Hot Sur

4. Interview with Ian Rose

“The only thing I have left now is to wander with my pack of dogs, animal among animals,” Ian Rose tells me. He agreed to have breakfast with me at the dining room of the Washington Square Hotel, where I’m staying now that I have come to New York to interview him for this book.

He assures me that ever since the dogs noticed his sorrow, they live attentive to his every move, as if they are there to remind him that in spite of everything life is worth it. Almost every day at the house up in the Catskills, Rose takes them out for walks in the woods, single file until a squirrel or rabbit crosses their path or a field mouse flashes by, and the dogs go crazy. Rose likes to watch them out in the wild; they become doggedly doglike, their instincts liberated and their noses trained to the ground to follow the traces of whatever sexual effluvia or droppings they may find along the way. The excrement of other creatures is crucial for them, he tells me; from it they get more information about a subject than the CIA could with a whole legion of infiltrators. When their caravan regroups, it proceeds behind Skunko, the most ordinary and unkempt of the three, who has earned his spot as leader because of his infallible instinct to find the way back no matter how far off they’ve gone or lost they are. Even if it takes a few times going around in circles, Skunko’s instinct always manages to get them back home. Behind Skunko is invariably Otto, the oversized do-gooder that Rose inherited from his ex-wife, and at the rear, the bitch Dix, all four of them, Rose included, lifting their snouts in the air when they sense something burning or water nearby, urinating on the rocks or tree trunks. They superstitiously avoid the bend in the path where Eagles’s mutilated body was discovered, remain expectantly silent before the trail of a bear or a fox, mark with their own trail the bright, fresh snow blanketing the fields, distinguish the edible mushrooms from the poisonous ones, or lay down to rest on the moss in a clearing, warmed by the pale sunlight filtered through the leaves. That’s how it was that morning, Rose tells me as we have our tea and toast.

“Do you understand?” he asks me. “When Cleve died, I knew that all I had left were my dogs. My dogs and the woods.”

Sometimes his dogs crossed the line and got him in trouble, especially the beautiful Dix, a spirited and explosive female with jet-black hair, the daughter of a Labrador and a German shepherd, crazy by nature and out of control, like all mutts that are a cross between two noble lines. Old fights had left her covered in scars, and her main thing was breaking into chicken coops and contributing to the extinction of the mallard ducks and other semi-endangered species. On those occasions Rose rebuked her, but did not really mean it because deep down he was proud when she brought the prize in her mouth to him. Until one day Dix brought him Lili, the neighbor Mrs. Galeazzi’s cat. Lili was a soft puff of white cotton who never did anyone any harm, not even mice, and seeing her in such a shitty state, Rose hoped at first that it was just a pigeon or something, but he knew for sure it was Lili, Mrs. Galeazzi’s great love, when he noticed the collar. Poor, wide, loving Mrs. Galeazzi, another soft puff of white cotton who never did anyone any harm. Indeed, that tattered thing clenched in Dix’s mouth was Lili, and Dix placed it ceremoniously at Rose’s feet, looking up with sweet and pleading eyes seeking praise.

“Goddamn it, Dix!” he said, his eyes watering with rage and compassion. He was thinking how to punish her when Cleve intervened, because at that time he was still alive and accompanied them on their walks.

“Don’t punish her, Pa,” he said.

For Cleve, it was clear that there was something sacred and primitive in that act of the dog, in that ritualistic behavior inherited from her canine predecessors but nonetheless extremely human, this choosing of a victim, hunting her down and sacrificing her, but not eating her. According to him, the splendid aspect of the whole thing was the lack of a practical finality; it was something more complex, the confirmation of an order of things dependent on this gesture of bringing an offering to the master. What motivated Dix? Cleve didn’t know for sure. But Dix seemed sure that in this manner she sealed a pact with a superior being, in this case Rose, who in the eyes of others may have passed as a hydraulic engineer, but who in the eyes of the bitch was a sort of god.

“Shit, Cleve,” Rose said, “I know what the goddamned dog meant, but fuck, she could have brought me a rabbit or something.”

“She feels that the rarer the prize offered, the greater the honor rendered,” Cleve said.

“Fine, fine. Since you seem to be so in tune with the animal kingdom, can you tell Dix that her god only accepts rabbits? And figure a way out of this jam. If we bury Lili without saying anything, we’re going to have to watch poor desperate Galeazzi looking for her cat everywhere. And if we confess the truth, the neighborhood junta is going to insist we put Dix to sleep. They’re going to claim that the next victim will be a child, so your theories will be useless in defending her.”

Cleve calmed him down, convincing him there was a third way, and proceeded to pick up what was left of Lili, barely a few tufts of hair. Stealthily, he put the remains with the collar and everything on the road in front of Mrs. Galeazzi’s house and smashed it down with a rock that he tossed far away later, so she’d think Lili had been run over by a car.

“You should have seen Cleve that night, carrying out his sinister plot,” Rose tells me with a mournful smile. “The only thing he was missing was a mask. But I felt bad about the deception. I really felt like shit. Not Cleve. He was different about things. Look, I’m a simple person, someone who likes to observe and not much else; my son, on the other hand, had a lot of things seething inside. I don’t know anything about ceremonies and symbolism; suffice it to say that my most complicated ritual is this white cloud I put in my tea in honor of my mother. What can I say, that’s as deep as I get? Fortunately, Mrs. Galeazzi got another cat; she watches it night and day and doesn’t let it out of the house.”

Ian Rose is well aware that under certain circumstances his dogs can be horrendous, and not just Dix, but all three of them. Always playful and well trained, they become like fiends if they sense a threat or detect that someone has trespassed into their domain. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, he tells me it’s astonishing to watch them, something admirable even, to see how they crouch and their fur stands on end, how their eyes grow brilliant and their looks askance, how their every joint becomes flexible and their whole anatomy molds itself to the ruthless agility of the hunt. They regress, turning into the wolves they once were in a matter of seconds and begin to behave like a pack, now in attack mode, so the hierarchy changes, with Dix leading the way, an Amazon; the great Otto behind her, a military tank; and Skunko, the little one, a killer expert at going for the jugular. More than once Rose has had to save some careless trespasser, or even some friend who is visiting and makes a sudden gesture or laughs too loud, from his canine guerrillas. Of course, all Rose has to do is pet them on their backs and say “That’s it, that’s it, everything’s fine, toy hounds,” for them to calm down and begin wagging their tails, becoming again as harmless as puppies, exonerating the victim they were just about to tear to pieces. “Let that be a warning,” Rose tells the intruder, or if it’s a friend, he tells him to take a deep breath, brings him a glass of water, and begs a thousand pardons for the fright.

On the morning after the manuscript arrived, Rose and the three dogs went out into the woods afterward, following Skunko as they always did when in search-and-discover mode, heading in no particular direction. They had been walking for more than two hours when they came across abandoned railroad tracks, half camouflaged by foliage, and they instinctively obeyed that sort of mandate that rails impose, to follow them from nowhere to nowhere else. They allowed themselves to be led, as if hypnotized by the ties slippery with moss, and Rose tried to think of nothing else but how the distance between railroad ties was half a stride.

“Or maybe I was thinking a bit about my childhood, or Cleve’s,” he tells me. “You see how it goes, old rails bring back memories of childhood, even if we haven’t seen any as children or been on a train.”

The first sign that the spell was about to break was the fur standing on his dogs, who then pricked up their ears and began to act nervous, as if they smelled something in the air they couldn’t figure out. A bit later, they came upon signs that said, “No Trespassing, Violators Will Be Prosecuted,” and then powerful floodlights that cut into the shadows of the woods with stabs of light. Rose called back his dogs with a loud whistle, and when they abandoned the rails to take up the path again, they came upon a silent patrol car watching from a bend, its windows foggy. Five minutes later, he saw another patrol car, and farther on a third one. “Let’s get home! Home!” Rose yelled at his dogs, to quicken their pace and move away from that guarded zone.

They tried taking a shortcut that didn’t work and soon were lost for a good quarter of an hour until they came out to a paved road on which there was a squad of police cars. Officers on foot were blocking the way, and they were under the surveillance of a dozen cyborg-looking guards, dressed in black like Darth Vader but with Mausers instead of light sabers. Above the squad, a huge sign spread from one side of the road to the other, and on reading it, Rose felt a chill: “MANNINPOX STATE PRISON.”

Unwittingly, he had been walking toward the prison after spending years evading it, avoiding even the mention of it. It was as if a magnet had drawn him to its very doors, or as if that inmate’s manuscript had already begun to assert its spell.

Downhill from the police cars was a disparate collection of commercial enterprises, clearly geared to the visiting families of prisoners: a generic Best Value Inn, a greasy spoon that served Thai fusion cuisine, a Best Burger, a Mario’s Pizza, a Laundromat, and a faded beauty parlor called The Goddess that featured haircuts, depilation, and massages. A strange name, Rose thought, given that it was so close to hell on earth. There was, aside from this, a stand where photographs could be developed, advertised by a large picture washed out by the sun of a bride wearing yards and yards of tulle. Rose headed into the nearby gas station’s mini-mart, where something caught his attention.

Aside from the ice cream, soda, magazines, gum, snacks, greeting cards, phone cards, condoms, and other such commonplace items was a group of peculiar objects for sale. Handmade and overwrought, they seemed to come from an underworld that lacked any kind of aesthetic notion or practicality and were displayed separately in their own somewhat dusty cabinet, each one painfully useless. There were embossed leather Bible covers, carved wooden circles that were supposed to be mandalas, beaded medallions with the signs of peace and love, embroidered cell-phone covers, key chains with the signs of the zodiac, grocery bags made of woven polyester. The price tags identified them as craft pieces made by the inmates of Manninpox. Rose examined the objects carefully, one by one, a bit shaken by the fact that those things came from in there, emissaries from that hermetic world that had climbed over fences and walls to reach this side of reality. He was overcome with curiosity about whether any of those objects had been warmed by the hands of María Paz. One of the medallions perhaps? The mandala? Or one of the polyester bags? That blue one with white and red? Could she have made it? Maybe María Paz had soothed the anguish of her days behind bars keeping her hands busy with that series of knots that would calm her nerves and kill some time. That exact bag? It was a one-in-a-million chance, but Rose bought it, paying $8.50 plus tax. He can’t quite tell me why he bought that one and not something else; it could have been the Aquarius key chain, which was his astrological sign, or a cover for the cell phone he had never wanted to own. But he chose that bag to leave on top of Cleve’s bed.

“It sounds creepy when I say it this way,” he tells me, “but after the death of my son, everything had become some sort of sign for me. Or amulet, or whatever. It was as if everything had a hidden meaning that I was urged to discover. I clung to whatever it was, as long as it allowed me to get closer to Cleve. Do you know what I mean? I can’t quite explain it. In any case, I bought the bag to bring it to him. Of course, in the end I couldn’t quite bring it up to the attic — like I said, too creepy. I just put it away in my sock drawer. I guess I put it there because I started thinking what my son would have said if he saw me come in with such a thing. Are you crazy, Pa? And yeah, I was a bit crazy. More than a bit. After his death, what could you expect?”

From Cleve’s Notebook

The Colombian prisoner surprises me. She’s annoyingly intelligent, a mixture of common sense and street smarts that unnerves me. She’s determined to learn how to write, according to her, so she can tell the story of her life. I don’t know what crime she could have committed, and it’s difficult to see her in those terms. Of course, around here you don’t ask that; you don’t pry into why any of them are here. Sometimes they’ll volunteer the information; they get a longing to confess and just let loose. But others are very reserved. So it’s a matter of principle not to meddle; each inmate is simply paying an outstanding debt to justice, and aside from this, each is a human being. Not just innocent or guilty, but a human being, period. But the more I like this María Paz, the more the possibility that she’s a true criminal disturbs me, although it’s more a probability than a possibility. When it comes down to it, I met her in a prison, not in a damned convent. Of course, her crime, if she did commit a crime, could have had something to do with drugs. Colombia and cocaine, cocaine and Colombia, they practically go together. And that would certainly be an extenuating circumstance. Clearly a big capo, a cartel assassin, a corrupt DEA agent, or a banker who has laundered millions would be incompatible with my moral parameters, but a girl who gets three or four years in prison for bringing a few grams of cocaine into the country hidden in her bra? That’s a forgivable sin. Who am I to judge her? Me, who smoked all the dope in the world when I was a teenager, specifically the Santa Marta Gold that came, yes, from Colombia. I’m going to dismiss her for drug smuggling, me, who every once in a while does a few lines myself that I buy in Washington Square Park right under the arch and the noses of the police? But that’s if she indeed was caught smuggling. I don’t know. Maybe it wasn’t because of that, and her case is more serious. But damn, she’s so gorgeous, that morena has such a pretty face… I pretend, do my best to fake it; it would be gross to use my job to pick up an inmate; forget it, that would be a big mistake, a cosmic fuckup. I think no one’s yet noticed how much I like her, not even her, but who knows? They’re little fiends, her and her friends, their looks full of innuendos; and I feel that they want to devour me with their eyes during class. They’re dangerous seductresses, like Circe, all of them, young or old, skinny or fat, white or black. Me, a momma’s boy, and each of them, hundred-year-old totems. Homer described Circe’s dwelling place as a mansion of stone in the middle of a dense forest, a perfect description of Manninpox. I feel as if the Colombian inmate places a lot of hope in me and it pisses me off knowing I’m going to let her down, but there’s nothing I can do about that. I enjoy reading the exercises she does in class. I feel good sitting here alone in my attic, reading her stories; the crazy things she writes about help me endure the silence of these mountains. I’d like to tell her that she’s the powerful one, that I drink from her strength, that she’s the one who helps me, there from her cell, and not the other way around. Between the two of us, she’s the real survivor. Her stories are somewhat gloomy, but she gives them a human grace that illuminates them, and her Scheherazade voice carries me from night to night. So funny, I write “Scheherazade” and the autocorrect on my word processor changes it to “schemer.” I write “Scheherazade” once more and again “schemer” appears, in which case, I give up, the thing’s right: it is trying to call my attention to the ridiculousness of my choice of words. Let’s just say then that the Colombian girl has become my nocturnal schemer.

Interview with Ian Rose

Not far from the prominent, white, well-lit sign that announced “MANNINPOX STATE PRISON,” Ian Rose saw another more modest sign that said in Spanish, in faded letters, “Mis Errores Café-Bar.” Cleve and his dogs had ended up right in front of the café frequented by Cleve. Shit, Rose thought, it’s as if everything is predetermined. He walked toward the entrance and went in like a detective walking into the scene of a crime, as if he were afraid to disturb any fingerprints that his son might have left floating there. The place was deserted and desolate, and did not reveal much. On top of the Formica table hung semicircles of plastic red lamps befouled with flies, and the blue oilcloth covering on the benches was coming apart at the seams, exposing the foam rubber guts. Rose asked for a Diet Coke at the bar and water for his dogs, and felt the urge to order an espresso for Cleve. That’s what his son always ordered, an espresso, to which he added a pinch of sugar.

“Look at them,” the bartender said, signaling with his chin to the women in the beauty parlor across the street from Mis Errores. “You see them. They don’t only do your hair, brother; they give you a cut too. Take a look at the tall one. Before she worked there, she did time at Manninpox. And she’s not the only one, you know. There have been several of them who didn’t know where to go once they were granted their freedom, or why to go; they didn’t have a job or a home, or family that loved them, or dogs that barked for them. So they stayed around here, right where they were released, getting together to share a room with a monthly rate at the Best Value Inn, and if they’re not too worn down, they latch onto The Goddess to work as manicurists or masseuses. And I don’t have to explain the kind of massages they offer, you know what I’m talking about?”

“I really couldn’t care less,” Rose said, fixing his eyes on his glass and swirling it to make the ice click, to signal that he had no interest in chatting.

“Do you want to see the prison?” The guy did not drop the subject. “You can’t see it from the road, but you can see it from the roof here. It’s quite a sight, I assure you.”

Rose told him he wasn’t interested, but the bartender persisted, trying make Rose feel at ease by telling him it wouldn’t cost anything, that he used to charge, when he had the binoculars for clients to use, but not anymore.

“I used to charge the tourists,” the guy kept saying, although Rose avoided eye contact. “Many people drive up here just to see the prison, and I’m not just talking about the family members of the prisoners. I’m talking about normal people, tourists who feel cheated when they realize that Manninpox is hidden behind all those trees. Installing the binoculars on the roof was my friend Roco’s idea, a great idea, I tell you, and we made some extra money from it. We charged one buck for three minutes of viewing. I’m the owner of the bar, the very person you see here, so I supervised everything and bartended while Roco took care of the fees and timing the customers with the binoculars. This new feature put my place on the map, it filled up, and people bought more drinks and food. A great show. And if you were lucky, you could even see the prisoners when they took them out to the bus to go to court. The human side, you see. They were led out single file, each one of them cuffed at the wrists, ankles, and waist as well as chained to each other. Quite the scene, I tell you, not even Houdini could have escaped such a thing. They could barely walk, looked like ducks advancing with little hops. They call it a fish line, and from the roof you could see everything as if from a box seat. Not anymore, that’s when we had the binoculars. I remember one prisoner in particular, a young woman, very good-looking, who cried and whose nose ran and she tried to wipe it with a hankie she had in her hand, but of course, she couldn’t because of the chain. I swear, I’d have released her if I could, at least to let her blow her nose. The binoculars were German, very good ones, I had bought them secondhand, but they were in perfect shape and came with a pigskin leather case and everything. But the authorities forced us to stop, threatening to arrest me if I kept peeping at what was happening in the prison, and they fucked the business. But if you want to go up on the roof, go right ahead. You can see the building with the naked eye. You lose the human angle but can appreciate the architecture. Manninpox was built between 1842 and 1847 under the guidance of Edward Branly, a genius of his time; you won’t see anything compared to what this man could dream up, at least not on this side of the Atlantic.”

“In the end, I relented and I went up,” Rose tells me. “Maybe because I needed to do it, although I’d have never admitted that. I had to see all that with my son’s eyes. I wasn’t being morbid; I can assure you of that. I imagine the tourists wasted a dollar for three minutes of voyeurism. But that wasn’t why I did it. I went up to see the place that had captured the attention and stirred the passion of my son in the months before his death. That’s why I went up, because that place spoke to me of Cleve, and on top of that, the girl María Paz was still locked up there, and I had been trying to figure out her story, thinking over what I’d read in the manuscript and asking myself questions about its author.”

When Rose went up to the roof of Mis Errores to look, he had to admit that the owner had been right. The thing wasn’t just a gray uniform block; it was an architectural spectacle in the middle of the woods, in the shape of a European castle of an indeterminate style, somewhere between the medieval and Renaissance periods. Before his eyes there appeared an ostentatious stone castle with massive walls, round arched doorways, narrow windows with iron bars crowned with spear tips, shuttered balconies, a chapel, and a dry moat all around. He wanted to compare it to something that would be familiar to him, and he found that the structure was sort of an American replica of the fortress of Pinerolo, where they had locked up the luckless Man in the Iron Mask, or a New World version of the Tower of London. The whole thing, created with a morbid attention to detail, looked something like a Disney World of horror. Rose thought that the only thing missing was a chorus line, with the prisoners kicking up their legs in unison, like the Radio City Rockettes, but wearing black-and-white striped miniskirts. To finish the sick, hyperrealistic scenario, the only thing missing was a tour of the torture chamber, or a light and sound show from the public gallows for a fascinated crowd. The whole thing could have been a new kind of wax museum, one in which they’d charge twenty-five dollars for admission for adults, fifteen for children, and free for seniors over seventy and kids under four. “Come see a cavernous prison from the Middle Ages, a one-of-a-kind experience. Don’t miss it!” With the added attraction that it would not be inhabited by wax figures but by flesh-and-blood prisoners. As seen from the outside, Manninpox prison was an ersatz, a trompe l’oeil, conceived and built to attract attention, to cause an impression, and finally to entertain.

Rose didn’t know how to explain the raison d’être of that amazing display of judicial power and coercive force, that manifestation of the greatness of authority, judges, district attorneys, wardens, guards, honest neighbors, and other good citizens before the alleged insignificance and baseness of the prisoners. The American state had spent a fortune building that monster to make an impression and teach a lesson. But to whom? Hard to say, if you took into account that the portentous structure wasn’t visible to anyone unless you went up on the roof of Mis Errores, certainly not to the prisoners themselves, for whom the punishment was meant, because once inside they could not see the exterior. They’d see it perhaps once, briefly, on the day they were brought in, and with any luck a second time, on the day they were released, when Manninpox would appear in the rearview mirror of the bus that would take them away from there.

From Cleve’s Notebook

“Why do we kill people who kill people to show that killing people is wrong?” Norman Mailer is said to have asked. It’s a good question. Not to even mention making a public display of the punishment of some as a show for others. That’s how we are — until very recently civilized humankind made a show of hangings in the public plazas, the last such case well into the twentieth century. In the end, how much more advanced is the lethal injection, that aseptic hypocrisy in which the condemned is put on exhibit behind glass before the carefully chosen audience that gets comfy in the little theater to witness death. How far have we really come from the ancient sacrifice nailed to the cross, today’s condemned tied down with leather straps, arms spread crosslike? The grotesque senselessness of Manninpox disgusts me, even the structure itself; I loathe its bizarre and pretentiously aristocratic architecture. And for what? Who are we? How fake can we get? How much buffoonery and cruelty are we willing to tolerate to anchor ourselves in a prestigious past that is not ours?

Interview with Ian Rose

Compared to the breadth and scope of the strange fortress of Manninpox, Rose found that the Best Value Inn and the nearby buildings looked like tiny cardboard houses, and that Mis Errores seemed small and ramshackle, a truly miserable joint, as if all the desolation of the world were condensed around the few tables, or as if all the flies of the world had agreed to shit on the red plastic lamps that produced such a measly light it wearied the soul.

“We’re empty now because it’s not visiting time. That’s on Saturday, at two in the afternoon, and the place gets packed then with family members coming to see the girls. They used to come by train, but now there’s no more train, so they come in buses or cars. Or they take taxis.” The owner of the bar, with his back to Rose, recited the string of events as if he were a tourist guide. “Many come by taxi, spend the night in the Best Value, and wait till one, when the white minivans from the prison come to pick them up and take them in. It’s sad watching them. The guards treat them as if they too are delinquent, no patience, insulting them when they don’t follow instructions. It’s just that the majority of the prisoners are Spics. Or African-Americans. Most of them are black or Latinas; you won’t find too many white girls. Some families come from far away, particularly from Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico. And Colombia. Every day there are more Colombians, snatched because of drugs — you know, Pablo Escobar, the cartels, that whole story. By six the families are back, because visiting hours end at five. It’s a tragedy having a loved one in prison. People feel pity for the prisoners, but they don’t think about those in the family, who almost always are old folk and children. Many of the prisoners’ children end up with the grandparents. And remember, they have to pay the fare to get here and back. The taxi drivers are my best customers, the ones who consume the most. They stay here watching a soccer game on TV or playing cards, and with the fares they have just made they can afford anything on the menu. The families, on the other hand, are often the worst, I hate to say it. They arrive broke after having paying for the journey, which sometimes includes a plane ticket. So guess who takes the hit. Me, of course. Because they set up camp inside the bar, take over tables for hours, use the bathroom, shave and groom in the bathroom sinks, fall asleep on the benches, and pay for just coffee and soda, because they don’t have much else. The worst are the poblanos, you know, the ones from Puebla in Mexico. They come by the dozens and bring food from their homes, chili peppers and other spicy things and tortillas, they’re nuts about tortillas. I had to forbid them to come in with food and even hung a sign outside warning them: ‘Prohibido entrar con comidas y alimentos.’ Just like that, in Spanish, because I put it up mostly for them, the poblanos. Roco wrote it out for me and I copied the letters on the wooden sign; you can say he did the brainwork and I did the handiwork, but it was no use when it came down to it. ‘Oye, señor,’ I try telling the poblanos. ‘Yo vender comida, tu comprarlo.’ Ever since Roco left, it’s hard to get them to listen. They pretend not to understand and order a single dish: ‘Give to us a spaghetti with meatballs.’ One dish for all of them. You can understand how I can’t run a business like that. And the worst of it is that they push the pasta to the side of the plate, take out the bag of tortillas and fried beans, and make tacos with my meatballs, they just can’t help it. That’s why I get along better with the taxi drivers, yes sir, much better. You can even have a conversation with them, so much better to deal with people who speak your own language and behave properly, folks you can trust, knowing that if they order spaghetti and meatballs, they’re going to eat the meatballs and the spaghetti.”

“What about the name of the place?” Rose asked, remembering he had seen the name mentioned in one of Cleve’s graphic novels.

“I didn’t name the place, Roco did. His parents are from Costa Rica. It was his idea.”

When he got back home, Rose hid the polyester pouch in his sock drawer and immediately went up to the attic to look through Cleve’s papers. He had never done that before, had never even thought about doing it, believing it to be a violation of privacy, but now he needed to know more. He wanted to know more about the world in which his son had become entangled where women prisoners engraved leather mandalas in the towers of their medieval castle. Cleve was an organized young man who had kept his things in order; Rose imagined it wouldn’t be difficult to find the papers relating to the time Cleve taught the workshop at Manninpox.

The task took Rose less than an hour. María Paz’s real name was there, as were her surnames, her astrological sign, her age, her nationality, and even the exercises and homework she did for the class, pages and pages with new autobiographical fragments that amplified what Rose had already read. There were even copies of her admission papers to the prison, the mug shots with the prison ID number held over her chest, which revealed a rather striking young woman, with a gloomy look, big lips, and brow so furrowed that the eyebrows touched. So this was María Paz. He could finally have a close look at her: defiant, contrary, and wild haired — possessed by some demon. This little fireball must give them hell, he thought. But at the same time Rose had to admit she was attractive, seductive, which Cleve must have certainly noticed. She was dark-skinned, with evident Latin features and untamed hair that refused to remain pinned behind her, as they must have ordered her to do so that her ears were visible in the picture. But hers wasn’t a mane of hair that would remain still or that would obey orders from those who would presume to identify individuals by their ears. This was hair that would escape in rebel tresses like creeping vines, or serpents that could strike if you got too close. Hair like Edith’s, Rose thought.

“Good Lord, Cleve, what a creature,” he said aloud, looking at the picture. “What a don’t-mess-with-me look your little friend has. This is a caged animal that has just realized that the fight is to the death.”

Rose had found out the true identity of the girl, had seen her picture, knew what she looked like, and now he needed to know more. He had to learn what her crime had been. He found nothing on the Internet under her real name, but he kept looking.

“I’m not saying that I was looking to blame her for Cleve’s death,” he tells me. “That couldn’t be, since she was in prison at the time of the bike accident. No, that couldn’t be. I was simply being guided by a scent, and everything seemed to indicate I was on to something.

“You want to know the only thing that I found on the Internet about María Paz’s crime?” he asks me. “It appeared months earlier in the NY Daily News; I Googled it. I printed it here if you want to read it; it refers to her as ‘the wife of the deceased,’ and she’s directly accused of the murder of her husband. Here you go. Make a copy if you want. I only ask that if you make it public, change the names. I know they’re on the Internet already, but I just don’t want them to become public because of me. Cleve would never have forgiven me. Just replace the names with XXXX.”

Retired Ex-Cop Murdered, Victim of a Hate Crime

On Wednesday night, at the corner of XXXX and XXXX, the lifeless body of retired police officer XXXX was found, apparently gunned down by gang members in a hate crime. According to forensic reports the victim, who was white, was struck by seven bullets, one of which fatally pierced his left ventricle. Upon the removal of the body, five other wounds were discovered, apparently inflicted postmortem with a blade instrument, one in the belly, on each hand, and on each foot. The ex-police officer, 57, had been retired from public service for eight years and been recently employed as a manager in a market polling organization. He was unarmed and wearing slippers on the night of the murder. Before fleeing, the assailants scrawled the phrase “Racist pig” on a wall at the crime scene.

XXXX, wife of the deceased, was arrested hours later in the apartment the couple shared a few blocks away, where a Blackhawk Garra II knife with which the deceased had been wounded was found and is now being held as physical evidence by the authorities. The knife had been wrapped in gift paper and was accompanied by a birthday card addressed to the deceased. The woman, 24, is Colombian-born, and worked as a pollster in the same company in which the victim was a manager. They had met there years before, and almost immediately afterward had been married in a Catholic ceremony. It has been confirmed that because XXXX was undocumented, she had obtained her job at the market research company using false papers and that she had afterward gained citizenship through her marriage with the retired police officer, who was an American citizen.

Shit, slippers, Rose had thought on reading the article the first time. What most stayed with him was that “human detail,” as the owner of Mis Errores would have put it. An old cop who goes out in slippers to meet death. Rose asked himself if Cleve had known, or at least suspected, that his little kitten was a cold-blooded murderer. Because at the least, the victim should have been afforded the dignity of being dressed properly and wearing a pair of shoes. That human detail. Not to mention the spine-chilling gesture of gift-wrapping the murder weapon for the victim on the very day of his birthday. What kind of a monster was this María Paz?

“My, my, your Colombian was a deranged knife-wielder. What did you get into, boy? Who were you dealing with?” Rose asked the memory of his son, before going back to Googling the Blackhawk Garra II knives, like the one they had found gift-wrapped in María Paz’s house. As always, Googling revealed something, and according to the pictures in a catalog, it was a loathsome thing with a curved blade, a folding knife that was shaped like a claw as its name indicated, a claw to claw, a nail that pricks and penetrates. Made of black steel, the disgusting thing, sharpened so fine it was almost blue, with dips in the handle for the perfect grip, was a sadistic little toy that in the blink of an eye must have sliced through the cop’s flesh, as if through butter.

It was quite conceivable how a pretty girl would have grown bored of her old husband, how she’d have used him to make her situation legal and grown to hate the price she had to pay for it, such as the need for Viagra and other such limitations. Up to that point, there was a certain logic to the whole thing. But to go from that to knifing him when he was in his slippers? To get together with her friends, dark-skinned and young like her, salsa dancers all, to stab the fat husband to death with a Blackhawk Garra II? Rose began to feel uneasy in his own room, that friendly cavern in which he sought refuge since Edith had abandoned him, and where he wasn’t always disappointed, if the truth be told, because sleeping alone had its advantages. He was the kind of person who snored, hacked, and farted at night; and it was much easier to do it without anyone else there. But that night, not even his bedroom could bring him peace of mind, and he fell asleep troubled by that sinister story of a cop massacred by his own wife; he was distressed by the horror that his son, Cleve, could have had anything to do with that, even if indirectly.

He awoke at midnight thinking that Emperatriz, the Dominican cleaning lady, could hate him the way that Colombian woman had hated her ex-husband, the white ex-cop, that Emperatriz was friendly and helpful only to his face, that she brought him his slippers hiding nefarious intentions, that behind his back she muttered all the reasons for her contempt, that white man who treated her as a slave for a fistful of dollars, or something like that. And then a graver doubt struck him. Had Edith been right, all that time ago, to flee with the child from Bogotá? Had all the servants there hated them, the little white rich folks for whom they had to drive the car and mop the floor and go to the market and cook and clean the bathrooms and make flower arrangements? Had Rose and his family provoked in them a hidden anger, a shameful urge for violence, just as Edith had suspected? One thing was certain, guerrillas had infiltrated the group of workers in his company, and they were more than willing to kidnap the first gringo boss who got careless. It had not been easy for the Roses to live with that sword of Damocles hanging over them, and that is why Ian had not tried to dissuade Edith when she announced that she had had enough. And now, so many years later, in the Catskills Mountains around two in the morning, amid the sleeplessness and the jumble of sheets, the Latino conspiracy was growing at an exponential rate in Rose’s feverish brain. María Paz, Emperatriz, and the servants from Bogotá conspired with workers and guerrillas to attack the Anglos, whom they planned to assault and stab to death as soon as they were careless and put on their slippers or whenever they fell asleep.

There was no defending oneself, Western civilization was being overcome by the whole of the Sur, the volatile and backward Sur, the wild and awful Sur, with its thousands of gringo haters who were rising in hordes following María Paz and Emperatriz, the leaders of the great invasion that surged up from Panama, crossed Nicaragua, grew into a tsunami in Guatemala and Mexico, and the Sur was unstoppable as it poured through the holes in the vulnerable American border. The North was already flooded by the black tide of the Sur; it was within, cleaning its houses, serving food in restaurants, filling cars with gasoline, harvesting pumpkins in Virginia and strawberries in Michigan, day after day repeating “have a nice day” with a terrible accent and a sly smile… hiding Blackhawk Garra IIs in their pockets, envious of the gringos’ democratic systems and ready to seize their property. The good guys, who had already lost Texas, California, and Florida, now would lose Arizona and Colorado. New Mexico and Nevada were already strongholds of the enemy, and one by one, the other states would fall into the hands of the bad guys. Unless, of course, Ian Rose managed to react and hold back the onslaught of this anxiety crisis. That’s what the doctor had told him he was going through, an anxiety crisis that had its origins in the death of his son, and to control it, he was prescribed Effexor XR, which Rose didn’t like because it made him dopey and because he held on to the hope that with time things would get better on their own.

I’m so hot, he thought, as he changed his pajamas drenched in sweat. He needed to calm down, find his point of balance again. Best if he left the bedroom, the scene of his nightmare, and went into the kitchen, which was always cooler, with bare feet on the cold tiles, open some windows, refill the dogs’ water dishes, have a nice glass of apple juice with lots of ice. By the time he went back to bed, he was afraid to fall asleep lest the hallucinations begin again, so he put on the television and for the thousandth time watched An American in Paris with Gene Kelly. He fought sleep for another reason as well: he feared that if he fell asleep he’d return to Manninpox, that place that he despised but that was beginning to ensnare him as it had ensnared Cleve. Awake, he could escape its influence, but if he fell asleep, who knows? He’d run the risk of being transported there, as if sleepwalking through the woods, hypnotized, betrayed by his own steps that led toward those porous walls and forced him through them against his will, past the secluded courtyards and through the gloomy hallways that smelled like the circus, a bad combination of urine and disinfectant, as his until recently loyal Taylor & Son boots, in a sudden display of insolence, led him to the very entrails of the place, to its feverish heart, the tight rows of cells, where the feminine breath stuck to the walls like water stains, and where the pride of caged lionesses would be waiting for him, him, Ian Rose, to lick his face and destroy it with one blow. In spite of the apple juice, the nightmares continued, and Rose had no choice but to take the Effexor he had avoided taking that day. He began dozing off around dawn and was sound asleep halfway through Some Like It Hot, another movie he knew by heart. In the end, he did not know how he had been able to defend himself, or what masthead he had held onto to withstand the siren songs of the inmates of Manninpox; but as it was, he awoke late that morning safe in his own bed, or rather he was awakened by the hounding of his dogs, who did not understand why at that hour of the day they had not gone out or been fed breakfast.

Later, while taking a shower, Rose got an idea. Although “idea” isn’t exactly the word, more like the flash of an image that assaulted him along with renewed uneasiness about his years in South America, the solitary figure of a man nailed to a cross. That was it: he knew it immediately. The murder of the policeman had not been a hate crime as the press had asserted. That phrase “racist pig” could have well been on the wall before the murder; such graffiti was likely common in a multiracial and troubled neighborhood like the one in which María Paz lived. It was no wonder the neighbors had been complaining. But the thing with the ex-cop was about something else. It had been a crucifixion without a cross. The wounds on the body were the same as the ones on the crucified Jesus, one on each hand, one on each foot, and one on the side of the torso. Rose knew what the stigmata was because he had learned about it in Bogotá. Rose wasn’t a religious man and had never been interested in such things, but the issue had become a priority the moment that his son, Cleve, then seven years old and likely because of the influence of school lessons in Bogotá, announced that he wasn’t only going to become a Catholic but also a priest. Edith was horrified, one more reason for her to hate Bogotá. But Ian had taken it as a joke. “Do it if you want, son,” he had told Cleve. “It’s your choice. You can be a Catholic if that’s what you want, as long as you don’t become pope.” But when the boy began to swear that he saw the Sacred Heart of Jesus in the bark of trees, Ian Rose realized that the issue was serious and decided to look into it seriously. The Christ that he came to know in the Baroque churches of the colonial center of Bogotá had nothing to do with the fair and incorporeal bourgeois of his Protestant family. This South American Christ was a man of the people, a working-class hero who attracted crowds with his melodramatic confrontations, a poor man who suffered and bled with them, a Lord of the Wounds, a Master of Sorrow, who fascinated crowds with his masochistic displays. Rose grew frightened that his son had been influenced by such mentality, which according to him was extremely twisted, and that was another reason that he did not prevent Edith from taking the child out of Colombia. And now, there in the shower of his house in the Catskills, Ian Rose thought he understood all of a sudden that Greg, the ex-cop, had been murdered by crucifixion, or something like it. The crime had been a ritual murder, that was the essence of it, and not a hate crime as the papers asserted. Why should Rose believe the newspapers anyway? Since when did they know anything? María Paz offered a different version of events, so in a towel and still soaking wet, Rose went to his desk, took out the manuscript, and reread that part a few times. She maintained she was innocent, and her argument was quite convincing. But if that was the case, who the hell had crucified her husband? A gang of wrathful white haters, as the NY Daily News assumed, or some religious fanatics? And what about that gift-wrapped Blackhawk they found in her apartment?

From Cleve’s Notebook

Paz — that’s what María Paz wants to be called. Paz. “Mi Paz,” I wrote the other day. I don’t know why I used the possessive when referring to her, given she’s her own person and no one else’s. “Mi paz os dejo, mi paz os doy,” recited the Colombian priest, and I thought he was saying, “Mis pasos dejo, mis pasos doy,” confusing “peace” with “steps,” but so I repeated at the top of my voice along with the others, feeling as Catholic as any of them. And then there was a very meaningful liturgical chant that was my favorite, dealing with the anxiety of souls, and that in its high notes exclaimed, “Yo tengo sed ardiente, yo tengo sed de Dios.” And the neo-Catholic I was becoming, a zealot like any convert, sang, “Yo tengo seda ardiente.” So I had burning silk instead of a burning thirst, that’s what it sounded like to me, and that’s how I repeated it, kneeling with my eyes closed, racked with emotion, in a complete mystical state, so much so that one day I confronted my parents, who are Protestants, I think, I’m not sure, maybe they’re nothing, but in any case I told them I personally would be a full-fledged Catholic. My mother grew very concerned, but my father simply laughed. And although I never became a Catholic — or, for that matter, a Protestant — I’m still somewhat possessed by the burning thirst and I struggle against the universal tendency to replace the gods of Olympus with the stars of Hollywood. A bad habit, that tendency to demystify. A bad habit for me, I mean, who is a novelist and convinced that the heart of any good novel is nothing more than a camouflaged ritual whose only great concern is forgiveness or condemnation. And all you have to do is dig a little to find the victim and victimizer, the crucified and the crucifier. I also think that its central theme, however varied it may be, always deals more or less with the same thing: guilt and expiation. Just ask Fyodor.

Interview with Ian Rose

Once he was a bit more calm, Ian Rose decided that the only option to overcoming his torment of doubts and shooing away the ghosts was to screw his courage to the sticking place, deal with the irreversible fact of his son’s death, and begin to investigate the not very clear circumstances surrounding it. I’m going to go crazy if I don’t do it, he thought, and they’ll put me in an asylum — and who’ll take care of the dogs then? That’s why at eight o’clock in the morning the following Wednesday, he was ordering orange juice, a cappuccino, pancakes with maple syrup, and fried eggs with sausage at the Lyric Diner, Cleve’s favorite breakfast spot in New York, a fifties-style bar and grill on Third Avenue and Twenty-Second Street.

“You’ll see, Pa,” Cleve had assured him the first time he took him there. “Here they only take six minutes to serve all the bad cholesterol you want.”

It was true: service did not take a second longer, six minutes exactly to bring everything to the table. Cleve timed them to show his father, and on top of that they were as efficient as they were sullen, something Ian Rose appreciated, because he disliked nothing more than that self-interested, syrupy kindness prevalent throughout the city. But not at the Lyric; there no one greeted you with a phony smile or said good-bye with a gelid “have a nice day.” The boys of the Lyric screamed from your table to the kitchen: “Blind eyes!” for poached eggs, “Drop them!” for eggs over easy, or “Shatter them!” for scrambled.

This time Rose was alone and not very hungry, so he only ate a quarter of the mountain of food they brought him, then pushed his plates aside and brought out pen and paper to make notes about what he’d have to ask Pro Bono, María Paz’s attorney, in a few hours. Right away he felt as if the rude wait staff of the Lyric were sending disproving glances his way, not happy that he had turned the table into a desk. Because just as speedily as they served you, they rushed you out, with the last bite still in your mouth, so the next diner could be accommodated. Rose gathered his belongings without having written anything, because aside from the obvious he really didn’t know what to ask the lawyer; and besides, how much could he ask in ten minutes, which is what he had been granted for the meeting, not a lot of time, enough for a hello and good-bye and that’s it. After leaving the Lyric, he walked to the Strand, where they often had Cleve’s graphic novels, and he went in to see if they had any. He found a bunch of them in a remote corner of the store, marked down from $12.00 to $3.50, and he felt a stab in his chest. He put them all in his cart and walked to the cashier. There were fifteen of them and he was going to buy them all. He’d take them and keep them in the house because it had pained him to see them so marked down, almost given away. He felt it was an unmerited degradation, a premature push toward oblivion.

“Excellent!” the cashier told Rose when he saw all the copies of the same book. He was young and slight as a tadpole, with a red-and-black hankie tied around his neck and a small dragon tattooed on his arm. “I see you too are a fan of the Suicide Poet…”

“Are you?” Rose murmured, and his eyes watered.

“Of course. Bedside reading! And believe me, I’m not the only one. They’re going to be disappointed when they see we’re out of copies.”

“Then I’ll take only two,” Rose said. “Keep the rest; I don’t want to be a hog.”

He walked up Broadway with the two books under his arm and headed to Union Square, where he got on the subway that would take him to the lawyer’s office in Brooklyn Heights. In María Paz’s manuscript the man’s first and last name had been mentioned, although here he appears only by his pseudonym, Pro Bono, because as far as I can tell, everyone in this story has something to hide and I’d rather not reveal their true names. María Paz alluded to the fact that her defense attorney was retired, and judging by the fascination bordering on love with which she referred to him, at first Ian Rose had imagined the lawyer to be the old legalistic type with Don Juan airs, with a toupee to hide his baldness, a pair of shiny black shoes à la Fred Astaire, and strong men’s cologne to hide the acrid smell of old age.

“Not even close, Mr. Rose,” Ming, Cleve’s editor and friend, who had done Ian Rose the favor of setting up the meeting, had corrected him. “This lawyer is famous. World famous even. He’s not some schmuck.”

Ming, who had known about Pro Bono before all of this, had added to his knowledge by digging a little deeper here and there. Through Ming, Rose found out that in his glory days, Pro Bono had been the Sardinian heavyweight in global litigation over water rights, acting as defender of local communities against the multinational corporations that sought to commercialize natural resources. He had successfully blocked several multimillion mega-projects to privatize water supplies in places such as Bolivia, Australia, and Pakistan, and also at home, in California and Ohio. And it hadn’t been a little quarrel: Pro Bono had made a specialty of kicking some serious thugs in the ass, so much so that once, in Cochabamba, Bolivia, there had been an attempt on his life for going around as a spokesperson of a huge mobilization of indigenous women who would not let the water be taken from their ancient wells because the multinational banks felt like privatizing them as a condition of debt renegotiations.

“Well, well,” Rose said to Ming, “so I’m going to meet with the champion of the world’s hungry.”

As might be expected, not everything about the lawyer had been altruistic, because the fights he had won had also brought him significant wealth. So he had retired at seventy-five; tired of his philanthropic adventures and his pockets full, and facing a life of rose gardening, he had opted to take on lesser cases pro bono, that is, to defend people such as María Paz, who could not afford a private attorney, for nothing.

“That’s your man,” Ming said. “Unmistakable, as you will see, because of his physical appearance.”

“Why?”

“A little issue. Well, a particularity, but rather obvious.”

“Is he blind? Because he deserves a medal of merit if on top of everything he’s blind.”

“No, not that.”

“Deaf-mute? Lame? Cleft lip?”

“Hunchback.”

Hunchback. The word itself was taboo and therefore unmentionable. An only child, pampered and protected by his parents, Pro Bono himself had not been aware of the implications of his deformity until he was six, when he started school and others began to point at him. But even at that age he showed resources with which to defend himself. One day, he grew sick of another kid who pushed him to the end of his rope calling him a camel.

“Don’t call me a camel, you moron, don’t you know a camel has two humps, not one?” Pro Bono screamed at him, pushing him to the ground.

The fact that he was intelligent and came from a traditional rich East Coast family shielded him against any complex he may have developed about being lesser than. As a teenager, the fact that his defect was taboo became a motivation to openly flaunt it. He never avoided looking at himself in the mirror; on the contrary, he stood before a double mirror to make his peace with that strange, almost mythological body that had been his lot. He repeated the word “hunchback” to himself until owning it and knowing it was human, and also all the degrading insults — hunchbacked, camel, retard, hunchy, dromedary, humpbacked, humpy — and in removing their thorns, he neutralized the degradation they carried. He also repeated the euphemisms that were meant to sidestep his true condition — invalid, special, disabled — because he knew that if anything could harm him more than the deformity itself it was the misleading silence and the pious metaphors. Through books, he had developed a certain pride in the uniqueness of being a part of the family that included Victor Hugo’s hunchback Quasimodo, Hawthorne’s Aminadab, and Dickens’s Daniel Quilp. He was pleased that Homer had singled out Tiresias, endowing him with a hump, as did Shakespeare with Caliban from The Tempest and with Richard III. Literature had wanted to present all of these first cousins, his brothers, as hunchbacked and deviant, making their physical condition a manifestation of their spiritual defects. But this wasn’t the case. Pro Bono knew them very well and saw them otherwise, feeling affection for all of them, understanding their motivations, and from the time he was an adolescent he had set his mind to come to their defense and those of their like, clearing their names, making it evident once and for all that a hunchback need not be one of the miserable ones.

For María Paz, who didn’t yet have a defense attorney, Pro Bono’s physical appearance hadn’t been a big deal. Not having a defense attorney under the critical circumstances in which she found herself was like going to war without an army or arms, not knowing who her enemy was, or what she was accused of, and worse yet, not quite knowing exactly what she had become involved in. Caught up in the hubbub of the courtroom’s waiting room, María Paz hadn’t even heard her name when they called her over the loudspeaker to appear at the bench, and she was alerted only because another detainee, who had heard it, ran over to her to tell her it was her turn. Once before the judge, she could not understand what they were asking her; in her head the words sounded hollow, as if all her English had been forgotten in one swoop, and she answered whatever came into her head. Her nerves were killing her; she mumbled, contradicted herself. And slowly dug a deeper and deeper hole, incriminating herself until there was no way out. And just at that moment, as if fallen from the sky, Pro Bono, the renowned veteran attorney, an expert in the arts and tricks of the trade, appeared and took over the messy case that seemed lost from the start: the Colombian woman accused of seducing and then murdering the American ex-cop.

“Take it easy, baby, I’ll take care of you” was the first thing Pro Bono had told María Paz that day, putting his arm around her and giving her a brief squeeze on the shoulder, just long enough so that she felt the warmth of another human being; she took that spontaneous gesture as a blessing, letting her know that she wasn’t alone. Amid the noise and confusion of the courtroom, those few words, the words everyone wants to hear in the middle of one’s troubles, miraculously reached her ears: “I’ll take care of you.” A generous and powerful offer, especially under these circumstances, coming from a stranger who was asking for nothing in return, a man of odd appearance but decidedly respectable, very elegant in his own peculiar way, someone who smelled clean and refined amid the thick stench of chaos. He was one of those skinny men with big bones and an angular face, an old-fashioned aristocrat with traces of vices long abandoned and a certain attractiveness battered by the years, and enormous, intense yellow-hazel eyes like a heron. A hunchback, yes, that too, an old gentleman bent over by the burden of his hunch, an individual painfully reduced in stature. But what María Paz noticed on that first meeting was that he came to her aid like a gentleman, conveying a sense of calm and self-confidence that inspired in her a rare sensation of relief, as if suddenly the weight that she also bore on her back was lifted.

Ian Rose had wanted to make it to Pro Bono’s on time, so as not to waste any part of his quota of minutes, and at 12:20 p.m. he was seated on a fine Chippendale chair upholstered in bottle-green velour in the middle of a waiting room of the office that took up a whole floor of a flawlessly remodeled Brooklyn Heights doorman building. The office had been furnished with heavy mahogany furniture, Persian rugs on the parquet floor, a vase of fresh roses at the entrance, and a ruling equestrian motif, evident in ashtrays, curtains, pillows, and various other objects. It was one of those places made up to appear British and that seemed to smell of wood and leather, but in reality didn’t smell of anything. More aptly, it was an old-school den of scheming lawyers through and through, with over sixty years of experience litigating criminal cases in New York and other cities around the world, very high profile, “assertive and aggressive,” known for its ethical and professional conduct, with a confirmed reputation for knowing the law backward and forward, fully understanding the penal system, and promising little but delivering much. The firm was known by three names, the first of which was Pro Bono, the principal and oldest partner. Although he had retired, his younger partners were still making use of his prestigious name and had allowed him to continue to use his old office, the most spacious one and the only one with a full view of the Brooklyn Bridge. Ming had told Rose that Pro Bono had an apartment in the same building on the lower floor, where he stayed when it got too late to drive back to his house in Greenwich, Connecticut, where he lived with his wife. It’s really something, Rose thought, that there are people like that.

While he waited, Rose began to read one of the copies of The Suicide Poet and His Girlfriend Dorita. Damn, my boy was talented, he thought, and once more big tears welled up in his eyes that he quickly dried with the sleeve of his coat.

“I’ve become an old crybaby, Cleve,” he said aloud, but he was alone in the waiting room and no one heard him.

He waited for twenty minutes, twice as long as he had been promised for the meeting, and he imagined that this lawyer must be a phony, who would’ve thought? As if Rose didn’t know that he was retired with nothing to do but cross his arms and sit on his ass in the office.

“I’m Ian Rose,” he introduced himself when he finally met the man.

“I know, Mr. Rose,” Pro Bono replied, impressing on his words a certain tone that Rose didn’t quite get. “You’ve come to see me about María Paz, the Colombian girl. Look, my friend, don’t waste your time with this. She’s fine. As fine as can be, if you get my drift; and in any case there’s not much you can do for her.”

“I just want to know if it’s true that she killed her husband,” Rose asked.

“I’m sorry,” Pro Bono said, but Rose sensed that he wasn’t. “But I can’t divulge that information.”

Apparently, the charm of that lawyer who had been so kind to María Paz would not be on display for Rose. Ming had warned him that it was very likely that the lawyer would not be willing to break attorney-client confidentiality for a stranger. That was understandable, but there was an aggressive streak about him that Rose couldn’t quite figure out.

“If that’s all, Mr. Rose, let me show you out,” Pro Bono said, gesturing toward the door.

“You promised me ten minutes, sir, and not even two have passed.”

“You’re right. We can just remain in silence for the other eight minutes. Or talk about the weather. You choose.”

It seemed that this would be it. For Rose, a failure, a waste of time, in some ways an insult. The silence was tense and the air heavy. Pro Bono stood by the window, and facing the light he checked the Cartier Panthere on his wrist for the minutes left that would put an end to this impasse. Rose commanded himself to come up with something, but his mind remained blank. He had thought he’d get some solace from the lawyer, or at least some direction for his investigation, but instead he had been treated like a nuisance. Who was this Pro Bono after all, and what role did he play in the story? He may well have been a champion for the hungry of the world, but something was rotten in Denmark. Rose could not understand at all why he was being kicked out. María Paz said such flattering things about him and showed him so much respect and gratitude that Rose began to suspect that something had happened between them, something outside of the attorney-client relationship. Something in her tone alluded to the type of intimacy that those who have shared a bed cannot hide. Is that what it was then? A tussle in the sheets? Maybe that’s what it came to. But on seeing the hunchback’s figure silhouetted by the window and then taking into account that the difference in age between this guy and his client must be enormous, Rose wondered if the secret they shared wasn’t about a sexual tryst at all, but was a secret nonetheless. He decided that Pro Bono looked honorable enough not to be sneaking quickies behind the guards’ backs. But there was something between those two, perhaps some intrigue more subtle than sex, although he knew anything was possible. It was likely that María had been won over by the attorney’s masculine vibes, with his fine wardrobe, and the keys to the Ferrari or Aston Martin that he had parked outside, but more than anything by the dignified solemnity that the protuberance on his back lent him.

As the clock wound down, Rose was able to gather himself enough to play one last card. If this guy has secrets, he thought, he’s not going to want them revealed. So he mentioned that he had María Paz’s manuscript of confessions about her life.

“You are in it,” Rose asserted, thinking it would be taken either as flattery or as a threat.

“What?”

“Her manuscript. Very long and detailed. And you’re mentioned in it. A few times. I have it here.”

“May I see it?”

“Only if you tell me what she was accused of.”

Pro Bono sighed, took a couple of sips of coffee, of which he had not offered Rose any, and made a gesture like a rabbit, wrinkling his nose and showing his teeth before responding.

“Alright, Mr. Rose. You win. What you’ll hear is off the record,” he warned, after he had the manuscript in hand and had browsed through it quickly. “I’m going to tell you what happened only once. Don’t ask me to elaborate upon or repeat anything. If you are not familiar with the legal terms that I use, don’t bother asking me about them because I won’t explain them. Understand as best you can and commit it to memory, because I will not allow you to record this or take notes. Is this understood?”

Bingo! Rose congratulated himself. Pro Bono had taken the bait.

Rose was indeed unfamiliar with many of the legal terms, so much of the lawyer’s yarn went over his head, but he nevertheless felt that he got a clear sense of the big picture. María Paz, an illegal, undocumented Colombian immigrant, marries Greg, a white American ex-cop, thereby acquires US permanent residency and employment rights. Behind her back, the guy is involved in dealing arms, complicit with other officers and ex-officers. In reality, this Greg is just a link in what little by little becomes clear is a huge net of arms trafficking within the police department. On the night of his birthday, Greg walks out of his house and is shot and stabbed to death. The knife, one of the murder weapons apparently, is found in the couple’s apartment and the Colombian wife is arrested, questioned, and beaten by FBI agents, who ignore due process and human rights guidelines and keep her locked up for a few days, without reading her her rights, contacting the Colombian consulate, or providing her with an interpreter. And they don’t allow her to contact a lawyer or her family. They literally disappear her as they question and torture her. And then they officially charge her with the murder of her husband. At first, they assume that the motive was racially motivated, and afterward they claim it was a crime of passion. Pro Bono calls four of the neighbors to take the stand and testify to having seen the murderers — three tall men, all of them African-American — commit the crime. He thus invalidates the prosecution’s version, according to which the ex-cop was killed by the short Latino woman. But there is the issue of the knife found in the apartment, and this becomes the showpiece and central evidence for the prosecution. But it is a flimsy piece of evidence. On the one hand, there are no fingerprints on it, or even blood, as if it had been meticulously cleaned, and the card accompanying it says, “To Greg from your brother Joe.” It doesn’t incriminate María Paz directly. On the other hand, it’s not the murder weapon. The stabs are not deep and they were inflicted after the bullets had killed the victim instantaneously. So the knife goes from being the main piece of evidence in the entire investigation to being relegated to the background.

“It happens quite often,” Pro Bono told Rose, “that when some proof is offered, everyone gets all excited, but it’s soon disallowed and forgotten because it leads nowhere.”

Thanks to the testimony of the neighbors, the Colombian woman is declared innocent of first-degree murder. Although the authorities succeed in preventing the revelation of internal corruption and arms trafficking within the police department for a while, it is eventually revealed, and Pro Bono cannot prevent María Paz from being found guilty of complicity, although there is not a whole lot of evidence for it, except for answering the phone in the apartment and that sort of thing. They also charge her for past crimes such as forging work permits. Once the trial is over, she returns to jail. Pro Bono then asks the judge to redo the entire proceedings to honor the fundamental rights of the defendant for a competent and fair defense. In other words, Pro Bono asks the judge to declare a mistrial and begin the whole thing again from square one. The judge agrees; he has no choice given that it is difficult to imagine more crooked methods than the ones used on this woman. So the whole thing is a do-over. There’s hope again for María Paz. But until the new trial, she must remain in prison.

“So she didn’t kill her husband,” Rose said, trying hard to take in everything the lawyer told him.

“She’s a beautiful woman. Admirable also, in a way. And no, I don’t think that she killed anyone.”

“Who did it then?”

“No one knows.”

“The murdered man’s brother?”

“He’s white, like the dead man. He was cleared right away.”

“But what about the knife?”

“Again with the knife.”

“Then it wasn’t a crime of passion?”

“You think what you want and keep those thoughts to yourself.”

“A crime related to the arms trafficking?”

“It could be, but they wanted to make it out to be a hate crime, at first, and then a crime of passion. To cover up things, my friend. They’d have done anything to cover it up. The police would rather no one knows how much they’re drowning in shit.”

“And she’s still in Manninpox?”

“You should know.”

“Me? Why would I know?”

“You messing with me?”

“I’m just asking.”

“No, she’s not in Manninpox.”

“They let her out?”

“Didn’t say that.”

“They transferred her to another prison?”

“Look, my friend, I’m guessing you already know the answer to all these questions, and if you don’t know, go figure it out,” Pro Bono said, glancing at his Cartier Panthere to signal that the time had long run out.

“It was a crucifixion,” Rose managed to say, “a crucifixion without a cross. The husband was crucified.”

“What makes you think such nonsense?”

“A wound on each hand, one on each foot, and one on the side. The five wounds of Christ…”

“The thing with the knife was just some grisly detail meant to distract.”

“I think it was just the opposite, it was a very important detail. Did the witnesses not see this? The stabbings I’m talking about, did they see that?”

“It was four members of the same family. They come out of the building just at that time, see the murder, and go back in; they’re not going to stay there like idiots so that the murderers do them in as well. They call the police from their apartment, which doesn’t face the street but a courtyard in the back, and for obvious reasons do not poke their noses out again. They don’t see anything that happens afterward. Is that good enough? A pleasure to meet you then,” Pro Bono said, ending the meeting.

“Remember, I still have the original,” Rose told him, not knowing where he got the gall at the last minute to continue to put pressure on the lawyer, fanning himself with a manila envelope that contained an identical manuscript to the one Pro Bono had in his hands.

“Are you blackmailing me?” Pro Bono asked, a flash of rage in his eyes.

“Let’s say I’m asking you a favor. I just want to know where she is.”

“Very well, you win again,” Pro Bono said. “Look for her at the Olcott Hotel, 27 West 72nd Street.”

Rose jotted down the information and was on his way out, muttering his thanks, when he heard a burst of Pro Bono’s laughter behind him.

“The Olcott Hotel isn’t there anymore,” he yelled. “It shut down years ago. Go, look for her there; see if you find her.”

From Cleve’s Notebook

Paz says that her work is what she most misses from her life before Manninpox. She worked taking surveys about people’s cleaning habits, and the stories she tells are very interesting, and in the end they’re about a social, ethical, and aesthetic hierarchy of the world according to the standards of cleanliness and dirt. I have been pushing her to write about work, about the kind of people she met, but she’s hesitant. At first she completely refused, saying this wasn’t a good topic. I asked her which topic was a good topic, and she said love was, that any novel that wasn’t a love story was boring. That’s what she told me, and in the end she’s probably right. In any case, little by little I’ve gotten her to write about her work. And I see how she’s transformed when she does it. It’s as if the whole human being that she once was, before she was chewed up by authority and justice, rises to the surface. For a time she was taking surveys on Staten Island, and the other day she told this horrific story in class that made us laugh nonetheless. She said she had been knocking on doors in West New Brighton, one of the most foul-smelling neighborhoods on the island because it is right next to what used to be the Fresh Kills Landfill.

Fresh Kills was not only the largest landfill in the history of mankind — it was also the cyclopean monument that outdid all of them, more massive than the Great Wall of China and taller than the Statue of Liberty. This feat was accomplished by dumping thirteen thousand tons of daily garbage on the site for half a century. There is a grisly symbolism that humankind’s most expansive handiwork was this immeasurable mountain of filth, which in the end remains as our American trademark, as a seal that legitimizes our ownership over this entire section of the planet, because the great paradox is that the more we soil things the more we own, and the more we own the more we soil things, and as Michel Serres says, that which is clean belongs to no one. Take an empty hotel room between guests, all cleaned up and disinfected by housekeeping and that will only become Mr. Doe’s Room 1503, or Mrs. Smith’s Room 711, when Doe and Smith leave the mark of their sweat on the bedsheets, the fungi from their feet on the bathtub, their hair in the drain, their cigarette butts in the ashtrays, the packaging and receipts from their purchases in the garbage can, and their drool on the pillowcases. Because that’s the way it is, we only own what we soil, and what is clean belongs to no one. Pushing this logic to its extreme, one can conclude that a great portion of the earth, sky, and water we call America is buried to the hilt with our garbage, our shit, our smells, and waste. That’s why it is ours, more so than because of land titles, and invasions, and aggressive defenses or the actions of border guards. Here we have deposited the filth that generation after generation has come out of or passed through our bodies; I’m referring to industrial amounts of semen, rivers of blood, tons of used Kotex and tissues and condoms, discarded diapers, obsolete televisions and computers, paper napkins, old cars, plastic bags, and rolls of toilet paper. And, above all, shit. I get dizzy thinking of the inconceivable amount of shit, because just as tigers and dogs mark their territory with their urine, so we have conquered an entire country through shit. With garbage and shit. It is not just us, of course; all the other people in the world do the same, but none of them at our level of magnificence and abundance. Our dead are buried in this earth on whose surface there hardens in geological layers the mountain ranges of crap that our civilization has left behind. Ergo, this land is ours. My reasoning has just proved it. Then there is the name, Fresh Kills. That mega garbage dump was called just that, Fresh Kills, because before it was a landfill it must have been a slaughterhouse, that is, a place bathed in and impregnated by the blood of thousands of animals sacrificed for mankind. Like any ancient sanctuary, from the Temple of Jerusalem to the pyramids of Teotihuacan, dyed crimson and stinking of blood. All of which shows — and what a discovery — that for all intents and purposes, inherently, Fresh Kills must have been a sacred spot, sanctified by sacrificial blood, and on that sacred land we built our temple, our huge dump, an ultimate cathedral of garbage, the tallest and widest by any measure that mankind has built upon the earth, a Notre Dame of filth, a Sagrada Família of waste. And there’s T. S. Eliot, of course, with his most apt quote: “What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow / Out of this stony rubbish?”

Side note: Yesterday I decided to try out my theory about Fresh Kills on my father, and he tore it to pieces. According to him, Kills doesn’t have anything to do with slaughtering; he says the term comes from the Dutch occupation of NYC and it simply means water or stream. Fresh water or something like that. Too bad, my version made more sense.

Interview with Ian Rose

Upon leaving Pro Bono’s office, Rose decided to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge to Manhattan instead of taking the subway. Very nice, the whole thing. A splendid view, impressive feat of engineering, gentle sunlight, and pretty girls who jogged past him and made it difficult for him to concentrate. “Look, Cleve,” he said, “look at all the lovely girls, and all about your age.” The warm breeze and the bright day partly mitigated the bad taste left by the hostile encounter, and, replaying it, Rose realized that the most difficult thing had not been to put up with the irritability or lack of understanding from the guy — after all, he had been able to draw out a good part of the information he needed. The hardest thing had been finding out María Paz was no longer in Manninpox. Up until that time he had not even considered going to visit her, at least not seriously, but the news made him feel as if he suddenly was losing her, that her trail was vanishing. In the manuscript, she had mentioned that despite everything it had been a relief to be taken into Manninpox with a number and a photograph, because it allowed her to exist anew on the face of the earth, have an identity once again, even as a prisoner, and a direction, even if in prison. Would leaving Manninpox then mean she was returning to the limbo of the disappeared? For Rose, losing her trail meant losing Cleve definitively.

He had a second appointment and the time was growing near. In the upper left-hand corner of the manila envelope from Mrs. Socorro Arias de Salmon was her address, 237 Castleton, Staten Island, NY 10031. Rose had sent her a brief note asking her if he could visit. A few days later, he received the response: Mrs. Salmon would receive him at her house. After the unpleasant experience with Pro Bono, Rose had to push himself to board the bright-orange Staten Island ferry on Whitehall Street in Lower Manhattan.

María Paz mentioned the landfill in her manuscript, recounting how she had been on Staten Island taking her surveys about cleaning habits. It was Mrs. Socorro Arias de Salmon who had agreed to introduce her to her neighbors, serving as a contact in the area, because someone who lived in the area and served as an introduction was priceless; otherwise, doors would be slammed in your face and it was impossible to accomplish anything.

Socorro’s home, built in the twenties, was made of weathered wood, with two stories and a gabled roof, a yellow canvas awning over the porch, and a small front garden with two bushes shaped like swans. Socorro, a short woman with a face hard to describe because it was so innocuous, wore a shiny beige polyester outfit with a white embroidered blouse. She reached out a small cold hand toward Rose, placing on a nearby table a can of floral room deodorizer she had just sprayed to try to hide the stench that still came from the Fresh Kills area. The inside was very clean, like a dollhouse that an industrious girl keeps neat and spotless, and it made Rose think about the contrast between the neatness inside, of the private, and the ubiquity of the former garbage dump, as if the opposing elements clean and dirty were just another expression of the tension between the public and the private.

“Did you see the Statue of Liberty?” she asked him.

Of course he had seen it, impossible not to, given that the ferry passed right in front of it. Huge, Miss Liberty, with her stiff tunic that was a green the color of time or a salt coating or whatever. Rose thought that one need not bother too much describing that color because there was probably no one in the world who had not seen it, whether in television or in postcards. Watching the profile of the huge monument as the ferry approached it, he found it sad and surreal amid the undulations of that slow-moving haze that surrounded it and at moments made it disappear. María Paz too, Rose imagined, had seen it, and maybe even visited it, buying souvenirs and perhaps paying the extra fee to go up to the crown. He asked himself what kind of symbols the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island and even the Twin Towers would have been for an immigrant who came to America only to end up being locked in a place such as Manninpox.

“Bolivia and I made an offering to Libita,” he heard Socorro say.

“I’m sorry, who?”

“Libita, that’s who, the Statue of Liberty; in my country we call women named Libertad Libita. Anyway, we made our offering to her during the first weeks of spring, tossing a pretty bouquet of Peruvian lilies into the water, because when it came down to it, Libita had treated us like daughters and opened the doors of America. But I never did it again after Bolivia and I grew apart; those things don’t make sense if you don’t share them with someone, depressing otherwise, don’t you think? That’s why you came to see me, right? To talk about Bolivia? That’s what I figured from the note you sent. Welcome to my home, Mr. Rose. Bolivia was a soul sister, my only sister, because I had no other. My family was all boys and one girl. Like sisters, yes sir, we were like sisters, Bolivia and I… till we grew apart, as things happen in life, what can you do? But come in, please, make yourself at home and sit in the living room. It’s a long story and you must be tired.”

“Well, the truth is that I came to talk to you about María Paz, Bolivia’s daughter…”

“Of course, María Paz… don’t tell me that they’re going to publish the book. I knew it! How exciting! I’m so glad I sent you all those pages. I had some reservations and that’s why I hesitated. The girl reveals things that are better left unknown. I imagined that Bolivia would turn over in her grave if she knew her family’s dirty laundry was being aired like that, especially in a book that everyone can read, because some of those bestsellers sell millions. Right? What if the girl hits that lottery? Who would have thought she could write? So they’re going to publish it? I’m so glad I finally decided to send it. She admired you very much. She said that your classes had opened her eyes, that you were marvelous not just as a teacher but as a writer.”

“Oh no, it wasn’t me she admired, it was my son, Cleve,” Rose managed to say. “Cleve died a few months ago. I’m his father. He was a writer, not me, and you sent the manuscript to him, but, well, it came to my house.”

“So you’re not the author of those famous novels?”

“Like I said, that was my son, Cleve, but he passed away.”

“Oh, I’m very sorry, I’ve never had children. Maybe it’s for the best. I could not have withstood the pain of seeing them die. I’m so sorry, please excuse me. But then you didn’t know María Paz?”

“My son is the one who met her, and unfortunately, I’m the one who is alive.”

“Those things happen, Mr. Rose, so sorry. But if you are here, it is because you intend to help her with the book. Or am I mistaken?”

“Not sure I can. I’m actually interested in—”

“Of course, of course,” Socorro said, “you have the right to think it over. How rude of me, you just told me your son died, and I hardly offered my condolences. You must be heartbroken, poor man. I know what the death of a loved one does to you. You should have seen how much I cried at Bolivia’s passing, may she rest in peace, and I’m not supposed to cry because my eyes get very swollen and red. Come, let me truly express my condolences, for a man to die so young. Don’t get me wrong, you’re young yourself, it’s just that…”

“Hold on one second, Mrs. Salmon, hold on. First tell me why you had the manuscript.”

“Because María Paz gave it to me, naturally. I visited her in jail once, with my husband’s approval, of course. He had warned me not to get involved in such things. So what if Bolivia’s oldest daughter wanted to live the life of an outlaw, that was her decision, this was a free country. But my husband insisted that I shouldn’t go sticking my nose into such things. Besides, as a foreigner, it didn’t make sense because they could nab me. ‘Who knows what could happen if they associate you with such scum?’ he grumbled. Anyway, she gave me the packet the one time I visited her; or I should say, they gave it to me on the way out, after closely inspecting it. I should also tell you that she was sad because she could no longer see you, Mr. Rose, she told me so outright, that she was very sad about it. Something had happened in the jail and they had suspended the classes.”

“Not my classes, my son’s, Cleve. I am Ian Rose.”

“Yes, of course, you’re not him, his father. I understand, and I’m very sorry. Please accept my full condolences. And the thing is that María Paz had written all the stuff in the manuscript to give to your son, who was her writing professor, but since she wasn’t ever going to see him again, she gave me the papers in an envelope asking me to send them to your son.”

“How long ago was this that she gave you the papers?”

“Oh, heavens, a few months ago, definitely a while, I’m not exactly sure how long… She urged me to get it to him as soon as possible. But you know, I had my doubts about passing off packages from a convict, because who knows what you’re getting into. Besides, what a filthy, dirty mouth that girl has, cursing on every page; she should be ashamed of herself. Fortunately, I overcame all that and finally did as she asked. I spent a good chunk of change on stamps, but what was really important about it from my end was my decision to send it in spite of everything. I hope she remembers me when money starts pouring in from the book.”

“Well,” Rose said, trying to correct her misconception, “it hasn’t been published yet, ma’am. I’m going to keep on trying, I know my son would have liked that, and of course she would too, but I still haven’t been able to do anything. I think that…”

“There’s no hurry, Mr. Rose. If it’s in your hands, things are as they should be. I sense you have a knack for these things,” Socorro said, winking. “My neighbor Odile has read every book in the world, probably your son’s also. I haven’t yet; I’m not a book person. But now that I have had the honor of meeting the father of the man in question, I’m definitely going to read them. I’m going to tell Odile to lend them to me. She probably has them because she buys every book, and as she herself says, if I haven’t read it, it hasn’t been written. And when you come back to this place you should consider your home, I’ll have them here for you so you can sign them. It doesn’t matter that you’re not the author, but the father of the author, which is also very important.”

“Cleve didn’t write books, ma’am, they’re graphic novels,” Rose said, but he went unheard.

“Oh, how exciting,” she continued. “I can imagine María Paz recovered from all her troubles and legal problems and signing books like a star. I’d see her picture under a headline that says, ‘From Convict to Successful Author.’ Too bad Bolivia isn’t here to see the triumph of her daughter. Who would have imagined it by looking at her, a writer, she who always seemed so lost?”

It was impossible to shut the woman up. Rose had thought of passing by her house for ten or fifteen minutes, just long enough to get a sense of Cleve’s activities before his death. But this pass-by on Staten Island threatened to go long, an eternal visit, because there was no holding back the tongue of this woman once let loose. And there was Rose, bound hands and feet, although even before he had been asked to come inside he had regretted making the visit. He began to feel ill. He felt as uneasy there as he had in Pro Bono’s office, even becoming nauseated, as if suddenly particles from the old landfill had gone down his throat. What the hell am I doing here, he asked himself, when all I want is to be home with the dogs? Then he answered his own question: I’m doing this for Cleve, or rather for me, to find out what happened to Cleve.

“Bolivia and I liked to watch as the waves took our Peruvian lilies and swallowed them,” Socorro continued. “They were simple flowers, nothing more. But the important part was the gesture, our way of expressing gratitude for being in this country.”

While she chattered away, Rose asked himself how old this woman could be. Sixty? A well-preserved seventy? She made him sit in one of the couches in the tiny living room, upholstered in white jacquard and covered in see-through vinyl, and explained with tears in her eyes that Bolivia had been the most industrious and motivated woman you could imagine, and that she had not deserved the fate that befell both her daughters, both of them so pretty, the image and likeness of her, the mother. Then she sang something softly in Spanish, taking both of Rose’s hands in her tiny cold ones with long red nails, because as Rose knew, Latinos like to touch, they touch other people, even those they don’t know, they hug them, they kiss them, because they’re not afraid of a stranger’s flesh. Socorro finally let go of his hands after a while, but Rose thought it excessive, because although he admired that nice custom of touching, he never really practiced it — let’s just say that he wasn’t a militant member of the group Free Hugs, those loving young men and women giving out hugs and human warmth on the streets to people who are not necessarily interested. And then Socorro asked him if he wanted a tinto, explaining that’s what they called coffee in her country, something he already knew.

“Bolivia’s two daughters, so beautiful and so unfortunate. The first one pursued by the law, the second one sick in the head,” Socorro said as she disappeared through the kitchen door to make the tinto, while Rose brought his hands to his nose to inhale the strong scent of the moisturizing cream that Socorro used on her hands.

He looked around, somewhat dazed by the countless pieces of porcelain, not one portion of a wall without a shelf and not one shelf that wasn’t packed with figurines, those nostalgic tributes to an unimaginable pastoral era: girls wearing wide-brimmed straw hats and holding geese in their arms; couples in love and gazing into each other’s eyes on park benches; tiny chocolate houses; barefoot shepherd boys, poor yet wholesome; shepherd girls, poor yet pretty, in wooden clogs. It was a strange sensation to be amid that porcelain world, but Rose grew accustomed to it, and before long he and his host were talking as if they had known each other for ages, two old women drinking tintico in their respective white jacquard chairs protected from grime by plastic.

“Parallel fates,” Socorro declared, “Bolivia’s and mine. But at the same time not so much, don’t believe it, Mr. Rose. More like crossed fates. You be the judge.”

Bolivia and Socorro had both been born in Colombia in the same town and in the same year. They went to the same grade school run by Salesian nuns and were friends from the very first. A bit later, Socorro’s family, which was better off, moved to the capital, and this left Bolivia trapped in her little provincial sinkhole. Socorro graduated from grade school and the family celebrated with a black-tie affair at the local social club.

“I had a silk shantung dress in the imperial style custom-made,” she said, “and my hair was put up in a loop bun, that was the style then, the loop bun, very big ones, and I complemented it with aquamarine earrings I was given for the occasion. By this point, Bolivia had decided to start working, you see, she had decided to forsake her studies before the third year of high school. She became a stylist, manicurist, and a beautician and was hired to work mornings at the D’Luxe Salon and during the afternoons as an assistant at a dress shop.”

But they spent the Christmas vacations together, like when they were girls, and they couldn’t wait to meet up in their old neighborhood and go to festivals or attend services, always sharing their dreams of one day leaving the country, looking for their destinies elsewhere. They’d fly off very far away. And their dream came true. They both ended up in New York, Socorro first and Bolivia seven years later. In New York, they soon reunited, didn’t even have to search each other out, because Socorro had already made herself a home in America, how could she not help the other, who was a sister recently arrived. She assured her: “Mi casa es tu casa, stay with me until you can get settled” and “This is the land of open paths, just walk the paths and all paths lead to Rome; it’s not about getting there, it’s about getting on the path.” She repeated these motivational maxims and others as she emptied three of her drawers and helped her unpack. Everything was fine up to that point, two friends who loved each other and a dream realized. But later the divergences began, the little misunderstandings in spite of their great partnership, and Socorro began carelessly unleashing other sayings such as “To each his own home” and even this other one, “Guests are like fish; they stink after three days.”

“I’m telling you step-by-step,” Socorro clarified, “so you understand. Bolivia had always been a beautiful woman, short but lively, with dreamy eyes and eyelashes like a doll, but not me so much, my beauty was more inside, like my husband said. You will judge on your own; I have never been a beauty. I’m what is known as a woman of intellect.”

And yet Socorro had married a man who was well off, or at least established. He was a plumber, did his work professionally, made good money, wanted to have a family, and immediately fell in love with the Colombian woman he met at Coney Island, on line for the Wonder Wheel, then the tallest Ferris wheel in the world. It happened that they shared the same coach — how frightened Socorro had grown with such heights, how she covered her eyes and screamed — and that was enough for him to know that this woman was destined to become his wife. On the second date, he brought her a leather-bound copy of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, which Socorro pulled out of a box to show Rose, proud of the dedication that said in green ink, “To Socorro who loves me so much,” and signed Marcus Clancy Salmon. Rose found the dedication strange, thinking that perhaps it should have said, “To Socorro, whom I love so much,” but Salmon had his own methods, and it was evident they worked for him, for on their third date, during a stroll in the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, by the Japanese pond, he triumphantly proposed marriage to Socorro, who delightedly accepted the two-carat diamond that would seal their union.

“He was Jamaican and I was Colombian, and God knows how we communicated because he didn’t speak Spanish and I didn’t understand his English. Maybe that’s why the whole thing worked; you know how it is,” Socorro winked again. “The language of caressing and spoiling is more beautiful than the one of reason and logic, am I not right?”

At that level of intimacy, Rose dared to ask her why Bolivia who was so pretty never married.

“She did try at least three times,” Socorro responded. “But she always ran away from it. Maybe her own beauty did her in. Look, I was always satisfied with my little Jamaican, always satisfied and proud to be Mrs. Salmon, although as you can tell it’s not the best last name, in English or Spanish, a fish. But Bolivia? Bolivia was always looking for something different, another thing, someone else. I was never able to understand the sense of dissatisfaction that made her chase illusions, whatever they may have been.”

And so went the story of those two destinies that at times met only to bifurcate again, Socorro happily married, and Bolivia not, although Bolivia had been a mother and Socorro had not.

“Bolivia had her two daughters,” Socorro said, “and I’m not going to deny that I envied her that, and in turn loved them as if they were mine, especially Violeta, the younger one. They’d come here to visit and that girl loved my porcelain collection, could spend hours looking at them, liked cleaning them with a wet rag, and I allowed it, as long as she was careful. Of course, she had her psychological issues, my girl Violeta, maybe bipolar, they’d say now, or anxiety-ridden, they didn’t know for sure; but she was a doll regardless, with that blondish hair and green eyes that lit the way like two lanterns. And really, it was just knowing how to deal with her, how to interact with her on her level. To calm her down, you know.

“On the other hand, with María Paz things have always been complicated. If the younger one was rebellious and difficult, the older one was worse. Let’s just say that she’s a temperamental girl and leave it there not to judge. My husband warned me from the beginning: ‘Watch that older daughter, she’s trouble, you’ll see, she’ll go from bad to worse, it’s a bad week coming if they hang you on Monday.’ Maybe it was just his paranoia, you know how we immigrants live in this country, so frightened to do something wrong, to behave improperly, to have the neighbors or the law come after us, that we panic when someone looks at us funny. Maybe it’s just a mental thing, up here, you know? An issue with the noggin. But we get psyched out anyway, can’t be helped. The lawn looks a little patchy and we think they can deport us for that. But, Mr. Rose, don’t judge my Marcus, he’s been good to me. Although he does impose certain conditions, and in that he is unequivocal and there’s no room for argument.”

Salmon had been pleased when María Paz decided to marry an American cop. He told Socorro that maybe the girl was rehabilitating herself and agreed to spend a large sum on the wedding present, a set of Czech glassware. When she went to jail, Salmon ordered that Bolivia’s oldest daughter could not set foot in their house again. “What if she’s not guilty?” Socorro had dared to ask. “She must have done something” was Salmon’s final answer.

“But tell me, when they were younger, did the girls ever live in this house in Staten Island?” Rose asked.

“No. It was a long time before Bolivia could send for her girls. And when they finally came, she was no longer living here. But they came to visit now and then, and sometimes would stay for the weekend, and we tried to spend Thanksgiving and Christmas together. You have to understand, Bolivia and I continued to be friends. But something invisible and sharp inside, like an icicle, had cooled what had been our sisterhood. And then later she died, and perhaps I haven’t behaved very well with the older daughter, I admit that. I just hope that Bolivia doesn’t hold it against me from the beyond.” Socorro glanced down in a gesture of confession, fixing her eyes on her leather sandals. “But don’t blame me entirely; you have to understand my husband’s convictions.”

“I imagine that this visit, the fact that I’m here, is something you are hiding from your husband,” Rose said.

“Well, you have come to revive phantoms that annoy my husband. I’m sorry, but it would not be good to shake the dust of certain events that put my marriage in jeopardy. Marcus is a man who does things by the book, and in spite of his generosity doesn’t forgive delinquency or bad conduct, or anything that is a threat to order and security, not to mention morality.”

“But you yourself admitted that it was possible María Paz wasn’t guilty.”

“But you try to explain it to Marcus, whose principles are unshakable. He’d never forgive me something like that.”

“Something like what?

Socorro began to trip over her words, said she regretted her lack of character, her submission to her husband, felt as if she had to justify her behavior to this stranger who had come to question her. She had always been weak, she said, with high blood pressure and frail health. What ills had she not been afflicted with, at least a dozen of the ones listed in Medical Care, and she went on to list all of them for Rose, counting them on her skinny fingers with the long fingernails: breast cancer, sinusitis, allergies, skin breakouts, hiccups that sometimes lasted for weeks. With all the visits to the doctor, all the hospital stays, the chronic fatigue, she had not been able to work or bear children. On the other hand, Bolivia was tireless when it came to work and strong as an ox, never taking a single day off, and not once in her life did she even have a cold. But Socorro was still alive and Bolivia was dead and buried before she turned fifty-two. Socorro had never had to work, but was never short of money. Bolivia, who never stopped working, was the type who never had enough for the rent. In the intensive care unit at Queens Hospital Center, a few hours after a sudden stroke had fried Bolivia’s brain, Socorro stood by the bed of her friend who was unconscious but still alive, and swore to her on the Most Holy Virgin that from that moment on she, Socorro Arias de Salmon, would take care of Bolivia’s daughters. “You can die in peace, my friend, I will watch over your daughters.” And up to now she had kept her promise, not entirely but well enough, or let’s say well enough when it came to Violeta and not so well with respect to María Paz. She confessed to Rose that she had set up a special trust fund so that she could continue to keep her promise to Bolivia concerning Violeta when she and Mr. Salmon were no longer alive.

“Almost all these porcelain pieces are Royal Doulton,” she said. “They’re worth a fortune. Look, this one is one of a kind. It will be worth almost seven thousand dollars when it is sold for Violeta.”

Under lock and key, behind glass, she had another half dozen Capodimonte pieces, and she asked Rose if he knew what they were worth, if he could tell they were originals, with seals of authenticity and everything, and in perfect condition.

“Look, with just this one here, Bolivia’s sick daughter has enough to live on for the rest of her life. I’ll show you,” Socorro said.

Rose examined it. It was a good-sized piece, made up of two figures on a sort of cloud, a man and a woman, the woman with an imperial air, a Marie Antoinette or Madame de Pompadour, wearing a tulle flounce dress and leaning down over a beggar at her feet. The beggar, or character down on his luck, gazed with an almost mystical rapture at the sumptuous cleavage of the lady. It could be said that he was gorging on that pair of porcelain breasts with his eyes, and Rose was annoyed with him, that beggar, because there was something base about him.

“Pretty piece,” he said, because he didn’t know what else to say.

“Since Marcus and I don’t have kids,” Socorro explained with a hint of frustration, “Violeta will be the sole heir of all these treasures. It’s a debt I owe to Bolivia, my dear Bolivia, because I didn’t always do right by her, didn’t always do right. Perhaps because I was jealous, or envious, and no one is perfect, we know, certainly not me. And neither was Bolivia; she was no pot of honey, my friend Bolivia, you can be sure of that.”

Although Socorro had not admitted it, Rose had come to the conclusion that this woman had not been able to stand the way her husband looked at Bolivia, that Bolivia was fertile and she wasn’t, and that it was painful to compare her sickly lean figure with the brimming roundness and spectacular smile of her rival. No doubt Bolivia had noticed, sensed something was wrong, that the tension as the months passed had become way too evident, almost tangible, as Socorro had mentioned.

Socorro told him that one night, when she and her husband returned from a party, they noticed that Bolivia had packed up her suitcase and gone, leaving a note that said, “Love you, thank you very much for everything, thank you and see you soon and may God give you many years of wedded happiness.” From then on, Socorro only saw her once in a while, and of her life and adventures only learned fragments. “She was a survivor, that’s what Bolivia was, a survivor,” Socorro repeated various times to Rose, and he remembered reading the same phrase in María Paz’s manuscript, and asked himself what it meant exactly, and if perhaps it had to do with the seventeen pages that were missing from the manuscript.

“There’s seventeen pages missing?”

Socorro pretended she didn’t know, but she turned red and drops of sweat moistened the bleached fuzz under her nose.

“Do you know by any chance what happened to those seventeen pages?”

“Sometimes things get lost, you know…”

“Mrs. Salmon, I’d appreciate it if you told me the truth.”

“You have to understand, Mr. Rose, those pages were the most compromising part of the story. I was afraid that… in the end… Look, the truth is I burned them, Mr. Rose.”

“You burned them.”

“Yes. I admit it. There were revelations about things that were too personal and serious and that affect me directly. Painful things for me. And others that I don’t remember. Things that would damage the memory of my best friend, you know what I mean. Let’s drop this topic, please, Mr. Rose.”

“Of course, we’ll leave it there. Just one more question before I say good-bye. What made you decide to finally send off the manuscript?”

“That’s an easy question. I did it because María Paz asked me to, and I didn’t feel I could deny her request.”

“But it took you a few weeks to mail it.”

“I suppose remorse, which bites like a dog, got the best of me, and I had no choice but to look for your address, Mr. Rose. Odile, my neighbor who reads a lot and knows her way around, helped me with that. She has a computer and found you on that goggle thing, is that what it’s called? And then I sent off the manuscript right away. Better late than never, right?”

“Do you think you did it because you were afraid that María Paz may have found out if you hadn’t?”

“What makes you think that? It has been a while since I’ve seen her. Haven’t seen her since the last time I visited her in prison. You do favors. If you can, you do favors. I once gave María Paz a mink coat so she could keep warm in the winter, or so that she could sell it if she needed the money. Doesn’t that count? I’m not going to say that the mink was in the best of shape. But in any case it was a nice gesture on my part. Like I said, we do what we can. And do you know who got Bolivia her first job in the United States after she got here without papers? Yes sir, it was me. It was a humble job, but a job still, cleaning the apartment of an old woman who lived on West Fifty-Fifth Street. But I’m boring you, or do you want me to keep going?”

“As long as you don’t lose your way, Mrs. Salmon.”

“The woman’s name was Hannah and she was Jewish. And it took Bolivia a while to realize that when she got to the apartment everything was clean and organized. Bolivia asked her one day, ‘Ma’am, how do you expect me to do my job if you do it for me beforehand?’ The old woman responded that she could not stand the thought of someone coming into her home and finding it dirty. So Bolivia came to understand that her boss was just looking for company, because there’s nothing worse than loneliness, as you know, Mr. Rose. So Bolivia never asked again and learned how to quickly clean what had already been cleaned and organize what had already been organized. Afterward, they went for a stroll in Central Park, always talking about trees or the color of the leaves according to the season.

“‘I’d say that is a poplar leaf and it is viridian in color,’ Hannah ventured.

“‘I don’t know what viridian is, I’d say it’s emerald green,’ Bolivia countered.

“‘Same thing, Bolivia, viridian and emerald are the same green. And this leaf from a weeping willow — isn’t it chrome green?’

“‘More like a lime green.’

“‘What about a swamp green?’

“‘Agreed, Señora Hannah, a swamp green.’

“And so it went, with sycamores, maples, elms, exchanging opinions on the range of greens, lemon green, mint green, malachite. Further on in the year they tackled the possibilities of the ochres and golds of fall, and in the winter the only things left were gray and white.

“‘Do you know that Eskimos can distinguish nine shades of white and have a name for each of them?’

“‘That’s over the top, nine shades of white!’”

After their daily walk in Central Park, having worked up a hunger, the two women, the illegal Colombian and the lonely American, walked arm in arm to the Carnegie Deli, where they had pastrami with dill pickles or matzo balls, often finishing everything off with a strawberry cheesecake. Señora Hannah always paid, of course, and since neither of them ate very much, there were mountains of food left over, which the waiter wrapped in aluminum foil so that Bolivia could take it with her on the 7 train from Times Square, which left her off almost at the door of her place, a room in Jackson Heights that she shared with a Dominican woman and her niece, who often had temporary guests or family members and friends who stayed longer. The interesting thing was the food chain that formed from that point on, because in that room in Jackson Heights an average of five people dined nightly for four and a half months without any of them once setting foot in a supermarket; they had enough with the water from the tap and the doggy bags Bolivia brought from Carnegie Deli.

“A terrible influence on Bolivia,” Socorro told Rose. “Trust me when I tell you. A horrible influence, those two Dominican women. They were called Chelo and Hectorita. They came here a couple of times with Bolivia. Chelo was the aunt, Hectorita the niece.”

Bolivia sent almost all of the salary from Fifty-Fifth Street to Colombia to support her two daughters. She lived on what was left, and tried to put some aside for savings. But very little remained, and there was never enough left for the main purpose: to pay the visas and plane tickets for her daughters. To that end, she had opened a savings account that remained meager, an anorexic account that emptied any time one of the girls got sick or had a birthday.

“‘There isn’t going to be a year in which your girls won’t get sick or have a birthday,’ the Dominicans insisted. ‘As long as you are a servant, you’ll never save. Drop that, girl, get up off your ass and look for something better.’

“‘And poor Señora Hannah?’ Bolivia protested.

“‘Poor Señora Hannah is rich. You’re the one who’s poor.’

“‘And what are we going to eat without the pastrami and matzo balls?’

“‘We’ll figure out something.’

“‘But Señora Hannah and I are friends…’

“‘Friends, my ass. Let’s call things as they are. Señora Hannah is the señora and you are the maid. But from now on you are going to be a factory worker.’

“‘A factory worker?’

“‘We’re going to take you to the supervisor where we work. You’re going to work at the factory. And we’re going to get drunk to celebrate.’

“It was a blue-jeans factory, one of those sweatshops where the workers are reduced to semi-slavery and which supposedly had been closed down in New York and fined, but that in reality was still operating full force. So Bolivia would be ready for the interview, the Dominican women prepared her psychologically, calmed her nerves with homeopathic drops, and instructed her on the questions she’d have to answer. ‘Take it nice and easy,’ they advised her, so that she wouldn’t be intimidated by the bitter character of the supervisor, who was named Olvenis and was one of those dry, hard-edged guys, with quills like whiskers who would scratch you if he grazed you; an origami made out of sandpaper, that was Olvenis.

“‘When he asks you if you know how to operate industrial machinery, you say yes.’

“‘But I don’t have a clue,’ Bolivia grumbled, ‘never in my life—’

“‘You listen to us and say yes.’

“‘And how am I supposed to respond with my shitty English?’

“‘No problem. His is worse because he’s not American. The owner of the place is Martha Camps herself. You know her, right? You don’t? What world do you live in? Martha Camps, the TV star. But she’s never there. That’s why she has the supervisor who speaks almost no English. Here in New York, English is not necessary, so don’t stress out, there’s always someone who speaks it worse than you. Don’t you know how to say yes? Anything he asks, just say yes. Or is it too hard to say yes? “Yes, of course, Mr. Olvenis, thank you, Mr. Olvenis, thank you very much.”’

“‘How much do I ask for pay?’

“‘Don’t ask for anything. Just take what he gives you, and then it gets better, and if doesn’t get better you quit and go look for another place. That’s how these black-market jobs work here.’

“‘What if he asks if I have papers?’

“‘He’s not going to ask. He knows none of us do and that’s the thing, that’s how they run the business. Without papers they can pay us bad, or not pay us, depending on the mood that month.’

“They took her to a building closed off and crisscrossed with yellow tape that said ‘Police Line, Do Not Cross.’ On the front, official notices reported default for tax delinquency, and there was a heap of garbage out by the building. The windows were all broken and boarded up, and if you didn’t know better, you’d swear there were only rats and dirt inside.

“‘It’s here,’ they told her.

“‘Here?’

“‘Yeah, we go in through the back.’

“They passed through a dark wooden structure attached to the building, Chelo and Hectorita leading, Bolivia behind them, and then groped their way step-by-step up a creaky stairway.

“‘Jesus Christ! How many more floors?’

“‘Cheer up, girl, we’ve gone up five and have four more.’

“And when Bolivia was all but out of breath, she heard the rumble of machinery coming from the back. And no human voices, as if the machines ran themselves. ‘We made it, we’re here.’ They opened a metal door and the burst of light blinded them, and once the images began to take form, Bolivia was able to note the silent presence of some twenty women, all young, huddled together around large tables, each one focused on her sewing machine as if the rest of the world did not exist. She thought they looked like zombies, and she had barely taken off her coat when they seated her between two of them, in front of her own machine. For each pair of jeans they had to make they were given twelve pieces of denim, six rivets, five buttons, four labels, one zipper, and her only instruction, which the boss said once and did not repeat, was that they had thirty minutes to finish each pair of jeans. The Dominicans had made the calculations, thirty minutes a pair of jeans, twenty jeans per worker for each ten-hour shift, minus mechanical failures, human errors, lunch break, eventual power failures, and breaks to go pee for a total of three hundred to three hundred and twenty jeans made and packed every day of the year.

“‘God Almighty.’ Bolivia sighed. ‘Who is wearing all these jeans?’

“She tried to remember the directions that her friends had given her about how things worked theoretically, made a sign of the cross, said this is for my daughters, and with her right foot pressed on the pedal, only to confirm that the industrial apparatus in front of her was a living monster, a stampeding horse that swallowed cloth and tangled the threads before she could even take her foot off the pedal. Sometimes the needle caught her fingers, but it did it so quickly that when she saw the bloodstains on the denim she didn’t even know where they came from. On the third day, Olvenis had called her into the office to give her a stern talking-to, shouting, cursing at her in that English of his that sounded too much like her native tongue, and although she couldn’t understand him, she could guess what it was about. They were firing her because she was a fake, a liar, because she had never operated any industrial machinery. The blood rose to her face but then dropped in an instant. She grew pale and her vision became cloudy; there was a ringing in her ears and she thought she was going to soil herself before she dropped to the floor unconscious, right there on the cement floor of the supervisor’s office.

“‘What a ridiculous scene I put on,’ she cried to her friends that night, laid out on the mattresses and with alcohol compresses on her forehead.

“In the morning, she went back to the old woman on West Fifty-Fifth to ask forgiveness for having left her without notice and to beg her for a second chance. But the old woman had already hired an Asian woman. And in any case, that night the Dominicans had good news back in the room in Jackson Heights.

“‘That fainting worked well, Bolivia,’ they told her. ‘Olvenis felt bad, and he wants you to know you can come back, but only if you are willing to do the ironing.’

“The ironing was the worst-paid job and the hardest, especially because of all the steam and heat. She had to iron blue jeans for the whole shift in a tiny room, hot as an oven, no windows, and very little ventilation. The blind windows were no accident, the owners wanted to make sure the factory couldn’t be detected from the outside. It was summertime and Bolivia suffocated amid the mountains of jeans. After a week, she thought she’d die; after two weeks, she came back to life; after a month, she faltered again. But the memory of her two daughters kept her standing. She couldn’t take it and decided to quit, but then didn’t. She had to hold on so that she could bring her daughters as soon as possible, whatever it cost. She was bringing them; even if she dropped dead, she was going to bring them. Once a month, she’d go by the Telecom Queens on Roosevelt Avenue, where dozens of Colombians lined up for the phone booths to call home. From there she’d talk to her older daughter and cry with her. Then she’d punch in another number to try to get in touch with her younger daughter, but she was never able to. The lady who cared for the girl made some excuse. Violeta wasn’t there, or she was sleeping, or was feeling shy. She told Bolivia, ‘You have to understand, it has been a long time since she has seen her mama. Getting her trust back isn’t going to be easy; it’s not going to happen overnight. Have patience with the girl. She’s confused, her head all messed up. Have patience, it will pass.’

“And the next day, Bolivia would return to the sweatshop, and the iron, and the oppressive heat, from seven in the morning, with half an hour lunch break, just café con leche and donuts that a messenger brought and they had to eat right there, because they weren’t allowed to go down to the streets, and on top of that they had to pay for them from their own pockets, the same menu every day, café con leche and donuts, café con leche and donuts for all twenty workers every day of the week. Then in the afternoon Bolivia continued to work until five fifteen. And what was she doing there fifteen minutes later than everybody else?”

Socorro told Rose that this was the subject of some of the seventeen pages that she had to burn.

There in the factory, after five in the afternoon, when her friends the Dominicans had left, as had all the others, and Bolivia was done with her ironing, the poor thing had to take care of another kind of manual labor.

“Olvenis?” Rose asked.

“Something like that.”

“A work slave and a sexual slave.”

“This was her misfortune.”

“And did she ever have fun, your friend Bolivia?” Rose asked. “Did she ever go to the movies? She must have gone dancing sometimes.”

“Well, she needed all the money she could bring in.”

“To bring her daughters.”

“Yes, and please swear you won’t repeat this, but the truth is that at a crucial junction, Bolivia was even a teibolera.”

“A what?”

“Teibolera. I didn’t know the term either. Teibolera, a woman who dances on teibols, or tables. Topless, they call it, you know how it goes”—Socorro lowered her voice, as if she were whispering a secret—“with her tits in the air. Bolivia’s were very full and could well be exploited. And all for bringing her daughters.”

“There’s something that doesn’t seem right,” Rose said. “Too much abnegation. Why had she left them in the first place?”

“It wasn’t really because they were hungry. It wasn’t really one of those cases where the mother can’t feed her kids. Not that bad. Back in Colombia her life was alright, with a family that helped her, all those aunts and cousins with map names, plus two jobs, several boyfriends, including the anonymous fathers of her daughters, and, modesty aside, she didn’t really miss me. I had my resources and once in a while sent something.”

“I see,” Rose said. “It wasn’t really an extreme case of hunger and misery.”

“Look, Mr. Rose, what she wanted was a dream life. She chased that dream. You know people like that?”

“But even to the point of leaving her daughters behind for five years?”

“It happens.”

“Could she have left her daughters behind because they were a nuisance?”

“Please, Mr. Rose, how can you say such a thing? Bolivia killed herself all those years trying to bring them over.”

“Abandoning your children could produce pangs of conscience in anyone. I know what I’m talking about. Bolivia punished herself working day and night, and so she banished the guilt of having left them. There are things one understands because one has lived them. But, not to be rude, I’m sure those missing seventeen pages said other things.”

“They did say something else. The most horrible thing for me. Those pages mentioned my husband.”

“Let me guess… Bolivia and Mr. Salmon? That’s where your fight with your friend stems from.”

“Bolivia was a meddler. And the older daughter is… like mother, like daughter, and I’m not making anything up. Before finishing off the poor cop, María Paz had skinned a few others.”

“Are you sure of that, Mrs. Salmon?”

“Well, not certain, can’t be certain, but it’s not hard to imagine. If she did it once, why not another time? Like I said, I have no proof, but that girl is something.”

“You’re letting your anger get the best of you. I understand you’re still smarting. Bolivia hurt you, and you are taking it out on her daughter. Isn’t that it? It’s very important that I know the truth. Think it over, do you have any basis for what you are insinuating?”

“Basis for what you are insinuating, good Lord, you sound like a detective. You’re scaring me.”

“I’m sorry, that wasn’t my intention. I just need to be clear about what happened, but don’t worry, it’s for personal reasons.”

“How about another tintico?”

“Yes, another tintico, perfect.”

“A little poison with it?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Do you want me to boost the tinto with a little aguardiente?”

“That’s fine, Mrs. Salmon, poison the tintico, but listen, María Paz’s lawyer says she’s innocent.”

“Oh, Mother of God, that lawyer. He brought her here one day in that red sports car of his. If I were you, I wouldn’t put too much trust in that lawyer, who is not very professional to say the least.”

“María Paz was riding around with the lawyer in a red sports car?”

“Like I said, a red sports car.

“While she worked in the sweatshop, Bolivia realized that no one ever came to the door of the ironing room. Nobody went back there. So one morning when the heat was terrible, she decided to take off her shirt while she worked. The next day she took off her shirt and her skirt, and each time she grew more audacious, until she was ironing in just her brassiere and undies, and soon she was ironing wearing nothing, her body soaked in sweat and her hair dripping.

“Teibolera after all,” Socorro moralized. “My husband says you don’t play with that. Breasts are like mean dogs, you only let them loose in the house at night.

“With the spray for the jeans, Bolivia misted herself on her face and back, and in the days when she was most suffocating, she even stood in a tub of cold water. She made herself at home in the little ironing room, the only place where she could feel fresh in the summer, and warm in the winter, while the others shivered in the hall without heat. And she had always liked ironing and had done it well since she was a child. Her grandmother America had taught her to moisten the cloth with starch, perfume it with lavender water, and go over it with one of those heavy irons filled with hot coals, because the grandmother insisted on using it even though someone had given her an electric one, and it was with that iron that she taught her granddaughter, who years later would use the skill to survive in that country of dreams, which happened to have the same name as her grandmother. So Bolivia, while she took care of the mountains of jeans in the tiny ironing room, remembered her grandmother and took pains that each pair of jeans came out perfect. ‘Look, abuela,’ she said aloud, ‘this one came out nice, only fifty more, abuela, and now forty.’ And the grandmother seemed to respond from the beyond, Way to go, mi niña, don’t fade, there’s only thirty now, twenty, ten, you’re almost done. Alone there, in that small and enclosed space, miraculously private, Bolivia could even afford to dream and think of her daughters, imagine a reunion, once and again and again, a thousand times envisioning each detail of the moment when they’d reunite and become a family anew.

“But I’m testing your patience, sir. These women’s things must bore you — starch, ironing, lavender water, sewing machine. How can you be interested in all that?”

“They’re important, it’s work, life. I’m not bored. It’s what a person does to survive. They’re not women’s things; they’re human things. Go on, Mrs. Salmon. How long did Bolivia work in that factory?”

“Until she died, señor, until she died. My poor friend, Bolivia. I hope she has been able to rest in peace.”

“One last thing. The most important thing. The main reason for this visit. Can you tell me where she is?”

“Of course, she’s buried in St. John’s Cemetery. If you want to go visit, I’ll go with you. It’s been a—”

“María Paz is dead?”

“Not María Paz! God forbid! Bolivia. Bolivia died a while ago, and she is buried in St. John’s, St. John’s Cemetery in Queens.”

“But María Paz is alive?”

“Yes, as far as I know.”

“Please tell me where I can find her. It’s very important for me, for reasons that are difficult to explain.”

“You want to talk to her about the book, right?”

“Not exactly, but if it were about the book, would you tell me where she is?”

“Oh, my dear, if I only knew… I really have no idea, I swear. Didn’t I tell you that the last time I saw her was when I visited her in prison?”

“Didn’t you say that the lawyer brought her here one day in a red sports car?”

“Mr. Rose, pardon me, but perhaps it’s best if you go. I don’t mean to offend you. If it were up to me, I’d love to continue our pleasant chat. But my husband is about to arrive, you know…”

On the return trip on the ferry from Staten Island, Rose went off on his own, away from the other passengers, his eyes fixed on the wide foamy wake the color of tar trailing the ferry. He had bought an extra-large bag of popcorn and was tossing it in the water piece by piece without eating a single one and when he was finished threw the bag as well and watched it get caught and swallowed by the whirlpool. That night, he stayed in the studio that his son had rented, a room with a bathroom, a closet, and a mini kitchen packed into an area of less than eighty square feet in a battered building on St. Mark’s Place. It had not been more than twelve hours since he had said good-bye to Socorro Arias de Salmon, or rather since she threw him out. The phone rang. It wasn’t yet dawn. Rose answered half-asleep, not knowing who the man’s voice could belong to at such an hour.

“Are you asleep?” the voice asked.

“Not anymore.”

“Forgive me, my friend, but this is urgent. We have to leave in one hour,” someone, whom Rose finally recognized, ordered. It was Pro Bono.

From Cleve’s Notebook

Paz has become a disturbing creature with two heads. A kind of bicephalous monster that I need to figure out, just to understand the tangle of feelings that she sets off in me. The Paz of the first head comes from a distant world that once, over there in Colombia, opened its doors for me, someone who I feel is a lot like me, my equal or even my superior, a hardy and tough woman who lives life with more intensity than I do, who is skillful at dealing with the other side of the tapestry, and at the same time more vulnerable and joyous, someone with whom I’d love to have the liberty to sit and talk for a few hours. Or go to the movies with and then to dinner. Or share a bed, that above all. Why not, what’s so strange about madly desiring a pretty girl, even if she’s your student, or is a prisoner and a delinquent? Of María Paz of the first head, I can say she’s dark-skinned and dark-haired without fear of offending, dark-complexioned and dark within because she’s impenetrable and because of that she’s disquieting. She’s someone who tears me away from my usual weariness of struggling against the obvious, what’s clear and pure and cryptic. My friend Alan, who lives in Prague, invited me to visit him. “Come quick,” he hastened to say in the letter, “before capitalism polishes off everything.” Maybe that’s what I’m searching for in Paz, someone who has not been polished off by capitalism. I want to touch her skin, which is different, feel her dark skin on my fair skin, confront the threats and promises of such contact, submit myself to the dreadful and almost sacred initiation it implies. Cross the threshold. The Song of Songs talks about the union with a woman as “dark and beautiful… as the tents of Qedar.” That’s how I see this first Paz, dark like the tents of Qedar, dark like Othello, whom Iago calls the Moor (from which comes morena). I once read in a sports magazine a quote by Boris Becker, the tennis player who is white as milk and married a black woman, in which he astonishingly confessed that he had not realized how dark his wife’s skin was till the morning after their first night of love when he saw her naked on the white sheets.

The matter of the second head is more complicated because it is rooted in old fears and prejudices from which I cannot honestly say I’m exempt. This Paz of the second head is the same as the other one but seen from a different perspective, and so there’s an abyss between us. She’s someone who comes from a distant and incomprehensible universe comprising impoverished, famished, violent lands that were never properly liberated. And she also belongs to another race, and there’s the key, someone with a sign on her forehead indicating her race, which is not the same as mine, and of a color different than mine. Someone whom I’d be afraid to take to bed because in private she might behave differently and would have other sexual customs, and perhaps would emit a strong and foreign odor. Someone who is nourished by things I don’t even dare put in my mouth. Someone with a pending debt to justice, capable of committing misdeeds I can’t even imagine. Another kind of human being altogether, like those who walk barefoot in the stone-paved streets of their towns in religious processions, who farm corn in tiny parcels to feed their countless children, who become guerrillas and are tortured by some military dictator. And if that were not enough, this María Paz of the second head has an intense gaze that goes right through me. Deep down for us folks with light-colored eyes, those black eyes can hold a wickedness, something perhaps beautiful but also wicked. Think of a trap; all you have to do is watch Penelope Cruz in a mascara commercial to understand that those types of eyes can hypnotize you then molest you, or at least steal your cell phone or wallet. You would think that someone with blue eyes like mine would think twice about trusting a child, or a credit card, to someone with eyes as dark as my Paz’s. Before I could think of her as a person, this second María Paz would be a foreigner, an extrañero, with all the implications of suspicion and neglect the word connotes, coming from the Latin extraneo, disinherited, and extraneus, external, from the outside, strange, unusual, something that is not familiar. She’s a foreigner, from the Latin foras, outside, from beyond, someone who has come a long way, someone who has come from far off, the exterior. Or forastera, from fouris, door, entrance, someone who remains on the other side of my closed door, who doesn’t cross my entrance. And forastera again, from the Latin foresta, forest, jungle, someone from the forest, a savage, a jungle beast, and as such a threat to the peace and security of my house and what is mine. Someone, in the end, who we keep in a prison like Manninpox, like thousands of other Latinos and Latinas and blacks, simply because they fit the type I have just described.