Hot Sur (8 page)

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.”