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“Please, one tzin.”

And the waiter: “What?”

“Please, one tzin.”

“What?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“This was different,” she said.

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

“This was something else,” she repeated.

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

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

“A stick? He shoved a stick in you?”

“A broken-off broomstick.”

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

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

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

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

“Praying? Who was praying?”

“Your brother-in-law.”

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

“During
 . . .
like in a ceremony.”

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

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

“An ugly ceremony?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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