Hot Sur

3. From María Paz’s Manuscript

America doesn’t really exist, Mr. Rose. America is only in the dreams of those of us who dream of America. I know that now, but it took me years to figure it out. And to tell you the truth, it wasn’t me who discovered it but Holly, you know, Holly Golightly, my heroine, from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, although I’m nothing like her, or maybe just because of this, because it was you who taught me that not even Holly was like Holly, because Holly was in fact Lula Mae. After arriving in Manhattan she became chic and sophisticated, came up with the idea of the little black dress, the sunglasses to hide the all-nighter, and the cigarette case, all that. But the truth was that she had been born in Tulip, the shittiest little town in Texas, where she was known as Lula Mae. So Holly was a hick like me, which I didn’t like so much when I found out, I couldn’t see admiring a girl who was so much like me. Of course, that’s according to the book that you made us read, Mr. Rose, not according to the movie. If you remember, I made quite a scene in class because I was so disappointed with the ending of the novel. I thought it was a trick. I had seen the movie with Audrey Hepburn at least eight times, and it has a happy ending, one in which you feel as if you’re on air, dreaming, and then you come along telling us this is not the original story, because Truman Capote had not wanted for Holly to marry at the end, but to leave. Go far from there and continue looking for America, not finding it anywhere. And you also said that in the movie Audrey Hepburn opened her eyes too wide, as if they weren’t big enough already.

“But she’s very pretty.” I stood up for her.

“Yes, but she doesn’t have to keep her eyes so wide open. She seems to want to convince us that she’s a bit dumb, and is quite good at it.”

“Holly is more sad than she is dumb.”

“The one in the book. The one in the movie is dumber than she’s sad. Capote didn’t like her. He thought she wasn’t anything like the Holly of his novel,” you said, and that’s as far we got in our talk because the bell rang and I had to return to my cell.

But now I have to ask you a favor, don’t reveal my true identity. That is, if this thing I’m sending you is ever published. And I’m sorry if it seems presumptuous to imagine such things, but it’s your fault. You told us in class that the story of anyone’s life deserves to be told, and the protagonists of novels are common everyday people like us. That’s what you told us, and of course it sets things off in our heads, fills us with ideas. Illusions. Anyway, please don’t use my real name, or any other people’s, or places, nothing that could be used to identify me. Give me another name; do me that favor. Not for me, for my sister, who is the sensible one and gets upset when she hears things she’d rather not hear. After all, Holly has others call her Holly when her real name is Lula Mae, and if changing her name works for her, it works for me too. I don’t know if you remember my name, it has been a while, or maybe not so long, although it seems like years, as if a huge chunk of time has passed since then, you out there on one side and me in here on the other. You don’t know how much you are still with me, though. Here in Manninpox, memory is our only plaything. But it’s better if you have forgotten my real name, and whatever the case, it’s better if I don’t remind you. I’ll only say this, I was christened with the name of a country. Is that weird? It’s a Hispanic thing, you know, as the Americans say, naming people after countries, or animals, or virgins and saints. But you might understand, because although you are a gringo you weren’t spared, with that last name of a flower. So call me whatever you want, as long as it is still a country, or a city, like Roma or Filadelfia, or Samarcanda, say. The fact is that it is a tradition in our family. I don’t have to go any further than my great-grandmother, poor woman, who was named America María. But she revenged herself by christening her five children with names also pulled from an atlas: the oldest Germania María; then Argentina María; Libia María and Italia María, who were twins; and the youngest, a wretched woman who in time would become my grandmother, was to be called Africa María, a name that apparently sealed her destiny. The tradition continued with my mother, Bolivia María, and reached me. Not even my sister, who is younger, was saved. The boys were given real names, like everyone else, such as Carlos José, my uncle; Luis Antonio, my other uncle; Aurelito, my aunt Niza’s husband; my cousin Juan de Dios. But all us girls were saddled with geographic names, as if instead of a family we were a map. A whimsical tradition, from people who never traveled, all of them solid country folk, until my mother, Bolivia María, decided to take off. She was the first one to discover the world. The rest of them, forget it. It was so bad that my aunt Libia didn’t even know on what side of the planet the place she was named after was, and you should have seen how enraged she was when she found out that Libya was a Muslim country, and a communist one to boot. They’re lying, they just want to shock me, she said, making the sign of the cross. She was so Catholic she’d rather have been named Fátima, or Belén, or at least Roma, but not the pagan Roma of Nero, but the apostolic Roma of Peter. As you will have noted, Mr. Rose, all of us ended up with the middle name María so that the Virgin would protect us, as they said. A Hispanic thing, I’m telling you, saddling people with this trail of names, all so weird, or the same name repeated for each member of the family, or a combination of both, as was our lot. I know it’s a provincial thing, ridiculous. You don’t have to tell me. But for some reason I’d rather not abandon it, maybe because behind each María with a geographic name there has been a strong woman not to be messed with.

If you want, call me Francia. Francia María. Although I don’t actually look much like a Francia, a bit too sophisticated for me since I am more at home washing and ironing. Not Paris either, don’t want to be Paris Hilton’s namesake, what a disaster of a girl with a hotel’s name. Maybe something tropical, such as Cuba or Caracas, something that’s not my real name but that resembles it. As far as my little sister, let’s do something else, let’s exempt her from the family tradition because she hates to travel, venturing into the unknown spooks her. She gets a little lost if she has to move, or even switch rooms, or change her place at the table. If you move her bed a few feet one way or the other, she gets pissed off and throws a tantrum. And she was precisely the one who my mother named for the country that was farthest away. Don’t ask me which one because I can’t tell you, but imagine the most mocked and constantly remade of nations. Sometimes I wonder if the name marked her destiny as it had for my grandmother Africa, or if it was in honor of the country that my little sister behaved so strangely. Name her after a flower; she likes them: flowers, stones, trees, anything that’s bound to the earth, anything that remains in its place and doesn’t move or go. Call her Violeta, an aloof and temperamental flower. That’s what she’s like, my little sister, shy but tough. They might seem like opposites, shy and tough, but they’re not. I think the name Violeta will fit her well because it is a sweet name, silent almost, and yet it is only an n away from violenta. And the fact is, my sister Violeta can be violent. She bites. I have her teeth marks in my arm, a scar from one of her bites. My mother, let’s just leave her with Bolivia. I always thought the name fit her well, because Bolivia is a hardy country without any airs, a survivor. And that’s my mother, a survivor. She has passed away, of course. But when she was alive, she dealt with life without breaking down or complaining, until the day she died.

But let’s see what we have so far, like you used to say in class. My sister, Violeta; my mother, Bolivia; and that leaves me. You can call me… Canadá? No, too cold. No Holanda either, not for me; I don’t know any Dutch people. Siria? Too much trouble, with all that’s going on in the Middle East. Not California — too long, and it doesn’t go with María. What if you call me Paz? Or Paz María? Or better yet, María Paz. I like María Paz. La Paz, capital of Bolivia, daughter of my mother. In the novel you write I can be María Paz, named after a city in the clouds, sixteen thousand feet high. I like it because no one talks about La Paz and no one goes there.

You and I will not see each other again, Mr. Rose, so you won’t be able to record my testimony as you said you would once. It’s better this way, I don’t like tape recorders; the cassettes always remain and end up who knows where. Anyhow, I’m asking you to care well for these pages I’m sending you so they don’t end up in the wrong hands. It’s ironic that I’m writing you these things on rose-colored paper, but I couldn’t get white. I wanted a more formal kind of paper, not one for children, but this is what they gave me and I shouldn’t complain because at least they gave me something. Anyway, it would be best if you burn all this after you rewrite it, I mean, change it as you see fit, you’re the pro here. Burn the papers so there are no traces of my handwriting, which is like my signature. The truth is that I’ve been dreaming of telling you my story for a while, Mr. Rose, the whole thing, because you know parts of it already.

I don’t know if you remember the day they took away our shelves. It was two shelves for each inmate, four inmates per cell. Small shelves twenty inches long and eight inches deep, that’s it; and yet, we were never as demoralized as the day they took them from us. They called it PRSS: the Policy for the Renovation and Strengthening of Security. They pulled out that highfalutin name any time they wanted to fuck with us. Can you imagine? Just to take away our shelves, where we placed whatever little belongings we had: family pictures, hand lotions, a change of clothes, a bundle of letters, a little radio, a pack of chips or crackers, the small things any inmate was allowed to have. They took off the shelves and left the walls bare, as if to remind us that this is not a fucking home for anyone, not even a shadow of a home, nothing but a hole where we were locked up. While they were doing this, they had forced us to stay away from our cells all day long. When they allowed us to return, we realized all the shelves were gone. All our things were thrown on the bunk beds. They had torn apart the walls, confiscated most of our stuff, and whatever was left was just scattered there covered with dust. Like garbage. They needed us to feel we were garbage, that what belonged to us was garbage because we were no longer human. They were human, we were scum; those were the rules of the game. The day after that, we had the writing workshop with you, Mr. Rose, but our spirits were dragging. No one was paying attention, although you were trying, coaxing us from the blackboard, but we weren’t listening. We were furious and defeated, our minds poisoned and miles away from there. Until you stopped the class and asked what was wrong. And as if you had opened a dam, we let loose, cursing our fate and grumbling about our shelves and all the knockdowns we suffered every day in this deathtrap called Manninpox prison.

You said you were sorry about what had happened with such feeling that we knew you meant it. Then you said that you could offer us a consolation prize, a very simple one: language. Language! We looked up at you as we did sometimes, as if you were a child who says outrageous things, and you blushed on that scar right in the middle of your forehead, really something peculiar, that pallid scar shaped like a lightning bolt that sometimes comes alive flashing in rabid red, no doubt your oddest feature. And because your skin is so white, you can’t hide it, and blush often, like that time you tried to dig yourself out of the hole by saying that language made up the shelves where we put the things of our lives, so that our lives would make sense. You told us that we had to think seriously about everything that happened to us so that we could translate it, and place it there, in some order, within sight and reach, because language is the shelving and without language everything is a mess, confusing, tossed anywhere as if it were garbage. Those were your words.

I’m not going to lie and tell you that your words put us at ease, Mr. Rose, on the contrary, my hairs stood on end each time you started preaching, when you reminded me of a priest, sorry to say. Who did you think you were with your lightning-bolt scar, your precious little nose, and yellow shirts? It angered us when you tried to tell us what we had to do to pretend you were on our side, because when it came down to it, neither you nor anyone else was on our side; the rest of the world was out there, and we were in here, alone with our solitude.

On top of that, that day we were like lionesses because of the shelves. Real shelves made of concrete, that’s right, hard concrete, you know, twenty inches long and eight inches deep, and all you could come up with was your philosophy. But I’ve always remembered what you told us that day about the shelves of language, Mr. Rose. And that’s where the good part starts, and the bad part, because what you put on shelves is there to be seen but some things I’d rather not have seen. Nobody can imagine what I have gone through, and it’s best if they don’t imagine.

I’m always hoping that someday I’ll see you again, Mr. Rose. Imagine running into you and telling you my story so that you can turn it into a novel. You know some of it already from the exercises I turned in for the creative-writing workshop. I like to dream that your novel about me becomes a bestseller and they make a movie from it that wins an Oscar. It’s not that I want to be famous. For what? If you want a famous Colombian you have Shakira; I, on the other hand, am inmate number 77601-012. That’s the hard truth. I’m also not after money, and it seems you are even less so — if you wanted to become a millionaire you wouldn’t be sticking your nose in these deathtraps. That’s why I’m telling you, if they pay you a fortune for my story, which could happen, Mr. Rose, donate to a foundation for the preservation of the white-tailed deer, which is a god to the Tarahumara Indians and is in danger of extinction. It was you who told us about that, remember? You almost made us cry with the melodrama about the white-tailed deer. By then I was beginning to like your class, really starting to get the hang of it. There were only two things that I enjoyed about Manninpox those days: your class and the TV show House M.D., which was also on Thursday. From two to four in the afternoon your class, and at seven, reruns of House M.D. on TV. I spent all week waiting for Thursday.

The reason I’m writing you, Mr. Rose, is to unburden myself of everything I know, a confession of sorts that will bring me forgiveness and peace. I remember your first classes, when you had us do exercises so we would learn simple things, like how to tell a verb from a noun; and once you had us make a list of ten verbs that were important to us. We had to do it quickly, jotting down the first ones that came into our head, and among my ten, I wrote “phobia.” You said that you couldn’t accept it because phobia wasn’t a verb, but I defended my choice, I insisted it was a verb, in a way, because a phobia couldn’t exist if someone wasn’t there to feel it.

“Fine”—you were polite—“let’s say it’s somewhat a verb, but only somewhat.”

“No, Mr. Rose.” I laughed. “You don’t have to give it to me. I get how phobia is no verb.”

The next class you made us do another list, this time adjectives, writing the definition on the board. One of mine was “phobiaized” and I wrote beside it “consumed by phobias.” You asked if to be phobiaized wasn’t the same as to feel a phobia. And I responded that a person like you might feel a phobia, but one like me is fucked and phobiaized. That means that fear has gotten inside you, never to be released; it means that a person and her fears have become the same thing.

“Touché,” you said, and explained that it was a fencing term, touché, and it meant that I had won.

But in the following class, you struck back; you weren’t going to fall behind in the competition we had started. You came out with this thing about a philosopher who was called Heidegger, and this Heidegger talked about the difference between fear and anxiety. He said that fear was a feeling about something or someone, let’s say a barking dog or a cop who could arrest us, while anxiety was a state of mind about everything and nothing in particular, simply about the fact that we were in this world.

“According to that then,” you asked, “what do you feel here in Manninpox, fear or anxiety?”

“Fear about what we face in here?” I was the first to pipe up, “and anxiety over what we’ve left out there.”

You smiled, and I knew we were beginning to hit it off, to understand each other. Sorry to be so blunt, but the whole thing seemed as if you were just flirting with me, with this is this, and that is that, and this Heidegger, and that my mother’s ass, and if this means that and that means this… I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong, but I think if we had met in a club instead of in a prison, we would have begun to get it on, like they say, or to “feel each other out,” which is the same thing; I got that expression from Marbel, a girl who just got here a little while ago. But maybe we better drop this, could be a slippery slope.

I like thinking that everything I have gone through will be kept inside an envelope, and that they will put that envelope in the mail so that it flies where you are so that I remain clean and light, like a blank page, ready for whatever may come. Me on one end and on the other end, far away, in that tightly sealed envelope, my panic and fear and phobias and anxiety. That’s why in my dreams, I imagine how you will recount each chapter, each detail. I’d like to think of everything that has happened to me as a novel, and not life that’s been lived. As such, it is loaded with pain, but as a novel it is a great adventure. I asked for your address to send you this package. I’d have liked to have given it to you in person, but they took us away from you before I had a chance to. And, of course, they didn’t give me your address. Who the hell are we, the inmates, to be given personal information about normal people, what right do we have, why else would I want your address if not to extort money or threaten you? I told them that it was to send you the novel about my life, and they cracked up. A novel — you gotta be kidding — and life? What life did inmates have?

“You, what do you tell everyone one in your… novel? You tell them how you get up at six, eat at seven, and take a shit at eight?” Jennings, the most sarcastic, rotten guard asked me.

So they didn’t give me your address, Mr. Rose. I’ll have to come up with another way to get this to you; it will be like sending a message in a bottle.

Another little thing before starting, I’ll tell the story and you believe everything I tell. That’s something Dr. House doesn’t understand. He’s my favorite, that limp bastard, my favorite of all time. We hear inside that he has gone out of fashion in the rest of the world, that audiences grew sick of his insufferable pedantries, and it’s true the guy does think he’s hot shit. But in Manninpox, his fame is eternal, always the king, maybe because time stands still in here and what comes in never leaves. According to House, everyone lies. That’s why he doesn’t believe what his patients tell him or what other doctors recommend. He won’t trust anyone so he goes around suspicious, spying out deceptions, because he is absolutely convinced everyone lies, all the time and about everything. And although he’s wrong, he’s still my favorite; fucking House, he’s wrong. No one is better than he is at diagnosing an illness, nothing gets by him, but about the lying he’s way off. I know, because for many years I worked as a market investigator for a company that made cleaning products. That was before my life burst into a hundred pieces. I liked the job and I was good at it, one of the things I most regret was losing it. I had to go door to door asking things such as How many times a week do you clean the bathroom? or, Do you wash your lingerie in the machine or by hand? or, Do you think your house is cleaner or less clean than your parents’ house? Those types of things. Maybe it sounds dull to you, Mr. Rose, but it wasn’t. People are crazy at heart, as you know, and the topic of cleaning sets off their weirdness. They come up with some surprising responses, sometimes very funny. I was happy with what I was doing, till that dreadful thing took place. It happens sometimes: everything is going well and lightning strikes and tears you apart. I’m not even thirty yet and I’ve been to hell, there and back and there again.

But as I said, in that job I found out a few things. For instance, I discovered that when people respond to a survey, generally, they more or less tell the truth. Maybe they exaggerate or play down things, but only up to point. A middle-class woman may tell you that she takes two trips a year when she only takes one. But if she goes to her mother’s house in South Carolina, she’s not going to tell you that she goes to the Ritz in Paris. That’s why, Mr. Rose, if you get inspired to write my story, it has to be as you hear it from me: I’ll tell it and you believe me. I might lie to you a little bit, exaggerate, so feel free to rein things in or delve a little deeper when you see that I skip over something. But in general you have to believe what I say. That’s our deal.

There’s a novel called The Distant World of Christina, based on the painting Christina’s World by Andrew Wyeth, the American painter whom you know better than I do. Well, I found out about the painter and that portrait here in prison when I read the novel not just once, but three times. One, two, three. Three whole times from beginning to end before I met you. The author’s name is Jordan Hess and there was a picture of him on the back cover, big head with a ridiculous comb-over, all long on the sides and bald up top, should have just buzzed it all off like Andre Agassi, the divine bald. Who cares if he admitted to snorting heroin; to me he is still a god in sneakers. While I was reading that novel I told you about, The Distant World of Christina, I liked to think of Jordan Hess as Andre Agassi, even fell in love with him, I think. With Jordan Hess, not Agassi, or I should say, Hess as Agassi. I have that issue, sometimes I can’t separate fantasy from reality, maybe that’s why all this crap has happened to me. Anyway, I read that novel three times because it is one of the few that they have in the prison library. Of course, it wasn’t just because of that, but more because of what that paralyzed girl’s story meant to me, Christina, who in Wyeth’s painting drags herself on the dry meadow struggling to get to the home that glints in the distance where she can’t reach it. The artist painted the deadened legs lovingly, her hair long and black fluttering in the wind, her arms skinny. I don’t know if you remember this but my hair is long and black as well, and although you knew me when I was chubby, I’m skinny as a lizard now, like Christina or even skinnier. Her face is not completely visible in the painting because she’s mostly turned away, seated on the dry meadow in her pale pink dress. I imagined my own face on that disabled body, she paralyzed and me imprisoned, and I imagined that everything that happened to Christina was happening to me. I kept telling myself, if she could do it why can’t I, if she can get to that house glinting in the distance, why couldn’t I be free one day.

It was because of that book that I decided to take your class. I signed up right away when they announced that a writer was going to teach a class in the inmate rehabilitation program and that enrollment was open. I did it not because I imagined I could learn how to write — that seemed like an impossible dream, a dream I hadn’t even dreamed — the truth is that I signed up because I wanted to meet a writer in person, just to see what a writer was in real life. Maybe you’d look like Jordan Hess, or better yet, like Andre Agassi. I have to tell you I was quite surprised when I did meet you, so tall, so scrawny, so pale, with the little lightning bolt on your forehead, your cute freckles, and those short-sleeved Lacoste shirts and canvas sneakers you wore, those light-colored pants that would have fallen off if not for the tight belt. It looked like you had been dressed by your momma or come directly from the campus of a very expensive university, or from an old-fashioned tennis court. I grew concerned because this was no place for you, buried in this dark world, breathing this rotten air. It seemed as if you had come from very far away, and you looked clean and innocent, always freshly showered, but as if someone had sent you here by mistake. You even told us yourself, not that first class but the fourth or fifth class, that white prisoners had three to four times the suicide rate of blacks or Latinos, because the whites weren’t used to such harsh conditions. Of course, you could come and go as you pleased, you’d be in the prison for your classes a few hours every night; but even so, coming into this place is not something everyone can take. Soon after, I began to look forward to your classes, and it was much easier to put up with that face of a seminarian freshly shaved and shirts the color of baby chicks, although sometimes baby blue, and sometimes white, but always the alligator brand. It had even become a running joke among us, taking bets before class on the color of your shirt that day. I always bet yellow, and almost always won. But the most intriguing thing was that lightning-bolt scar; you must have taken some motherfucking whack on the head to get such a scar, which I thought was a mark of intelligence. Someone with a lightning-bolt scar is one of two things: Harry Potter or some brainiac, which is what I thought when I first saw you, even though another inmate, old Ismaela Ayé, a superstitious witch, had spread the rumor that the scar meant you had the gift of prophecy. And it might be so, who knows, it doesn’t seem like such an off-the-wall theory, but I still prefer mine because I just don’t get along with Ayé the witch. Others said it wasn’t a lightning bolt but the letter Z, like the mark of El Zorro. As you will see, everyone had a theory.

The marketing investigation company gave me a job right away. It was my first interview after having become free. That wasn’t so long ago, but it feels like prehistoric times or some earlier life. They noticed my good disposition and strong work ethic right away. Also, I was bilingual and the consumer survey business was made up of both Latinos and gringos. In the actual field, I had to deal with all types of people: blacks, Latinos, whites, Quakers, Protestants, evangelicals, Jews, hippies. Even Catholic priests. They probably hired me just because I was bilingual, but I made it a point to prove to them I was a good worker and that everything I did was done right, door-to-door surveys, focus groups, pantry checks. And don’t think it was easy; forcing your way into people’s houses and asking them questions about their personal habits required both talent and guts. It’s always risky because you’re out on the streets and the streets are the streets. In the bad neighborhoods, you get robbed, and in the good neighborhoods, doors get slammed in your face. You rely on your coworkers for everything, the only ones who defend you and stand up for you. Anyone who goes off on her own is as good as dead, vulnerable to any kind of assault. My coworkers pretended to be the musketeers, all for one and one for all, and as I said before, it’s a job for warriors, in which you have to earn the respect of others. You have to be forceful to break down the resistance and then quick and wily as a fox to find the psychological give-and-take that will grant you access. You also learn to be tolerant and take everything as it comes and respond properly to all those who say I can’t, or to come back later, or right now I don’t have any time, or not really in the mood, or get the hell out of here.

Mr. Rose, one time you said that I was intelligent. We were coming out of class when you said it. It was quite a surprise. No one had ever said that to me. I had been told that I was a good worker, that I was sharp, that I was pretty. But intelligent, never. I kept hearing the word all that afternoon, all that week, and to this very day. I like knowing that inside of me I have this little machine called intelligence, and that mine is working well, that it’s well oiled. I tell you things about my job as a market surveyor so that you know that this job was like the schooling that awoke an intelligence in me that perhaps had been dormant. Others begin their careers after they finish college, but I didn’t even graduate from high school. I was schooled as a market surveyor, house by house. And I was the best one on the team — well, one of the best. But what I did so well at work, I did not know how to do in the rest of my life. I haven’t been quite as smart about living as I have been about working. At work, everything was about precision and efficiency, while in my life everything has been about daydreaming, longing, and confusion.

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.”

“Please, one tzin.”

And the waiter: “What?”

“Please, one tzin.”

“What?”

Until Cori got pissed off and ordered in a defeated tone: “One tzin and tonic without tonic.”

I will never get over her absence. I have not turned to any of my friends during this jam I’m in right now, fucked and locked up in this hole, but Corina, I’d have called right away, and I know she’d have done anything to get me out of here even if it meant kicking down these walls. I comfort myself with memories of her, going over the days of our friendship, so playful, so joyful, so true, regretting what happened that night, which was partly my fault. You have to understand, anybody else may not have been affected as much, but Cori was heartbroken. Her soul was shattered, as they say, and bruises appeared over all her body. That Friday in the restaurant, Sleepy Joe and Greg threw back their beers. No interactions with us at all. Think of the Tower of Babel but as a table, the Table of Babel, with the two of them on one end chatting in their hellish language, and the two of us facing them, going at it in Spanish and having a good time at our end, above all because we were using our language, which always makes things easier. Until it grows late and the time comes for everyone to go home, and my rude-ass brother-in-law, who all this time hasn’t even turned to look at Cori or spoken a single word to her, throws his arms over her shoulders and takes her away. They left the restaurant together, Sleepy Joe half shoved her into a car and took her. I didn’t even get a chance to say good-bye, or to ask her what she thought about the unexpected turn the blind date had taken at the end. Like I said, she’d had a few drinks, but nothing outrageous. She was a little buzzed, but walking fine, although granted, with that good bit of tzin still in her. Greg and I walked back to the apartment, which was a few blocks away, and that weekend we didn’t hear from Cori and Sleepy Joe again.

“Should I call her?” I wanted Greg’s advice.

“Leave her alone, woman!” he responded. “Let her be, she’s not a child.”

On Monday, Cori didn’t show up to work, so when I got out, I went to her house. She opens the door and makes me come in, but something’s wrong. I don’t know; she’s acting weird, different. Quiet and evasive, she who was always so cheery. It took some effort to get her to tell me what had happened Friday night; actually at that moment, she did not tell me anything, some time had to pass before she told me that Sleepy Joe had raped her.

“The strange thing is that he didn’t have to,” she told me, “because I’d have let him have sex with me anyway, I was ready. I had made up my mind not to let all that makeup and the tight pants be for nothing. It was me who suggested he come to my place. That was the purpose of the date, no? That’s why I put on heels and drank all that gin. That’s what it was about, no? It was all about getting laid, wasn’t it? And yet, your brother-in-law raped me and abused me, not once but various times, very brutal, you know. I begged him to stop, begged him no more, but it was as if he was possessed. There came a point when I thought he was going to kill me.”

That’s what Corina told me, and I have to tell you, Mr. Rose, I didn’t know how much of it to believe. It’s a fact that she was no sex expert, that she didn’t have much experience in the field, and the little that she had had been precisely the rape back in Chalatenango when she was barely fifteen. That’s why I had my doubts. It did seem as if she had been beaten, that’s true: with bruises here and there, but not wounds or anything. The biggest damage seemed to be psychological, and she seemed so hurt, so depressed that I took her to the doctor, and it was there how I found out how Sleepy Joe had violated her, hurting her in the front and tearing her a bit in the back. He penetrated her in whatever hole he could find and left her with her breasts, mouth, and genitals swollen. “But what can you do, that’s the way passionate sex is,” or so I tried to explain to my friend Corina.

“Look, chica,” I said to her. “Sometimes after a good fuck you feel as if you’ve been crucified, barely able to sit down, walking like a duck, your jaw a bit unhinged from so much sucking dick. And maybe your man is in bad shape too, bruised from top to bottom, holding his balls in his hands, his cock turned to compote, his back all scratched, his tongue scalded, his neck with bite marks. That can happen. But sex doesn’t stop being pleasurable because of that. You get what I’m saying, chica? You understand?”

“This was different,” she said.

“Haven’t I heard you yourself say that some things that are clean for some people are dirty for others? Maybe some things that seem terrible to you might seem normal to someone else.”

“This was something else,” she repeated.

I had read somewhere that a woman who has been raped relives the rape every time she has sex. That’s the picture I had in my head about Cori, and that’s why I was talking to her as if she were a little girl. Me, the know-it-all, the experienced one, and she, innocent, ignorant, and psychologically damaged.

“He used a stick,” Cori told me. “A broken-off broomstick. He shoved a stick in me.”

“A stick? He shoved a stick in you?”

“A broken-off broomstick.”

Mother of God. Then it was possible that she had gone through her own Golgotha. But what kind of monster commits rape with a broken-off broomstick? What pleasure can he get out of that? I didn’t understand. Sleepy Joe, a sexual maniac? An impotent one? It didn’t make sense; I couldn’t see such a masculine guy as someone who was impotent or who had to replace his natural equipment for something artificial. I couldn’t let it go and finally decided to ask him directly, and of course, he denied everything.

“Your friend is a prude,” he told me. “Doesn’t know how to have fun. She’s a tight-ass.”

I didn’t know what to believe. Everything could have been the product of your fears, I repeated to Cori, and she ended up admitting it was possible. Maybe she said it so I’d leave her alone about the issue, because she didn’t like discussing it. Who knows in what cubbyhole of her mind she archived it, because even so she let out a few words about it now and then.

“I think he was praying,” she told me one of those days.

“Praying? Who was praying?”

“Your brother-in-law.”

“You mean he prayed that night in your house? Before he did what he did, or after?”

“During… like in a ceremony.”

“Of course, those Slovaks are worse Holy Rollers than us Latin Americans. For them religion is like a mania, they bless themselves, they kneel, they carry rosaries in their pocket, and the children dream about becoming pope and as adults use their savings for pilgrimages to the Virgin of Medjugorje. They’re fanatics; there’s no other word. Each nationality comes with its defects.”

“No, María Paz, it wasn’t that. What he did with me was an ugly ceremony.”

“An ugly ceremony?”

“What he was doing to me. Ugly, very ugly. I mean the fear more than anything.”

“Oh, I know, you must have been so afraid. Poor girl, it was all my fault, for letting you go with such a brute.”

“That man knows how to make you feel fear. He delights in watching you tremble with fear, María Paz, for hours. He takes you to the limit, little by little, systematically. An expert at it.”

I insisted on comforting and indulging her as if she were a frightened little girl, and after that, Corina did not want to or could not tell me any more, probably disgusted that I was never actually listening, and after that I didn’t see her again because she quit her job and returned to Chalatenango, El Salvador. Just like that, all of a sudden and without the slightest warning, without giving me a chance to beg her to stay, not to leave me, because we were like sisters. Because she was my biggest support, and I’d have wanted to explain to her that an incident could not invalidate such a strong and hardy friendship, because these things pass and are forgotten but the friendship remains. But she didn’t even give me a chance. Corina made the decision out of nowhere and afterward there was no going back. She did offer a word of warning. When she called me to say good-bye from the airport, minutes before she got on her plane.

“Open your eyes, María Paz,” she said. “Open your eyes and be careful. That boy is sick; I know what I’m talking about.”

Sick, my little brother-in-law? Back then, recently married, I’d have said exactly the opposite; he looked very healthy. True, he was strange, off his rocker, fierce, and a gangster, but what child from a poor neighborhood doesn’t grow up to be somewhat like that? Corina had been my teacher, Mr. Rose, to deny that would be absurd and ungraceful. Just as you showed me how to write, she showed me how to live. At work, in the streets, how to deal with people and behave in America so that you were accepted by the Americans, how to be a friend: she was the teacher and I was the apprentice. But in this particular and delicate case, the episode with Sleepy Joe, I was convinced, or, better yet, I knew that I was the one who was right. She was the novice and I was the veteran.

Cori never forgave me for not believing her, not supporting her, not telling her: You’re right, my friend. I’m with you, one hundred percent, I understand the horror you must have lived through that night, and it pains me as if it had happened to me. My brother-in-law is an asshole, garbage, a sad lump of dog shit. I’ll ask my husband to forbid him from ever entering our house again. Because that’s what Cori expected of me, and I knew it. But I had my own opinions on the matter. The truth was that I was fascinated by Sleepy Joe despite his weirdness and his rudeness. Worse yet, frequently I dreamed that we made love. And in those dreams what need was there for a broomstick? With what he was naturally endowed, the man performed extremely well.

What can I do? I’ll never get Cori back, but I do have to drag along with my own life. So I might as well make an effort with this writing thing, because telling you offers some relief and clears my mind, and you might as well know that these days it is my only support along with the Virgin of Agarradero. So I go on with my task, and listen to another story, something that I heard from a widow I interviewed, who lets out that she doesn’t wash her bedsheets because her husband, who had been dead for seven months, slept in them, and that at night she wants to reencounter his smell, his presence in the bed. Hearing this, I managed not to say anything; such drama needs to be infiltrated slowly, so I began asking tactfully: “How do you do it, señora? Aren’t the sheets a little bit filthy after so much time?” And she says that they aren’t, that they’re just as he left them, because she’s the one who washes herself every night before she goes to bed. Every night she washes every part of her body, even her hair, and puts on a fresh clean nightgown, so that she won’t have to wash the sheets. Isn’t that crazy? Cori was right that everyone draws their own line between the clean and the disgusting. You know what the Arabs think of someone like you or me who uses toilet paper? They wash themselves well after number two and they consider toilet paper a dirty Western habit. They may be right.

I’m wondering if you’ll be able to see me as character material after finding out all these ordinary things about my life. You introduced us to Lizzie from Pride and Prejudice and Poe’s Eleonora. These are protagonists; I’m just one other woman from the bunch, or worse than that, I’m merely 77601-012 in the last hole on earth. Well, I’m also one who has lived through a tremendous drama, but I’m not so sure that is enough to make a character in a book. I also wonder if someone at some point will be able to read about me with the same passion that I read about Christina, you know, from The Distant World. When I told you once how much that book had fascinated me, you grimaced and told me it was a young adult book, that is, of minor literary value. I responded that it was the first novel I had read and therefore of major value to me, incomparable, even. To this day, I still believe that I’d be content to simply be the protagonist of a minor little novel, someone like Christina. I’d like to tell Jordan Hess that I read his book in a trance, feeling great tension, as you would expect from a prisoner devouring a book in her cell, well, a prisoner who enjoys books, like me, because there are others who despise books, fear them even. In any case, I suspect a writer has no idea how close he can become with a reader. I think it would frighten the writer if he really knew. Because a book is not just a story and words, it is something physical that you possess. The Distant World of Christina was locked up in the cell with me, and lying on the bunk with me, and when they allowed us to go to the courtyard, it sat beside me in the sun. It absorbed my tears, was splattered with my drool and stained with my blood; that’s not a metaphor, it was literally stained with my blood, you’ll see why later. I often caressed the book. Jordan Hess would probably be upset to learn all this, and maybe you are also, because writers think of readers as ghosts. Shadows out there, far away, nameless, blurry, of whom they will never know anything about. A writer goes to a bookstore and asks, “How many copies of my books have sold?” And maybe the writer is told, “Two hundred and fifty thousand.” There it is, two hundred and fifty thousand readers. But that’s not how it is. Each reader is a person, and each person a knot of anxieties. While I read The Distant World of Christina, I put my nose to the pages to smell the paper, but also to try to smell him, Jordan Hess himself. I’d have liked to tell him how much I liked the book and protest that the ending wasn’t very convincing. This one too, I’m always dissatisfied with endings, I’m always expecting something more, a kind of revelation that never comes. When I finish a book, I feel a kind of unease, that there was something important there I missed, but not knowing quite what. It must be very difficult to finish a novel. I wonder how you will end mine, and I hope it’s nothing tragic. In any case, I’d rather it be a weak ending than a tragic one; I should just tell you once and for all.

One day you made me laugh in class and I always laugh again when I remember the episode. We had gone through several classes working on a story you had assigned and I just wanted to finish it, no matter what. But my story had too many characters and each of them had too many things happening to them, so there was no way.

“Read it, Mr. Rose,” I asked you, “and advise me on how to finish it.”

“I don’t know, María Paz, I really don’t know,” you said after you had read it. “This thing you’ve written is too tangled up.”

“Just dictate an ending to me,” I insisted, “because I can’t take it anymore.”

“Alright, I’m going to give the advice that my friend Xavier Velasco offers for such cases. You have a pencil? Then write: ‘And everyone died.’”

So I was telling you about how I wanted to complain to Jordan Hess. But how would I get in touch with him if I didn’t know him and didn’t have his phone number or e-mail address? When it came down to it, all I had were the words that he had written. No matter how many questions I asked him he was never going to respond, and that was as disappointing as praying to God. The real miracle was you, Mr. Rose. A women’s state prison is the last place in the world you’d expect to find a writer. That’s why I’m giving you this story that I wrote for you. So you revise it if you like it, and publish it under your name if you think it’s good enough. Or at least that you read it, just that you have read it will make me happy. Pretend that it is one of the exercises that you assigned for class, just somewhat longer than usual.

And now, let me tell you a little bit about my sister, Violeta. Pretty and strange, given her appearance. Different. Sometimes unbearable and sometimes likeable, shy at times and at times wild. I was almost a teenager and she was a little girl when we were finally able to meet, or I should say meet again, on the plane to America. Five years before, my mother, Bolivia, had left for America to fulfill her dream and to make some money, because there wasn’t enough to support us. She wanted us to have a good life, that’s what she said, and the good life was only over there, in America. Or I should say here, but, back then, for us America was very distant and unreachable. Violeta was my only sister, she with one last name and me with another, but both of us with map names, like all the females in our family. It was on that plane that I began to know my sister. I had met her just a few hours before, at the airport, and she clutched her stuffed giraffe as if her life depended on it. But she didn’t want to hug me, not even to turn around and look at me, although her godmother told her, “Go on, say hi; it’s your sister, María Paz.” But she seemed to need nothing but that giraffe and wasn’t paying attention when I showed her the chain around my neck.

“Look, Violeta,” I said, gesturing for her to look at it, “you’re wearing the same one.” I reached out my hand to grab her chain, that was all I did, tried to touch the chain to show her it was like mine, and that’s when she, who up to that moment had seemed angelical and lost in thought, turned into a lightning bolt and scratched my cheek. You should have seen it; she drew blood with her nails, like a cat with rabies. I found out then, that’s what my little sister was, a pretty cat who was almost always indifferent, but could turn fierce in a flash.

That was our first encounter after waiting five years for a reunion. Bolivia had not been able to take us with her to the United States because she had gone there tempting fate as an undocumented worker, leaving us with the promise that in a few months she’d send for us, as soon as she had a visa, a place to live, and a job. Some of the girls in my school, back in our native country, would go out to flaunt their stuff in tight Lycra pants, Nike shoes, and Bebe brand shirts with brilliant hearts and silver sequins. There was no need to ask where such treasures came from. “This is American,” they said, “they brought it to me from Miami.” I didn’t have anyone who could bring me anything from Miami, not even Barbies. On the other hand, we knew that Bolivia was there and that one day she’d bring us there, me and my sister, and she’d fill our closets with American clothes. Sometimes, I saved enough money to buy a Milky Way. They sold them as contraband near the school exit and I’d taste them with my eyes closed, not daring to actually ever bite into one, thinking, this is what America tastes like, and the first thing I’m going to do when I get there is to go on a Milky Way binge. I’m going to buy a whole bag of the minis just for myself, my favorite, because I could stick the whole thing in my mouth and dream about my mother in America.

Bolivia had left Violeta and me in different houses, cared for by different families in separate cities. She couldn’t find anyone to take both girls at once. As I’ve said, when she left I was seven and Violeta only a few months old. I was one man’s daughter, Violeta another man’s, and my mother had broken things off with both of them. Who were these men, what kind of creatures were they, what color were their eyes, their hair, were they good people or not? Only our mother knew. See how things are, I’ve never known anything about the man who gave me life, and now I don’t know much about you, who is going to write my biography. I know that once you hit a bear riding a motorcycle on a mountain road. I know it because you told the story in class. I’m trying to remember what your hands looked like. Big? White? That would be the obvious choice, but the truth is I don’t know. Maybe I’ve forgotten, or perhaps never really looked at them, although I doubt it, I like masculine hands and in Manninpox there weren’t many. Your face also has been erased, so I have given you Andre Agassi’s face. I hope that’s okay.

Oh, Bolivia, at what point did you become obsessed with America? The fact was that we too lived in America, Latin America. But that wasn’t America: the North had even taken the name. Bolivia would say on the phone, “Here the streets are safe, honey; the trucks pick up the garbage every day and there is no one without a car.” That’s what Bolivia said, and she assured me that America smelled clean and I believed her, and I dreamed of that smell, and of the taste of Milky Ways, and took it for a fact that Bolivia had a car. If everyone else did, why not my mom? She called every month religiously, once a month, and she sent money for our upkeep. She also called Violeta, although at first she was too young, but even when she was older, she never wanted to speak on the phone. She had her issues, Violeta, so pretty and so locked up in her silences. Unless she gets the urge to talk or scream, and then no one talks as much or screams as loud.

Once, when we were already in the States and Violeta must have been around thirteen, she started to scream in a museum where I had taken her one Sunday. All of a sudden she let out a prolonged shriek because of a portrait she had seen. Of a saint. I don’t remember the painter, but an old, dark canvas. There was something terrifying about it, for sure. It was St. Agatha and she was carrying her breasts on a platter, white, very round, and tender, one on each side of what seemed to be a silver platter. They had severed them to torture her and she exhibited them so that humanity took note of her unshakable faith. It was my fault; I shouldn’t have explained it to Violeta. She asked me, “What is that woman carrying on that plate?” And I told her the truth when I could have lied, I could have told her, It’s a pair of coconut pudding cakes. Of course, she’d have started to ask, Who are the pudding cakes for, why is she carrying them in that platter, why doesn’t she eat them? It’s always some story with no end with her: when something bothers her, she doesn’t stop asking questions. Sometimes it seems that she has finally forgotten a matter, and a month passes, two months, without her mentioning it, but not a chance. At some point out of nowhere she’d start again, And why was she carrying those pudding cakes? You don’t even remember what you had been talking about, but for her it’s as if the old conversation had never been interrupted: And why are they coconut, why doesn’t she eat them, and why two and not one? That’s how she is, Violeta. She’s either quiet for weeks on end, or she’s such a chatterbox asking endless questions that she drives even the sanest person mad. But now that I think about it, she who always asks so many questions never asked why they had cut St. Agatha’s breasts off. She just started to scream.

Bolivia said that America smelled clean but what really smelled clean was her, my mother. She was always pretty and fresh, as if she had just stepped out of the shower. Even during the dog days of summer, Bolivia smelled clean and young. She smelled like breakfast on a checkered tablecloth in the courtyard, although we never had a courtyard, or come to think of it a checkered tablecloth, and as I’ve said before my mother’s own body was foreign to us; there was something about it that wasn’t domestic, that opened outward, like a window that remains open at night and leaves the house exposed. That was Bolivia, she killed herself to provide four walls and a roof to shelter us, and at the same time made the space vulnerable by leaving the door open. This seems like a mess, all this I’m writing you; but deep down I just want to say something simple, let’s say it was on a weekday, on a Wednesday morning, already in America, the three of us finally together, my mother, my sister, and I, pretending we knew each other well, that in spite of everything we were a family, let’s say that seated at the breakfast table, our dream had been fulfilled, because although we didn’t have a checkered tablecloth, we did have orange juice and cornflakes and chocolate milk, those things that make up the well-being of a mother and two daughters, hurrying to get to school. Then suddenly, from Bolivia’s darkened room some guy emerges, his hair all on end, half-naked, after just waking up, his eyes still heavy with sleep. And at that moment in a festive voice, Bolivia would say something like, Girls, this is Andres, or This is Nate, or This is Jonathan, come here, please, splash some water on your face, I’m going to introduce you to my daughters, this is María Paz and Violeta, a pair of adorable girls, now that we’re finally all together, I want to assure you that from now on things are going to be fine for the four us, a real close family. Come, sit with us, Andres, or Nate, or Jonathan, let’s have breakfast together, you’ll see how dandy it will be for us as a family. A week later, Bolivia would be already married, or living together, but in six or seven months, Nate’s or Jonathan’s shirts and underwear would not be on the shelves, instead those of Andres or Mike would be there, which in turn would also disappear, and the shelves would remain empty so some other man could put his clothes there. And so on, successively. Do you know what I’m talking about now?

She liked to dress in white, Bolivia did, when we were poverty-stricken and later, when that wasn’t so much the case. If she wasn’t in white, she wore light colors: lilac, sky blue, pink. In America, she worked fourteen-hour days every day until the day she died, and she was still able to smell like a garden. She indulged in an extravagant luxury for a woman of her means, Heno de Pravia soap, which according to her whitened the skin and made it silky. Heno de Pravia could never be missing from the house; there would be no sugar in the sugar bowl or bread in the basket first. When Bolivia left us in Colombia, I imagined America smelled like Heno de Pravia. I yearned desperately for her and thought America would smell like her. Of course, when we got to America, I realized that there were things about Bolivia that as a teenager embarrassed me. For example, well dressed as she was, she was never able to get the American casual look right. Imagine if your mother ever showed up at a parent-teacher conference with an orchid corsage pinned to her lapel, tell me if you wouldn’t want the earth to open and swallow you. That’s what I’m talking about, that type of thing. Suffice it to say that Bolivia never bought a single item of clothing at an American store, no, not her, God forbid. Until the end of her days, she remained loyal to a neighborhood store where the clothes were custom sewn. It was named Las Camelias, Prendas y Accesorios para Damas, just like that in Spanish, so you get my drift about her.

I’m curious about how you are going to depict me in the novel. Physically, I mean, how you are going to portray me in that sense. We are now too far away from each other and you cannot see me, and I doubt that back then you looked at me closely, or that you even looked at me. You did notice the skewed ways I had of looking at things, you were surprised by my way of thinking, sometimes my writing exercises made you laugh. And I was the know-it-all who responded first to all your questions. But did you ever pay attention to the way I looked, my physical aspects? Could you tell I was ill? This hemorrhaging that doesn’t stop had already started then. One time I almost fainted in class, right in front of you, and I think the loss of blood made me hallucinate. But I faked it, I played it off as if it wasn’t anything and put up a front, which wasn’t too hard in this place in which the women look either sick or mad. And I wasn’t going to let my ailments stop me from going to class; I wouldn’t have missed one of your classes or an episode of House for anything in the world. So take note, Mr. Rose, the main thing about my appearance is that the hemorrhaging has left me baggy-eyed as a vampire’s girlfriend and gaunt as a punk rocker. The second important element about my appearance is my Latino air. I was one of six Latinas who took your class, and maybe some others had wanted to sign up as well but didn’t know enough English. This had become an issue ever since the warden had prohibited the use of Spanish, the guards intimidating us when they heard us speaking our own tongue. “This is America,” they shouted. “Here you speak English, or you shut the fuck up.” And even the Latino guards, bastards, traitors, played along and didn’t respond if you asked them something in Spanish. We screamed at them that they were sellouts and they screamed, “Go get fucked, you motherfuckers.” Although the fact is that there are not many Latino guards here. The prisoners are almost all dark-skinned and the guards are almost all white. And the shits in the warden’s office have decided that even visiting hours had to be conducted in English. Here visiting hours are from behind a glass partition with a microphone, so the authorities can monitor everything you are saying and of course, they can’t understand Spanish. Who do they think we are anyway? What do they want us to speak in, Greek? The glass prevents touching: no hugs, kisses, not even the graze of a hand. And now, on top of this, they violate you by forcing you to speak in a language that’s not yours, a language that your people don’t even know how to speak.

Visiting day has always been a delicate matter. At 5:00 p.m. the families leave, taking with them any illusion of warmth and affection, and the inmates return alone, freed into our cold reality. Some minutes later, around 5:15 or 5:20, begins the worst part of life in jail, because the prisoners tend to commit acts of desperation. It’s as if they had been emptied inside, grown even more desolate than before, as if their hearts, softened by the visit from loved ones, become more vulnerable to solitude. Sometimes it’s stabbings. Or beatings, rapes, that sort of thing. But not just that, which doesn’t happen every day; I’m talking more about gratuitous acts of intimidation. Imagine that apropos of nothing someone I haven’t even noticed, who has no relation to me, passes by and shoves me, or knocks my tray from below so all the food goes flying in the air, or grabs my ass, or lets out some obscene insult. It’s not as serious as a stabbing, and it likely isn’t serious at all, physically, I mean, but it strikes a chord, sets my nerves on edge, and triggers alarms in my head because it is clearly letting me know that a person detests me, doesn’t support me, and would feel better if I weren’t around. Why? Just because that person feels I’m stealing her air. The feeling of suffocation is constant in here. Air doesn’t circulate in these closed spaces, and you have to fight for every drop of oxygen against the others. Let’s say that person has pushed you or bit your lips. In the struggles between prisoners, it could be that one rips off another’s lips with her teeth, what they call a Swiss kiss here. That person is letting you know that you are reducing her space, that you exacerbate the desperation that is already inside her. That’s why on Saturdays, after the visitors leave, the best thing to do is to take cover, make yourself invisible in some corner, don’t mess with anybody or try to fix anything that ain’t broke. And to make the shit even worse, the authorities have decided that the visits need to be in English, no Spanish, and those who don’t obey get their microphones turned off. And there are the poor families, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Colombians, that often come from afar, that don’t speak a word of English and begin to cry helplessly when they’re forbidden from speaking Spanish with daughters they can only see through bulletproof glass. Words are forbidden, and so are hugs: they destroy all form of communication, so that fierce frustration and anxiety are all that lingers in those looks crossing from side to side, those hands that want to reach through the glass between them. I know what a visit means for a prisoner even though no one has visited me here. For some in here, the encounter with a loved one is reason for living, sustenance hour after hour, the only hope of the entire week. If they take that away from you, the only thing you want to do is die or kill someone. The banning of Spanish has been the worst, Mr. Rose, the most difficult thing of all, an injustice that rips away at the guts. People outside have become aware, and human rights groups have filed complaints. Mandra X, who is our inmate representative, has made sure the matter is being shouted from the rooftops, and the scandal is making the rounds in newspapers. That’s why the warden of this dump has begun to make accusations. She has said that we Latinas use our native language to traffic and make illegal pacts with family members, unnoticed by authorities. Or as Jennings said the other day, “Who’s to say that when you speak Spanish you’re not ordering a hit from the outside?” One of us responded, “Your mother might be a killer, but mine is an honorable little old woman.” Jennings, that garbage-digging rat, I don’t know why I have a feeling her days are numbered. The authorities also claim that we use Spanish to insult the guards without them knowing it. Imagine, coming up with such things, although they have a point because it’s true that in English, all of us respond, “Yes, ma’am, no problem, ma’am, I’m sorry, ma’am, I won’t do it again, ma’am.” But in the next line we mutter under our breath in Spanish to “stick it up your ass, you old bitch” or “eat shit, you filthy whore.” That is, there is no doubt that the guards are assaulted with a good motherfucker, or gross insult, or low blow, depending on whether the inmate is Mexican, Argentine, or Colombian, because here Spanish is defended in all its versions: in Argentine che, in Salvadoran guanaco, Guatemalan chapin, and Honduran catracho, in Nicaraguan nica, and Costa Rican tico, in all the Colombian versions of paisa, rolo, costeño, and veneco, in boricuan, in newyorkrican, chicano, and the Mexican chilango.

In the middle of this mayhem, Mr. Rose, it so happened that because your workshop was in English, to attend became an act of betrayal in the eyes of our Latina sisters who accused us of selling out, and they began to block the hallways to the classroom. The six of us tried hard to explain things to them. The little gringo was teaching us to write, the language it was done in didn’t matter. We are not siding with anyone, but they thought it was all bullshit.

“Well, from now on, I will conduct half the class in English and half the class in Spanish,” you announced when you heard what was happening.

“What do you mean in Spanish?” the students who only spoke English, who were the majority, piped up. “You don’t speak Spanish and neither do we.”

“But I do speak it.” You stood your ground defiantly and let out an impeccable Spanish that left us Latinas flabbergasted. Where the hell did this gringuito learn Cervantes’s language? And from that moment on, you conducted the rest of the class in our language, while the white girls stewed.

After the hour was done, you said good-bye and left, so you didn’t see how the Latinas all gathered on one side of the class with our backs to the wall, our hairs standing on end like fighting cocks: the vengeance of the North was about to come down upon us. We had been waiting for it since before you left, and who knows what would have happened there if not for the intervention of an inmate known as Lady Gugu, a radical white activist who led a gang that preached it was a waste of time for the races to be pulling each other’s hair. And because she’s quite charming and knows when to play the clown, Lady Gugu announced that she too was going to conduct half the class in Spanish and began a demented and nonsensical monologue that broke the tension and made both sides break out in laughter. Who knows what that madwoman was saying in a Spanish with the worst American accent, that your ass is a great hat, and good morning, enchiladas, Antonio Banderas eats my cunt, and anything she could come up with, my little señorita whore, good mosquito tacos, anything at all, I’m very Mexicana, I’m a pretty little coco. And the rest of us were disarmed, safe on first, because it was impossible to figure out who Lady Gugu was insulting, the white folks and the way they speak Spanish, or the Latinas by mocking our language.

The bad thing was that after that we never saw you again. That happened on a Thursday and the following Tuesday they told us that the course had been canceled. That’s all they said, canceled, that’s how they tell us things around here, just like that, without saying why or who, canceled, by God or a ghost, canceled, that’s it. That’s the way things are around here, they like to make us think that misfortunes occur on their own, and they can then wash their hands. But there was no need for them to say anything else, for us the reason you were fired was very clear.

Ever since they started fucking with us about the Spanish, the Latina inmates have been going around like lionesses, ready to scratch anyone’s face off, our halls always on the verge of exploding. They’re going to have to stitch our lips together if they want us not to speak our own language, which, as you yourself said, is the only thing they can’t take away from us. And so the game continues, sometimes they’re stricter and sometimes they relax the rules because they just give up, but they keep fucking with us, and if on Saturday they turn off someone’s microphone during visiting hours, the blood rises again and rage builds up. And what could not be reversed, Mr. Rose, was the thing with your class. They just canceled it, but I’ll never forget that Thursday when Lady Gugu decided to speak Spanish, talking about asses and hats and other nonsense. It was a euphoric moment, Mr. Rose. You should have been there, a kind of small victory, a few minutes of fun and games between the Latinas and the white girls, something very rare around here. It was as if the prisoners of all colors got together and decided to smack the faces of all those who hated us.

By night, that feeling had vanished. When you’re a prisoner you have to be skeptical about those moments of hope because they turn quickly, and the higher you jump the harder you fall. You go around with moods like a yo-yo, up and down, up and down, one moment you think you are saved and in the next you realize you are damned. That’s what happened to me that night, after that class that would be your last, although we didn’t know it yet. Alone in my cot I was struck by the reckoning, the name we have for the kind of depression that drains the blood, and what had seemed marvelous a few hours before now seemed tomfoolery, what hat or not hat, what enchiladas, I had never eaten enchiladas in my life, didn’t even know how they were made, probably something gross and spicy as hell. And Banderas was a bad actor. So much pride in his Spanish, which he didn’t even speak well because he was forgetting it. And me, so proud of being a Latina, and months before I’d have given anything to be married to an American? I’m telling you, everything seemed very forced. Which got me to thinking: while I was free, my goal was to wipe the Latina off me as if it were a stain, and in prison I’m becoming a fundamentalist of Latinohood. But what I’m going to do, on the one hand it’s something that’s spontaneous, it’s the face of my rage, on the other hand, I need it to survive, that simple. Here, you have to take sides not to get sandwiched in the eternal war between the races.

I mentioned that the Latina prisoners had a name for that blood-draining depression, that plummeting of the spirit; we called it the reckoning. The reckoning comes upon you like a bucket of cold water, soaking your bones and drowning you in despair. “The reckoning hit me,” we say around here, or “I have the reckoning in the brain,” or “Don’t talk to me, I have the reckoning.” The reckoning is the worst, you want to die, nothing interests you; you just want to be still, to isolate, as if locked up in yourself, a dead woman living. The reckoning is introversion, despondency, pessimism — all mixed into a deadly cocktail. In the second section I was in, 12-GPU, there was a black Cuban woman, under the full weight of the reckoning, always huddled up on her cot. An enormous woman abandoned in the narrow cot in which she hardly fit, like a mountain that had crumbled. Her name was Tere Sosa, but because she never moved, we called her Pere Sosa, which means the lazy one. The reckoning comes and goes for the rest of us, but it had swallowed her whole. She didn’t even get up to go eat, and after a while not even to go to the bathroom. She soiled herself and gave off a smell that wasn’t even human, as if she had decided to transform herself into a pile of shit, a heap of garbage. The guards couldn’t make her get up, not even by force, because there is no force as powerful as the reckoning. So they hosed her down with water and left her there, soaked and trembling from the cold. But even then, soaked and soiled and starving, the woman couldn’t care less. Recently arrived in that section, still inexperienced and ignorant of its laws, I passed by Pere Sosa and asked what she had done to be in such a state, why they had arrested her. Why did I open my mouth? I felt a shove behind me right away; someone was throwing me up against the wall with all her strength. Later, I was to discover that it was no other than Mandra X, one of the capos of the prison, a lesbian thug who was one of the leaders of a powerful gang, according to what I was told then.

“Listen to me good,” Mandra X told me that time, flattening my nose against her chest. “We don’t know what Pere Sosa might have done. And you know why we don’t know? Because we don’t ask. We don’t ask those things here, princess. So the next time I hear you asking them, I’ll break your face.”

The cure for the reckoning is work. Nonstop work, in handicraft, in whatever you can get, leather embossing, crocheting, knitting, making wooden objects, whatever, so you can rock to the whir of the routine of your hands and let them think for you, so that there is no other thought in you besides that trivial thought free of anguish that the hands think. It’s the best antidote. But it’s hard to get work in the prison. It they don’t trust you, you can’t have access to tools that can be turned into weapons, you know, so they only give them to you, if they give them to you at all, for a couple of hours and under surveillance. Only a small percentage of prisoners enjoys the privilege of manual labor, and most of them are white, because the black and Latino prisoners are always under suspicion. They let me make knapsacks from polyester fiber, tying the yarn by hand. That soothes my mind, and it is easy to get permission for because no tools are necessary. Making knots hour after hour is a compulsion that may save you if the reckoning has befallen you; at least it works for me, and I have become almost addicted to it, I could tie polyester yarn from here to eternity, thinking about nothing. The other recourse against the reckoning is to sign up to mop floors. They always need volunteers because never in my life have I seen such shiny floors. At all hours, there’s someone mopping the concrete, somebody cleaning what cannot be cleaned. No matter how much bleach they use the smell still lingers there, floating in the darkness, the stink of the urine and sweat and shit of the thousands of prisoners that for more than a century have inhabited this place, the miasma of the great sewer that runs under these floors that each day they mop and mop until they’re dazzling.

I at least remained in high spirits with the polyester knapsacks and the mopping, but the hemorrhaging has dwindled my strength and each day brings me down even further. There I go off on a tangent again. I begin to tell you something, but I’m dragged by a gust that blows and end up who knows where. I was asking you, Mr. Rose, how you would describe me physically in the novel, because in class it didn’t seem that you looked at us or were interested in me or any of the others, not in that way; you didn’t even seem to flinch when we sat in the front row and crossed our legs provocatively. We were about to give you up as a homosexual when you spoke to us about a girlfriend who was a teacher of deaf children. After you left, we gossiped about such a little saintly pair, her dealing with the deaf and you with prisoners. I think you never properly inspected us visually, undressed us with your eyes, as they say, out of good manners, and perhaps because you knew how persnickety the gringos are about harassment. So I’ll have to tell you what I look like myself, describe what I look like, in case you don’t remember.

I’m sorry if this seems conceited, but I consider myself a rather pretty woman. Not beautiful or gorgeous, but definitely pretty. My hair is coffee-colored, long and thick. A thick head of hair, a crown of hair I should say. My hair is my best feature. The only thing that hasn’t deteriorated with the hemorrhaging and with this life in jail. As for the rest, I have acceptable features, a seductive smile although not perfect because I never wore braces, tanned skin, cinnamon they call it, and a pleasing little body. That’s what a boyfriend told me once the first time he saw me naked; he told me that I had a pleasing little body. I found the comment a little off-putting, especially in the middle of what was supposed to be a torrid sex scene. But maybe the man didn’t want to offend and was only making “an objective description with restrictive use of adjectives” as you would have advised in your creative-writing class. Anyways, I’m no babe, but I’m also not lacking in female graces. Well, I have a pleasing body when I’m thin, although not as thin as now, now I’m thin as a rake, and besides I’ll confess that for a long time I was fat, chubby fat with a big ass, especially after I got married, married life accumulated in my thighs and in my butt. Now I’m very skinny, and that makes me look anorexic, with the prominent cheekbones and the eyes grown so large I look like a nocturnal bug. Because of the anemia, my hands are transparent. If I put them against the light I imagine I can see the bones, like in an X-ray. And although my current appearance shocks me, I think Kate Moss would be envious.

One time, after I had arrived in America, I had to fill out an application for a job. I was with my friend Jessica Ojeda, who was born in New Jersey and spoke English better than I did. Although just because she was born here was no guarantee she spoke better English. I learned it as a girl in Colombia, at the Colegio Bilingue Corazon de María of the Mothers Clarisas, which I attended with the Navas and in which Mother Milagros provided intensive lessons on grammar, pronunciation, and English literature five days a week. Then I got to America and from the time I was twelve to the time I was eighteen I hung out in Latino neighborhoods in which English was hardly heard. My first great disappointment upon arriving in America was that Bolivia had no car, the second that it was so hot, and the third was that in America everyone spoke only Spanish. You want to know what the business signs were of my first neighborhood in America? La Lechonería, Pasteles Nelly, Rincón Musical, Pollos a la Brasa, Tejidos el Porvernir, Pandi y Panda Ropa a Mano para Bebe, Papasito Restaurante, Cuchifrito, Sabor de Patria, Fútbol en Directo, Cigarrillos Pielroja, Consultorio Pediatrico para Niños y Niñas. And so on. But back to the job application that I filled out with Jessica Ojeda. She noticed that where they asked for the color of your eyes and hair, I wrote coffee. Hair color: coffee. Eyes: coffee. Skin: coffee with milk. That’s what I wrote because that’s what we call that color, coffee — or rather it is one of three terms: wheat, cinnamon, or coffee.

“Those are names of food,” Jessica reprimanded me. “Don’t say that here, because people get offended. Here you say Latino when they ask you for your ethnic group and dark brown when they ask you about your hair and eyes.”

“You don’t understand,” I explained. “Those of us born in the coffee zone have coffee eyes, and hair that is the same color as brilliant dark coffee in a cup, of coffee when it is magnificently coffee-colored. And our skin is the color of coffee with milk and sugar when you drink it really hot.”

“Alright then,” she said, offering a compromise, “put dark brown.”

“Not dark brown.” I held my ground. “Coffee. I’m proud of that, end of story.”

Let’s see, Mr. Rose, what else can I tell you about me? Do you want to know if I have any special features? A few scars, which here in prison they call embroidery. One on my cheek from a scratch from Violeta that I told you about. Another one from an appendix operation, one on the eyebrow from a bicycle fall, a mole an inch from the corner of my mouth on the right side. Normal all in all, so far, but I have a few other things that are somewhat embarrassing. For example, stretch marks on my thighs from all the weight I gained and lost, too much hair on my legs, and a coffee-colored bramble of pubic hair; one of my nostrils is a bit higher than the other, and although I’d like to tell you that my breasts are full, like in the novels, the truth is I barely fill an A cup. Aside from that, I’m five feet five inches tall, wear size seven and a half shoes, have transparent hands from anemia, which I told you already, and have a pair of ears that are “full,” but which I can fortunately hide under my long hair.

I’d like it if in your book you recounted Bolivia’s departure for America as sad but also joyful, because before she left we took a hot shower together, something we had never done. She washed my hair with an herb shampoo that she herself made in the kitchen, and since my body was small and dark, hers seemed a wonder, so round and full, so white and generous, which always made me uneasy. I was a little girl, Mr. Rose, and didn’t know much about life. But I did know one thing, that my mother did things with her body. Though I wouldn’t be able to tell you exactly what. I felt as if her body wasn’t guarded, wasn’t private, but rather exhibited outside the house; there was something about Bolivia’s body that fascinated me and frightened me at the same time. That afternoon she had ironed my halter top and favorite dress, a yellow jumper, my favorite color then. Bolivia knew how to iron with starch beautifully, by which I mean that the clothes came out fragrant and fresh, as if new. It seems it was a family thing, because her mother also ironed, my poor wretched grandmother Africa María, may she rest in peace. And my mother had shown me; I think it was one of the few things she got to show me before she left. Although come to think of it, I must have made that up. No one shows a seven-year-old girl how to iron; that would be an atrocity. A girl would burn herself with an iron. Anyway, I’d have liked for such a memory to be real, and maybe it is and it is good to think that Bolivia taught me something, that she left me something before leaving for America, something besides the coscoja, the broken-off coin piece that hangs from the chain around my neck, well, that used to hang around my neck before they confiscated it when I was brought to Manninpox.

Do you know what a coscoja is? Don’t worry, I didn’t either, and when I found out, I didn’t like it at all. I immediately dipped the pendant in rubbing alcohol and left it there all week, me, who, before knowing what it was, put it in my mouth all the time, disgusting. Only my mother, with the coscoja; you always had to be careful with my mother. But be patient. Little by little, I’ll explain everything.

In any case, the day she was leaving, Bolivia dressed in jeans, plain shoes with laces, and a plaid shirt, as if she were going on an excursion to the countryside. I saw her put makeup on her eyes, which were coffee-colored like mine, with long lashes. Many years later, I’d glance on her in a similar manner on the day of her death, with her head on the satin pillow in her coffin of dark wood. She had been made beautiful again, seemed rejuvenated, because near the end fatigue and worry had beaten her; yet on that day she seemed peaceful again, as if the Heno de Pravia had once again restored the resplendence of her skin. I remember watching the shadows of her eyelashes caused by the flames from the altar candles dance softly on her cheeks, creating the sensation that death was treating her lovingly. I’d seen other corpses, and although they did not let me attend the funeral of my husband, I had been to others, and I had never seen a dead person as beautiful as her. Señora Socorro and the other friends roasted a turkey and prepared a Russian salad for the mourners, and we all ate. All of us except Bolivia, she who had always made sure that we never lacked turkey during the winters in America. A few days before Thanksgiving and Christmas, we always went to the parish where they gave out free turkeys so that everyone would have a good meal during those days. So we lined up and got our turkey, and the following day we did it again, and the day after, morning and afternoon, claiming our turkey as if they had not already given us one, and another turkey, and one more, and the best we made out with this scheme is when we got six turkeys one Christmas.

The day she left for America, I looked at Bolivia and thought, I’m so lucky to have such a pretty mother, and at the same time, I grew disheartened because that marvelous radiance who was my mother was going to be so far away from me. Afterward, we bathed the baby Violeta, who had inherited a fair complexion and had the greenest eyes anyone had seen in our neighborhood, where such things were not common, so that strangers stopped us on the street to admire them. Mami, where did Violeta get those huge green eyes? Did her father have green eyes? Bolivia did not respond. She went silent when I asked her about her men. The day she left, we dried Violeta with a towel our mother had put over the heater to warm up; we put Johnson’s powder on her, a diaper, and a onesie made of baby alpaca wool. The whole time, Violeta never cried, she lived as if lost in a dream. I wondered if everything she saw would be green with those eyes of hers. I tried to play with her by shaking a rattle of plastic keys in front of her, but she didn’t notice it.

“Mami,” I told Bolivia, “what good are those eyes on Violeta if she can’t see?”

“She can see. The doctor assured me there’s nothing wrong with her eyes. The thing is that they’re too green,” she responded, and was satisfied with the explanation.

Bolivia’s bags were ready and so were the cardboard boxes with our clothes, but before going out she announced, “Now we’re going to have a little good-bye, soon-to-be-reunited ceremony.”

I, who did not know what a ceremony was, was surprised and delighted when she opened three little blue-velvet boxes and pulled out three metal pendants on gold chains.

“What are they?” I murmured, knowing that we were doing something solemn, that the moment would not be repeated, and that those pendants, whatever they were, represented something. I didn’t really like the dark metal pendants all that much; what was truly beautiful was the gold chain, but regardless, I knew the pendants were important.

“They’re three pieces of the same coin,” she replied, and showed me how they made a whole. On one side of the coin there wasn’t anything, just scratches on the worn metal. On the other side, there was an eight-point cross with the word “lazareto” written in the middle. Around and above the cross, it read “two and a half cents,” and below, “Colombia, 1928.” Bolivia put one of the necklaces on me, lifting my hair to fasten the chain behind. She put the second pendant on the baby Violeta and kept the third for herself. Of course, I didn’t know what a lazareto was, and I didn’t even think to ask; I must have thought of it as something magical that made the pendant a protective amulet. Years later, in America, Bolivia would tell me that such coins had been minted in the first decades of the twentieth century for restricted circulation in leper colonies, to avoid contagion in the rest of the country. They were called coscojas, and the engraved octagonal figure was the cross of the Order of St. Lazarus of Jerusalem, also known as the Templar cross or the cross of the eight beatitudes. That’s when I came to know the horror of leprosy and learned of the great family secret. I found out that my grandmother Africa María had spent her last days being eaten away by the illness in isolation at the leper colony Agua de Dios. Her husband and children never saw her during the nine years she spent there, until they heard about her death and then went looking for her, but only to be there for her burial. Apparently, the husband, my grandfather, had been sending her personal necessities all along — although he never went to visit her, each month he’d send her a suitcase full of food and other goods, with a note that the suitcase wasn’t to be returned. According to what Bolivia told me later, my grandfather preferred to buy a new suitcase every month and deal with the loss rather than get back such a thing impregnated with miasmic airs. Among the contents of the suitcase, there once was an electric iron, which apparently my leprous grandmother never used because she preferred one of those old-fashioned heavy iron ones, one of those you fill with hot coals. That’s what Grannie Africa ironed with, there in her colony for the sick; her flesh may have been falling off in pieces, but she painstakingly cared for her clothes.

My mother was a teenager when her mother died, and she told me that they arrived at Agua de Dios for the burial exhausted after two days of travel, dazed by the heat and the buzzing of insects because the place was in the middle of a swamp. They were not allowed near the lepers who attended the burial but stayed on the other side of the fence. My mother remembered she could see them in the distance, but not their faces, which were covered with rags, and that she had been shaken by the thought that these creatures were the only company her mother had had for such a long time.

The authorities had made the members of the family cover their mouths and noses with handkerchiefs that had been soaked in alcohol. My grandmother’s body was incinerated along with her mattress and other belongings. Bolivia stood there, scratching the swollen mosquito bites on her legs and watching the flames consume someone who was supposedly her mother, but who had been buried alive for so long that she had been almost erased from her children’s memory.

“How can I explain it?” Bolivia told me. “For us, her children, she had always been present, but not as a person, as fear, a shadow.”

When the flames had died out and the embers extinguished, Bolivia saw a metallic glitter in the ashes. She shook herself loose from her father, ran to the place where the pyre had burned, and in spite of the screams of warning, picked up a dried branch and scraped out that little gleaming thing that had caught her attention. It was the coscoja, probably from one of the pockets of my grandmother’s incinerated clothes.

“Funny how the mind works, María Paz,” Bolivia told me when we were in America. “The day of my mother’s burial, I thought of her surrounded by sick people, but healthy herself. Healthy and with her old-fashioned hairdo and with the knitted shawl over her shoulders that she wore in the photograph in our living room.”

It was only little by little that Bolivia and her brothers began to understand the truth that had been kept from them for so long. After the burial, which in fact had not been a burial at all but a cremation, permitted by the church for deaths from contagious diseases, the family had to stay overnight, three to a cot, at an inn at the halfway point of the journey back. It was only there, in the insomniac mugginess of that night, that Bolivia finally figured out that during all those years of her absence, her mother must have been just like those sick folk who hid their putrefied flesh with rags.

Why did my mother choose that specific object, my grandmother Africa’s coscoja, for our farewell ceremony so many years later? She never told me, and when I asked her, she’d use any pretext to change topics: “Do you want more chocolate milk?” Or “Turn on the TV, María Paz, the telenovela is on.” So I had to go digging for answers on my own. And I can assure you, Mr. Rose, that the things I began to discover did not put my mind at ease. My mother had told me about what she called the great secret of the family, the unnamable illness of my grandmother Africa. But that was just the beginning. The real secret, the secret behind the secret, I had to figure out myself. It had to do with a dark well without memories, the years in which my mother and her brothers grew up in the absence of their own mother, that woman who had been denied and made to disappear, that mother whose name the father never again spoke aloud, that living corpse whose children could not ask questions about, that undeclared orphanhood, that absence of maternal love that was never explained, the horror of that muted nightmare. That blind point of panic and darkness in the hearts and heads of those children who no one thought it necessary to make things evident for. I can’t help but think of my mother at sixteen years old, the willowy pretty girl she must have been, saving from those ashes of disgrace that coin that contained some vestige of memory, or perhaps healing or redemption. I also can’t help but think of my mother, already a woman in her own right, having my abandoned grandmother’s coin broken into three parts so she’d leave a legacy for her daughters whom she was about to abandon.

Bolivia paid a jeweler to cut the coin and on each piece place a ring through which the chain would pass. That’s what she had decided, but the rest of it, what I’m going to tell you about now, was fate, like everything else that has happened to me. And you, who are a professor and more importantly a writer, know that fate means chance, luck, coincidence — something that happens to you not because you want it to happen but because it is destiny. Don’t think that I haven’t looked up such things in dictionaries. Because that’s exactly what happened, that the word “lazareto” engraved in the coscoja happened to be divided like this: L-AZAR-ETO, and because the middle piece was mine, mine said and still says, AZAR, Spanish for fate. You figure out the consequences. Imagine, in particular, everything that can happen to you from the moment that your own mother brands you with such a word by hanging it around your neck.

After our ceremony, each of us with her medallion, we went out on the street, clean and freshly ironed on the outside and full of foreboding on the inside. We left Violeta and her cardboard box at the house of her godmother, Doña Herminia, who would care for her. Violeta passed peacefully from the arms of her mother to those of her godmother, which did not surprise us because we had already began to sense that Violeta was Violeta. But what did Bolivia feel on leaving her baby, so pretty and so innocent, in the hands of someone else? That I never found out. Many things cannot be known. Was Violeta really strange from the time before Bolivia left for America, or did she become strange because who knows what could have happened at Doña Herminia’s house, where no one was there to defend her or give her proper company. That was one of those mysteries that Bolivia refused even to acknowledge, always finding some excuse to avoid the heart of those truths. Chocolate milk, the telenovela, anything to pretend she didn’t know what you were talking about. The past, our past, her own past, what may have happened during the years of separation, none of those were topics she ever agreed to discuss. She made us believe the page was blank: zero memories, zero regrets. As if our lives had begun at the moment of that second ceremony we had five years later, at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York, when, worn out by the heat and fatigue, we finally brought together the three pieces of the coscoja again.

Sorrows do not exist if they’re not named, that was Bolivia’s philosophy. Her native country had been left behind. And the past forgotten. She wasn’t a woman who dwelled on nostalgia, my mother, or bet against impossible odds. She prided herself on being practical, remaking herself endlessly. “Don’t look back,” she’d say, and was committed to moving us forward without too many complications. She had to feed us, so she provided food; we needed a roof over our heads, and she arranged for that. “Pulling us forward,” she always said, and I suspect she never noticed how twisted we were coming out — really more sideways than forward. There were so many things we never knew or talked about, and that burn inside us with a dark resplendence. Coins rescued from the ashes — I’m telling you about this side of my mother, Mr. Rose, because I know that there shouldn’t be any secrets when I write. You need to know that because of this, Bolivia’s silences, it was difficult to grow up with her, to be secure, to become an adult, and remember that after five years apart, we got there only to live together like strangers. You can’t blot out the sun with your thumb, and the three pieces of a coin brought back together didn’t change the fact that none of us really knew who the other two were. Remember that when you write about all this. The things we dared not talk about forced us to live in constant fear, confined in a narrow box. I sometimes wonder if it wasn’t that web of big and small lies that tangled up Violeta’s mind.

“It’s only for a few months,” Bolivia told Doña Herminia when she handed her Violeta. “Take care of her as if she were your own; you’ll be well compensated.” Then the two of us headed for the bus terminal. In one of the many yellow buses with red stripes, I journeyed to the city where Leonor de Nava, kin to my mother, lived with her daughter Camila, who was two years older than I was, and Patricia, who was my age. They called them Cami and Pati, and because their last name was Nava, they were nicknamed Caminaba, which means walked, and Patinaba, or skated. I’d live with them until my reunion in America with my mother and sister. Pressing the piece of the coscoja in my hand, I looked at Bolivia one last time from the window of the bus. I thought that she looked awfully young with her backpack, her plaid shirt, and without daughters, and for a moment I got the feeling that she was getting rid of us. “It’s only a few months,” her mouth said, enunciating the words exaggeratedly so that I could see them through the glass that prevented me from hearing them. Only a few months, and then America!

Only a few months. But five years passed before I saw Bolivia and Violeta again.