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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 Mar
í
a 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.