who is this animal going to crucify now? The cross was white, as if for a boy, or a girl. For Violeta? That would be the logical conclusion. He had constructed the whole set away from it all, camouflaged among the thickets, though right behind her school. But other than the fact that it was pristine white, like the cross of the child in the portrait, this cross was sturdy and big, and could easily bear the weight and height of an adult. Even Jaromil’s huge frame.

Sleepy Joe remained with his back to them, submitting himself to a rocking back and forth that slowly grew more intense, as if on the verge of a revelation. Something like the aura that precedes an epileptic fit with the spine bent backward at an impossible angle, the eyes raised to the heavens, body trembling with love for God, or perhaps from the cold. Rose tries to explain to me that it was worse, a more impressive scene than he had imagined from María Paz’s descriptions, because it was so unapologetically grotesque, more grotesque than frightening, actually, or in any case a good mix of both.

So finally, this was Sleepy Joe. Jaromil. The Passion Killer. The man who tortured and killed Cleve. And Pro Bono, and many more. A lone and naked giant, with yellow boots, blue with cold, shaken by hysterical mimicry in the middle of the forest. Rose did not know whether to laugh or weep. Cleve, my lovely son, think how much damage this clown has done to us.

Sleepy Joe prayed. Or at least he muttered things, repeated phrases, perhaps in Latin, or in an invented gibberish. To Rose’s ears it sounded like a litany of the names of demons: Canthon, Canthon, Sisyphus, Sisyphus, Scarabaeus, Scarabaeus — muttering names like that in pairs, the first time very serious and the second more shrill, all very theatrical.

Astonishing, really, but as Rose heard other names, he realized they were not the names of demons but of species of beetles.

“What followed all happened very fast,” Rose tells me. “Don’t expect some grand choreographed finale, because in fact the whole thing was very chaotic and arbitrary. Chaotic, no doubt. Although arbitrary, who knows, maybe not. Don’t think I was unmoved by this spectacle Sleepy Joe was putting on. There was a force behind it that made it almost impossible for me to bear. Remember that this makeshift priest, this motherfucker, had killed my son, in a ritual probably very similar to the one I was watching. And I was not immune. My mourning, my attachment to my own flesh, forced me to connect with that. I’m saying that I was very much aware that this dark ceremony involved me. Ultimately, it was me that man was waiting for, me who had been summoned, and perhaps I had only just beckoned his call.”

Once Rose was able to accept that, he was there of his own will and with a definite purpose. He opened his backpack and pulled out the Glock. Not before that, only then. “Sacrifice is sacrifice,” he said half aloud. “If the thing is killing you, then you have to kill it.” The gun was loaded and the target a gift, yes, there was his Gift from God, distracted, his back to him, practically naked, as if begging for a clean shot in the back of the head. But Rose’s hand began to tremble, and his conviction faltered. Not because he feared the consequences of such an act in the sense of electric chair or such.

“There are things that a man should not live through,” he tells me. “The death of a child is one of them. You might survive, but you’re no longer alive. So that day on the mountain, I couldn’t have cared less about what would happen to me. This was about something else.”

If Rose’s hand trembled, it was because it was one thing to make the decision to kill another human being and another to do it. That was the complicated thing. This wasn’t the first time that Rose’s inability to execute had prevented him from doing away with Sleepy Joe. He just could not pull the trigger. It was beyond his strength; his finger did not obey the order sent from his head. Should he just turn around, go back to where he came from? Have forgiveness? Or pretend none of this had happened and try to forget? Maybe that’s how things would have turned out, given human limitations. But dogs are different kinds of creatures. Rose was seriously considering backing out just at the moment his dogs made a completely different decision, and raced down the hillside as a pack, encircling the kneeling man. Rose, who saw what was happening from above, referred to it as “a vicious hunting scene.” His exact words.

The three beasts fell on the unsuspecting prey and corralled him, cold and contained, in the splendor of their rage. Their teeth were peeled back to the base of their gums, their eyes fixed on the victim, as if reading his thoughts, their ears pricked, registering even the slightest gesture; more wolves than dogs, more wolves than gods, not one false move, no fussing, no barking: the single lethal threat a low growl, sustained, coming from deep inside.

“What I’m about to tell you may sound weird,” Rose warns me. “But the dogs may have saved Sleepy Joe for the moment, definitely forcing me to lower my weapon. With my shitty aim, if I had happened to shoot, I could have missed him and hit one of the dogs instead.”

Sleepy Joe’s next move was a mistake, a dreadful mistake. He tried to run. He had been terrified of animals since he was a child and, faced with this pack ready to maul him, Sleepy Joe thought it best to run. And the dogs, which until that moment simply surrounded him without touching him, fully set on him with the worst intentions. Bare as he was, the man offered all that white meat on a platter. It very soon became a massacre, especially because of Dix, the bitch. While Otto pinned him to the ground and Skunko locked his jaw on Sleepy Joe’s neck, Dix clamped on a calf and twisted his leg this way and that as if trying to yank it off. There are dog bites and then there are dog bites. Some dogs are just biters; other are butchers, merciless, and they don’t stop until the victim is carved up. Dix belonged to this second category, and within minutes the leg was reduced to shreds. Rose believed he heard crunching of bones and cartilage, and could swear he could even smell the fear that paralyzed Sleepy Joe, making him pee on himself. So this is what it comes to, Rose thought. If they could see you now, Sleepy Joe, fucked by the rules of your own game, the same mindfuck you played with your victims, making the pain of body, torn flesh, gore, nothing compared with that inward cry of utter panic.

It was an almost mythical scene of superhuman violence and infernal beauty, as memorable as Actaeon devoured by his raging hounds, the heads of Cerberus spewing fire, or the saga of Nastagio degli Onesti as interpreted by Botticelli.

From his box of honor, like Caesar at the circus, Rose noted some revelations from human sacrifice, the clairvoyant terror emanating from the truth that is hidden in death, or something similar, the monstrous lucidity brought about by pain. He understood what Sleepy Joe had been looking for by opening such disgusting doors into the sacred, or the other way around, opening doors to the profane through the sacred. And what had been incomprehensible for Rose took on another color, as if suddenly and for a moment he looked at the situation from within, or crossed a threshold to be able to perceive certain things.

“Don’t ask me what things, because they have no names,” he says. “Things that passed though me like an electric shock and then dissolved, like the images of a dream.”

I ask Rose if he ordered his dogs to stop, for the release of the man he was about to kill. He is evasive in his response. “I’m not sure,” he says. “I doubt that after a certain time they would have obeyed.” I repeat the question, and then he admits that no, he never tried to stop them. They stopped themselves when the man gave up the struggle and froze. Then Rose, who had been standing at some distance, approached, the gun aimed at Sleepy Joe’s head.

“You may say I’m a coward,” he tells me, “and I won’t argue with that. But still, wounded and torn apart as he was, the guy was still a threat. He still inspired fear, perhaps even more than before, bloody as he was, with that bone hanging out of his leg.”

The dogs were done with their prey and took a few steps back, not breaking the circle or hiding their fangs, and something like a gurgle came out of Sleepy Joe’s throat. Was he asking for something? Mercy, or perhaps water? Rose thought it over. Give water to this vermin? He couldn’t bring himself to do it. Wasn’t vinegar customary in such cases?

“I have coffee,” he said, and threw him the thermos.

Sleepy Joe took a couple of sips and turned to look at Rose, his eyes staring as he tried to say something, but at that point the dogs’ growling drowned his words. Rose did not know how long this exchange was supposed to be, what, if any, things were supposed to be said. Drivel, really, while the blood ran out of Sleepy Joe’s leg and the dogs surrounded him and he stared up into the barrel of the gun. But Rose couldn’t quite finish it: he dared not kill the enemy, and that was extending this situation longer than necessary. Sleepy Joe there, wounded but alive, and the minutes passing, and Rose killing time because he did not dare kill Sleepy Joe. At one point, he was about to tell him that he was Cleve’s father, had the words on the tip of his tongue, but ultimately he didn’t. It disgusted him. Why stoop low with such a claim; the name of his son was untouchable, and to say it in front of his murderer would be to soil it. Best just to give this piece of garbage the coup de grâce and put an end to it. But Rose couldn’t do it.

The silence of the mountain, until then absolute, was suddenly shattered by the blare of sirens. They were far away but they made Rose shudder, because he was forced to face the reality of the situation. A shot would be heard clearly down below, drawing the attention of the police.

“As if my natural cowardice were not reason enough,” he tells me, “I had a new reason not to shoot: I did not want to attract the police. But then I realized that this factor was both against me and in my favor. And I made a decision, to set things up so others could finish off Sleepy Joe.”

Rose would take a few shots in the air, and from there, the key would be in the timing: with the Glock and the help of the dogs, he would keep Sleepy Joe immobilized until the police were almost there, and then step aside to let things proceed. Not too far-fetched a plan, so he shot once, twice, three times in the air.

And from that point began the surprises and necessary improvisations. First off, with the gunshots, the dogs scattered. Otto, Dix, and Skunko were good fighters, but unlike María Paz’s crippled doggie, these three would not qualify as war heroes. Secondly, Rose forgot a very important detail. Something he had neglected to do before the dogs fled.

Rose forced himself to get closer to Sleepy Joe, the Glock held tightly in his right hand and pointed at the forehead. He felt horribly insecure without the support of his dogs, but at least he had the Glock. One step closer, another, jumping back every time the fallen man as much as stirred, and then forward again. The sirens were getting closer, and Rose hesitated, but then he made the risky move anyway, stretching his left hand out, with the finesse with which he would use chopsticks. A little closer and he could almost touch the guy, and then he rushed through the hardest part of the maneuver, which was bending over without giving Sleepy Joe an opening to strike him. A couple of inches more, and Rose’s hand dug into the clothes Sleepy Joe had left on the floor. The winter coat was pinned under the man’s weight. “Turn over, you fuck,” he yelled, feinting to shoot, and as Sleepy Joe stirred, Rose managed to kick the coat out of the way. And then he glimpsed a piece of what he was looking for: red canvas. He grabbed it and pulled it toward him in one swift move.

It was the red backpack María Paz had bought at the last minute in Colorado.

“And you remembered such a thing, just at that moment?” I ask.

“Well, it was not like Sleepy Joe was in any position to have invested in stocks,” he tells me, “or to deposit it in the bank. So he had to have the money on him… And there it was, or the red backpack was there anyway. And judging by the weight, he had not spent much.”

And then it was time to retreat without turning his back on the man even for a moment, undeterred by the sirens closing in. Alright. So far so good, as well as could be expected from someone who has leaped out of the seventeenth floor and was passing by the fifth floor or so. One step, pat pat, another little step, pat pat, back and away. Already at a safe distance, Rose started wiping the Glock with his shirt hem, a tricky maneuver, because at the same time he had to continue pointing it. And then, a moment later, at a safer distance, he threw the Glock as far as possible into the thicket so the cops wouldn’t find him armed and think he was the bad guy.

Again the sirens, this time more than one, right on them almost: the cars must have come upon the Gift from God. Rose knew that in a few minutes he was going to have to take off and run. That was the trick; he would count to a hundred, then run for his life.

But he did not count on the third and most grievously unexpected matter: a serious error in characterization. Rose had not counted on Sleepy Joe retaliating, given the sorry state he was in. But he did. He got up and started moving toward him, as if possessed, like the Incredible Hulk: a giant tortoise in his underwear, upright and wounded, his massive arms floating up as if separate from the body, the rather elfish head rising from his thick neck and coming out of the shell, meaning the shell of his torso bulging at the muscles on his chest and shoulders. It wasn’t hyperbole; this beast did indeed look like the Hulk, only not green but blue. Torturously dragging his shattered leg, but despite this handicap and the fact that he was unarmed, the age difference, the size, the weight training, and his newly invigorated state all played in his favor. And Rose, who was no longer twenty, and no longer had his dogs or the gun, began to fear the worst.

“Jaromil!” he yelled as a desperate last resort.

Hearing his real name, Sleepy Joe shrunk and squirmed like a slug sprinkled with salt. Who knows how many years it had been since someone had called him that?

“Where is Danika Draha, Jaromil? You dried her up, Jaromil, you, such a big little baby sucking on your mommy’s tit.”

An uppercut by Rose, not terminal but lethal, like David’s stone hitting Goliath. He won several seconds with the stupefaction that overcame Sleepy Joe, who until that moment must have wondered who this insignificant homunculus that set his dogs on him was, and couldn’t have cared less whether he was a gnome or a park ranger. But now he was suddenly stunned by this mysterious being who knew the name of his sainted mother.

“He must have thought that he was dead and that I was God,” Rose tells me.

But then Rose realized that his relative advantage was only momentary, because Sleepy Joe put two and two together and recognized him.

“I know who you are,” he wailed. “You are the old asshole from the Catskills with the dogs.”

A posteriori, Rose had made sense of things. He thought that ultimately it was not him who Sleepy Joe recognized, but the dogs, just as his dogs must have recognized Sleepy Joe, who during the days before killing Cleve must have prowled around the house in the Catskills, maybe unable to make it inside precisely because of the dogs, and hence nabbed John Eagles, who happened to be nearby, and ripped off his face. Then he waited for Cleve to go far from the house on his motorcycle to kill him.

“It makes sense,” he tells me. “But back to the Hulk. I heard male voices getting closer and closer. Sleepy Joe advanced, staggering, arms akimbo, blinded by the blood that dripped from his forehead, but advancing, advancing toward me. The cops were coming down, I could see them, and I ran toward them, shouting, ‘He’s armed! He’s armed!’ And the cops signaled for me to get out of the way and safe from the crossfire. And they moved in, shooting from all different directions. Sleepy Joe continued to advance, but surprise, surprise, not toward me; apparently I was not his goal because he passed right by me, stumbling, blinded and lame, as if drunk, suicidal, arms open and chest exposed, right into the endless volley of gunfire.”

And that’s it. Sleepy Joe fell, and nothing happened. The sky did not darken, torrential rain did not suddenly fall, the earth did not flinch nor stars cry. Nothing.

The police noted the white cross, of course, impossible to miss, and they realized they had come upon the fugitive they had been after for days, the celebrated Passion Killer, the biggest catch in all the US of A.

Ten or twenty minutes later, Rose, again surrounded by his dogs, played the part of the innocent neighbor who had gone for a walk on the mountain and been shot at by this man, and his dogs had jumped to the defense of their master. He answered a few routine questions from the lieutenant, who was friendly, euphoric even. There were several inconsistencies in Rose’s version of events that would have become known through a more thorough investigation, but the police were too excited about their own role in the case to worry about such things. “Thank you, lieutenant,” Rose said, squeezing his hand, “you saved me, thanks.”

“I would have wanted to say more,” Rose admits. “To say, for example, not to boast, ‘Lieutenant, you brought down the man, but my dogs defeated the god.’ But I squeezed his hand, and said that other thing instead, which I’m pretty sure is why he let me go just like that. At the end of the day, things came out well because I stuck to my script, as if I were a minor character in CSI.”

“Things could have turned out a lot worse,” I tell him.

“True.” He laughs. “Fatally so. But there was a good turn in the end, you know. A string of mistakes that led to a final success.”

Throughout that week and the following one, the news cycle focused almost solely on the end of The Passion Killer and the brave men and women in uniform who brought him down in a masterful operation. The Glock turned up in the bushes, and witnesses attested to hearing three shots, and inside the yellow truck the Gift from God the authorities found countless gadgets of death, crucifixion, and martyrdom, so they did not hesitate to claim self-defense and had no problem justifying leaving the body of the super serial killer with more holes than a colander.

“It was nearly noon when I finally returned to North Star,” Rose tells me, “and I almost didn’t find anyone there.”

Ming had stayed back to wait for him, his nerves frayed because the old man had taken so long. “But what happened, Mr. Rose?” Ming came out to greet him fussing and complaining. “I was going nuts, sir. I figured the worst. Where have you been? The police came by; everything is super tense. The owner of the motel started shitting on himself, panicked about harboring so many strange people. He asked us to please return the keys and practically threw us out into the street, not in a bad way, but kicking our asses out anyway.”

María Paz and Violeta had set off to avoid any more risks, and were waiting in some camp trailers on Lake Champlain, near Tinconderoga, about an hour away.

“They got out of here just in time,” Ming told Rose. “María Paz and Violeta. Ten more minutes and they would have been fucked. Just as they’re leaving, the cops burst in asking all kinds of questions at the reception desk. Everything is on high alert, Mr. Rose. Pro Bono’s murder has stirred the wasp’s nest and unleashed the state and federal agencies, all chasing The Passion Killer. It seems he had been followed from Brooklyn, and they are convinced that he is here in Vermont.”

“Makes sense,” Rose said. “But I don’t understand, Ming. How could the girls just leave… who are they with?”

“We’re going to see them in a bit,” Ming said, “I’ll explain everything, but not now, especially not here.”

“Wait, Ming, I have to apologize for one thing…”

“Later, Mr. Rose,” Ming said, dragging him toward the Toyota.

“I must tell you at once, I lost your grandfather’s gun.”

“You lost it? Well, what’re we going to do? It’s not important, Mr. Rose. But let’s go, let’s go!”

“Can I have some breakfast at least?” Rose protested. “I could use a shower too, but let me grab some breakfast and feed the dogs.”

“Later,” Ming said. “I’ll take my car, follow me.”

“Let’s just go in mine,” Rose said. “We’ll come back to get yours later.”

“Please do what I say, Mr. Rose, follow behind me.”

The winds, which began to rage as they neared their destination, pushed the Toyota sideways, and Rose had to struggle to keep it on the road. He was so tired. He would have preferred if Ming had driven. After all, Ming knew where they were going and he didn’t. Rose didn’t know where or why, but above all else he was simply exhausted, almost medically in need of rest at home for a week, or a whole month. He couldn’t wait to escape this winter at the end of the world, and observe the season instead from his window next to the crackling fireplace, a nice cup of Earl Grey with a cloud in hand, and his three dogs spread beneath him. He felt truly exhausted, and particularly old. I am already an old man, he thought, as he struggled to keep the car on the road. Now there is nothing else to do but to keep getting older. In the back, dogs slept like rocks, very worn out themselves: in the end, they were the veterans of a tremendous battle. And nobody knew, or was going to know, except themselves and Rose.

“Damn it, Mr. Rose, you almost didn’t make it. My heart was in my mouth, thinking you were so irresponsible to get lost at the worst time!” María Paz yelled, coming toward him on the shores of Lake Champlain, trying to keep her balance in the gale winds that made her shiver and buckle. “But what a face, Mr. Rose, as if you’ve just come home from a war…”

“Well, sort of. And Violeta?”

“I’m sorry?”

Conversation was almost impossible. The wind whipped their faces and made the skin on their cheeks flutter, got into their mouths and pilfered their words, and every step forward they tried to take was followed by two steps backward. María Paz was all wrapped up in her hard-shell outfit, ready and dressed for the journey through the realms of ice, everything covered except for her eyes and a few locks of hair, very black, which whipped madly in the wind like a pirate flag.

“Where’s Violeta?” Rose asked again, screaming this time.

María Paz was beside him now, clinging to his arm, but such was the violence of the wind bursts that despite their proximity they could only hear each other if they screamed.

“It’s the Boreas,” Rose said.

“Who?”

“The Boreas, the north wind, blowing like a fucking mini hurricane!”

“Listen, Mr. Rose, we have to move it along. Violeta is waiting for us just ahead, in a four-by-four,” María Paz screamed. “She’s coming with us! What do you think, Mr. Rose! She said she wanted to come. She decided all on her own, without even me asking. I swear, I didn’t have to press or anything, she alone decided. She didn’t want to return to school. So I brought her with me. I’m taking her!”

“So you arranged things with the coyote?”

“What?

“The coyote! You talked to the coyote?”

“What coyote, no, I didn’t talk to any coyote, he sent me to hell. Insulted my mom, even called me a bitch. I offered to pay twice the fee, counting on your generosity, of course, Mr. Rose, sorry about that. But no, even then. I begged and begged until he told me to go fuck myself and hung up.”

“And so?”

“Elijah is taking us!

“Who?”

“Elijah, from the motel…”

“How did that come up?”

“The man wearing the cap put me in contact, the motel manager. Don’t worry, Mr. Rose, everything is arranged. Good people, this Elijah!”

“How do you know?”

“What?”

“How do you know he’s good people?”

“You can tell by his face! But hurry, Rose, Elijah says we can’t wait long.”

“And where do you think you’re going with all this wind?”

“Elijah says it’ll stop soon.”

“At least you got rid of the cyber-coyote.”

“What?”

“What about Violeta? She’s not going to leave stuffed into the false floor of a Buick LeSabre.”

“Buick? What? Wait, Mr. Rose, my scarf is flying away. What about Violeta?”

“How are you going to get her across?”

“Very easy, see, Violeta is a gringa! She has a valid passport, so no problem there. And you too, so I’ll go hidden in the four-by-four with Elijah, and Violeta leaves with you.”

“With me?”

“With you, silly, who else!”

“With me? To where?”

“First to Canada, then to Seville.”

“You’re crazy, María Paz, I can’t go anywhere.”

“You’re the crazy one; do you think I’m going leave her here for Sleepy Joe to make mincemeat of her?”

“Sleepy Joe no longer exists.”

“What?”

“You heard me. Sleepy Joe: kaput, fini.”

“What’re you saying?”

“He was gunned down by the police.”

“Really? Unbelievable… And how do you know, did you hear it on the radio?

“More or less.”

“A shoot-out? But that man is immune to lead. Are they sure he is dead?”

“Deader than John F. Kennedy.”

“Son of a bitch. Even better. But let’s go, Rose, tell me about it later. So let’s see, you in the Toyota with Violeta and the dogs, following Elijah.”

“I’m staying, María Paz. I can’t go.”

“No. Why not?”

“I’m tired, I want to go home.”

“What home, what’s there? Well, you have the dogs. But we’re your family now. Come with us, Mr. Rose, I’ll take care you from now on, like you’ve taken care of me. Don’t stay, don’t be afraid, come with us, we make a very good team.”

“I’ll be in touch, María Paz. I swear. I’ll look for you, you and your sister, wherever you end up.”

“You swear. Swear for me.”

“I swear by Cleve.”

“So be it, amen. So this is good-bye, Mr. Rose, until very soon. I love you, don’t ever forget that, and thank you very much for everything, absolutely everything. You have been my blessing. Are you sure you don’t want to come? Everything is arranged. Elijah has no problem taking all three of us, with the dogs… Cheer up, man, a little bit more and we’re on the other side, look at these trees, syrup trees. That means we are almost in Canada.”

“Go, María Paz, go.”

“Wait, I have to say good-bye to Ming, and to Otto, Dix, and Skunko. And to a few others before I leave here.”

The north wind is born in the lake, skating on the water, dancing on the surface as it pushes the waves against the shore, where they break in white foamy fans. After rising from the lake skyward, it becomes a planetary wind, reaching clouds, chasing them, swirling back down, wrapped in fog.

María Paz took a few steps away from Rose, stood with her back to him, facing the lake and the strong gale so that her hair shot back and her eyes became slits. “Good-bye, my dead,” she said. “Good-bye, Bolivia, my pretty Mami. I leave you here. Take care of yourself alone, because I can’t come back. Ciao, Mami, you see how things turned out, both a dream and a nightmare, and now, good-bye, Mami, good-bye. I’m taking Violeta, and I’ll always take care of her, like I promised you. So don’t worry, rest in peace. And good-bye, my Greg, you were a good person in spite of everything, and I know you are up there where you should be, feasting on your kapustnica with the Virgin of Medjugorje. And good-bye, my beautiful Pro Bono, the greatest of men and the most handsome among the angels. And good-bye, my creative-writing professor, Mr. Rose of my soul, my friend, and my love, I better not say good-bye to you because I won’t stop crying. Well, then. That’s it. Oh, wait! I’m forgetting to say good-bye to Holly, Holly, my fascination, my Holly with her beautiful black dress, as lost in the world as I was. Maybe someday our paths will cross, Holly Golightly, but for now, bye! Oh, dear God of mine, and I need to say good-bye to Sleepy Joe. How am I going to say good-bye to that? I would like to say good-bye forever and ever and ever, to the very point I never would have met you or seen you. But I can’t do that. That would be a lie, an impossibility, because Sleepy Joe, you are my nightmare, which I’ll always carry inside me. Even dead as you are and against my will, I’ll take you with me, what can I do, not everything is victory. So now. Since I have said good-bye to almost all my ghosts, I now say good-bye to the living. Good-bye, my coworkers, farewell, friends, I wish a good life for all of you. Good-bye, Mandra and my sisters of Manninpox, I wish you nothing less than freedom. And good-bye to America. Ciao, America, I won’t be coming back. I have no idea, really, if I’m leaving or if I never really got here.”

María Paz now turned to Rose.

“I won’t say good-bye to you, sir,” she told him, “because we will meet up soon, you promised me and I believe you, because you have to believe people. But I’ll leave you with a gift to keep you company. Take it, Mr. Rose, I’ve been taking good care of it to this very day, from now on it’s your turn to care for it.”

“What is it?”

“Cleve’s notebook. What he wrote here is how he lived his last days. You’ve been wanting to know for a long time, Mr. Rose. Take it, read it, let your son be the one to tell you himself.”

Rose took the notebook, stroked the cover gently, and put it in his pocket. He bundled himself tightly inside his coat to protect his skin from the wind, and passed a hand through his white hair in a vain attempt to keep it in place.

“I have something for you also,” he said.

And as Perseus offered Athena the freshly severed head of Medusa, old Ian Rose, ceremonious and overcome with emotion, handed María Paz the red backpack.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Photo © Daniel Mordzinski

Laura Restrepo was born in Bogotá, Colombia. She has written numerous bestselling and prize-winning novels, including Leopard in the Sun, The Angel of Galilea, and Delirium. Her books have been published in more than twenty languages.

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

Ernesto Mestre-Reed is a novelist, translator, and teacher from Brooklyn, New York.

Content

Laura Restrepo
Hot Sur

1

2. Interview with Ian Rose

3. From María Paz’s Manuscript

4. Interview with Ian Rose

5. From María Paz’s Manuscript

6. From María Paz’s Manuscript

7. Interview with Ian Rose

8. From María Paz’s Manuscript

9. Interview with Ian Rose

10. Interview with Ian Rose

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR