Hot Sur (21 page)

“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.