Hot Sur (32 page)

“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.