Hot Sur (35 page)

“Why are you dressing up as if you were coming from the beach?” Bolivia often asked him.

“I’m not dressing up, it’s who I am.”

Deep down, I always liked this Miguelito, call him Mike, better than any of the scum we had to put up with later. This guy had character, that can’t be denied. He was the owner of a packaging company and that may have been the reason Bolivia said yes one of those Sundays at the Copacabana; she’d later be less subtle about her reasoning: if this man supported her, she could save the money to bring her girls. And what was said was done. Maktub. The new apartment was a dream, more beautiful than she could have imagined, but living with her new boyfriend was more difficult than she had suspected. Until you sleep beside a severe asthmatic, you have no idea what a torment the night can be, for the afflicted and the partner. Bolivia came to understand that for Mike the bed wasn’t a place to lie down, because he’d sit up almost at a right angle with a bunch of pillows propped up behind him, and he’d snore like a seal if he happened to fall asleep, or wheeze all night if he didn’t. Sometimes she pitied him, and tried to help him by boiling eucalyptus leaves, getting him the inhaler, massaging his back, and begging him to stop smoking. Other times, and these were more frequent, she thought of him as a giant and clunky noisemaking machine. She couldn’t forgive all the horrible nights and the days she struggled through at the factory because of him, overcome by such sleepiness that she shut her eyes even though she was holding a hot iron. But my mother withstood this respiratory drama for seven months, during which she was able to save the money she needed. She sent us the tickets and said she’d be here waiting for us, and ten days before we arrived, she left Miguelito, called Mike, without offering too much explanation. According to Bolivia herself, she told him as he served her the morning coffee. Ciao, Mike, I’m not coming back tonight, I’m going to live with my daughters who will soon arrive. She had warned him previously that the setup would last only until her daughters arrived. Then good-bye forever. That very afternoon, Bolivia sublet two rooms with a bathroom in an apartment of Colombians, far from Spanish Harlem, near the East Village, which was cheap then.

Her roommates were single and pleasant, students, or so they had told her, and she believed them, or had to believe them because she had no other choice. That’s the way my mother thought: if I can’t afford another place, then this is the best place. It wasn’t huge or pretty, safe or peaceful, no wall-to-wall carpet or grand piano, and in the end wasn’t even private because the entrance and kitchen were shared. The money she had saved was enough to buy a whole other round of used goods, three simple mattresses, a table with four chairs, a black-and-white television, and a set of picture frames.

“The two rooms turned out very lovely,” she told me. “Like a dollhouse. I was very lucky to have a place to receive you. All that was missing was a vase and the towels and sheets I had left at Mike’s.”

Our plane arrived on a Monday night at eight and Bolivia had asked for a week off from work, so that she could show us our new American home. That Monday as we were about to board at the airport in Bogot
á
, she got up at six to finish ironing the blankets, cleaning the whole place, going to the market for crackers, food, eggs, cereal, maizena, soda, flowers, and at around noon she went to get the rest of her luggage from Spanish Harlem. Returning in a cab, she noticed the commotion of sirens near her block, and when she got closer she realized it was directly in front of her building. She asked the cabdriver to stop, got out at the corner, and went into the deli to find out what had happened.

“Get out of here, woman, they’re searching your apartment,” the store clerk told her. “Get out.”

“But why?”

“For the same reason as always, drugs. Get lost, woman, before they grab you as well. Did you leave your papers up there?”

“No, I have the papers right here in my purse. But I have my furniture in there, stuff for my girls. I’m going to go see if I can get my stuff. I’ll explain to them I have nothing to do with these drugs,” Bolivia resolved.

“Oh no you won’t,” the man detained her. “Over my dead body. I won’t let you go.”

“What about my things, my girls?

“Your girls are lucky there’ll be someone waiting for them at the airport tonight. Their mother was almost taken away by the feds. Thank God and get lost. Now, what are you waiting for?”

The rest of her belongings were in the taxi, and the taxi driver was cursing because of the delay as he emptied the trunk of the car, leaving Bolivia’s things on the sidewalk.

“Now what do I do?” she asked the store owner. “I have nowhere to put my things.”

“Come. Leave them down here until you get set up. There’s room in the store.”

Bolivia could not have been more grateful. May God repay you, as they say in Colombia. She stacked her belongings in one corner of the store and set off on foot to look for a place to rent, because in a few hours we would arrive, and she had no place to put us. How would she tell us she had no place for us to sleep? All the promises of the good life in America, so much waiting for the great moment. But where was my mother going to find someone who would open their doors, just one someone who would take pity on them and say come on in,
comadre
, bring your daughters and make yourself at home, where two fit so do three, where three fit so do four, and if we have to water down the soup, so be it. That’s how Colombians welcome each other. But in New York, no one told her these things, and Bolivia couldn’t find a place, and she had to suspend the search to come get us.

The plane arrived on time and Bolivia saw us immediately, her two girls standing there almost unrecognizable with the years that had passed, very different from each other, me darker than she remembered me, almost an adolescent but still a girl, and with hair, a lot of hair, messy and unruly, that’s what she’d tell me later, she said that on first sight I had seemed more hair than girl, and that she watched me looking around with those sullen eyes and that face of few friends. That’s how she saw it, but it was just that my face was puffy from having slept most of the flight.

“I looked at Violeta from the other end of the gate and I don’t know what I saw in her,” Bolivia would tell me years later, “but I saw something. Very pretty, my girl. But strange.”

I have to love them both equally, Bolivia promised herself as she approached us, I have to love them both exactly the same, not an ounce more for one or the other. And I’m not sure if she succeeded. I’ve always thought our mother loved Violeta more. Maybe to protect her, but it wasn’t just about that. There was something the girl had that I lacked, some magic in between temper tantrums that made it easier for Bolivia to be a mother to her than to me. Who knows? Between the three of us nothing ever arose spontaneously, everything had to be learned slowly after five years of everyone on their own. Bolivia was going to have to get used to being our mother, us to being daughters. We had a lot to learn, sometimes I think too much, or perhaps too late. In any case, it wasn’t going to be easy.

At that point, the story of that day ties in with my own memories, a swarm of people and suitcases in that airport, very hot, Violeta restless and me in a black mood, maybe because of exhaustion or all the confusion.
María Paz! Violetica! María Pacita! Violeta!
The woman with wavy hair and red lips that ran toward us, screaming our names, turned out to be our mom and she fell on her knees and embraced us and we embraced her, although I think Violeta was hesitant. I wasn’t hesitant, but it was strange. Five years of not having seen Bolivia, five years of speaking to her on the phone, had made her more into a voice without a face, and at the point of meeting her, there in the airport, I felt as if that voice that was so familiar was coming from the wrong face, I couldn’t make the two square off, I don’t know if you get what I mean.

Bolivia, for her part, who had fought like a lioness to get to this reunion with her daughters, lived through that moment as if it were a personal victory, the end of a long journey, a kind of impossible goal that became reality through a monumental sustained effort. A victory, yes, but a Pyrrhic one, because her little girls were here, but where could she take them? Up to that point every time Bolivia was about to surrender, every time she was about to drop dead from exhaustion, or that she couldn’t take it anymore, every time that happened, she got a second wind with the mere thought that one day she was going to see us again, just as was happening at that moment at the arrival gate in JFK. Except that she did not imagine Violeta looking so strange and she couldn’t quite see me in that young woman with dark skin and too much hair, as if I was not her daughter but that I nevertheless brought back memories of the man who had impregnated her, who I learned from Socorro, because my mother would never talk to me about these things, was a sailor on a Peruvian fishing boat, half-native and half-black, who had arrived to the Pacific Colombian coast in pursuit of a school of tuna. He had partied with Bolivia for a whole week and then taken off after another school of tuna. And never returned. That was my father, and Bolivia thought of him when she saw me at the airport that day.

“You look like your father,” she told me that time, and never mentioned him again.

Bolivia had imagined the reunion with her daughters just as it was happening, except that in her dreams, we left the airport hand in hand, like in the movies, heading to a pretty house with plaid blankets and curtains and a bouquet of flowers on the table, a place where her two girls would marvel at things like the air-conditioning and the remote control. But she had no such things to offer us, and she couldn’t find the words to tell us what was happening. She just wanted us not to find out what was happening, and, putting on a face as if everything was alright, she hailed a cab having no idea where we might be going. While the driver loaded our luggage into the trunk, she thought, I have two minutes to figure out where we are going, one minute, half a minute. She covered me in hugs and kisses and tried to do the same with Violeta, who didn’t let her, and meanwhile the taxi driver insisted on directions and she didn’t know what to say.

“Where to, señora?”

“What’s that?”

“An address, lady, you haven’t given me an address. Where are you going?”

“Just go out here, I’ll tell you. Go straight here, I’ll tell you. Cross that street, take a right there,” Bolivia responded because she had to say something, to keep the car going, to stall while she thought of something, and meanwhile she prayed, help me, my dear, dear God, show me the light, tell me where I should take these girls to spend the night.

“Here,” she said finally in front of a hotel.

A dumpy hotel, a reeking hole in the wall, with dirty linen, stained carpets, cigarette burns on the furniture, and one window that looked out on a black wall. What did I think of all of this? I don’t remember; I was just tired. It must have already been a disappointment when we realized Bolivia didn’t have a car, but that shitty hotel definitely laid waste to any pretenses I may have acquired from living with the Navas. In any case, when Bolivia awoke the following day near dawn, I was ready; I had the suitcases packed and Violeta ready as well.

“Get dressed, Mom, we’re getting out of here,” I told Bolivia.

“But where, honey?”

“To America,” I said. “We haven’t gotten there yet.”

“But this is America, my pretty girl,” she said.

“Don’t lie to me, this is not America.”

Then she made a phone call and things got better quickly. Soon we were having breakfast in a big elegant apartment with a wine-red carpet and a white piano with a big-bellied man named Miguelito who spoke Spanish and asked us to call him Mike. Mike offered us corn arepas, black beans, white cheese, and café con leche. When I looked out the window I saw that many of the signs outside were in Spanish: Chalinas Bordadas, Pollos a la Brasa, Cigarillos Piel Roja, and Las Camelias. We had arrived. There with Miguelito, in that apartment in Spanish Harlem, we would spend our first few years in America.

And so, Mr. Rose, the time draws near. So off this goes, see if it gets to you, like a message in a bottle. I have a cramp in my hand from writing so fast, and it’s a little sad too, because it’s as if I am saying good-bye to you. Thank you for your company. Telling you all this has been a way to keep close, I should confess to you that lately you have been like that orange because you remind me that it is bright outside and that one day I’ll be there, outside, and that everything is going to pass, as all nightmares pass. It’s 11:40 according to the clock in the hallway. The countdown is about to run out. Visiting hours begin at 2:00. The inmates have to be ready in the visiting room by 1:30; at 11:45 they ring for lunch and I have to go even if I’m not hungry. So I have only five minutes to tell you these last things. If we’re going a line a minute, it would be a paragraph, at least a paragraph, a good one to finish our novel. If you ever see Violeta and recognize her, tell her that the first thing I’m going to do when they let me out is go get her. And tell her I will get out of here, whatever it takes, to be able to keep that promise. Tell her that in spite of everything, I love her. Tell her I’m sorry, to forgive me and wait for me, I’m going to come for her. And what else, my God, what else can I tell you, Mr. Rose, in the minute I have left. You make up a good ending for the novel. But make it beautiful. Please, you know I hate depressing endings. Invent something. You know about that, it’s your job. Don’t make me look bad with the readers; I don’t want them to pity me. Ciao, Mr. Rose, the bell for lunch just rang, it was truly great meeting you. Maybe we’ll see each other again one day, although I’m not holding my breath. It all depends on maktub, what has already been written. And now, for real, ciao.

7

Interview with Ian Rose

Rose was still in the shower when the buzzer rang and had to get out wet and in a towel to open the door for Pro Bono, who had arrived earlier than agreed upon at the studio on St. Mark’s. “Maybe ‘agreed upon’ is not the right term,” Rose tells me. They had not actually agreed to anything yet. Rose had been asleep when he answered the phone at about four or five in the morning and heard Pro Bono give an order through the fog of his sleep. “That’s his style, giving orders. I hadn’t agreed to anything,” Rose clarifies. Pro Bono had told him to get ready because they had to leave in an hour. “Anyway, I got up,” Rose tells me, “I guess to see what would happen. Soon I was opening the door for him, with a towel wrapped around my waist, and he, of course, was looking like a million bucks.”

Even at that early hour, Pro Bono was more gussied up than on the previous day: his shirt impeccable, white and crispy; a heavy Hermès silk tie; a dark flannel, custom-tailored suit with chalk pinstripes; a touch of classic and clean Equipage cologne; Cartier Panthere watch, wedding band on his left ring finger, and a ring with the family shield on the pinkie of the same hand. A bit too fancy for Rose’s taste. In that, just that, it was clear that the hump had made a dent in Pro Bono’s personality, which was otherwise overwhelming. It was as if he had to use everything in his exclusive closet and barricade himself behind big brands to make up for his deformity.

Rose let Pro Bono in, offered him tea and, like the day before, immediately felt intimidated by the man. Pro Bono was overbearing, at once irritable and paternal, or patronizing—Rose wasn’t sure what to call it. In any case, it was a combination Rose did not like to deal with.

“It’s about María Paz,” Pro Bono told Rose, ignoring Rose’s greeting and glaring at him with yellow-hazel eyes.

“I figured,” Rose said.

“It’s serious.”

“How serious?”

“Serious.”

“Did something happen last night?”

“It’s been happening for a while, but just I found out about it last night.”

“What makes you think I can help you?”

“We have to be at Manninpox before 9:15. You know the way because you live right near it.”

“How do you know that?” Rose asked. The day before he had given Pro Bono the phone and address of the studio on St. Mark’s; he had not mentioned the house in the mountains.

“They know everything in my office.”

Rose tried to explain that he wasn’t going back to the Catskills yet because he had unfinished business in the city. But Pro Bono wasn’t one to take no for an answer, and simply pretended not to hear. He had assumed that Rose would go on this trip and that was the end of the discussion.

“He said it like that, ‘you have to leave early, my friend,’” Rose tells me, “that’s it, as if I were one of his employees—and then to top it off calling me friend whenever he wanted me to do something. That’s who Pro Bono was. It really threw me off when he called me friend. Why would he call me his friend if we weren’t friends? One day I told him to fuck off and the next day he was Paris Hiltoning me, making me his new BFF.” Rose decided that was how that kind of person—one who is used to maneuvering others to do his bidding—acts.

Pro Bono told him that he had received a call from Mandra X, and Rose knew right away who that was. María Paz had mentioned Mandra X in the manuscript, and the name had stuck in Rose’s mind. Was it some kind of homage to Malcolm X? A reference to mandrake? She was a terrifying creature for whom María nevertheless seemed to express only gratitude, even affection, one might say.

“Mandra X is not the type to just run her mouth,” Pro Bono said.

“What did she say?”

“She says it is urgent we find María Paz, or she will die.”

“We’re all going to die.”

“This is not a joke, my friend.”

“A matter of life and death, huh? And you want me to believe that you have no idea where María Paz is?” Rose asked.

“I lost track of her a while ago, that’s why I need you.”

“All I know is what I read in that manuscript that I brought to you yesterday.”

“Stop acting all innocent, Rose. María Paz spoke to me about you. Although I have to say the girl is a bit in la-la land. She made it seem to me that you were much younger.”

“And to me that you were much more handsome.”

“Help me be of use to her, Rose. The girl is your friend, and she must have gotten herself into a mess. A new mess, I should say. Don’t turn your back on her now. She trusts you, told me so herself various times.”

“She trusts me? She doesn’t even know me. Unless . . . wait, I think I get it now. You came here this morning looking for Cleve Rose.”

“That’s who you told me you were, Cleve Rose.”

“I never said I was Cleve Rose.”

“Cleve Rose, María’s writing instructor.”

“No, you don’t understand. Maybe your office doesn’t quite know everything, sir. Check into that when you get back. I told you my name was Rose, but not Cleve Rose.”

“I’m not following.”

“Cleve Rose was killed in an accident, sir. I am Ian Rose, his father.”

“Cleve Rose is dead?”

“I thought you knew everything.”

“And you’re his father?”

“Like I said, I am not Cleve, I am Ian. And I have never met María Paz.”

Pro Bono seemed upset with that bit of news. It flustered him for a moment; he who was always so obnoxiously sure of himself was now a bit befuddled.

“Sorry to have to tell you,” Rose told him, “but my son can no longer help you.”

“Then you will have to do.”

“I can help you even less so, I’m afraid.”

“But you sought me out, asking all those questions about her, and besides you have that manuscript, those papers.”

“Only because the chain of mistaken identities is long. That manuscript was sent to Cleve, not me. But Cleve was already dead, so it came to me.”

Knowing there was no way to get out of the situation, Rose nevertheless tried to impose a few conditions before leaving for Manninpox with Pro Bono. For one, he needed to know what this was all about. For another, no more calling him “my friend.”

“About one, I can’t tell you because I myself don’t know,” Pro Bono said. “About the other, that’s fine, my friend, I’ll stop calling you my friend. I’ll be downstairs.”

On the road in Rose’s car, leaving Manhattan through the Lincoln Tunnel, Rose asked why they were using his car and not Pro Bono’s.

“I’ve heard that you have a much finer car than this one,” Rose said, “a red sports car that makes you very popular with the ladies.”

“It’s black, not red.”

“Socorro said it was red. That woman from Staten Island, a friend of María Paz’s.”

“Socorro is a manipulating freak. Take anything she says with a grain of salt. My car is black, a black Lamborghini.”

“So what the hell are we doing in a blue Ford Fiesta?”

“Let’s just say they made me hang up my driving gloves, too many speeding tickets.”

“And that’s why you need me to take you to Manninpox? Couldn’t you just have hired a driver?”

“So you’re telling me that the renowned Mr. Rose who taught María Paz’s writing workshop was your son,” Pro Bono said, changing topics.

“He was.”

“And he was murdered?”

“I didn’t say that. I said he was killed.”

“Are you certain?”

“Only death is certain, as the saying goes.”

“How do you know he wasn’t murdered?”

“Murdered by whom? Cleve had no enemies. He was a good boy.”

“Everyone who deals with María Paz makes enemies.”

“Cleve was simply her teacher. He didn’t have any dealings with her.”

“Or so you would think. Look, Rose, maybe it’s best if you just keep your eyes on the road. Didn’t anybody teach you that when the line is solid you can’t cross over it?”

Rose lowered the windows to see if the cold air would help a bit. All this bossing around unsettled him, as did not knowing the purpose of their trip, and the cologne of this character, which filled the car with the aroma of something like horses. Pro Bono’s person, like his office, was infused with the supposedly aristocratic smell of horses, but not just the whiff of any old horse grazing in the field—more like the smell of a Thoroughbred’s riding saddle. Rose had a wealthy friend obsessed with equestrianism who had told him once how much money it took to develop and maintain a champion. Rose had thought it absurd; it was more than the friend spent on himself. Pro Bono smelled like that ilk of horses and could not stop himself from blurting out commands on how to drive: slow down, watch out for that car, light is about to turn red, start veering right, look out.

“Who’s the one without a license?” Rose protested. “Just let me drive.”

“You’re not very good.”

“You want to get out? I can still drop you off at the bus station and go back to sleep. If I’m not all that good, it’s because you’re driving me crazy with your tyrannical little orders.”

“Fine, I’ll shut up and you focus on the road.”

“How about this? You shut up and listen to me,” Rose said, taking an off-ramp and parking the car on the shoulder. He let go of the wheel and faced Pro Bono. “Look, I’m not quite sure what you want, but I can tell you what I’m looking for. The only thing I’m interested in is finding out what happened to my boy. Is that clear? You, María Paz, that Socorro woman, I couldn’t care less about any of you. I just want to know what happened to Cleve. I’m not sure what that has to do with María Paz. Maybe nothing. But for now, she is the only lead I have. Now if you can kindly tell me what made you change your mind about me from one day to the next, that would be a good start.”

“I realized I need you to find María Paz.”

“I’ll take you to Manninpox and our partnership ends there.”

They drove on in silence and a couple of hours later got off the main highway and took an old road that wound up the mountains through a forest of trees. Everything seemed wonderful out there at the end of fall. The flock of geese against the deep blue of the sky, the light breeze past the almost bare branches, the fiery colors of the landscape, the smell of wet earth.
It’s the same every year, Cleve, exactly the same. And yet you should see it, son, it still startles one as if there had never been such a lustrous season,
thought Rose. And since he couldn’t help but feel better, he tried to make peace with the character dozing beside him, painfully shrunken under his hump, yet peaceful, stripped at last of his armor of arrogance, reduced to his true state of an old man that for who knows how many years, eighty at least, had had to make his way in the world with that weight on his back.

“Do you need to lean the chair back a bit?” Rose asked when Pro Bono opened his eyes. “The lever is there on your right. You’ll be more comfortable.”

“I wasn’t made for comfort, my friend,” Pro Bono said, shutting his eyes again. But a bit later, more fully alert now, he asked Rose, “Do you know the great thing about my Lamborghini?”

“Everything,” Rose said, “everything must be great about your Lamborghini.”

“The best thing is the driver’s seat, custom made for my size out of carbon fiber fabric. La Casa del Toro ordered it especially for me. A full-fledged Lamborghini Aventador LP 700-4, a relentless mechanical force, made expressly so that a cripple like me could drive it two hundred miles per hour. What do you think of that?”

“What else can I think? No wonder they suspended your damn license. But listen, I was thinking . . . Mandra X, or Mandrax. You know? Mandrax, the barbiturate. Those little blue-and-white capsules that were big in nightclubs moons ago. Do you remember them? No? Well, yeah, you’re not much a nightclub person, I take it.”

“Filicide with Mandrax? Could be. Good job, Rose! Maybe you’re brighter than you look.”

“Don’t expect any miracles from me, Señor Attorney. I am a man broken by sorrow, very simple.”

Mandra X, real name Magdalena Krueger, was serving life in Manninpox and was in fact German, as María Paz had guessed. She was born in a place where two rivers come together to form the Danube. As was the case with Jesus Christ, nothing is known about the first thirty years of her life. It was at that point that she made her entrance into the history books when she turned herself in to the Idaho authorities after murdering her three children in cold blood. The lead-up to the trial was a huge controversy and caused quite a scandal in the press. She was convicted by public opinion from the start, but there was a movement led by several human rights groups and pro-euthanasia organizations in her support. In the end, she was sentenced to three consecutive life terms, destined to remain behind bars throughout this lifetime and the next two. Pro Bono was silent about whatever legal intricacies led her from the judgment of an Idaho jury to a prison in upstate New York. All he confirmed was that Mandra X had been taken to Manninpox, and there she would remain forever and ever. She had been spared the death penalty because of a single mitigating detail: according to the record, the victims, the children who happened to be triplets, suffered from a debilitating combination of worsening birth defects that included blindness, deafness, and mental retardation. She had been fully devoted to them until they were thirteen years old, and at that time had decided to do them in with an overdose of narcotics, all three of them at once, making sure to take precautions so they would not suffer or realize what she was doing. “I just put them to sleep, put them to sleep forever,” she declared to the press with a measured calm that one reporter called breathtaking.

Mandra X told the judge that from the moment they were born she had known that there would come a time when life would become unlivable for them. She still had plenty of strength left and had up to that time relied on a family inheritance to be able to remain at home and care for them. But the children could not go to any type of school, and because they could not tell night from day, there was always one of them awake, demanding her attention. Caring for them was a Herculean undertaking. To make matters worse, the money from the inheritance was dwindling fast and they could not live on the welfare check from the state. On the day the children turned twelve, Mandra X had been diagnosed with cancer of the bladder. It had gone into remission, but she became obsessed with the idea that soon it would return. The last thing she wanted was to die and leave them alone.