Hot Sur

5. From María Paz’s Manuscript

You had a distinct smell, Mr. Rose. I tried to get close to you, not to touch you, I wouldn’t have dared, but to smell you. You’re a good person, so you put on this face as if everything was normal. But you were so tense that an alarm zone formed all around you. I think there would have been sparks if any of us inmates had as much as grazed you. You seemed electrified, sir, at least at the beginning. During those first classes you were so tense you were almost trembling under your Lacoste shirts. It was understandable. It could happen to anyone who goes unprotected into that den of thieves. But we’re not all dangerous here; I want to make that clear. That’s only a small minority. There are some scoundrels, why deny it, bad women who would strike their own mothers. And I’m not talking figuratively. There was this inmate named Melissa who was serving life for killing her old lady by smashing her on the head with a toaster, she toasted her, she toasted her own mother. How much more evil can you get than that? So I don’t blame you for half shitting your pants while you were here, don’t think I don’t understand. I’m the first one to watch my back so I don’t get jumped. Anyway, I was drawn to the fact that you smelled like the outside world. The guards also come and go, they do it every day, but they don’t carry with them that whiff of fresh air. They’re as permeated with confinement as we are. For when it comes down to it, they too are prisoners, or almost, or worse than prisoners, ours at least is by force but theirs is of their own choosing. Your smell, Mr. Rose, brought me news of things so far out of my reach that I had begun to believe they did not even exist, that I was making them up, that they only lived in my longing for them. There are no windows in this restricted area to which I have been confined for a week, not one window. But in 12-GPU, where I was before and where I hope to return soon, there is a window that looks outside. You see, there are numerous windows in the compound, but they all face the inner yards. This is the only one that faces the street. High up on the wall, near the bathrooms, like an eye peering out on the world, or a little ship heading out onto it. Small, the window, nothing really much, and almost shuttered with bars. But you can get up on a bench so you’re at eye level with it and look out to the street, a portion only, in the distance, nothing special. There are no passersby, and not even a tree or a street sign, just a stretch of asphalt and the portion of a wall. Imagine a black-and-white photograph, one of those ones taken by mistake, where nothing or no one is in the frame. That’s all you can see; still, there is always an inmate up on the bench looking out, the eyes escaping to that place known as the outside world, the mind fleeing toward a son, a mother, a house, whatever it may be, any pleasant thing from her past life, like a garden, say, a plant that was watered every day and that has by now withered. Or a lover, there are many in here fingering themselves thinking of some guy on the other side. For even the lowliest among us has left something behind, something that is waiting for her and that glimmers in the glass of that window in 12-GPU near the bathroom. There’s always an inmate upon the bench, and five or six others in line waiting their turn. If one of them gets impatient, she screams at the one standing on the bench, “Get down, you bitch, you think that window is yours?” But the others immediately shut her up. They respect that moment and you have to know how to wait for it calmly, to be able to look out and breathe a little. Watching that stretch of road, I ask myself, Is that America? Or I should say I ask Bolivia, the deceased, because lately I have taken to chatting with her. What do you think, Mother, you know better, is it just a dream after all? Or is America really in here?

You may ask yourself if I thought about escaping. Yes, I did. These days, it is the only question that matters. But it bounces back; I can’t complete the thought before it turns on itself. It’s trapped inside my head, booming and echoing off the walls of my skull but futile. There’s no way to escape from Manninpox, that’s the truth. As much as I turn it over in my head, I can’t figure it out. Although, sure, I imagine it, my cells and neurons scheme, plotting somehow and some way they can make it real. It’s a given that I won’t be able to escape in body, that is, whole, with my eyes, my hair, my bones, my flesh. The only part of me that can leave is my blood, which runs free and can be found again some place far off. And there it goes, there goes the trail of my blood, dripping, slipping, draining, drop by drop searching for the light of day, finding little holes in which to seep, slipping between the rocks, passing through bars and cracks, filtering through walls, sliding past the feet of guards, without excusing itself or drawing attention, not setting off the alarms. This is the only way I can return to the world of the free. A thin stream of blood crossing the field, I run softly on the highways and traverse the woods until I reach the home for special-needs adolescents where Violeta is. From a distance, I see her seated under those ancient trees that soothe her mind, and I watch her, looking at her while she’s looking within. Then I approach her to ask for forgiveness. It’s all my fault. Violeta, I’m going to come for you, little sis. I’m going to take you with me; from now on, we will be together forever. No one or anything will disrupt our plans; I swear by Bolivia that I will keep my promise if you forgive me. I will keep it. I will survive only to keep that promise to her. I tell her that, and that she has to wait for me a little while longer, to have patience while I pass through the place planted with crosses and covered in snow where my mother rests, pretty mamacita. I tell her as well. I’ve come to ask forgiveness for what? I don’t know. Because I haven’t done anything to you, Mami. I’m innocent of what I have been accused. But you know how the mind works. The sense of guilt can be strong even if one is not guilty. So I’ve come to ask for your forgiveness and leave you roses and that’s it, I suppose, because in the end, with you being dead and all, there’s not much you can contribute at the moment. So what can I expect from you? Or maybe, this is funny, I’ll scratch on your gravestone, “Mother, I don’t deserve you, but I need you.” That’s the phrase that Margarita has tattooed on her arm, a Peruvian inmate who is as sentimental as you were, and everyone here mocks her for it. And then I run, a trail of blood now a little more lively, a little lighter, until I get to my house to open the windows to let the sun and air in, and I stay awhile looking at my things, my high-school diploma, the letters from Cami and Pati, pictures of when we were girls, my white crocheted cushions, my bedroom decorated in mint green, my farmed pearls, the box of Swiss chocolates my friends at work just gave me. And I ask my dog Hero to forgive me, that above all, to forgive me, because I’m not sure if he survived after I abandoned him. I ask him who fed him after I left. Come here, little doggy, I’ll never leave again, I assure him, scratching his belly. He believes me and peacefully goes to sleep on my bed. That’s what I’d do out there, Mr. Rose, when they let me go, if they let me go one day, or when I escape: I will take Violeta and Hero, and the three of us will live our day-to-day life, the good life, that is. That’s what I’d do, the same as ever. Because here inside, it is those normal things, the most routine ones, that kill you with nostalgia. But it won’t be easy. When I get out of here it will not be easy at all to deal with the world. The men who broke into my apartment destroyed everything. Everything they touched, they soiled. They pissed on the mattress and the sofa, put my things in black plastic bags, and handled them as if they were removing dead bodies. They ripped up the carpet, pulled down the curtains, and tore open the upholstery, broke bottles, emptied boxes, and broke apart my house and left the door open as if it were a bar, so anyone could just go in. But I don’t remember much of that, and if I don’t remember it, it’s because it didn’t happen. I like to imagine that my house is waiting for me as it always was when I left in the mornings, the bed made, everything in its place, clothes ironed, the floors mopped, the rug vacuumed, the bathroom impeccable, and the first thing I’ll do when I get back — well, the second thing, after taking care of Hero — is to make myself a hearty breakfast to soothe the hunger that has built up. Fresh-squeezed orange juice, café con leche, pancakes, Aunt Jemima syrup, and fruit, a lot of fruit, strawberries and peaches and apples and papaya and mango and cherimoya, and also some perico scrambled eggs Colombian-style, with diced tomatoes and green onions, and a bagel with cream cheese, and also toast with butter and peanut butter. And a big glass of Diet Coke with a lot of ice. All that? Yes, all that. I’m going to put all that on a tray with one of the embroidered linings that I inherited from Bolivia, and I’m going to have breakfast in bed, no hassle, in my pajamas watching reruns of Friends. And another thing. When I get out of here, will I go looking for Greg? Sleepy Joe? Would I like to see them again? Good questions. But to tell you the truth, I think the answer is no. Neither of them. I don’t even think about reuniting with Greg or with Joe. I barely remember them, perhaps because I blame them for a lot of things. My memory has become whimsical, Mr. Rose, it keeps what is clear and discards what is blurry, it sticks to the past and rejects the present, and seemingly, it liberates itself from what it finds intolerable or incomprehensible. Maybe it would be best to leave Greg and Sleepy Joe where they are, swallowed by oblivion. The entire current of my thoughts, or almost all of it, flows toward Violeta; she takes up all of my memories, the past and what is to come. I have a debt with her. You understand? With Violeta. A huge, crushing debt. I have to take her out of that home for autistic adolescents where I left her against her will. I have to get out of Manninpox to fulfill my promise to her. You’ll see, Mr. Rose, all this is not impossible, my escape plan, I mean. I have started to execute it as we speak. Becoming a stream of blood is already happening.

It’s as if I unplugged something and I’ve begun to empty. As if because I could not escape past the walls, I’ve begun to escape from myself. But don’t think I’m attracted to the idea of dying. I’ve tried to stop the hemorrhaging with compresses, drugs, spells, yoga, prayers, and even cotton balls coated in arnica and ginger. All for nothing. I started with this whole drama right after I arrived in Manninpox, in the dining room during lunch. They had assigned me a permanent spot at one of the tables, which are long, for eight or ten prisoners with adjoining benches. That day I finished eating, picked up my tray, and headed for one of the corners, where we have to turn them in before the bell rings, and as I was doing this I noticed that the others opened a path before me. They had already warned me that one of the most dangerous moments in here is when you are walking with both of your hands busy carrying the tray, which is when they can jump you. If somebody wants to fuck you, that’s when they can do it, stab you in the side and disappear into the mayhem that ensues. I don’t know if they ever told you, but Piporro (do you remember Piporro, who came to your workshop a couple of times?), she was carrying her tray, and they pierced her with the long sharpened handle of a plastic spoon. Nothing like that was happening to me. I panicked because of the opposite, when I noticed that everyone was moving aside to let me pass. I felt as if they were watching me with disgust and thought they were going to hit me. That’s the sensation I had. In jail, intuitions like that come all of a sudden, like getting sucker-punched. The certainty of danger is physical, the warning from the body, not the mind. I was always aware of the eyes of the others, terrified to be looked upon with hatred or to be looked at too much. I needed to know how they were looking at me to know what to expect. But the longer you’re here, the more you come to understand that the eyes are less important than the hands. What you must never grow careless about are the hands of others, because that’s how aggression is expressed. Keep a close eye on anyone with her hands behind her or in her pockets. The real danger is always in the hands.

I didn’t know that yet, and I hadn’t made friends who would defend me. I hadn’t formed alliances or joined any of the gangs, and my sisterhood with Mandra X had not yet begun, meaning I was alone and left to my own devices.

They had already warned me about her, Mandra X. “She’s the leader of those who spill milk,” they told me. I imagined a million things. Spill milk? It sounded sexual, but something a man would say. Later, I was able to see it with my own eyes. Fucking around, they’d spill cartons of milk on the floor of the dining room. Las Nolis: that’s what Mandra’s girls are called. They’re her clan, her buddies — the sect of the chosen. You would go get some food and there were puddles of milk everywhere, the tables, the benches, the trays. At first, I thought they did it just to fuck with people, but later I found out it was their way of demanding from those in charge that they replace the regular milk with lactose-free milk. Because of the farts, you know? Here, it’s two, three, or even four to a cell. Many of the inmates are lactose intolerant, and if they drink it, their stomach swells, and then come the torpedoes. Can you imagine what it’s like to spend a night locked up in a room eight by nine feet with three old broads farting away? A gas chamber, sorry, bad joke. They also said that Mandra X was a dyke, and that if she liked someone, she got her by hook or by crook. That’s what they said. I wasn’t sure. I had seen her, and she was a huge woman; in Manninpox, whoever commits to working out and is disciplined about it can become a bull without leaving her cell, with a daily routine of push-ups, pull-ups, sit-ups, and crunches. That was Mandra X, so muscular you would swear she had a pair of hanging balls. And she was weird, very weird. Weirder than a checkered dog. They also told me that she was the leader of the resistance inside. That she was a warrior, or what they call warrior in here, an inmate who’s not afraid of skirmishes. The one who goes to the authorities with demands when the prisoners get worked up about something. I had heard all this, but until that moment I had only run into her in the hallway when she had jumped on me for asking too many questions. They also said that her gang, Las Nolis, made blood pacts, that they had their own mythology and rituals, and even engaged in sacrificial practices. That’s what they said about her and her group, and I didn’t like it, although it seemed to have its benefits, given that I was vulnerable here, and I needed to associate with someone. Because here, if you’re alone you pay for it, and you can be forced to do some pretty ugly things, such as become somebody’s woman. Or a maid. “From now on you are mine,” one of the butch women would tell you, and if you don’t respond by pulling her eyes out you become her sexual slave. Or some cacique comes and says, “You, just so you know, from now on you are my servant.” Either you smash her teeth in, or you’ll be doing her laundry, making her bed, giving her money, finding her cigarettes, cleaning her cell, writing letters for her sons and boyfriends. They even make you cut their toenails and give them manicures. Or also to go down on them, which here they call cunni. That’s almost always the fate of the unaffiliated. But I still avoided Mandra X and her Nolis, so they wouldn’t rape me or force me to participate in their satanic rituals. As if there were other options to consider, such as the Children of Christ, who take a drug called angel dust and walk around having visions of Christ. Anyway, they were a black sisterhood and would never accept me. There were also the Netas, all Puerto Rican, the Sisters of Jarimat UI for the Muslims, and the Wontan Clan, the least likely to take me because they were white extremists.

I grew to understand that Mandra X had real pull in this place and it would be a good idea to belong to her group. That’s why I’m part of the group, more or less. Don’t think I’m one of the zealots. In any case, she has become my protector and adviser, my sister, my “brotha,” and me, her “sweet kid,” her protectee. When it comes to matters of love, she’s imposing, jealous, randy, unfaithful, Don Juana-ish, fucked in the head, calculating; that is, she has all the defects of a man and more. But with her friends she’s solid as a rock. There is not a more dangerous lover or a sounder buddy. I’m not gonna tell you she’s my friend, she’s friends with no one, she’s up on her high horse, and no one can touch her. How should I put it? Mandra X is a fortress inside the prison, a place of refuge for her protectees, a horror for her enemies, a boyfriend to her mistresses, and a leader for her followers.

One time I told her I felt alone. It was naiveté on my part.

“Alone?” she harangued me. “What the fuck do you mean you feel alone when you just joined the ranks of a huge part of the population of the United States, the ones behind bars, that is? So you’re alone, my depressive little fuck, my sad little cunt, my pillow biter? So snap out of it, bitch, because you are also part of a quarter of all the imprisoned people in the world, who are here in these United States.”

Now I know that you shouldn’t talk nonsense here, or be guided by sentimentalism. I have learned to report my days as bad and not so bad, sometimes more bad than others. Sometimes the hemorrhaging stops, it disappears completely for a week or so, as if a spigot in my veins has been closed. Then I feel as if my life comes back, I recover my energy, my joy, who would’ve have thought it, my joy in spite of everything. On those days, I try to recover, I feed myself well, I write pages and more pages, I even grow calmer thinking that at some point everything will become clear and I’m going to get out of here and go directly to Violeta. I give myself to this vision, dreaming that one day I’ll buy her a house with a garden for her, for Hero, and for me, who knows with what money, but who cares, money doesn’t exist in dreams. And Mandra X, who is Mandra X? Where does she come from? No one knows. She doesn’t utter a peep. She’s white but she speaks Spanish; she’s male but she has tits and a pussy; she’s a justice-seeker and a writer of legal writs and she knows everything there is to know about the law, but she mocks American justice, asserting it is the worst and most corrupt in the world. But she knows it inside out. Imagine decades locked up in here, studying the penal code, looking for a way around it, finding loopholes and resources. But all this knowledge is useless when it comes to her case, because she’s sentenced to life, and from that, no one, not even she, can save herself. She doesn’t allow questions to be asked about her and doesn’t gossip, yet she knows everything. She’s the living memory of this place. According to her, forgetfulness and ignorance are the worst two enemies of a prisoner. Look at my case, the most horrible things that happen to me are the ones I forget about the quickest. Since the night of my husband Greg’s birthday, I have lived through a chain of horrors, but there are blank spaces where the sequence of events should be, like you used to say, on display on its corresponding shelf. But not me, I hide pain and confusion when they’re still fresh in these nebulous zones. Mandra X won’t tolerate that one bit. She forces me to write about what has happened, to go over it, make it worth something, and learn from it. She stores away facts about you that your own memory has forgotten; then she gives them back to you, forcing you to confront them. That’s rare in here. Here, things are set up so that you grow apart from yourself, divide yourself in two, and mop both sides of the hallway at once.

A few weeks after you left, Mr. Rose, you were replaced by a lady with a lot of titles. We showed her what we had done in your workshop, not to betray you, but to provide a sense of continuity to the class. Well, she just went off, talking about goals, and motivations, and achievements, and gains. According to her the whole thing was a glorious race toward becoming better. It was more like she was directing graduate students at Harvard or something and not some fucked-up prisoners shit on by fortune, and no more gains than two or three steps in a circle and no more goals than pressing your cheeks to the bars. What a bunch of crap, this fucking self-help self-improvement, they want to make you drunk with that and expect you to believe it. But that doctor they brought to take your place, Mr. Rose, was the reigning queen of it all. And on top of it she gave us a warning: “Write about whatever you want, girls,” she told us, “any topic, you can write about anything that comes into your head, whatever, it’s all fine, everything is welcome, except what happens in this jail. That is strictly prohibited. I will not accept any writing about life in the prison, episodes in the prison, or criticism or complaints about what happens here.”

“Listen, ma’am,” we asked her. “Where do you think we live? You think we hang in the city and come to Manninpox to hand in our little homework assignments about life outside?”

What an idiot, that lady. She said there were a bunch of other topics. That we could write about our childhoods, about our lives before prison, our loved ones, our dreams — constructive things and positive memories. We told her that we made suppositories with the positive and the constructive, and we never went back to the workshop. At least I never went, and neither did a few others. For now, Mandra X is my reader. She forces me to think about things seriously, to learn new words, and to call things by their name. Maybe it’s true that every door closed opens a new one, because I have had the best teachers of my life here in Manninpox: you and Mandra X. She doesn’t have family that visits her, just human rights people and defense lawyers for other inmates who come to talk over things with her. I imagine that Mandra X is their contact in here. She works for them, I think, or maybe it’s the other way around.

Anyway, it was her, Mandra, who hooked me up with my amazing lawyer, my little saint of a lawyer, my talented and intelligent protector, my dear old man, what would I do in this life without him? I tell him that anytime I see him. “You are the man of my life.”

He laughs. “Get one your own age,” he responds. “One who stands up straight and not a humpbacked old man like me.”

“But you’re the one I like,” I say. “You and only you, always dancing to your own beat, always true to yourself, different from the others, more dignified and elegant than anyone.”

“Hi there, baby,” he told me the first time he saw me, right in the middle of that horde that gathers in the lobby of the courthouse. That’s what he told me, before we had even met, “Hi there, baby.” An affectionate greeting, kind, playful. I began to cry like the Magdalene. Because all of a sudden, I felt like a person again and not a criminal on the way to the gallows, just a person with problems who needed help. Since then, the old man has become my defender, my solace, my ally, my powerful lawyer. I’m pinning all my hopes on him. He says he’s going to get me out of here. Every time we see each other he tells me. And I believe him; I cling to his words as if they were the Our Father. In the end, what is the Our Father but a string of words?

Mandra X is not someone who ever talks about where she was born or where she lived, what kind of life she had, how she was hurt, or what ankle she twisted. When she was still free, did she have a husband or a wife? A mystery. Did she ever have kids? There is a story that was going around that I’d better not repeat. Mandra X. What kind of a name is that? Like a bug, or a robot, or medicine for a migraine. A clownish name for a clownish old lady. That’s what I thought at first, before I knew her. Her tattoos and weirdness alone could have you talking about her for hours, if you dared. Here everybody gets inked. And you see every kind of tattoo, broken hearts or hearts plunged with arrows, names of men and women, Christs, skulls, Baby Jesuses. A tattoo is the only luxury and the only jewelry allowed for inmates. So paint yourselves, eyes on shoulders, spiderwebs in the underarms, tears on the cheeks, butterflies, dragons, birds, pictures of loved ones, Mickey Mouses, Betty Boops, self-portraits. Anything you can think of, even initials on the soles of your feet and drawings on your ass. There are those who even call themselves artists and are expert inkers, setting up businesses with inks and needles. They are never short of customers; here everyone uses their bodies as sketchbooks. Some have poems on their thighs or revolutionary symbols. One named Panterilla had a whole stanza of “Imagine” by John Lennon inked on her back from top to bottom, and Margarita, the Peruvian girl I told you about has that written on her arm, “Mother, I don’t deserve you, but I need you.” The thing is, in Manninpox your body is the only thing that belongs to you and they can’t stop you from doing with it what you want. That’s why many also pierce themselves. There are those who even purposefully mutilate themselves, and Mandra X is the queen of them. That kind of thing makes me shudder, leaves me speechless. I can’t understand why someone would voluntarily amputate a finger, like it happened the other day in the ward where the white inmates are. But Mandra doesn’t disapprove. She thinks they’re gestures of freedom and independence, and that actions that might be wrong or even atrocious when you are free become the complete opposite when you are locked up in prison. That’s what she says, and I listen. She says that in our circumstances, orgies, blood pacts, and even suicide are acts of resistance.

“Then let me bleed,” I ask of her, when the fatigue of the anemia makes me melodramatic. “Come on, Mandra, it’s an act of resistance.”

But she forces me to stand up. She finds some medicine and makes me sign letters to the authorities demanding proper medical attention immediately.

“Let me do it,” I beg her. “I’m fine here. I want to rest.”

“You’ll be surrendering.” She shakes me. She brings a ball of snow from the courtyard, packs it tight, and puts it on my belly so the bleeding will stop.

Her gang, or I should say, our gang, is called Noli me tangere: that’s why they call us Las Nolis. It’s a Latin phrase that Jesus uttered to Mary Magdalene after he was resurrected. It means don’t touch me. Don’t get near me, leave me alone, don’t mess with me. See, you learn things. Even in Latin. Now that I’m a Noli, I know the meaning of words like skirmish, independence, liberty, rebellion, rights, resistance. Well, I also learned the meaning of the word clitoris; it embarrasses me to know what it is. Can you imagine? Years and years of tapping and tapping that little button without knowing what it was called. But going back to what we were talking about, I don’t have any tattoos, not even one. I write only on paper. Many sheets of paper because I have a lot to say. Maybe I don’t do it on my own skin because I’m terrified of needles. Sometimes I think I should do it, it would be braver on my part, more daring, more permanent. But what if I regret it later, what if something feels stupid that the day before seemed extraordinary? I imagine you have the same fear, Mr. Rose, when you publish your stuff. There’s an inmate who has “live valorously” tattooed on her shoulder, but both words are written with a b so she’s going to have to libe balorously until the day she dies. And then there’s Greg and Sleepy Joe, who are Slovaks, and who have tattoos on their chests that say, “Lightning over Tatras.” Lightning over Tatras? What the hell is that? Not me, thank you very much, I’ll stick to pencil and paper, at least I can erase it that way, or cross it out, throw it in the garbage, and start anew. Mandra X inspires me. She tells me that Miguel de Cervantes was locked up when he dreamed up Don Quixote. Aside from you, Mr. Rose, she’s the only one who knows that I write, and I ask her about spelling and other such issues. You were a teacher who liked to please us, you put up with anything, congratulated us about everything, but she doesn’t let me get away with anything. She tells me write down everything I lived and to describe things in detail, even if they burn, even if they sting. But I forget, maybe because of the anemia.

“I don’t remember, Mandra,” I apologize. “That little bit is not clear. I’m not sure what happened at that moment.”

“You’re a woman and you act like a girl,” she tells me and leaves.

Mandra X’s tattoos? They’re different. Imagine blue snakes slithering across her back till they hug her belly, going down her thighs and her calves, and twisting into each other like ropes. They go down to her feet and down her arms to her fingers. Her skin is like one of those laminated figures in anatomy books with veins and arteries, but some who know her say that it is not about veins or arteries, but about rivers. All the rivers of Germany with their respective names, so a map, of her native land. It’s difficult to believe that Mandra X belongs to another place that is not this one. She got here before all of the rest and she’ll be here when they’re all gone. According to these versions, her very white skin is a living map that illustrates the course of the rivers of her country. The Rhine, the Alster, many others that I don’t remember, and the biggest and fattest, the one that goes down on Mandra’s spinal column, the Danube.

“In Spanish, it is Danubio?”

“Ah yes, el Danubio. Greg spoke to me about that river, but for him, it is called the Dunaj.”

“Don’t listen to him. Your husband was a Slovak, that’s why he called it the Dunaj. The river is called the Danube and your husband is dead; they killed him.”

I change the topic immediately. They’re saying that Greg was killed on the night of his birthday, but I don’t believe it. If they also say that I did it, and I didn’t do it, how am I supposed to believe them?

Hey, Mandra, that Danubio, or Dunaj, or Danube, that runs down your back and goes all the way down there? Does it go up your asshole? Is that where it empties? And inside, do the waters of that river find beds in your veins? I’d like to ask her, but I don’t dare because if she gets angry she can flatten me with a single blow.

There I go on a tangent again. What I want to finish telling you, Mr. Rose, is what happened that day in the dining room. The others kept their distance, as if they had decided beforehand that they’d gather in a circle around me.

I was the reason for this possible melee, that was as clear as day, but I wasn’t sure why. I felt dizzy and things went blurry. Have you ever been about to faint? Well, those were my symptoms. That’s how I felt. I thought I was going to fall. I’m going to fall right here and they’re going to kick the shit out of me. No, don’t fall, goddamn it, I ordered myself, no matter what, don’t fall. As I advanced, the crowd of women opened the way before me. I put away my tray in that silence that precedes any great blow. But the blow didn’t come. As I passed by the bench where I had been sitting, I realized it was empty. My tablemates had disappeared and in the place where I had been there was a pool of blood. Fuck, they stabbed me and I didn’t even notice was the first thing I thought. They must have struck me with something, a makeshift knife, a blade, something so sharp I didn’t even feel it. I passed my hand behind me and realized my uniform was soaked in a warm liquid. I looked at my hand and it was red. The hemorrhaging. No one had stabbed me; the blood was coming out of me on its own.

Have you ever seen on TV how sharks go into an attack frenzy at the scent of blood? Well, here in prison, it’s the opposite. At the sight of blood, the instinct is to move away and remain as far away as possible. Me, alone with my blood and the others looking at me in disgust. And at that moment, who do you think shows up? The one they called Mandra X. At that time I thought of her as a kind of monster. She appears at my back and begins to walk behind me. And we left the dining room like that, me in front and her behind me, hiding my stained clothes from the others.

Maybe it’d be good to join her group, if they even accept me, or who knows what kind of favor I have to do in return, I thought when the fright had passed. Strange, my own blood made me a target and protected me. The reason? The horror most prisoners and guards feel at the blood of another. In this place that boils over with violence, where the inhuman rules, there’s nothing that causes so much dread as the sight of human blood. These women have lived through everything. There’s not a horror that’s unknown to them; the streets have initiated them under the worst circumstances, and what they haven’t learned about out there, they learn in here. They tolerate all sorts of filth, the vomit of drunks, the piss of the incontinent, the miserliness of beggars, prostitution inside the jail. Here, any disgusting thing is acceptable; filth is law. And rudeness, bad words, filthy talk, threats, insults, aggressions, lunacy, screams — everything is tolerable except blood. The blood of others is taboo. One single drop of blood is enough to become infected. But blood doesn’t appear drop by drop — it puddles in the middle of the yard or in hallways. Everyone has pints of possibly contaminated blood inside them, and it is the law to carry it protected inside the body. It is up to individuals if they’re consumed by their infections, their problem, nobody else’s business, as long as they don’t go around spreading infection. The plague is in the blood. In Manninpox, that’s what they call AIDS: the plague. They call it by its true name instead of disguising it in an acronym. So I inspire hatred but also fear; my blood is killing me, but it also protects me.

I realize that Mandra X has begun to sing a song called “Moonlight” with the voice of a man: “I want the moonlight for my sad nights.” Apparently it’s a sort of lesbian anthem, and since Mandra gives it a certain depth, everyone who listens to her sing it suddenly wants to be hugged. Some cry because the song reminds them there is a moon. We never see it here; by the time it comes out, we have long been locked in our cells.

Now I’m in solitary confinement again, with no way of knowing if it’s rainy or sunny out, if it’s day or night. Time only exists in the round clock that glares at me from the end of the hallway, and which may as well not be there, because nothing changes, everything is repeated, so what good is it to consult it? Better just to let it go around and around, because here time doesn’t exist, it’s no good for anything, time is only waiting for something that never comes. You might say that here time runs backward, toward the past, and that it is not the minutes that pass but memories.

All the memories pile in my cell, taking over my space, sucking in my air, stealing my peace. I either rid myself of them or get out and leave them there. Here in Manninpox, I have been forced to change, change so much that I have become another person. I’m not sure if better or worse, but certainly different. So what do I do with the hordes of memories of that other María Paz? In what corner of my mind do I keep them? Where do they fit? How should they be classified?

I’m referring, for example, to the memory of the day that Bolivia finally called for us to come to America. She had in her pocket that magic object we had yearned for, that passport to happiness called the green card, which when it comes down to it is not even green, but which these days is the Holy Grail. Years later, she told me how she had been able to get it, that greencita card of her soul. They gave her a Tuesday appointment and it took her hours to get ready. She bathed with her Heno de Pravia, put on her makeup more carefully than usual, dabbed perfume behind her ears and on the inside of her wrists where the pulse beats. She, who was full-figured and flashy, put on a tight V-neck sweater, letting her cleavage show a bit. Yes sir, my mother was short but voluptuous, something she always put to good use. Bolivia used her body to get ahead in America. She’d never admit that, but I knew it. Knew it and learned it from her, and I can tell you that I was an excellent student. She had a saying, “Necessity has the face of a dog.” I suppose that’s what I am, a dog who does what she can to survive, nothing more than that, or less. Why spin it? The truth is that whoever comes to America has to fight to the death and is good and fucked if she doesn’t use all the tools at her disposal. Bolivia did it. Holly Golightly did it. Why shouldn’t I do it? And speaking of, Mr. Rose, I have a question I never got to ask you about Holly. I’d like you to tell me plainly who she was. Sally Tomato’s lover, an escort, or simply a whore? Or maybe all three at once?

When Bolivia had a stable enough job, she put all her energies into legalizing her situation. She pulled together the thousand dollars she needed for the lawyer, and after a lot of paperwork and formalities, she finally had the letter to present herself. For months she had prepared herself mentally for this ultimate test, studying, reading, memorizing the list of US presidents and their first ladies, the ten amendments of the Bill of Rights, the fifty states of the Union and their capitals, the location and languages of the seven commonwealths and territories, and I don’t know how many other things that someone said they’d ask her. And in the end, they didn’t ask her. But there was one little detail about the meeting that should be mentioned. Before coming to America, Bolivia had been a fan and follower of Regina Once, a Colombian spiritual and political guide whom my mother found admirable, who had incredible powers, and was a master of many sciences. This Regina Once was a swindler in my opinion. She controlled people by the way she looked at them and made them vote for public causes she supported, using a strategy she called “running the lights.” Running the lights of a person consisted of looking at them intently, but not in the eyes, that was the key, because as she said to her students, looks cancel each other out. If you stare at someone and the other person stares back at you, the whole thing is a draw. That’s why the more effective technique is to fix your gaze right between their eyes, to overwhelm them with your power and make them do your will. From the moment Bolivia sat across from the immigration official, she fixed her eyes on the spot between his eyes, as Regina Once had taught her. She ran the lights on him, to nail him and win him over to her cause, because he had a folder with all her information in his hand, and on him depended the yes or no that would decide her fate and the fate of her daughters as well.

“How did you come into the United States?” was the first thing the guy asked.

“Illegally,” she responded directly, casting intense rays with her eyes.

“How have you lived all this time?”

“Illegally.”

“Have you worked?”

“Yes sir.”

“You do know that’s against the law?”

“Yes sir, I do know. But I had no other choice.”

The man asked these questions without any sense of commiseration, without showing any sympathy; rather, on the contrary, with the self-importance of someone who feels he has more rights in this land because he arrived earlier. But Bolivia held her own, not letting him intimidate her, conscious of her tight sweater and her pretty face, and of her inner force. She talked to the man in Spanglish. But you have to understand, Mr. Rose, we’re talking about Bolivia’s Spanglish, which when I was a girl made me blush with shame, and that wasn’t any more than Spanish with a few okays here and a few thank yous there, and ohs and wows, batting her eyes and gesturing with her hands. But look how Regina Once’s trick worked, this running of the lights. While my mother answered the questions from the man, she repeated one phrase, one phrase, my mother concentrating, resolved, gazing right between his eyes with the power of that single phrase, as if she were firing an arrow, so that he’d feel that he was receiving an order he had to obey. Gimme the green card, sonofabitch, gimme the green card. Gimme the green card, sonofabitch, gimme the green card. And the man gave it to her.

“From now on behave yourself,” he told her. “No more funny stuff or you’ll end up in jail.”

Bolivia left there to place flowers by a photograph of Regina Once, although I think more than any spell, what worked for her was the honesty with which she responded to the questions. Once her green card was official, she began to work more than she had worked without it. If you asked me why she died so young, I’d have to say that she imploded from working. Aside from the green card, she also had a somewhat stable job and a place to put us in, so she was able to buy the plane tickets and pay for the papers to get a visa. So much waiting for that moment that would never come, and suddenly Bolivia tells me that this is it. Finally, the moment had come to reunite with her in America.

“Right now?” I managed to respond.

She told me yes, right away, in a voice that sounded strange, I supposed overcome with emotion. “This coming Wednesday,” she said, whimpering. “This Wednesday I’ll be in the airport with open arms.” That’s what she said. “I’ll be waiting for you, my girls, my girls. Bless me, Lord, my two daughters at last. Can you believe it, María Paz, can you believe it?” And then she thanked God again.

“What about school?” I asked. “Can’t I finish the semester here?”

“Aren’t you happy with the news?” she said, noticing my lack of excitement.

“Yes, Bolivia, it makes me happy.”

“Bolivia? No more Mami?”

“Yes, Mami, it makes me happy.”

You have to believe me, Mr. Rose, up to that moment it had been the truth. Up to that moment what I wanted more than anything was to reunite with Bolivia. At any other time during the first four years, I’d have gone insane with happiness to hear such news, because I waited for it day after day, hour after hour, with that broken coin hanging on my neck, hiding in the garage of the Navas’ house to write endless letters to Bolivia while I cried. But lately, I’d grown more used to saying Mami to Leonor, the owner of the house where I lived; I hope Bolivia can forgive me for that, wherever she is. I also didn’t correct those in school who thought that Caminaba and Patinaba were my sisters; on the contrary, I encouraged the confusion. It’s just that there were things. Somebody came to me with the gossip that Bolivia worked cleaning houses in America, and I didn’t like that. Then they told me that she ironed other people’s clothes, and I thought that was shameful. I had imagined her driving her new car down a wide boulevard lined with palm trees, and now they were telling me that she was a servant. Meanwhile, Leonor de Nava was a woman who could hire a servant, or even two, one to cook and one to clean. Do you see the difference? She was also the widow of an army officer, had a pension for life, and on weekends, we could go to the military club, a reason for pride and prestige up there in Las Lomitas, the neighborhood where we lived. And then there was my mother working as a servant who ironed other people’s clothes. Humble jobs, but at least they were in America, you may say, but I’d respond: Better to be the head of a mouse than the tail of a lion. But that saying doesn’t paint the whole picture quite right, because the fact is that in America my mother was a tail, but a mouse’s tail. Maybe that’s why I felt more like a person calling Leonor de Nava my mother and Caminaba and Patinaba my sisters, and that’s why I was somewhere else when they handed me the airplane ticket to reunite with Bolivia in America. I had just turned twelve, gotten my period, was the best student in English class, had tons of friends, and although I still didn’t go to parties with boys, I practiced the steps to the merengue and salsa and was a fan of Celia Cruz, Fruko y sus Tesos, and Juan Luis Guerra y 440, and I spent all day straightening my hair with a dryer and a round brush and then setting it in big curlers. And I had fallen in love with Alex Toro, a boy from the neighborhood who paid for school by working at night as a messenger for a discount pharmacy. Leonor often screamed from the bathroom, Why do we need another bottle of alcohol? Or who takes so many aspirins? Who bought more Merthiolate? And it was me. I’d call the pharmacy and order stuff to be delivered just to see Alex Toro. He’d ride over on his bike and bring me Condorito comic books and I’d lend him Roberto Carlos LPs. And that was all we did, but I thought that was love, the love of my life, and that’s why I wasn’t overjoyed by the great news of going to America finally. That dream had slowly become just that, a dream, a distant dream. And Bolivia had become something like the Virgin Mary, and America something like heaven. But my solid ground was Caminaba and Patinaba, Alex Toro, English classes, the military club on weekends, and salsa and merengue on the radio afternoons after school.

Maybe having a dream and being disillusioned is the same thing, two sides of the same coin, the dream that comes first and the letdown that follows. That’s the way the wheel turns, one and then the other, from dreams to disillusions and disillusions to dreams. It seems silly, but it takes a while to admit that life doesn’t proceed in a straight line, but that you wear yourself out in circles. That’s the kind of thing I have had to learn in prison, because here everything’s more intense, like when you were a child and they gave you a coloring book and instead of just coloring things by pressing the pencil softly, you sometimes felt like re-dyeing the whole thing, which is what we called it, re-dyeing, which meant you wet the tip of the pencil with your tongue so that the color would come out more strikingly, brilliantly, and evenly. Re-dyeing. Here in prison, that’s how things seem, re-dyed. Here in Manninpox, I have come to realize that if my mother was a mouse’s tail, my role in this story has been even more pathetic, going down to the category of mouse droppings.

Every morning at seven, unless it’s raining or we’re in isolation, they take us out to an interior yard they call the OSRU, for open space recreation unit. I’m not sure you ever saw it. You have the sky above, cement floor under your feet, and it is forty-two by fifteen steps. A space a little fucking tight for the one hundred thirty to one hundred fifty prisoners that share it. But it doesn’t matter, because you can see the sky, a glorious rectangle of blue, and there’s fresh air that fills your lungs so you can breathe again. In the winter, the yard is covered in snow and it is like a miracle to walk on that intact blanket, so soft and white, so resplendent and fallen from the sky, and that I first came to know here in America. I have told you, Colombia is tropical and there is no winter there. Every time Bolivia called me when I was staying with the Navas, I asked her, “Tell me, Mami, what’s snow like?” “Like lemon ice cream,” she responded. But among other things, the first thing that caught my attention when I saw that yard were the inmates walking around in a circle. Walking fast and faster in a circle, hugging those walls that kept them locked up. You know how this is here, a ridiculous Dracula’s castle with walls of reinforced concrete, without even a little crack to foster dreams of escape. They’d all be there, one hundred thirty to one hundred fifty women going around in circles, one behind the other, two deep, three deep, counterclockwise, like sleepwalkers trapped in their own dreams. This didn’t look like a jail but an insane asylum. And yet, after a week, I was doing it too, possessed of that urge to go around in circles without even asking myself what I was doing. It’s as if you need to break the bonds of confinement, and what drives you to walk in circles is the need to get out of here. Observe a caged tiger. Or any animal in a zoo, have you seen them? They go around and around, staying close to the bars, circling the space of their entrapment. We will never be able to go over the walls of that yard unless they crumble by the grace of God and the trumpets of Jericho. Searchlights and sirens await the spider woman who manages to climb to the top, and rolls of barbed wire, a swarm of blades, and electrified fences that will cut her to pieces, slice her, electrocute her, and mash her until she’s pulp. That’s why we go around in circles, I think. Maybe we are looking to close in that which encloses us, confine what confines us. They say that she who arrives on an island, sooner or later begins to go around it in circles. It’s called “rock fever.” We suffer from it here in Manninpox, and so every day we do the same thing.

Maybe it’s time to tell you why they put me in here. Although it won’t really be possible to explain it because I don’t really understand it myself. All I can tell you is that my chain of missteps in America began when I fell in love with a cop. Or when I didn’t fall in love with him enough, because I’m not going to lie to you, Mr. Rose, I can’t say I fell in love, not that kind of love you’d die for, that didn’t happen. I wonder if you are madly in love with that girl who teaches the deaf. I imagine you are from the way you talked about her. But with Americans you never know. You have this habit of saying things as if you were on camera, so it doesn’t matter what you say, as long as you say it with a smile and “have a nice day.” How I hate that “have a nice day.” They may not even know you or give a shit about your life, or you can drop dead in front of them, and they’ll still blurt out “have a nice day” with that fake smile.

Let’s put it like this, so when you write about it in your novel things are clear: my ruin was marrying Greg, the American ex-cop too many years older than me. He worked for the same company as me as a daytime security guard. Or maybe my mistake was loving him, because I shouldn’t have loved Greg, but I did. In his glory days he must have been a son of a bitch, one of those assholes that stomps on blacks and Latinos with their boots. Or maybe not, I was never quite sure. Anyhow, he had mellowed out by the time fate set him on my path, grown old and crusty, with a half-smile that was his white flag, making it clear he had surrendered long before. And besides, he was a widower, that type of widower with the air of an orphan begging for a good woman to take care of him.

He had the stuff of a bull, but came around the corner seeming like a tired steer. A nice fellow, believe me, with a beer belly and shiny black shoes. But what really attracted me to him, I’ll tell you, although it sounds bad, was that he was tall, white, blond, and English speaking. Well, blond at some point, but by the time I met him he was bald. I was attracted to the fact that he wore his blue-and-white Colorado Rockies T-shirt when he sat down to eat, that he put half a bottle of ketchup on everything, and that he thought if you were Colombian, you surely must know a friend of his who lived in Buenos Aires. Someone like that was a dream come true, just what I had been looking for since the time I ate Milky Ways dreaming about America. I’d had various US Latino boyfriends, one Honduran and another Peruvian. But this would be the first time in all those years that a gringo-gringo expressed serious interest in me, as Bolivia would say, or interests other than sucky-fucky ones. Think about it, Mr. Rose, what it meant for a poor Latina to finally be part of life, not on the side of the violent minorities and the superpredators, but on the side of law and order and the special victims unit.

One Tuesday, I was on my way to the office with thirty-eight completed surveys when I needed forty. I was short two and that was a big drama, because they only paid us for completed jobs, a check for the paperwork for the entire job. Before going in, I was able to get in touch with a contact by phone, something that was prohibited because interviews had to be done in person and at the place of residence. But this time it was a real emergency; in general, I was very diligent about my work, none of these routine proceedings like the rest of the girls. Not me, I got into it in depth, pursuing the task with an investigative reporter’s brio, and asking more questions than I had to, for gossip’s sake, I think, because I got excited about the stories people told. I confess that sin, I like to stick my nose in other people’s business, find out what’s happening in the dormitories and kitchens, and well, now by necessity, inside the cells. Ever since I was a girl, I’ve always liked to butt into private conversations. I try to understand people’s dreams and miseries, and I am fascinated by real-life love stories and follow them as if they were telenovelas. The thing was that on that day I was able to get a survey done, but I still needed one more after that to get to forty. I went into a café to have breakfast, diagonally across from our office, very worried because for the first time I was going to turn in incomplete work. I ordered coffee and toast, and who do I see there but Greg, the security guard. The old man was standing there holding his coffee, feeding pieces of a ham-and-cheese sandwich to his dog Hero, a crippled little pet that was like a mascot for everyone in the company. Greg is my man, I told myself; he had been heaven sent. So I went up to him very demurely, questionnaire in hand. We had never talked before, that is, except for the “have a nice day” or to exchange a few words about how Hero was doing.

“I’ll buy another sandwich for Hero if you answer a few questions for me,” I proposed.

“About what?”

“About your cleaning habits, what do you think?”

“I don’t have many,” he said, but he responded to one question after the other honestly and sincerely. That’s how I first got to know him. He told me that before he joined the police force, he didn’t shower every day.

“How often? Weekly?”

“Let’s say a couple of times a week. But after joining the police I had to take a freezing shower every day.”

“Do you ever shower with hot water, or warm water?”

“That’s for sissies, for faggots,” he told me, and then admitted he didn’t know how to swim, that he had been terrified of water as a child because he grew up in Colorado, where his father worked at a barley farm owned by Coors.

“How is that pertinent?”

“Because there wasn’t a lot of water there, and whatever water there was they used to irrigate the barley fields.”

Moreover, his mother thought that water was dangerous because water opened the pores, and the open pores made the body vulnerable to infections and illnesses. She had only taken two full baths in her whole life and was proud of that, because for her cleanliness wasn’t about taking baths; on the contrary, she thought that if one wasn’t dirty, there was no reason to bathe, and that those who bathed a lot must be hiding some unspeakable sickness, because there was no other reason to explain such behavior.

“So according to your mother,” I told him, “the cleanest ones are the ones who wash the least.”

“Something like that.”

“You said your mother took two full-body baths. Do you remember the occasions?”

“The first on the day of her baptism when she was eleven years old. In her hometown, kids were baptized by plunging them into the Dunaj.”

“What’s the Dunaj?”

“The Dunaj, the Dunaj! Don’t you know it? The Dunaj is the biggest river on the planet.”

“The biggest river is the Amazon,” I said, sticking up for my own. “The Amazon that runs through where I come from. But no one thinks of plunging a girl into it to baptize her, because the piranhas would feast on her. But let’s leave it at that. Everyone has a right to think that their river is the biggest. But tell me about the second bath your blessed mother took.”

“I don’t know. I don’t think she ever told me, but there were only two, I’m sure of that, I heard her mention it a few times. She bathed my brothers and me body part by body part, feet and hands, face, ears, and neck, but she’d never put us in the bathtub, that was for lepers and the ill, according to her.”

“It’s okay, Greg,” I said, because I noticed distress in his voice, as if the memories weren’t pleasing.

It wasn’t long before I’d find out that the problem wasn’t just the mother. Greg as an adult also resisted bathing. My coworkers bragged how their husbands washed their things before doing it and then showered afterward. But that wasn’t going to be the case with me, neither before nor afterward. At that moment, of course, I couldn’t have fully known, so I just responded with the kind of consolation that entails offering someone who tells you a sad story about his life with an even sadder story about your own.

“We all have our issues,” I said, tapping him on the shoulder. “Take my Aunt Alba, Alba Nava, Leonor de Nava’s sister-in-law, aunt to my almost sisters, a rich woman with no kids who lived in an enormous house.”

“Who lived in an enormous house?”

“Alba Nava, the sister-in-law of… look, it doesn’t matter, a rich woman in my town. I’m from Colombia. Anyway, this Alba Nava kept her huge house very neat, with a tiled pool in between the living room and the dining room, a pool for fish, but there were no fish in it, not even water. It was empty the whole week except for Wednesdays, the day on which my half-sisters and I went with Leonor to visit Alba. Then the pool was filled, but with us three.”

“Wait, what three?” asked Greg, whose mind was always somewhere else.

“Well, us three, me and Cami and Pati Nava. Us three, the three girls, they’d put us in the pool on Wednesdays.”

“In the water, with the fish?”

“I told you, there was no water or fish. What I’m trying to tell you is that Aunt Alba made us get in there, in that empty pool, for the whole visit. So that we wouldn’t get her house dirty, capisce? When it was time to serve tea, she’d bring us hot chocolate and crackers with butter and marmalade that we had to eat there, inside the pool, being very careful that not a single crumb fell outside.”

“That’s pretty pathetic,” Greg said.

“What I’m trying to say is that it’s as awful to be too clean as it is to be dirty.”

My strategy for solace must have worked, because two weeks later, the man was proposing to me. I said yes, without even thinking about it twice, and said to myself, María Paz — only it wasn’t María Paz but my real name — you did it, and I congratulated myself with little taps on the back of my shoulder and told myself to have a nice day, pretty little María Paz, you hit the jackpot finally, you’re going to marry a gringo and become a real American, so from now on have a very nice day every fucking day of your life. The thing is that my mother had come to America but she had never become a real American. Violeta and I grew up in this country, but for us also it was as if we remained at the threshold without being able to step into that enormous and bright hall. We had arrived but we hadn’t gotten here yet. Because getting to America is not landing in Phoenix, Arizona, or Dallas, Texas, or finishing high school with honors, not even speaking English without an accent. America is hidden inside America, and to truly penetrate it, a visa is not enough and neither is a Visa card, nor a green card, nor a MasterCard. All that helps, but they don’t definitively make you a real American.

For me, Greg signified access through the big door. Finally, I’d be a hundred percent American. You know what that means as far as papers? Bolivia had been able to get a green card for herself, but they had denied them for us, her daughters. In time, she had been able to normalize Violeta’s situation with the help of the mental health institute that confirmed that the girl was autistic and could not be deported because she could not take care of herself. But I remained outside. Bolivia wanted to get me in by claiming me as a mental case also, but I refused. So I behaved normally during all the psychological exams and wasn’t diagnosed with anything. Bolivia had gotten her green card when she applied for it through proper channels, but times had changed by the time I applied, and I was denied. That’s why I had to use false papers when I began to work for the survey department of the cleaning products company. It’s easy to get papers. Maybe you’re not aware of this, but the business for false documentation is a multimillion-dollar industry in this country. The problem is if they catch you, you go straight to prison. But I was saved. My marriage to Greg would allow me to obtain the proper paperwork and give me the rights to residency and work. I was going to marry a gringo; what more could I ask for. I was going to marry all these legal rights and a white American.

Of course, later I’d discover that he was a Slovak. From Slovakia, a country that before then I did not know existed. And that, even today, I confuse with Estonia and Slovenia. Greg was born in America, of Slovak roots. His mother, the one who did not bathe, was a Slovak. Comical, if you think about it. After so much suffering about being considered a foreigner, I came to find out that if you dig a little, every American is something else, from another place, and feels nostalgia for some town in Japan, or Italy, or whatever mountain in Lebanon. Or Slovakia. As for Greg, he was most nostalgic for kapustnica, a traditional soup made from fermented cabbage, and he took great pride in making it as his mother had made it, and his grandmother and great-grandmother before that, and so on all the way back to Eve. Greg and his kapustnica, a nightmare for me, for I don’t like strange foods: scrambled eggs with surprises in them, or let’s see what the spoon scoops out on this miraculous fishing expedition, nothing worse than soups that are like the sea, turbid and full of critters. I don’t go for that. I need to know exactly what I’m eating. If it’s rice, rice, or beans, beans. My tongue is a cowardly creature that hides in its cave and is terrified of strong flavors or weird textures. All the fears that I don’t have as a person, my tongue has. I’ll do anything, except to taste something I don’t recognize. In that, we were very much alike, Greg and I. He too had a phobia of unknown and suspicious foods, but of course he didn’t think of kapustnica as such. For him, kapustnica was the thing, the queen of soups, the eighth wonder of the world. I once tried to prepare a typical Colombian dish so he’d try it, so he’d learn a little bit about where I’m from. I made him ajiaco, a traditional Bogotá-style stew with three types of potato. Well, I was able to find two of the potatoes in a market for Colombian products and substituted for the third. For our native potato, which is small, yellow, and very tasty, I used the pale and sweet Idaho, but it didn’t matter, Greg would never notice. And instead of the guascas, which is an herb we add to the stew, I put some marijuana leaves, also Colombian and easier to get here. The rest was all according to the recipe, corn from the cob, chicken, capers, heavy cream, and avocado. I got emotional cooking, tears almost welling up in my eyes; it’s a whole ceremony to cook native dishes in a foreign land, something patriotic, like singing the national anthem or raising the flag. You feel as if it is you, your ancestors, your identity that are simmering in the pot. I spent a whole Saturday getting the ingredients and all of Sunday morning making it, and even took the trouble to explain to Greg that it was a pre-Columbian dish and then had to tell him what pre-Columbian was.

“It’s something that comes from our indigenous ancestors,” I told him.

“I see,” he said. “So it’s Aztec.”

“Well, not Aztec, not really, you have to go down in the map a little further, from Central America to South America, you understand. Because although it might sound strange to you, there are three Americas: North, Central, and South — not just North, which is yours. The Aztecs are from Mexico. We Colombians are Chibchas. Me, I’m Chibcha, not Aztec. It’s not the same.”

“But almost the same,” he said.

In any case, my stew was a failure. Greg barely tasted it, a few spoonfuls and that’s it because he was overcome by a case of the hiccups. And he said offensive things that I wasn’t really expecting, me who always played along when it came to his kapustnica, which I think is atrocious but would never have said so to his face. But he, on the other hand, was the type that just blurted out any insult right in front of you, and told me that my stew was a very primitive dish. What do you think, Mr. Rose, Greg the peasant calling my things primitive.

“It’s not primitive,” I corrected him. “It’s ancestral, which is different. So have some respect. I already explained to you that this is a soup that they have been making since before Columbus, that is, from the pre-Columbian cultures, which in many ways were more advanced than the Europeans.”

“Oh yeah,” he challenged me, “tell me a single thing in which you are more advanced than the Europeans, one thing, and it’s definitely not soup. In Europe, this thing that you prepared is something very poor peasants would eat in the winter when all other foods have run out and there are only potatoes left in the cellar.”

I could have argued that potatoes are originally from the Americas, that without the Americas, his peasants could not have eaten any potatoes, but I bit my tongue so as not to get him riled up. Although I could have also asked him if he thought his crude scraps of fermented cabbage were a feast for a king. But I stopped myself. The truth was that I always stopped myself so I wouldn’t provoke him. My Greg was a calm guy, almost lethargic, but when he got worked up, he’d let loose with the biggest threat. He used it often and without much thought, as if drawing a gun: he said he’d make them take away my green card, because it was only thanks to him that they had given it to me. That kind of blackmail intimidated me. I grew meek, lowered my head, and even allowed him to say that my Colombian stew was disgusting, because in the end that’s what he really meant, that it disgusted him. I tell you, Mr. Rose, Greg was a calm person, but there were things that set him off, and the topic of food was one of them. I don’t know why food makes us so sensitive. Perhaps because it’s what we have inside, in our guts, and also what we shit, that is, what runs through us from our mouths to our assholes, what goes inside the top hole and comes out the bottom hole, what we are, to put it plainly.

Don’t worry, Mr. Rose, don’t think I’m going off on tangents again because I’m taking my time telling you these things; on the contrary, it’s a way of getting directly to the matter you are probably waiting to hear, the reason I ended up in prison in the USA. You might think that the kapustnica has nothing to do with that, but it does. It has everything to do with it; it is almost the heart of the matter. I know that you don’t know why I was imprisoned, I know because during the first class you asked us our names and nothing else; you said that what we had done or failed to do was exclusively a matter between us and the law. That’s what you said, and added that it was none of your beeswax and that we didn’t have to explain anything to you. And I’m almost getting to the matter. We’re on the right track, but let me talk about Hero a little bit first, the dog that went with us everywhere; when we were not at home, he was at work with my husband. He was crippled like Christina of that novel. His hind legs ruined like her legs, because apparently he had been used to detect plastic explosives in Alaska, where there are still independence fighters who set off bombs. And the independence fighters blew off Hero’s hind legs, so because of the accident, he got around on a little cart that Greg himself built for him, careful to make it as light as possible and attach to him so that it wouldn’t scratch off his hair anywhere. Hero’s martyred parts fit snugly in the cart that he pulled with his front legs as if nothing, and I never saw a dog more agile, more full of joy, or more excited fetching a ball, even if we threw it a hundred times. All in all, he was a dog like any other, normal size, I imagine, before they turned him into half a dog, with a coat that was black and yellow with a little white near his snout, and we adored him. The Association for the Protection of Retired Police Dogs had decorated him for canine services to the homeland and turned him over for adoption to good-guy Greg, who kept the name the dog had had in Alaska, although I always thought that we should change it. I wasn’t convinced that our Hero had fought on the side of the good guys. I suspected that the fighters for Alaskan independence had some just claims, like the brothers of my Puerto Rican friend Alissette who fought for the cause of Puerto Rico Libre. And anyway, I preferred a name without so much history for Hero, such as Tim or Jack, or maybe Lucero, the name of the Navas’ toy poodle.

For twelve hours every day, from eight in the morning till eight at night, Greg and Hero were stationed at the entrance of the building where we worked, checking bags, asking for documentation, giving passes, always very cordial and easygoing, Greg and his little dog. The little dog and the cart. And I, who had worn myself out with some tormented and unpleasant love affairs earlier, told myself, María Paz, muchacha, it’s time to think about things a little differently. This Slovak is no Adonis, nor is he a real American, but it would be enough that he is as loyal as his dog. Who was Greg really? For me, always an enigma. A good cop? But how good, I never knew. He swore that he wasn’t a racist, but he was. He’d see a white woman with a black man and claim that she must be a prostitute. And if he saw a black man driving an expensive car, he said it was likely stolen.

And yet, he married me, a dark-skinned Latina. In church, in a wedding that was lacking nothing. There was a priest and altar boys, Madonna lilies, white roses, a cake with three tiers, various canapés, a hot and cold buffet that included lobster, a bride’s dress and a veil with a crown of orange blossoms, and even a cubic zirconia ring that looked like a diamond. Because that’s how Greg had wanted it. I had never been very religious, but he was so Catholic that he even hung a crucifix over our marriage bed. He paid for everything with part of his pension funds, the church, the reception, the honeymoon in Hawaii, and even bought a royal-blue tuxedo with a bow tie and a tight-fitting, wine-colored cummerbund to hide his belly, if you know what I mean. The wedding dress also came out of Greg’s pocket, and my sister, Violeta, who was to be the maid of honor, her dress, and even the bridesmaids, four of my coworkers, their dresses. Because Bolivia didn’t live to see it, I had asked Violeta to be my maid of honor. But in the end she didn’t do it. At the last moment, she decided not to come to the wedding, and left us holding a long, almond-colored shantung dress that we had had made for her to pair with mine, which wasn’t shantung but embroidered and also almond-colored. But Violeta’s case is a whole other chapter and requires its own explanations, so it’d be best if I talk about her later; just keep in mind from this point that she’s the heart of the story. For now, I’ll only say that I’d have rather been married in a more simple ceremony, definitely a more private one. Don’t think that I was feeling like one of Charlie’s Angels strolling on the beaches of Hawaii with an old fatso like Greg.

Our relationship began according to the law because that’s the way he wanted it. And it suited me, after all, because after so much anguish and effort I was finally going to become an American citizen. Put yourself in my shoes. From the moment that my mother passed away, I was the only person who cared for Violeta, and they could deport me at any moment. Now do you understand why I almost fell to my knees the night Greg and I met at Applebee’s to go to the movies afterward, and he pulled a black velvet box out of his pocket, with white felt on the inside, like a miniature coffin, and in it was the cubic zirconia set in white gold? It wasn’t from Tiffany’s, Mr. Rose, as Holly Golightly would have wanted it, but for me it was as if it were. Always generous, my poor Greg, he had his savings. At home, we never lacked food or services, and after we were married, we always paid the rent ahead of time. Not that it was much. They’d have had some gall to charge us more, given the depressed neighborhood and the depressing building. We’re talking about one of those “white flight” zones. It had been a long time since anybody saw a white face around there. My Greg was like a museum piece amid so much brown and black, mestizo and mulatto. The truth was that even though Greg was the white one, he always felt like a fly in a puddle of milk, and he couldn’t wait for the day we would leave. He was just waiting for the rest of his pension to kick in so we could get the fuck out of there to that town of poor white folk where he had his house, where the fly in the milk would be me. What I’m trying to tell you was that my neighborhood was in a seriously bad state. A few years before, suffice it to say, the owner of our building had tried to burn it down to collect insurance and would have gotten his way had the firemen not put out the fire in time. To this day, no one lives on the first floor, the walls still blackened. But my apartment is different. Freshly painted, cozy, with all the necessary appliances, blinds in good condition, and a white rug. I always kept my apartment gleaming. Or as Bolivia would say, like a silver cup. And Greg lent a hand, with his toolbox always ready to fix anything. The last thing he had been able to do, my poor old man, was to widen the barbecue on the so-called roof terrace so that we could fit more burgers and corn on the cob on it, a nice detail on his part. A rather useless detail, though, because we never really invited anyone, except Sleepy Joe, who invited himself. But that we even had a roof terrace with a barbecue — tell me if that’s not the “American way”? The terrace also had a splendid view and with binoculars we could even see the Empire State Building. But what you saw with the naked eye was our neighborhood, not a great sight, as I said, a rather depressed area, but at least we had a barbecue. Although we never got to try the new larger version.

My husband had his things. Odd ticks of a cop, but a Catholic ex-cop. He belonged to an order of retired officers called the Most Holy Name of Jesus. He’d bring me there on the first Sunday of every month to take Holy Communion and then we’d have breakfast with his old coworkers, the Catholic cops. And I sat there quietly, listening to them talk about everything, but foremost about how to live your life so as to not offend the most holy name of Jesus. On top of that, three or four times a year we’d go to these nighttime ceremonies in which they’d give each other awards, for courage, devotion, or any other virtue. Greg would don his uniform on those occasions, which despite the alterations barely fit him. And I’d put my hair up in a bun and wear a long evening dress. The whole thing would end with a dance and fireworks. I looked like the daughter of even the youngest couple there, and Greg showed me off with pride. In the summer, we would meet with the same group for a commemorative picnic in one of the national parks, and that was about it. But these occasions were mandatory. My Greg would never skip out on the sacred host of those first Sundays, or the sandwiches in the national parks, or the cannellonis of the evening dances.

Why did he marry me and not a white girl? The first answer is the obvious one: I was young and pretty. And I doubt that a white girl who was young and pretty would ever want to marry the likes of him. But on top of that he thought that white girls were a bit too whorish. And he knew a thing or two about whores. He had been part of an anticrime unit in which he’d worked the streets undercover. This was the most unsupervised and fucked-up part of the police force, I’m telling you, but I’d have never said such a thing to Greg’s face. Greg was only rude to me once — he who was otherwise so gentle and delicate — only once, and for a very surprising reason. It must have been eight or nine at night, and I was stretched out on the sofa, watching a movie that I had just gotten at Blockbuster. He arrived home in a good mood, as always, asking me what I wanted to do with dinner, because, like I said, he was the only one who cooked. Everything was fine up to that point, but his face grew contorted when he saw the movie I was watching, one with Nick Nolte, playing a corrupt cop with his hair gelled and a thin mustache. Q & A it was called, remember? Nothing special, a convoluted plot I’d already lost track of and was just looking at the pictures, thinking about other things. Well, Greg dashed toward the TV to shut it off, pulled out the DVD, and went to return it to Blockbuster right away, screaming that he’d not allow this thing to be in his home one second longer. Which by the way wasn’t his home but mine. And all the furniture was mine, bought by me, beginning with the TV. The only thing that was his was the crucifix, which I could have done without. That little bloodied figure hanging from the cross wasn’t anything to get aroused about, if you know what I mean. And here you may ask yourself, Mr. Rose, why Greg didn’t have a house in spite of his police pension and salary as a security guard. But he did have one, a house with three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a studio, a garage, and a garden in a nearby town, where according to the plans we would go live in a couple of years. Not yet, we couldn’t leave the city yet, because there were no jobs in the town and it wasn’t enough with only the pension, especially because of the extremely expensive school that I paid for, for my sister Violeta, and because I didn’t want to stop working — I had made that quite clear to him. Anyway, that time with Q & A, Greg slammed the door on his way out and I was left confused. But then he came back and he was the same as ever, just Greg, with a pizza from Sbarro and a six-pack of Coors. While we were eating, he apologized and explained that he hated the morbidity of people who enjoy the stories of bad cops.

“They think a corrupt cop is something funny,” he said. “They like to play up cops who kill and get killed. They’re motherfuckers, those directors that line their pockets talking about spilled blood when they wouldn’t even know what it smells like.”

“What does it smell like?”

“It’s metallic. And sometimes it emits steam, because it still contains some of the heat of the life that has escaped the deceased’s body.”

But what I was telling you about, Mr. Rose, is that working for the anticrime unit made Greg value prostitutes. He told me they were his strongest allies, because they were the only ones who knew everything that was happening on the streets, the ones who knew the goings-on and snares of the underworld best. That’s why he valued them. But of course he’d not have wanted to fall into their clutches. Greg had too high a regard for the sacrament of marriage. He went the whole Catholic route with his first wife, and repeated the process with me. I guess he thought that because Latinas were so Catholic, we would be less likely to cheat on him. Something like that, or maybe he was affected by having grown up in a Latino neighborhood. Of course, with me he made a mistake, not because I cheated on him, although not from lack of wanting to.

Let me stop there, because I’m lying. I did cheat on Greg, Mr. Rose. I cheated on him in a bad way. Even though it hurts, I have to tell you the truth, because if I omit that fact, you’re not going to understand the mess that followed. I slept with my brother-in-law. And not once, but a thousand times. There you have it. It’s out. I’ve said it. Now you know why I doubted Corina’s story, that whole thing about the rape? Because I knew how the man handled himself when it came to sex, knew it by heart, and I didn’t have any complaints — just the opposite; that wasn’t a problem. But the whole situation was bad, sleeping with two brothers, terrible idea. And now you understand why I wanted Sleepy Joe and Cori to hit it off? I needed to rid myself of him, Mr. Rose. Get him off me, toss him from my bed forever, before the shit hit the fan. All this adultery mess was beginning to weigh on me. I lived terrified that my husband would catch us, and that was the least of it; the worst part was that the guilt was eating me alive. But I couldn’t do anything by myself, I went soft just seeing my good old brother-in-law, my will and my conviction vanished as soon as that boy walked through the doors of my house. I also didn’t dare tell anyone. The best thing I could come up with was to pawn off my lover on my friend, my best friend, as if asking her without saying anything, Cori, free me from this mess, you take him. But apparently that was a big mistake, a major screwup on my part, and as I should have known, it turned out bad for everyone. First, Corina comes with the rape story, the broomstick, all that horror. But how was I supposed to believe her when I knew Sleepy Joe’s sexual habits so well? Me and my brother-in-law. My brother-in-law and I. We were obviously not playing some kids’ game; it was full-fledged sex, hot stuff, twenty-one and older, full-frontal nudity, no-holds-barred pornography, whatever you want to call it, every position and transgression, anything you can imagine. But in spite of his tantrums and horrible temper, our sexual relations always remained within the bounds of human rights, so to speak, and whatever violence there was, it was consensual and moderate.

The blind date with Cori sent Sleepy Joe into a frenzy and let loose some lunacy that had been previously kept in check. Greg told me months later that this was exactly what they were talking about in Slovak at the restaurant. Joe was accusing his brother of disrespecting him, the insult, the indignity, and who knows what else. “What do you think I am?” he screamed at Greg, with me and Cori sitting right there having no idea what the quarrel was about. “What do you think I am? Your little whore?” he screamed at Greg. “You think you can just pawn me off on anyone? Huh? Tell me to my face, brother. Is that what you think of me?” He made quite a little scene. My poor Greg who had to put up with it. Fortunately, they were quarreling in Slovak; that left me and Cori with our gin and tonics out of the loop. It would be too late before I found that Joe had felt stung and humiliated by the whole episode. I imagine he didn’t feel it was right that I, his lover, would dispose of him by hawking him off on someone else. I’d have liked to have given Cori a heads-up about this, asked for forgiveness, talked about these things openly, confess my dirty little scheme. But she had already left for Chalatenango and hadn’t left an address. Maybe mistreating Cori was Sleepy Joe’s way of getting back at me, his revenge, which was much harsher than the offense, as could be expected from Sleepy Joe, who doesn’t believe in an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. If you knock out a single one of his teeth he will punch out all of yours and poke your eyes out with a pencil. But there’s still one more question. Why such an indirect way of letting me know that he was hurt? Pride probably, and probably because that’s just the way he is, Sleepy Joe, full of resentments and coded messages.

From the first day I got into this whole adultery mess, I was looking for a way to end it. Think of it, Mr. Rose, as if you shot two arrows in completely different directions. That was me, trapped in infidelity and at the same time detesting it. I wanted to cut loose but I couldn’t; the more I tried the tighter the bindings became. And my passion for my brother-in-law grew with my regret. At the beginning, I wanted to end the affair with Joe because of Greg, the fear that Greg would find out; Greg’s explosion, if he were ever to find out; the end of our marriage; the loss of the green card; the fight to the death between brothers; the final judgment. But after what happened with Corina, my main reason for ending it with Joe was because of Joe, who had always inspired a bit of fear in me; after Corina, that fear became panic. Because I knew well what my dear brother-in-law was like in the sack, and I could attest for that, but I also knew about his more perverse side. He was Catholic, after all.

If Greg made a mistake with me it was that in the end I wasn’t very Catholic, and even less faithful. The complete opposite of his first wife, who I know almost nothing about because he never talked about her. I only knew that she had worn the ring of white gold that had belonged to her mother-in-law, and that Greg gave to me, with the cubic zirconia, on the day of our engagement, the very same one that they confiscated from me when they put me in here, and they haven’t given it back. Not that I need it. That piece wasn’t all mine, it had passed through a lot of hands before it got to me.

What else can I tell you about, what other clues may have foretold the tragic outcome? Well, there were weapons in the house, but what ex-cop doesn’t have weapons in the house? A few pistols, or revolvers or whatever, I don’t know the difference, never touched them, never even noticed them. Greg kept them well oiled and they were his pride and joy, because according to him the department had granted them to him. He used to leaf through weapons catalogs and subscribed to various magazines that he read in the bathroom, but not Playboy or Penthouse or anything like that, my Greg became aroused by other things. He locked himself up in the bathroom with Soldier of Fortune, the bible of mercenaries, or with Corrections Today, the essential source for the discovery of prison-security innovations. I know because he showed them to me, he wanted to share his passion with me, because in the end that was his world, the souvenirs of his profession, remembrances of his youth. Everyone has his stuff. And I respected it because Greg was a good man. Let’s say a man whose love for me was insecure, over the top, the kind of love an older man has for a much younger woman. He spoiled me as if I were his daughter, and I let myself be spoiled, although the excessive affection was a bit suffocating. In previous relationships with men my own age I had come to know plenty of insolence, and Greg’s love felt like an oasis. After he died, if he is in fact dead, I came to realize that living with him had been a privilege, because he was the only man who truly loved me or who still loves me, if he happens to be alive. Except for that whole nonsense that I told you about with Q & A, his outburst about that movie, I never once fought with Greg. Things went well from the moment we married until the night of his fifty-seventh birthday.

And now I’ll get back to the kapustnica. One night in the middle of the fall, Greg and I were making dinner at home, a special dinner because it was his birthday. Or I should say, he was making dinner, because remember, he cooked, I didn’t. I also had to work on the other side of the city and was getting home late, a very formally attired dinner and I was all stocked up with a bouquet of roses in one hand and a six-pack of Coors in the other. I was out of breath after climbing the five flights, because we are on the top floor and there is no elevator. When I went into the apartment, Hero ran out to meet me and as always began to do circles around me. You don’t know, Mr. Rose, how much I miss my dog, Hero. If at least they’d let me keep him, things would be easier in here. I have to hold back tears every time I talk about Hero. But to get back to that night. As soon as I walked into the apartment I was surrounded by a cloud of steam, and the smell of the kapustnica, which had been simmering for hours; Greg had taken the day off to devote himself to it. The windows of the house were fogged over, a Turkish bath of fermented cabbage, and among a pile of dirty pots he stood in front of the stove, a big spoon in hand. He was wearing his apron for special meals and he looked comical, I swear, I felt a certain tenderness seeing him like that, his red cheeks and the little hair left on his head, all sweaty with his belly bulging over the apron, which had a print design of two circles up top and a little triangle below representing the tits and the pubic area of a curvy young woman. Greg was very proud of his apron; he thought it was quite the joke to wear it, a stroke of genius worthy of a select group of males obsessed with the culinary arts.

I like to think you cook, Mr. Rose, and that you make traditional dishes from your country for your girl, or from your parents’ country, or your grandparents’. We don’t have Internet access here, so I haven’t been able to find out anything about your last name, Rose, although I’d like to think it’s from an ancient country where roses grow wild, and where your grandparents made leek-and-potato soup, or roasted a goat with rosemary, a country they had to flee from by ship because war and hunger had made the leeks, potatoes, and kids disappear. Only the pure roses remained, and no one could live on that. That’s why I imagine that when you prepare the potato soup for your girl, or the roasted kid, you do it in remembrance of your grandparents and dress up the table with a vase of roses. I don’t know, that’s what I like to think; as you know, we have time to fiddle our diddles here.

“Hi, sweetheart, good to have you home,” Greg screamed at me from the kitchen on the night of his birthday, and it was clear he was glad to see me, always glad to see me, kind Greg. And that’s what he always called me, sweetheart, and to me it sounded like a Sandra Bullock movie. Every once in a while his voice would tremble and he’d sing me an oldie by Nelson Eddy, as he explained to me, which went “sweetheart, sweetheart, sweetheart,” like that, a threesome, because sometimes he tried to be romantic, my Greg.

“The kapustnica is almost ready and it is a masterpiece, best one yet,” he told me. “And I couldn’t even find the Cantimpalos chorizo, the best substitute I’ve found here, I had to use a more common brand, but you can’t even tell it’s missing the Cantimpalos, come here, sweetheart, try it. So? Is it better with the Cantimpalos or without? What does it need? Someday I’ll take you to my country so that you can taste the kapustnica with our sausage, the authentic smoked sausage from our country. Meanwhile, we have to make do with what we have. Go on, sweetheart, set the table. Did you remember to bring me beer? Good, then bring out the wineglasses to do honor to this magnificent kaputsnica.”

“Beer in wineglasses, Greg? What gives?”

“Why do we have those glasses then if we are never going to use them?”

Beer in wineglasses, Cantimpalos chorizo, smoked sausage, or his mother’s ass, it was all the same to me. And if you want me to tell you the truth, Mr. Rose, I preferred it without any chorizo, or any roasted goat, or cabbage, or pork ribs, or onions, or garlic; but, of course, that’s not what I told Greg that night. Fortunately, I didn’t tell him and he died convinced that I appreciated his culinary efforts.

“Is Sleepy Joe coming?” I asked. “Should I set a plate for him?”

“Just two settings,” Greg responded. “One for you and one for me, and Hero’s dish.”

“Don’t you dare give kapustnica to Hero, you know how it gives him the runs,” I warned him as I arranged the roses in a vase.

“I’ll give him just a little bit so he can try it. Don’t set a plate for Sleepy Joe. He always says he’s coming and then stands us up,” he told me as he washed his hands, wiping them on the painted tits of the apron.

That was the last image of Greg alive that I remember.

I gave a chunk of cheese to Hero and took him to the roof so he’d take his last pee of the day. I unhitched him from his cart, went back down the stairs carrying him, and dropped him on his favorite bed, which was of course our bed. I then went into the dining room/living room and was taking out the wineglasses from their boxes, a wedding gift from Socorro, my mother’s best friend, when I heard the phone ring and then Greg taking the call in the kitchen. A few minutes later, I heard him putting his jacket on behind me and opening the front door.

“Where are you going?” I asked, without turning around to look at him.

“Sleepy Joe just called.”

“Should I set a plate for him then?”

“No, he just wants me to come down for a moment.”

I imagined that Sleepy Joe wanted to give him a birthday present, or at least a hug. It didn’t seem odd that he didn’t want to come up. Lately, things were a little tense between them, and although usually they didn’t argue inside the house, not to do it in front of me, I knew that outside they’d get into arguments more frequently. Well, sometimes they’d do it inside the house also, but in Slovak, so don’t ask what it was about, because I couldn’t understand a thing. Greg would always end up annoyed and agitated after those squabbles, but I couldn’t get him to talk about them, so I never knew the reasons.

“Why were you fighting?” I’d asked him, half-fearing I was the reason.

“Don’t worry about it,” he’d tell me, “it’s an old fight, something about an inheritance in Slovakia. One day I’ll have to go to claim it and you’ll come with me, it’ll be our second honeymoon.”

I had no desire to go to Slovakia. I imagined it frozen and desolate and lost in the past. In any case, it was probably best if I stayed out of those types of brawls. These are passing things between brothers, I thought. In the end, they loved each other, they couldn’t live without each other, and they even prayed together often, also in Slovak, or maybe in a language even more ancient, because they sang what seemed to be ancient hymns from far away, more, how should I put it, more warlike than religious, or at least that’s how they sounded to me. They’d do it every morning at six sharp. The Angelus, as the devotion is called, commemorates the Incarnation. A hell of a mystery, terrifying to me, according to which God, regretful of the errors he committed in the Creation, is incarnated and becomes man, descends to earth to suffer like any other man, to come to know in the flesh the suffering that he had imposed on humans, and to be humiliated and whipped and tortured on a cross in the most atrocious manner, to bear a suffering worse than any human, and in the end God is God and his pains are infinite because he is divine. What a mystery. But why, if he is almighty, doesn’t God return to his creatures, sparing the whole world from suffering and sparing himself as well? That’s what I asked Greg, and he said to stop talking nonsense, girl, that without suffering there’s no religion and no religion without suffering. That’s it. A mystery is a mystery and it’s not meant to be solved. In any case the two brothers prayed on the roof, never inside the apartment, which was small with low ceilings, cozy but tight, and according to Greg, the roof was a cathedral with the sky as the dome. That’s how my Greg put it. Sometimes he came up with the prettiest expressions. I don’t know where he got them. A cathedral with the sky as the dome. And he was right. When you’re up there, on the roof of our building, it seems as if the wind blowing in your face comes from some other place. It’s as if you left this devastated neighborhood, looked at it from above, and although it is only five floors high, you could see everything really small, way down there, because you’re in some other world up here, and you dream of escaping to strange and distant cities, and you dream you see the stars although you don’t, and then you’re hit with the smell of the country and the noise of the sea, I mean, although it’s not real you can dream it, that your life becomes wide and free, without a roof to crush you or walls to constrict you. I think that it was Violeta’s favorite place because it was the only one that calmed her down and where Greg and Joe prayed their so-called Angelus each morning and then all the days of Holy Week, Greg leading with the singing part because of his rights as older brother and Joe responding. I was the only one not so sure about the whole thing. The neighbors are going to think Muslims live here and are going to become suspicious of us, I warned the brothers, because aside from their chants and prayers they rang a little bell like in school, and I thought it would wake up the whole neighborhood, and then the icing on the cake was the lighting of candles and incense. But they didn’t listen to me; my warnings went in one ear and out the other. They just kept doing their thing, loyal to their traditions above all, rain or shine, because they put a lot of passion into their prayers and rituals. Sleepy Joe was more committed than Greg, who had been somewhat tamed by the years, while Joe was a fanatic, or as they say in the news, a fundamentalist. When he argues a point, he seems ready to kill or die for what he believes, and when he prays… when he prays it’s even worse. I have always been suspicious of the pious who pray all the time, those who adore God above all things. I get chills watching those that kneel and kiss the ground, those that self-flagellate, those who drag and sacrifice themselves for the Lord and revere his saints and angels. Sleepy Joe is one of those, and when the mood strikes him, he metamorphoses, the fever chills spread through his body and he becomes another person. That’s what he is, a violent and mystical man who knows how to combine those two elements without straining; either one of them flows through him spontaneously, sometimes at once. Greg wasn’t like that. He shared his brother’s religious fanaticism, that’s for sure, and they made plans to visit the Virgin of Medjugorje together. I mean they were those types of old-time fanatics, but at least Greg didn’t make that face of a transfigured lunatic when he prayed. Joe does, and I know, because as I told you I’ve seen him do both things, fuck and pray, and sleep and start a fight, that too, because there’s no doubt that the man has some bipolar issues, but above all, he likes to sleep, from dawn till nightfall. The truth is that I don’t think he does much else with his life. I got scared when he was overcome by one of his mystical fits, I swear to you, Mr. Rose. Imagine some Russian-looking guy, with his crazy tattoos and T-shirts with the sleeves rolled up, legs like pillars of stone, tough-looking from top to bottom, like Viggo Mortensen in Eastern Promises, that sturdy and good-looking, as some would say frighteningly masculine, too much perhaps, and also too white, aggressively Caucasian. I’m not sure if you understand what I’m saying, but now imagine him in concentrated form, ecstatic, reciting rosaries in Slovak to the one he calls the Most Holy Virgin Mary, mother and lady, queen of heaven and earth, like his own mother but to the millionth power, even more frightening and powerful than his mother and huge like the universe. If she only saw Sleepy Joe in one of his trances, the veins in his neck bulging and his eyes going back in his head as if he were an epileptic. Maybe not so much, but something like it. Veins bulging, the whitened eyes, and a shuddering throughout his body — such was the strength of his faith. I’m telling you, that’s the face Joe makes when he fucks, when he argues, and when he prays, and it’s frightening to look at him when he is doing any of those three things, as if eternally on the border of somewhere else, a step away from a psychotic episode.

Greg loved him like a father, in the good sense and in the bad. He spoiled Joe and put up with too much of his crap. At the same time he was always preaching to him wherever they’d happen to be as if he were a kid. I remember the craziness that came over Greg as we returned from Mass one Sunday and found Sleepy Joe seated at the kitchen table and playing with the meat knife, holding it with his right hand and stabbing the spaces between the fingers of his left hand, faster, faster, pricking holes in the table, and right when Greg said to stop the fucking game, Joe misjudged a move and stabbed one of his fingers. Not badly, but enough so that blood splattered on the table. And Greg screamed out, “You idiot, you moron.” What didn’t he call Joe? “You’ve ruined my kitchen table, you asshole,” he said. “Look what you’ve done, it’s full of marks.” But Joe took it and remained silent, sucking on the wound between his ring finger and pinkie.

They fought a lot because they’re a lot alike, I used to think and still think; I imagine that Greg became a cop just as simply as he could have become a criminal. And that Joe became a good-for-nothing just as simply as he could have become a cop. But perhaps I’m not being fair to Greg, who was a peaceful sort of guy, whereas Sleepy Joe had a rage inside him that was eating him alive and making steam come out of his ears. I have always thought that he never became a serial killer simply because he was too lazy. He told us he was a truck driver, and although I had never seen a truck, there was no reason to doubt his word, except for the sleepiness. If it were true that he was a truck driver, he’d have long before wrecked a vehicle by falling asleep at the steering wheel. After we were married and Greg moved into my place, Sleepy Joe began to visit us frequently, dining with us and sleeping on the sofa in the living room. He usually slept straight through the day. He had his beers, burped loudly and resoundingly, like a sated baby, lay spread-eagled on the sofa to watch TV, and fell asleep so deeply and for so long that it seemed he had died. An amazing corpse, if the truth be told. I took advantage of this to watch him, his face half-hidden by his folded arm and his powerful body on display, barely stirred by a breath. A young lion in docile rest. Greg, of course, saw it differently. He thought that since childhood Joe was in a rage and cursing the world, fast asleep, or silently hatching some malicious plan. Deep down, I knew the truth about Sleepy Joe. It would be a lie to say I didn’t, but I never put it in words, and if I had, Greg would have jumped to his brother’s defense.

“Let him be, he’s young,” he’d have argued, “he can take life calmly.”

After the prayers at six, Sleepy Joe slept the entire morning. He’d wake up briefly to devour whatever was in the refrigerator, sleep again till midafternoon, and then he’d remain awake until the morning light, because, as he put it, a cautious man doesn’t sleep in the dark. I always thought it was something physical. In the darkness, his heart froze and he’d not dare close his eyes to confront whatever phantoms haunted him. I told him once, “Joe, you kill the nighttime hours with the sound of the television so you don’t feel lonely.” More than likely he responded with one of the filthy obscenities that came out of his purple mouth. I’m not making that up. His gums and his lips were of a purplish hue, identical to Greg’s. The brothers were those types of people with visible gums and thick purplish lips, or I should say with too much mouth in the paleness of the face, mouths that insist you look at them against your will. I can see the two of them as children back in Colorado, sharing a bed with the other siblings like sardines in a can, Greg sleeping like an angel, but Joe wickedly awake, a little Slovak punk with his eyes wide open under the coarse scratchy bedsheets, counting the thousands of minutes and millions of seconds that must remain till morning, not daring, in his need, to scream for his mother, that woman who never bathed them and who, as soon as morning came, sent them out to play in the backyard, whether it was winter or summer, and whether they were still dressed or in their underwear, so that they accompanied her in reciting the Angelus. Or maybe she was the source of the panic, the mother, it could be. I, for one, am glad we never met, and I’m heartbroken that I had to use her wedding band.

When Sleepy Joe was in my house he’d prepare for this nighttime sleeplessness by stocking up on Coors, Marlboro Lights, and the spicy Mexican candies he ate all the time, according to him so he could stop smoking. They were called Pica Limón and they were packaged in red-and-green wrappers; when I returned from work, it wasn’t hard to see if Sleepy Joe had come by, all I had to do is look for the ashtrays full of cigarette butts and the Pica Limón wrappers scattered on the floor.

“You eat hundreds of those to stop smoking,” I told him, “but you still smoke like a demon.”

“I eat the candy to stop smoking, and smoke to stop eating the candy,” he responded sarcastically, giving one of those looks he used to give me, one of those slow, pasty looks that would stick to my body.

From midafternoon till dawn, Sleepy Joe abandoned the sofa, which according to him he was keeping warm the rest of the time, to settle down in the best chair in the apartment, one of those Reclinomatics with faux leather that gave massages. He turned on the television and never took off his boots when he set his big old feet on the little glass coffee table I had bought for the living room.

“You’re going to break that, you pig,” Greg scolded him. “At least take off your boots, and throw them out while you’re at it. Crocodile-skin boots are for mafiosos.”

I, on the other hand, never said anything, not to be rude; I wanted Greg to think that I did everything possible to keep a peaceful home environment. I put up with almost everything Sleepy Joe did; the only thing that drove me crazy was when he fed Pica Limón pieces to Hero. The poor little mutt began to cough, drool, and grimace like a vampire, curling his lips and showing his teeth. I hastily went for a piece of bread to give him to quench the spiciness, while Sleepy Joe was bent over in laughter.

“What has that animal done to you for you to torture him like that?” I demanded.

“What has he done to me?” he responded, his eyes still teary from laughing so hard. “What has he done? Well, track that fucking cart all over your white rug. You have forbidden him to soil your rug and he pays you no fucking mind, so I’m punishing him for it, like he deserves. And besides, I get to laugh at him for a while, why can’t I laugh about a rat?”

“You’re afraid of dogs and that’s why you harm them, that’s what’s happening. You’re a shit, nothing more than a scared little boy. Even Hero terrifies you.”

“I’m not afraid of that filth of a half dog, I despise it. That thing should be dead. It pisses me off, you understand? The way it carries himself around with half a body bores me to no end. Who do you guys think you are? Good Samaritans? Can’t you see how absurd this is, you trying to save this thing, when the poor thing just wants to be dead? When that animal looks at you like that, straight in the eyes, it is begging to die with that half that remained alive by mistake. One of these days, I’m just going to do it in with a swipe.”

The worst part was that Sleepy Joe wasn’t bluffing. There was something in his tone of voice or expression that made you think he really did believe all that crap. His hatred for the most vulnerable always caught my attention. He simply abhorred them, maybe because they held up some kind of mirror to his life.

I met Sleepy Joe at the restaurant where Greg had invited him to meet his girlfriend who would soon be his wife, in other words, me. On first impression, he was ravishingly handsome but a bit dull. The guy who according to my husband was going to be my brother-in-law was a boring show-off. I didn’t like his habit of looking this way and that like someone who doesn’t plan to stay long enough to take off his hat, or when he made the bold assertion that he could swallow us all and spit out the seeds. And to finish it off, he barely spoke, and when he did, only to his brother in Slovak. He did not make a good first impression on me. A handsome man with holes in the head, nothing else. And that’s where it would have remained had I not seen a completely different side of his personality as the three of us left the restaurant. At the time, the streets were overrun with homeless people, a wave of epidemic proportions, homeless folk sleeping on the sidewalks, homeless drunks, homeless and playing a harmonica and begging for change. As we came out a particularly disheveled homeless person approached us, toothless, fetid, someone stripped of any dignity and barely alive, or I should say a scrap, someone who had been trampled upon by life and left in tatters. The wretch played the clown and had a sign hung around his neck that said, “Kick my ass for one dollar.” Greg and I passed by, trying not to look at him, but Sleepy Joe went right up to him to negotiate the kick in the ass for half a dollar. “I’ll give you fifty cents. You don’t deserve more, you piece of garbage.” That’s what Joe told him. The poor man accepted the deal, took the coins, and crouched, still laughing, or pretending to laugh. And then Joe delivered a brutal kick to the man’s hind end, a blow so outrageous it sent him face first into the asphalt. Greg and I were half a block ahead by the time it happened, but were still able to witness the scene. I started trembling. But not even then did it sink in what a pearl of a brother-in-law fate had handed me. Later, he began to come around our place, but in a more tranquil mode, with his A-game behavior plan, which wasn’t much, as noted above, but at least he restrained himself from assaulting the helpless. Although not without his words; he didn’t hold those back. He’d let out torrents of monstrosities, generally couched in threats against anyone who seemed vulnerable, or ignorant, or down-and-out, or poor, or crippled. “That guy has the face of a victim,” he said of an obese neighbor who could barely get up the stairs of the building.

“Drop dead of a heart attack already, you fat shit,” he screamed at him. “Do the world a favor and drop dead.”

Any class of persons with defects or problems drove him crazy and put him in an almost hyperventilating state. One time I went with him to get dinner at the Pizza To Go on the corner, and he called the cashier, a not-so-bright woman who did things at her own sweet pace, a damned bitch. That’s how he was, out of control. He felt a blind hatred for all beggars and thought that they needed to be wiped off the face of the earth. When he expressed these ideas, he grew very excited; I remember once he grew red in the face, and his body shook, recounting how the Spartans tossed crippled newborns off a cliff. Another case in point: Sleepy Joe couldn’t help but be glued to the TV screen when they broadcast the Special Olympics, but not because of any admiration for those athletes who made such great efforts, but because he wanted to grab them, shake them, and make them pay, as if they were guilty of something. He even professed that babies were abhorrent. But of course, it wasn’t always that way. There were days when he seemed normal, even charming, seductive, now and then telling some good jokes and proving generous in his gift giving, which he ordered by credit card during the TV promotions of It Has to Be Yours. And there were other days in which he seemed frenzied, bewildered, even beside himself. I don’t know, maybe I judged him too harshly, and maybe he was just a stunted adolescent, full of aggressions because of his many insecurities and fears. I don’t know. In any case, I had started to look at him in a different manner in regard to what had happened with my friend Cori, that episode with the broomstick. And I couldn’t forget the warning that she had given me right before she left: “Open your eyes, María Paz, open your eyes and be careful. That boy is sick. I know what I’m talking about.” That’s what Cori had told me, her last words before she left, and I hadn’t forgotten them. And when Sleepy Joy began with his string of foul language, I’d begin throwing cushions at him until he shut up. Or I’d leave him there alone and lock myself up in my room.

“Come back out with that pretty ass, come back out to Papi. It was a joke,” he screamed from the living room.

But I didn’t think it was funny. If Greg was there, Joe never dared to give Hero a Pica Limón, or look at me, or talk to me in that tone; in the end, he was terrified of his older brother. And there was a reason. If things got out of hand, Greg would have probably ended up on top. Sleepy Joe was nothing but smoke and mirrors, while Greg, in spite of his deterioration and the indignities of age, was still a formidable two-legged beast. I noticed that one Sunday in which they decided to bet on a game of tossing bracelets on the kitchen table. Greg won toss after toss rather effortlessly till he had accumulated twenty dollars and left his brother with a sore arm.

What were my brother-in-law’s favorite TV shows? None. As far as I could remember, he didn’t watch any shows regularly. No series, no reality shows, and definitely no news. Not even sports or pornography. It was on all night tuned to guess what, guess, I just mentioned it. Sleepy Joe’s passion was those shopping channels with shows such as It Has to Be Yours, which hawk all kinds of miraculous products and send them to wherever you may live — Asunción, Managua, Miami, you name it. There wasn’t a city on the continent that didn’t have a corresponding number to call on the screen. You just had to write it down really quickly, because in a blink of the eye they were already pushing something else. Sleepy Joe was hypnotized by the fat burner that would leave you slender as a sylph in two weeks, an ecological microwave that didn’t use electricity, the shaping girdle that took away what’s extra and put in what was missing, the stairs that transformed into a bed, the bed that transformed into a closet, and the facial lotion that gave you a lift so you could look fifteen again without surgery. Sometimes I sat with him, and I would start to say something about a product that interested me. Sleepy Joe would stop me and always bought it for me as a gift. He ordered it, paid for it by credit card, and less than a week later, it arrived. Most of their merchandise was for the home. One time he gave me a vacuum cleaner to get rid of the dog hair floating everywhere, and one December he ordered a Santa Claus with blinking lights that took up half the living room because it came complete with reindeer and sled.

“You know why Santa has so many reindeer?” he asked me. “Because he eats them. In the long winter nights, when the old man can’t find anything else to eat, he lights a fire and pit roasts one of his precious reindeer. The others, meanwhile, mourn their brother. And if the old man needs a woman and there are none in those wide spaces, he helps himself to one of his cheery reindeer. While the others look on and snicker slyly.”

I was intrigued by Sleepy Joe. He kind of scared me, but I was also half-fascinated by him. In any case, it was strange that a truck driver would have money to buy so many gifts, all the ones for him, sophisticated and expensive products to prevent baldness, such as castor oil, and Amazonian ointments, because the thing he was most frightened about in life was going bald. At some point, he became interested in my work, and asked me if he could take the multiple-choice survey so he could see what it was about.

“Which of the following smells bother you the most?” I began, and was going to read him the options when he cut me off.

“Do you want to know what stinks?” he said. “My life stinks, just like everyone else’s who live near the pier.”

I was shocked by his response.

It’s true we lived in a working-class neighborhood in one of the most dangerous areas in the city, and that we were swimming in garbage every time the sanitation workers went on strike. All that was true. But the apartment was my pride and joy, so I let Sleepy Joe’s response pass as if it had nothing to do with me. I scribbled his response in my notebook in the panels reserved for additional commentary. And as I went to move on to the second question, he said furiously that he wasn’t finished with his response to the first.

“It stinks not having money,” he said. “Money cleans everything, poverty is motherfucking filthy. People like you buy detergent, soap, lotions, thinking life will be better with them. Pure bullshit.”

“Look who’s talking,” I retorted. “You’re the one who is like that, hypnotized by television commercials, they show any little thing, and it is as if you had been given a way to acquire it.”

“We are sunk up to the tits in crap,” he said with the air of a fanatic and such fierceness in his eyes that I even got scared. “Everything is miserliness, scabs, grease, and drippings,” he added, signaling his surroundings with a circular gesture as if he were talking about the entire universe.

“Maybe the world is muck and debris,” I said, upset. “But do me a favor and tell me what’s dirty at all about this house, aside from the candy wrappers you throw on the floor instead of putting them in an ashtray, where they wouldn’t fit, of course, because all the ashtrays are overflowing with your butts.”

“Everything is disgusting,” he said. “Everywhere you look, filth. Go out on the street, grab a little stick, any stick, and dig a hole. Then get down on your knees, face to the dirt, ass in the air, and look through the hole. What do you see? You see an ocean of shit. This city, all cities, floats on a sea of our own shit. Every day we add to it. We send it from the toilet through the sewers. The system never fails. We wisely store our shit below like the banks store gold in their vaults. We have been storing shit for hundreds of years. Go ahead, finish washing dishes up here, tidy up your apartment, fall for lies, cleanse your skin with creams and lotions, use a lot of toilet paper every time you shit, and remain in control of your personal hygiene. But I’m going to repeat: all we have below us is shit. When a volcano erupts, do you know what spews out?”

“Rivers of lava.”

“Wrong. Make note of it there in your work journal. Write down that you understand absolutely nothing. When a volcano erupts, it spews rivers of shit, incandescent, shitty shit. Do you get it? Like diarrhea, a cosmic diarrhea. The earth gets pissed off and erupts in a diarrhea in which we all drown.”

“You’re disgusting,” I said, moving away from him, feeling nauseated. “You’re a pig, Joe, an authentic filthy pig. All you need is to make some comment so all the filth of the world slips past your mouth.”

“You’re right this time, you got me. I’m a pig. And do you know what pigs eat? They eat shit. They go around, sticking their noses in mounds of shit. You think you’re a know-it-all, but there are truths no one has told you about. Did you know that three-quarters of all living things are coprophagous?”

“They’re what?”

“Coprophagous, do you know what that is? Write the word down so you remember it. Three-quarters of all living beings: coprophagous. It means they feed on shit, like this, munch, munch, munch, yummy, yummy, yummy, they swallow it and they lick it, the fuckers. Write it down, three-quarters. Write down these words I’m about to dictate to you, memorize these, Copris, Helicopris, Onitis, Oniticellus, Onthophagus eucraniin, Canthonini. And you know the other rules. Don’t pull the chain of the toilet after depositing some stuff in the bowl, because you’d be wasting the food. And don’t be coming to me with stories; go with your surveys to someone who is more naive. I’m not one of them. Ever since I was a little boy, I knew how things worked. In high school, I had a friend who dreamed about burning down his filthy neighborhood. He set fires between garbage cans, lit firecrackers, and he was always going around messing with matches. He claimed he was going to build a great pyre one day, a global fire to teach the world a lesson, he said, and burn off all the shit that has been accumulating for centuries. All damn pigs beware, because I’m going to burn their asses with balls of flames.”

“Is that friend you?”

“No, a friend,” he responded. “A classmate in high school.”

But aside from his rudeness and obscenities, Sleepy Joe wasn’t someone I disliked entirely. On the contrary, I tended to like him. Physically, I mean. That’s what really disgusted me. Greg was becoming for me more of an old man, and with Sleepy Joe it was like the version of Greg when he had been younger. They had similar height and features, but Joe showed off his body in Lycra shirts with sleeves neatly rolled up over the biceps, and he wore tight stretch jeans to emphasize his ass and legs and to provocatively delineate the package up front. It was clear that he took very good care of himself. He must have spent hours at the gym, lifting weights and then on the tanning beds. God knows when he did all that, maybe while he was at his other house, the one he kept me far from, although he always denied there was such a thing. He assured me that for him settling down went no further than the roadside motels.

“What else do I need?” He looked at me with the eyes of a calf that has just been castrated. “During the day I have my truck and at night I don’t need much: a television, a bed, and a bar open twenty-four/seven, and I can find all that at any motel on the road.”

He sighed and played up the martyr angle. I was overcome with crazy feelings of just wanting to hold him, protect him, shelter him, and he noticed, of course he noticed, and took advantage of this. But he wasn’t a good liar. You couldn’t believe anything he said, and it was obvious that the only true thing in his life was his brother, who always lent him money when things got tight. Or just gave him money. He was a womanizer who abused the bonds of fraternity, a frightened boy who prayed away his fears, a good-looking good-for-nothing, with no job and of benefit to no one. That was Sleepy Joe, more or less. And yet when he stayed with us and he came out of the bathroom with his hair wet and a towel wrapped around his waist, I couldn’t take my eyes off his gorgeous six-pack tanned by ultraviolet rays. I’m telling you, Sleepy Joe with a towel around his waist was a god, and I had to bite my lips to restrain myself. Unfortunately, the temptation was ongoing because he took many showers, at least twice a day, in the morning and early evening, and if it was hot, in the afternoon also. The fight between the brothers often concerned those fifteen or twenty minutes that he spent in the shower. Greg would pound on the bathroom door yelling at his brother and asking if he was going to start paying the bills. And he was right, all that water and electricity for hot water weren’t cheap. But Sleepy Joe didn’t turn off the water; instead he yelled back at his brother that he was a pig, a dirty goat. And this too had some truth in it.

What a strange twist of fate, I thought when I saw my brother-in-law pass by me half-naked with steam coming out of his pores. That body, specifically that one and no other, is the one I’d have wanted beside me on my honeymoon, when I sunbathed on the Hawaiian beaches. Sleepy Joe knew exactly what was going on and he squeezed all he could out of the triangle, an electric triangle that vibrated dangerously when he was in the apartment: an older man, his young wife, and the younger brother. But now that I’ve told you about Joe’s six-pack, I should also tell you about the double-beamed cross on his chest on which I was almost crucified. One day, Sleepy Joe and I were seated on the sofa… but wait, not yet, that part comes later. I can’t help it; I keep jumping around and messing up the story. No problem, Mr. Rose, you can fix the order later before it is published.

The weird thing is that Greg didn’t even notice, naive as can be, sticking an Adonis in the house thinking that his young wife would take no interest in him. Greg, who was suspicious of everyone, jealous of everyone, who when we got home would make a scene if he had seen me speaking with anyone in the office, even if just on friendly terms. And who would threaten me with having to return the green card if I didn’t stop being such a whore. No man escaped Greg’s false suspicion, not the grocer, the neighbor, the insurance representative, his retirement buddies, my past loves, my doctor, and especially my gynecologist. My husband tortured himself imagining that I did things with all of them, or would if I had the chance, with all of them except one. When it came to Sleepy Joe, my Greg never had a single suspicion or bad thought, only brotherly chastisements, paternal affection, and the instinct to protect, my poor Greg; meanwhile the kid and I, pure lightning and thunder.

It made me shudder to think that Sleepy Joe was watching me. Greg had to punch his time card at eight in the morning, but since my hours were more flexible, I gave myself the luxury of leaving the apartment a little later. During that difference in time — twenty minutes, half an hour, an hour at most — Sleepy Joe and I would be alone. Sometimes he simply stood in the doorway not saying anything while I brushed my hair or buttoned my blouse.

“You need something?” I asked his figure in the mirror.

“No, I don’t need anything,” he responded with longing and sarcasm, as if to say, I need you, my little bitch.

And not a single suspicion from Greg. Is that maybe why I ended up in bed with Joe, the only man who could approach me without the threat that I’d lose my green card? I’ll confess it here: I tore it up in bed with Joe, touching the sky with my hands, making love to him not once, not twice, not three times, but many hundreds more, and to make it worse, right there, in the same marital bedroom I shared with Greg, on the same mattress and sheets, under the glare of the very same Christ hanging from the cross.

And since I mentioned my bedroom, I should describe it, because it is my great pride and joy. Even before I got married, I decided to do it first class and not spare any expense. I chose mint green for the spreads and curtains; I knitted pillow covers in white and arranged them against the headboard; I bought a double bed with an orthopedic mattress, which was actually a mistake because it did not leave enough space for the two night tables in white wood, or the dresser and the bedside lamps with their bell-shaped fringed amber shades that emitted a warm, intimate light. Over the dresser, there was a wide mirror where I’d apply my makeup in the morning light, because there were no windows in the bathroom and Bolivia had always warned that if you put on your makeup under artificial light you would end up looking like a sad clown. Later, when Greg moved in with me, he put up that crucifix over the headboard. I abhorred it because it was so realistic, so bloody, a nightmarish thing that clashed with the décor. I don’t know if I’m being clear, but that crucifix is some antiquated disagreeable thing that had nothing to do with the mint-green blanket and curtains that I had chosen to brighten my life.

A double-beamed cross on three blue mountain ridges, that’s how Sleepy Joe described the tattoo in the middle of his chest, some Slovakian symbol for something about the native land, and under the cross, in Gothic letters, the legend “Lightning over Tatras.” My Greg had exactly the same tattoo, double-beamed cross on three blue mountain ridges, and the same legend, “Lightning over Tatras.” Just like Sleepy Joe, the tattoo was in the middle of his chest. Neither of them liked to talk about it, but I realized that it had religious and patriotic importance for them. Was it the mark of a legion or some rebel group? Did it have to do with a place of origin, some fraternity, or the mafia? I never knew. Sleepy Joe liked to recount how he had ordered his two lovers to get a tattoo of the same cross on their asses, but smaller, thumb-sized. More bullying from Sleepy Joe, with the touch of a truck driver. If he was a truck driver. He said that his two girlfriends or wives or lovers, whatever they were, worked at night, in bars or other dives, and he showed me pictures of them that he carried around in his wallet. I hated him for that and at the same time was obsessed and demanded details, and asked questions that were tormenting me: Do they know about each other? Do they know about me? Of the three, which one did he like best? And other such nonsense.

“What did they offer that I don’t? Tell me. What did they offer that I don’t?”

“They let me sleep during the day and don’t bug me about it.”

That topic had become a permanent conflict between us, so much so that at times it seemed as if I were more interested in Sleepy Joe’s girlfriends than in Sleepy Joe. I imagine that’s how jealousy works; they set up a blind boxing match against someone you don’t even know, and because of this you’re overcome with the zeal to dominate every minute detail about your rival, to know her by her short hairs. Only then can you realistically calculate the chances of defeating her. As to my brother-in-law, I was slugging it out in a phantom ring not with one contender but two. One was called Maraya, and she was a disco chick. Judging from her picture, she’d have been pretty if not for her wide nose and her protruding front teeth with a gap between them, not to mention the face of not having slept for a few months, and the bags under her eyes that made her look sick. I thought she was a drug addict. But she had a hell of a body, impossible to deny that. She was one of those women granted the miraculous power to remain thin where it is desirable to remain thin and full-fleshed in those areas where it is desirable to remain so. At least that’s what it looked like from the pictures where she was wearing a black spandex top, hot leopard-print pants, platform boots, a sailor’s cap, and huge hoop earrings. She danced at Chikki Charmers, a roadside bar for truckers in the countryside, twelve miles north of Ithaca, New York. According to Joe, Maraya specialized in ballads, because Chikki Charmers would put on themed shows depending on the time of night, and she performed striptease and karaoke with slower songs such as Billy Joel’s “She’s Got a Way,” Rod Stewart’s “Tonight’s the Night,” and the Commodores’ “Three Times a Lady.” Because I bugged him so much for details, Joe once told me that in Maraya’s contract there was a clause that said that each night she had to perform dressed according to the era, whether it was the sixties or the Saturday Night Fever period of the seventies, when they danced hard to release the stress of the week. That’s the mood that she had to create for the scene, and to show off that stunning body, she had to wrap it in clothes made out of Lycra and spandex, elastic, satin, silver pants; and she had to wear platform shoes to appear six inches taller than she usually was, and do pirouettes and other moves on the pole, while removing her miniskirt, hot pants, and crochet bikini. I think that was it, the seventies.

Are you surprised, Mr. Rose, that each detail has been engraved in my memory, even the silliest ones? You probably know from your own experience that nothing bores more into memory than jealousy. Sleepy Joe’s second girlfriend went by the name of Wendy Mellons. She spoke Spanish, had children by other men, and was considerably older than Maraya, and older than I was, and taller and fatter, and apparently much older than even Joe himself, although he’d deny it. With a spectacular pair of tits and a formidable ass, according to him, but as far as I’m concerned she was a hammy grandma, a diva past her prime. She worked as a bartender at a place called The Terrible Espinosas in Cañon City, south of Colorado Springs, Colorado, the birthplace of the two Slovak brothers, which is maybe why Sleepy Joe loved her so much. This Wendy Mellons must have been like a second mother to him, for there is no other way to explain why he’d be so in love with that Little Red Riding Hood granny.

“Your two girlfriends are a pair of whores,” I liked to tell him.

“What do you want from me?” he responded. “If honest wives like you don’t give it up for me.”

And we laughed about the situation. What else could we do? In the end, I was married and in no position to demand a fidelity that I could not give in return. Of course, with Joe the laughter did not last long; it was but a brief ray of sunlight in between the thundershowers of the day, because he was just as soon overcome with a rage that poured from him like streams of black vomit.

“Get out of bed,” I said after we made love, “we have to get dressed and pick up this lion’s den; your brother will be here soon.”

And it was as if I had cursed his mother. Did not he, after all have a right to nap a little after a good fuck, or was I some pitiful whore that had to get up right away to wash off what men had dumped between my legs? When it came to offending others, Sleepy Joe had no limits. Rudeness. But not that kind of rudeness that is innocuous but the kind with malicious intent.

“I’m leaving this place!” I screamed at him in the midst of my frustration, and I didn’t know what to fear more, that Joe would stop me with a whack or that Greg would discover the whole scenario.

So I just started to clean, clean like a madwoman, not overlooking one hair or leaving one drool unwiped, one wrinkle unsmoothed, not the smallest bit of his sperm floating around, nor any traces of what had just happened, not even the memory of so much desire and so much sex and so much rage that had transpired in that bed. I opened the windows wide and sprayed air freshener throughout the house and doused myself with perfume behind my ears and deodorant between my legs. At the last minute, I was able to grab Joe’s underwear, hanging from the feet of the Christ, to whom I’d beg, My beautiful sweet Jesus, you who died on the cross, close your eyes, pretend you have seen nothing, forgive my sins and promise me you will keep my secret.

At times, Sleepy Joe would disappear for weeks, sometimes even months. During those times we knew nothing about him, did not get any calls or any other signs of life from him, as if the earth had swallowed him up. And then one day when I came from work the little red-and-green candy wrappers would be there, scattered on the floor of the living room, the ashtrays would be full of butts, and Sleepy Joe would be stretched out on the couch watching some shopping channel. Where have you been? What were you doing? Why didn’t you call? We thought you were dead and so on. They were useless questions and expressions of concern, because he never responded or explained. He reappeared just as he had disappeared, Casper the Friendly Ghost. One time he did say something. He had returned with one of those black armbands used for mourning, and I asked him who had passed away.

“Maraya,” he said, “I’ve just come from the burial.”

“Maraya? Your Maraya? The Chikki Charmer, the one who dances like Olivia Newton-John, but naked?”

“Shut the fuck up. Why would you mock the dead like that?”

“She died? Seriously?”

“I’ve never known anyone to die any other way.”

“I’m sorry. Really, Joe? I’m very sorry. I don’t know what to say. What a shock. Poor Maraya. How did she die?”

“In a Jacuzzi.”

“A Jacuzzi?”

“She lived in a place that had a balcony with a Jacuzzi. She went into the Jacuzzi on Monday night and died, and no one found her until Thursday morning.”

“You mean she was in the bubbling hot water for over seventy hours?”

“When they found her, the flesh was so soft, it was coming off the bones, like when you broil a goat.”

“Don’t be disgusting, Joe, I can’t even imagine, that’s the most horrible thing I’ve heard in a long time. Even I, who hated her, am horrified at what she must have gone through. But how did it happen, why couldn’t she get out? Did she overdose on something? I’ve always told you she was probably a drug addict.”

“She was murdered.”

“Inside the Jacuzzi? Who?”

“They don’t know, one of her clients, perhaps.”

“Did they call the police? Do they suspect anyone?”

“The police aren’t interested in such cases.”

“Who told you?”

“Some of her friends.”

“Her friends told you someone had killed her?”

“Her friends told me and I went and paid for the burial.”

“The burial of what was left of her… You did the right thing, Sleepy Joe. After all, she was your girlfriend for however many years.”

“That’s not why I did it. But regardless, I arranged for the ceremony that she deserved.”

“The Catholic thing?”

“I put a die on each of her eyes.”

“What?”

“A die.”

The whole story was so grotesque I almost burst out laughing. Fortunately, I was able to control myself because Joe seemed truly affected, or let’s say that he seemed stupefied, talking to himself more than to me.

“Why? What does it mean that you put a die on each eye?” I asked.

“That was something between me and her. She’d have understood,” he said.

“Is it a Slovak ritual?”

“I took all of her clothes out of the boxes.”

“All that Lycra and spandex, all those psychedelic colors that glow under black light…”

“What does that have to do with anything? Are you an idiot, María Paz? That’s why I never tell you anything, because you have no respect, because talking to you is like talking to no one. Go to hell.”

“I’m sorry, Joe. Please forgive me. It was an innocent comment, that’s all. So go on. What were you saying?”

He didn’t answer so I went on: “You don’t want to talk to me. You were saying that you took all of her clothes out of the boxes. I understand, because she lived in a rented room, which you had to empty. Something like that, right?”

I racked my mind trying to find some logic in his stories, but it was impossible. It was as if his brain worked under another set of instructions.

“I divided her clothes into four piles,” he said after a few minutes.

“That’s good,” I said, because I did not know what else to say. I always had to be careful not to say something he’d consider improper, but his criteria for such things were so inaccessible, it was difficult to gauge.

“And then I put each pile in a different corner of the room,” he said.

“But why four piles?”

“I burned the first pile, the second I gave away, the third I put in the coffin with the body, and the fourth raffled away.”

“I see. And who won the pile you raffled?”

“Strangers. Folks who had never understood her or appreciated her.”

“That happens sometimes. Very sad. But was there any family there?”

“She didn’t have any family.”

“Did you hire a pianist to play at the funeral?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You don’t understand what happened, do you? I try to explain things to you, María Paz. I really do. In fact, I need to tell you about these things. But I’m wasting my time because you are never going to understand.”

“Maybe if you explained things more… especially the part about the die on each eye, that’s what I’m most having trouble with.”

But he stopped trying to get me to understand and I stopped trying to understand. He took out the pictures of Maraya from his wallet, burned them, threw the ashes in the toilet, flushed, and fell asleep and slept for three days straight. After a month he stopped wearing the black armband and never again mentioned his deceased girlfriend. I decided to tell Greg that one of his brother’s girlfriends had been murdered. Greg had been a cop, after all, and he’d have some opinion on the matter. I never, or almost never, told Greg something that Sleepy Joe had mentioned, so that he wouldn’t be suspicious about when we could have spoken of such things. But the death of that woman made me anxious. There was something too strange and lurid in the details of this story, and I was suffering from nightmares about that poached flesh coming off the bone, and with a die on each eye, the raffling off the poor dead woman’s clothes and all that, so I told Greg. Omitting certain details obviously, I just told him they had murdered one of Greg’s girlfriends.

“She was a whore, wasn’t she? Whores hang out with thugs until one of the scoundrels kill them” was all Greg had to say in response.

I knew very well that Sleepy Joe was a raging madman, and that he was getting worse: madder, more raging. His bile rose at the strangest things. He was very anal about certain things, and heaven help anyone who questioned him about it. His food, for example. Each item had to be separated from the other or he’d push it aside with a look of disgust. The rice should not be mixing with the vegetables and the meat should not be touching the potatoes. He insisted it was disgusting but never explained to me why. Once, I gave him a very nice wool sweater with leather patches on the elbows and the shoulders. Mother of God, he almost threw it back in my face. Who did I think he was that he’d wear mixed clothes? “Mixed?” I dared ask. “What do you mean?” “Wool and leather mixed, you moron. Can’t you see? Only you would think of giving me such shit; God forgive some of the lowdown things you do.” I remained stunned for a while after each of these outbursts. What did God have to do with the goddamned sweater? After a while, Sleepy Joe would feel bad about his behavior and come to me with kisses and hugs, begging me to forgive him. That time in particular he ended up taking back the gift, but only when I showed him he could take off the leather patches without damaging the sweater. That’s better, he said, but never wore it nonetheless.

I knew better than anyone that to be mixed up with Sleepy Joe was playing with fire. But what could I do? He had become my vice. On his divine chest the double-beamed cross seemed all-powerful, almost horrific, as if it were a dark symbol of who knows what, while between the little breasts that had sprouted on Greg the cross looked pathetic. I know that as a young man, around the time he got the tattoo, Greg had the same athletic chest that his little brother had now, maybe even a little more tanned, and sturdier and more muscular, because Greg was the taller one with the wider shoulders of the two. But with the years, his double-beamed cross had taken on the appearance of a sad lamppost weathering a stiff breeze in the fog of so many gray hairs, and the peaks of the blue mountains in the background highlighted the rolls of fat on his belly. On the other hand, with Sleepy Joe… I’d dream at all hours about that cross tattooed on his chest. Shit, how I loved it, more with each passing day. Lightning over Tatras, may God forgive the lunatic lust I felt for my brother-in-law.

“The kapustnica has to boil for twelve more minutes, twelve minutes exactly, and then you turn it down to a low simmer. But be careful, don’t cover it completely or it’ll get smoky and be ruined. Or you know what, forget about it, don’t touch it, I’ll be back before the twelve minutes,” Greg indicated from the door, on the night of his fifty-seventh birthday as I have already told you, Mr. Rose. He was about to go out after having talked briefly to Sleepy Joe. Greg whistled for Hero to come with him, but we had already unattached his cart and I heard his helpless whines.

“Leave him alone, he’s already in bed,” I told Greg, my back still to him as I set the table. I never knew if he heard me or if he had already stepped out.

When the twelve minutes passed and he had not returned, I turned down the flame on the pot without covering it completely, just as he had instructed, and I took the opportunity to sneak a Swiss-cheese sandwich with mayonnaise, because I was starving and did not hold out much hope for the kapustnica. I’d have a few spoonfuls during dinner, trying to avoid any of the solid chunks, and as soon as Greg wasn’t paying too much attention, I’d tell him that I was going to the kitchen for bread or water and empty my plate in the pot. It had always been the same with the kapustnica, except for the first time, when we were not married yet, and he took me by surprise, so I had to gobble the whole thing down, not deceive the person who soon, bless the hour, would be my husband.

Ten more minutes passed and still Greg had not returned. So I went into the bedroom to fix myself up to surprise him; it was his birthday, after all, and for months he had been seeing me in the same attire, a blue suit that we had to wear as a uniform for work, except Saturdays and Sundays when I’d wear sweats around the house. So I decided I’d surprise him, put on a strapless, tight-fitting black dress, and a string of pearls that, although they were farmed pearls, would create that classic look I was going for, an impeccable flawless look à la Audrey Hepburn, and without even thinking about it the words to “Moon River” started coming out of my mouth, sung softly as she sang it looking out the window, “Moon river, wider than a mile, I’m crossing you in style someday.” And what a coincidence, Mr. Rose, the one who ends up telling Holly’s story is a young writer like you, or maybe it’s not a coincidence at all, but that down deep I’m searching you out above all so I could mimic Holly.

Whatever the case may be, that night while I fixed myself up, I sang Holly’s song, and why not, that had been my dream also, in style someday. Someday, someday, and why not that very day, that is, that very night, although Greg, my poor fat Greg looked more like Sally Tomato, the gangster who pays Holly, than Paul Varjak, the very handsome author who writes about her after she has left. That’s in the book; in the movie, it’s different because the author ends up getting married to her, and when I said in class that I preferred that ending, you thought about it a little bit and responded, “I’m not sure, I’m not sure, I think that for Varjak to remember Holly and write about her is his way of loving her even more intensely.” Wow! What a great phrase, Mr. Rose. You sometimes spoke so pretty.

That night while waiting for Greg to return, I put on a pair of high heels and went over the top a bit with a retro makeup job, like Holly’s. Remember that thick black line she drew above her eyelashes? Well, I did the same thing and I had a hell of a pair of eyes, then I put on some Anaïs, my favorite perfume at that time, pinned my hair back, letting a few strands fall carelessly over my cheeks, and, pushing Hero a bit to the side, I climbed on the bed to get a good look at my whole body in the mirror.

What a surprise awaited me. Just like Audrey Hepburn? Holly Golightly in person? What I saw in the mirror was a monstrosity. The strapless dress, which had fit me fine when I was single, now seemed way too tight. I looked like a Oaxacan tamale, with the thighs and belly all wrapped up, and if that were not enough, as it widened and stretched the dress rose up and revealed my knees, which had been pretty and shapely but now were swollen, unsightly. The neckline, which previously fell neatly in place, not revealing too much or too little, now was way too low and made me look cheap, like Bolivia but not as pretty, more like Maraya or Wendy Mellons, or at least that’s how I saw myself at the moment. So much for the classic look. Quite the makeover I had gone through. I knew I had gained weight the year and a half I had lived quietly with Greg, but I had never imagined it was so much. Shit, I said. Not a fat housewife. I shed the strapless dress before anyone other than Hero saw me in it. I buried it in a corner of the closet and resigned myself to the marine blue suit I had been wearing, which at least concealed the pounds. Ciao, Holly, maybe next time. I did leave on the high heels, and instead of the farmed pearls, I tied a fuchsia hanky around my neck that matched my lipstick. What the hell, I thought. All the same, generous Greg will think I’m a knockout no matter what.

I went back into the living room and looked at the clock. It had been thirty-five minutes since he had gone out the door. I hope he is not fighting with Sleepy Joe, I thought, that boy can sour his birthday. I examined the table I had set a while before and it seemed as if the tablecloth was wrinkled. I’ve told you that I’m obsessed with ironing. I detest wrinkles. It’s a hang-up I inherited from Bolivia and maybe from my grandmother Africa, and even life in jail hasn’t cured it. Because there are no irons here, I dampen my uniform at night and stretch it on the floor under my bed so that it is smooth in the morning, anything not to go around with wrinkled clothes. So that night I thought that maybe I could pass a quick iron over the tablecloth before putting back silverware, glasses, candelabra, bread basket — everything that I had set up so meticulously. I pulled out the ironing board and ironed the tablecloth, starching it with Blue Violet Linen Water Spray, just as Bolivia always did. I put it back on the table, reset it, and looked at the clock. Greg had been outside for more than an hour. I shut off the flame under the kapustnica, which was beginning to dry up, threw myself on the Reclinomatic in the living room, setting it to a gentle massage, and quickly realized how exhausted I was. I fell asleep at some point, and when I woke up it was eleven fifteen. Eleven fifteen! And no sign of Greg at all.

I called his cell number, something I generally didn’t do because he didn’t like for me to call him when he was dealing with his things, but this time the call was merited, something must have happened. Greg wasn’t the type of person who would abandon his kaputsnica for no good reason. I called his cell, Mr. Rose, and guess what rang in our bedroom? That little melody that worked my nerves, from ABBA’s “Mamma Mia,” just at the point where it goes, “I’ve been cheated by you since I don’t know when, so I made up my mind it must come to an end.” Greg had chosen it as a ringtone. Ridiculous: What connection could he have to that syrupy song and the brilliant white outfits the members of ABBA wore in the video, like idiot angels? Remember that ancient video? The blonde and the brunette, all in white, and particularly the two guys, not sure if they were the husbands, with the smiles and the perfect little salon hairdos? What connection was there between that and a crude, hairy cop like my Greg? How I jumped every time that phone rang. It seemed as if Greg had chosen that ringtone, that one specifically, to throw my affair with Joe in my face. Those lyrics, you can just imagine, Mr. Rose, how I thought they spoke directly to me. A warning, a call to order, an I know all about it, you bitch, and one day you will pay for this great betrayal.

“Change that ringtone, Greg,” I asked him. “Get something more serious.”

But he always had the same response. He liked it, so why should he change it. So that night, the night of his birthday, past eleven, I couldn’t wait anymore and I called his cell. It had gotten too late, something must have happened. But the only response was ABBA and “Mamma Mia” from our bedroom, which woke up Hero, who began to bark. So there wasn’t anything I could do.

Something had happened or else this was a repeat of the old story of the man who tells his wife he’s going to the corner to buy some cigarettes and never returns. But no one spends all day making a soup if he knows that before eating it he is going to flee from his house. I went down the five floors and out onto the street. I remember that there was a strong wind blowing, a cold wind with the smell of Chinese food. I walked a couple of blocks to the right of the building and then a couple of blocks to the left but found nothing. And then I realized that just at that moment Greg might have been trying to get in touch with me so I raced back up to the apartment, climbing two stairs at a time. Maybe he had called while I was out, or when I slept on the chair. Could I have been sleeping so deeply that the phone ringing didn’t wake me? It would be strange but possible, and what was more strange was that Greg would be gone so long without calling. He wasn’t that type of guy, least of all on such an important date. I was just about going out of my mind when the doorbell rang and I ran to answer it, convinced it was him, but in truth not so sure because he had a key and never rang the doorbell. That had always been an issue during my affair with Sleepy Joe, because I never knew when Greg would burst in and catch me with my hands in the cookie jar, as they say. So I opened the door and it wasn’t Greg. It was Sleepy Joe.

He was wearing a wool hat pulled down to his eyebrows and a wifebeater, with his marvelous arms on display in spite of the windy weather. That was him, as I’ve told you, an exhibitionist, showing off his goods whenever possible, so I wasn’t surprised by the getup.

“Hello, my hot ass,” he said, pinching my butt.

“Stop it, not now,” I whispered, convinced that Greg was right behind him.

It was a logical assumption, given they had been together, or at least that’s what I had imagined. But there was no one behind Sleepy Joe.

“Where’s Greg?” I asked him.

“Greg?”

“Yes, Greg, your brother.”

“Greg, yes, Greg. I was waiting for him and he never showed up.”

“What do you mean he never showed up?” I said. “He left here to go meet you.”

“There you go, and he never showed up.”

“What are you talking about? You called him. He went to meet you.”

“I don’t know. He never showed.”

I noticed something strange about him. He was trying hard to seem calm, coolheaded, but he was shaken up, disturbed. He was trembling. He who is white as can be that night was almost transparent.

“You’re lying,” I said. “You were waiting for him for two hours.”

“I waited for him for a bit, and then I just found things to do,” he responded with a nervous, wry smile I wasn’t quite sure how to interpret.

“Stop it with the hands,” I told him, because he kept trying to feel me up. “Can’t you see I’m worried?”

“Calm down, calm down, no hysterics, please.” It was more an order than an attempt to console me.

“I’m telling you that Greg went out to meet you when you called him and he hasn’t returned yet.”

“And I’m telling you to calm down. You don’t want to make me nuts. And you will.”

It was true. I realized that he was on the brink of bursting, so I opted to change my tone. Besides, I was still worried about Greg but not as much anymore. Joe had begun with sucking on the back of my neck and the dirty words in my ear, and I’ll tell you the truth, Mr. Rose, I have never been able to resist the bastard, I don’t know what it is about him that makes me abandon all common sense. Maybe it’s the testosterone, youth and testosterone, a big juicy plate of food when one is starving to death. But why do I need to explain it to you when you already get it? And besides, it’s too late, what good is it understanding when calamity has already struck? If I go on with these clarifications it is out of guilt that eats away at me. Not a pretty thing on my part, my Greg disappeared on his birthday and me happy with his delay and making the best of it with his handsome little brother. But things were weird, very weird that night. There was something strange with Joe, even in the careless way he touched me, as if his mind were elsewhere. Because he was lazy and a bum about everything except sex. In that arena he always put forward his best effort and was very dedicated. But not that night. He was unrecognizable that night.

“What are you thinking about?” I asked him.

He didn’t respond. He went into the kitchen and had a few spoonfuls of the cold kapustnica straight from the pot.

“Do you want me to heat it up for you?” I asked him, and he pressed me against the wall, placing his package in between my legs.

“Yeah, heat it up,” he said, but it was soft. He, who was always hard, was soft that night.

“Something is wrong with you,” I told him, “now I’m sure of it. Does this have to do with Greg?”

“Be quiet and hurry up, there’s no time” was all he said. “And take off those heels; you look like a cheap whore. Put on some comfortable shoes and grab a coat. Quickly.”

“We’re going to go look for Greg?”

“Yes, exactly, we’re looking for Greg. Go, the minutes are ticking. Hola, Colorado, viva amigo mios de Rio Huerfano,” he screamed, going in a second from down in the dumps to a euphoria that sounded artificial, put on. He screamed it in Spanish, tilting his head back and howling like a mariachi, which startled me.

“Tell me what’s going on,” I said. “You’re up to something.”

“Our time has come, Hot Ass. We’re out of here for good. Cucucurrucucu the pigeon!”

“What are you saying…?”

“Nothing. Get your coat. But get me a cold Diet Coke first. Now, come on. Move that ass. A Diet Coke. Not that one, you moron, that’s regular. Diet, I said, diet. Don’t make me repeat everything a hundred times. The regular one has sugar and this is going to be stickier than used candy.” Again his mood changed and he was beginning to lose it, which could happen quickly if his wishes were not fulfilled right away.

He took a knife out of his pocket and showed it to me, but pulled it back when I reached for it.

“Easy,” he warned me. “Look but don’t touch.”

“Why do you have that?”

“I bought it for Greg.”

“A birthday present?”

“Yeah. A birthday present.”

I detest weapons, and this was one of those horrible knives, with an ugly black blade, something a gangster or a mugger would have. But it wasn’t strange enough that I suspected anything; often, the brothers would spend whole Sundays with their weapons. It was their thing. There are some men obsessed with metal, and that was them. So it wasn’t strange that Joe would have brought a knife as a birthday present. I went to our bedroom, changed my shoes, and returned to the living room with a coat in one hand and Hero in the other.

“I’m ready,” I said, “let’s go look for Greg.”

Joe was cleaning the knife with his handkerchief soaked in Diet Coke. When he was finished he dried it with a cloth napkin, then wrapped it in the same napkin and put it on a high shelf.

“I’ll be right down,” he said as he went up the stairs to the roof. “Wait for me here. Don’t move. And put that dog down, he’s not going.”

Hero seemed to understand and whined. While I was waiting, I thought the present was all wrong like that. It wouldn’t hurt to wrap it properly. So that it seemed like a real gift. It was one of those things that occurs to us women, who care about details. Details, that’s how we refer to such nonsense. But I thought I’d get a couple of pieces of tissue paper, scissors, and a blue ribbon. I wrapped it carefully, not touching it so I wouldn’t smudge it after Joe had cleaned it so carefully. In less than two minutes it was done, with a ribbon and everything. On the refrigerator door, among the pictures and other memories put up with magnets, there were a few of those “To… From” Christmas cards. I saved them all for sentimental reasons, I guess, that hang-up inherited from Bolivia that nothing gets thrown away because it could come in handy one day. And that all garbage is recycled, or simply kept, collecting in a box. I looked for a card that said “To Greg, From Joe.” And found one, in his handwriting, perfect! Greg would appreciate the detail, so I put the card on the gift and hid it high up on the shelves, thinking that if Joe saw it, he’d ridicule me, or throw a fit, so best if he saw it right before Greg got it. And then Joe started making some racket on the roof. Some dry blows, as if with a hammer, and then he started cussing, like he did whenever he grew impatient, and then again with the blows, hard smacks, as if he were striking a wall with a sledgehammer. What he screamed while he was doing this I couldn’t tell, but I did realize that he was having a fit, something had set him off, and I so feared these rages that I went back to our bedroom. I sat on the edge of the bed petting Hero to calm him down. The poor little thing trembled every time we had to deal with one of Joe’s fits. And that’s when I heard the door slam, not the door to the roof, but the apartment door on our level. A hard, violent slam, the front door smashing against the wall when opened. At first, I thought that Joe had left, swinging the door behind him. Sometimes he would do that, in a fury. But then I heard voices, male voices. And I realized that a group of men had broken into my apartment.

Sometime later, I don’t know, maybe two or three months, after I had arrived at Manninpox, during those weeks when I was so befuddled, I came upon graffiti that Las Nolis had painted in a hallway. Guess what they used as ink, Mr. Rose, it’s not that hard. The only paint handily available to them, their shit. Aside from their blood, of course, which is for more desperate circumstances. The graffiti said, “From my skin inward, I’m boss.” It was typical of them, trying to raise awareness of such things, but it made me angry with them, for their snobbishness, for preaching such pretentious nonsense. But there is everything cooking in this rotted stew, from the most rebellious to the most wretched, from those just barely crawling by, who do not have as much as a place to drop dead, to a few daughters of wealthy folk who indulge in more than a few extravagances. Like Tara, an ex-model in her fifties but still in good shape, who was my cellmate for a while. She swore that was her real name and we called her “Tarada,” Spanish for loony, because she was dumber than a mule. Who knows what her rich lover did for a living, or the money might have been hers, I’m not sure, but the guy sent her everything, creams, lotions, nail polish… and a pine-scented spray that was my misery, for every time someone sat down to do number two in the stainless-steel toilet embedded right in the middle of the cell — on its own, like a throne, in full view — every time someone sat down to poop, Tara would bring out the spray, and squirt the fucking thing everywhere, smothering us, until it seemed as if someone had taken a big shit in the woods. But Tara’s lover sent her everything, including the soybean pellets that she had to apply subcutaneously. Can you believe it? I didn’t even know such a thing existed, soybean pellets. They’re these superexclusive beauty products that Tara knew how to inject under her skin near the hip; with a Gillette she made a tiny little cut, put the pellet inside, closed it up with Micropore tape, and that’s it. To regenerate the hormones, awaken sexual desire, and rejuvenate the skin. Each pellet cost $280, and her lover bribed the guards so that she got her monthly dose, or bimonthly, I can’t remember, and that razor, but she always got her soybean pellet on time so that her treatment wouldn’t be interrupted. And meanwhile those lunatics Las Nolis writing such nonsense on the walls with their own shit. From my skin inward, I’m boss. Nothing could be further from the truth. That there is some pure shit. Maybe Tara still has her skin intact thanks to her creams and her soybean pellets. But my story is different. My skin is no longer mine. I’m skinless, one of those who goes around in the raw flesh. It’s a figure of speech, of course — not literally. The thing is that ever since those guys got to me I feel as if I’m burning, as if my whole body is on fire. I’m talking about the FBI men who broke into my apartment on the night of Greg’s birthday.

One of them, whom the others called Birdie, locked himself with me in the bathroom, threw me on the floor, and hurt me, asking me where the money was. “The money,” he screamed, “the money.” He needed to know where who knows what money was.

“The only money here belongs to the Virgin of Medjugorje,” I told him.

“What did you say?”

“She appears, the Virgin of Medjugorje…”

“Shut up with this bullshit.”

“I’m telling you, I don’t believe in it either but my brother-in-law and my husband are very Catholic and they’re saving money for a pilgrimage there,” I blurted out nervously.

“What are you talking about?”

“The sanctuary of the Virgin of Medjugorje, it’s in Bosnia, or so I’ve been told. My husband and brother-in-law are saving money to go see the miracle. But take the money if that’s what you want. No problem, it’s in the kitchen in a jar.”

But that’s not what Birdie was looking for. He shut me up with a slap and started to go nuts. His eyes bugged out and he began to strike me in the face till I saw stars. I thought it was just a saying or something that happens only in comic books, but that night I realized it was real. I saw stars. After each blow, things went black, and in that blackness there were points of light like stars. Birdie kept on shouting at me, “the hundred and fifty thousand, you bitch, the hundred and fifty thousand dollars, quit acting stupid.” I had no fucking idea. Of course, I’d have told him if I knew.

The men ate Greg’s kapustnica, spread out like pigs on the living-room furniture. They put on some cowboy program on the television with the volume all way up, while the others wandered around the apartment, searching, emptying boxes, kicking everything around, and swallowing up anything they found. I asked about Greg. “Where is my husband? Tell me where my husband is,” I screamed, or I wanted to scream but they didn’t hear me, or they heard me and ignored me. “Don’t be acting stupid,” they repeated, and kept demanding the money. I was handcuffed in the bathroom. But I must warn you, Mr. Rose, that night for me is a blank; it has no substance, a fog that lifts only momentarily. The voices still echo in my memory, that’s certain, I hear them laughing, but the rest is very hazy. I think at times that I was left alone. Maybe because Birdie got tired of hitting me, or else he needed a break to gather his strength. Everything is off-kilter as I remember it, as if it had happened a hundred years ago or to another person. But I remember the coldness of the tiles. Those cold wet tiles made me shiver, maybe because they had pissed on them; the stink was intense. It smelled like males in heat and like my own fear. And I remember my neck pressed against something, maybe the toilet or the bathtub. They didn’t like the soup, I heard them say, but they ate it, and they drank beer, and I knew they were making a big mess, the dishes dirty, the glasses shattered, the tablecloth soiled, and their shoe prints on my white rug.

I wasn’t very much concerned about what would happen to me in the long run. “Nothing to fear if you have done no wrong,” as they say in my country. And I had never gotten involved in anything. With my papers in order, I didn’t see what they could accuse me of. I was convinced that they couldn’t even take me from my house. I demanded to see a search warrant, an arrest warrant, some document that authorized them to do what they were doing, and I was sure they had no such warrants. So during that whole time I struggled to convince myself to just hold on patiently. Stay calm, I told myself, stay calm and this nightmare will be over and everything will return to normal. Maybe that’s why I didn’t scream or cry during the interrogations, I didn’t want anybody in the building to hear. And look how the mind works sometimes; during that whole ordeal I was most concerned about the living-room carpet. Unbelievable. The worst part is that I still think about it, my white carpet; I must be nuttier than that woman I interviewed once who told me she couldn’t stand for the shags in her carpet to go the wrong way, and that every time someone walked on the carpet she followed behind setting the shags the right way with her hand. Without telling her, I classified her in my journal as anal, a fundamentalist about hygiene, which was precisely what we were looking for, to gather the names of these anal-retentive folks as a target list for things such as the multiservice vacuum that would suck up particles from the air, cat hair from corners, and even the cat if it gets in the way, the Miele S5 Callisto Canister, just the machine for such a task. And that was me, all anal, obsessing about my rug, when what I should have been worried about was Greg’s whereabouts, why he had not returned, what had happened. I did ask them, “What have you done with my husband? Where is he?” Because my only hope at that moment was for Greg to show up, my poor Greg, who was so in love with me, while I was so in love with his brother, but it was Greg I needed to see now, and inside I prayed for Greg to walk through the door, so he could show his police badge and everything would be fixed, everything new again, end of nightmare.

Or not? Was there another terrifying possibility? What if all this had been orchestrated by Greg himself, who had found out about my betrayal and had sent these thugs to give me what I deserved? Could they be friends of his? Accomplices in what was happening to me? Was this Greg’s vengeance falling on me like divine retribution? The very idea chilled my blood. I thought I could withstand anything, except for Greg to find out I was cheating on him.

And what about Sleepy Joe? Had these guys grabbed him? Was he handcuffed in the apartment somewhere? Was he being questioned also? I couldn’t even dare ask. Maybe Joe had managed to escape, or was hiding on the roof, and it was best not to alert them. If Joe had escaped, he’d return soon with help. He’d call Greg, tell him what had happened. And Greg would certainly come rescue me, because he’d not know anything about the adultery. Of course, it could also be that Sleepy Joe had fallen asleep on the roof, and had not even heard the break-in.

“Don’t eat the cake, it’s for my husband’s birthday,” I begged the FBI guys, but they couldn’t give a crap.

“No more birthdays that will count,” they told me, and ate the cake directly from the platter, with their hands, not even cutting it into pieces. Fucking pigs. They didn’t seem to be going anywhere, they had settled their haunches, and they seemed like they lived there and I was the intruder.

Then Birdie took me in handcuffs from my apartment to another place, and the interrogations, blows, insults, and rough-ups continued, now even more brutal. When they were finished with me, a few days later I think, they took me out of what must have been a police station and put me on a bus, chained like a rabid dog. On the way I was able to see trees, enormous swaths of woods. For a moment, I thought that they were just going to throw me out in the woods and I remembered the story of Hansel and Gretel, who tried to save themselves by leaving pieces of bread crumbs on the path that the birds ate later. But soon I saw the sign for Manninpox State Prison and I knew what awaited me. After I arrived, I don’t know how long I went without washing myself because they wouldn’t take me to the showers. My hair was disgusting, all stuck together. They had forced me to strip and had taken my clothes along with my wedding ring and my necklace with the coin piece. They made me put on a uniform made of threadbare cloth, a rag against the cold in that place, and at night they gave me a single blanket, so short my feet stuck out. They didn’t give me any underwear. I’d have paid a million dollars for a pair of panties, just that, just some panties so I didn’t feel so exposed, so helpless in the hands of these people, they some gods and me but some piece of garbage. I felt the wind sneaking up my legs and it froze me inside. Of all the people who knew me, my coworkers, Greg, Sleepy Joe himself, none of them knew I had been arrested, or where I was, because they had not let me get in touch with them.

At some point, they took a picture of me, the infamous prisoner mug shots facing front and in profile, and they assigned me a number, 77601-012. I swear, Mr. Rose, at that point I felt as if there was some hope, at least I had a number, was registered in some file, and if one day Violeta asked about me, they could tell her that it wasn’t my fault that I had not visited her again. If they disappear me, I thought, they’re going to have to account for me to someone. They’d open an investigation about 77601-012 that figures somewhere.

That mug shot was my ticket to survival.