Hot Sur

2. Interview with Ian Rose

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Cleve’s Notebook

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interview with Ian Rose

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Cleve’s Notebook

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

Interview with Ian Rose

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

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

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

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

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

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