And so went the story of those two destinies that at times met only to bifurcate again, Socorro happily married, and Bolivia not, although Bolivia had been a mother and Socorro had not.
“Bolivia had her two daughters,” Socorro said, “and I’m not going to deny that I envied her that, and in turn loved them as if they were mine, especially Violeta, the younger one. They’d come here to visit and that girl loved my porcelain collection, could spend hours looking at them, liked cleaning them with a wet rag, and I allowed it, as long as she was careful. Of course, she had her psychological issues, my girl Violeta, maybe bipolar, they’d say now, or anxiety-ridden, they didn’t know for sure; but she was a doll regardless, with that blondish hair and green eyes that lit the way like two lanterns. And really, it was just knowing how to deal with her, how to interact with her on her level. To calm her down, you know.
“On the other hand, with María Paz things have always been complicated. If the younger one was rebellious and difficult, the older one was worse. Let’s just say that she’s a temperamental girl and leave it there not to judge. My husband warned me from the beginning: ‘Watch that older daughter, she’s trouble, you’ll see, she’ll go from bad to worse, it’s a bad week coming if they hang you on Monday.’ Maybe it was just his paranoia, you know how we immigrants live in this country, so frightened to do something wrong, to behave improperly, to have the neighbors or the law come after us, that we panic when someone looks at us funny. Maybe it’s just a mental thing, up here, you know? An issue with the noggin. But we get psyched out anyway, can’t be helped. The lawn looks a little patchy and we think they can deport us for that. But, Mr. Rose, don’t judge my Marcus, he’s been good to me. Although he does impose certain conditions, and in that he is unequivocal and there’s no room for argument.”
Salmon had been pleased when María Paz decided to marry an American cop. He told Socorro that maybe the girl was rehabilitating herself and agreed to spend a large sum on the wedding present, a set of Czech glassware. When she went to jail, Salmon ordered that Bolivia’s oldest daughter could not set foot in their house again. “What if she’s not guilty?” Socorro had dared to ask. “She must have done something” was Salmon’s final answer.
“But tell me, when they were younger, did the girls ever live in this house in Staten Island?” Rose asked.
“No. It was a long time before Bolivia could send for her girls. And when they finally came, she was no longer living here. But they came to visit now and then, and sometimes would stay for the weekend, and we tried to spend Thanksgiving and Christmas together. You have to understand, Bolivia and I continued to be friends. But something invisible and sharp inside, like an icicle, had cooled what had been our sisterhood. And then later she died, and perhaps I haven’t behaved very well with the older daughter, I admit that. I just hope that Bolivia doesn’t hold it against me from the beyond.” Socorro glanced down in a gesture of confession, fixing her eyes on her leather sandals. “But don’t blame me entirely; you have to understand my husband’s convictions.”
“I imagine that this visit, the fact that I’m here, is something you are hiding from your husband,” Rose said.
“Well, you have come to revive phantoms that annoy my husband. I’m sorry, but it would not be good to shake the dust of certain events that put my marriage in jeopardy. Marcus is a man who does things by the book, and in spite of his generosity doesn’t forgive delinquency or bad conduct, or anything that is a threat to order and security, not to mention morality.”
“But you yourself admitted that it was possible María Paz wasn’t guilty.”
“But you try to explain it to Marcus, whose principles are unshakable. He’d never forgive me something like that.”
“Something like what?
Socorro began to trip over her words, said she regretted her lack of character, her submission to her husband, felt as if she had to justify her behavior to this stranger who had come to question her. She had always been weak, she said, with high blood pressure and frail health. What ills had she not been afflicted with, at least a dozen of the ones listed in Medical Care, and she went on to list all of them for Rose, counting them on her skinny fingers with the long fingernails: breast cancer, sinusitis, allergies, skin breakouts, hiccups that sometimes lasted for weeks. With all the visits to the doctor, all the hospital stays, the chronic fatigue, she had not been able to work or bear children. On the other hand, Bolivia was tireless when it came to work and strong as an ox, never taking a single day off, and not once in her life did she even have a cold. But Socorro was still alive and Bolivia was dead and buried before she turned fifty-two. Socorro had never had to work, but was never short of money. Bolivia, who never stopped working, was the type who never had enough for the rent. In the intensive care unit at Queens Hospital Center, a few hours after a sudden stroke had fried Bolivia’s brain, Socorro stood by the bed of her friend who was unconscious but still alive, and swore to her on the Most Holy Virgin that from that moment on she, Socorro Arias de Salmon, would take care of Bolivia’s daughters. “You can die in peace, my friend, I will watch over your daughters.” And up to now she had kept her promise, not entirely but well enough, or let’s say well enough when it came to Violeta and not so well with respect to María Paz. She confessed to Rose that she had set up a special trust fund so that she could continue to keep her promise to Bolivia concerning Violeta when she and Mr. Salmon were no longer alive.
“Almost all these porcelain pieces are Royal Doulton,” she said. “They’re worth a fortune. Look, this one is one of a kind. It will be worth almost seven thousand dollars when it is sold for Violeta.”
Under lock and key, behind glass, she had another half dozen Capodimonte pieces, and she asked Rose if he knew what they were worth, if he could tell they were originals, with seals of authenticity and everything, and in perfect condition.
“Look, with just this one here, Bolivia’s sick daughter has enough to live on for the rest of her life. I’ll show you,” Socorro said.
Rose examined it. It was a good-sized piece, made up of two figures on a sort of cloud, a man and a woman, the woman with an imperial air, a Marie Antoinette or Madame de Pompadour, wearing a tulle flounce dress and leaning down over a beggar at her feet. The beggar, or character down on his luck, gazed with an almost mystical rapture at the sumptuous cleavage of the lady. It could be said that he was gorging on that pair of porcelain breasts with his eyes, and Rose was annoyed with him, that beggar, because there was something base about him.
“Pretty piece,” he said, because he didn’t know what else to say.
“Since Marcus and I don’t have kids,” Socorro explained with a hint of frustration, “Violeta will be the sole heir of all these treasures. It’s a debt I owe to Bolivia, my dear Bolivia, because I didn’t always do right by her, didn’t always do right. Perhaps because I was jealous, or envious, and no one is perfect, we know, certainly not me. And neither was Bolivia; she was no pot of honey, my friend Bolivia, you can be sure of that.”
Although Socorro had not admitted it, Rose had come to the conclusion that this woman had not been able to stand the way her husband looked at Bolivia, that Bolivia was fertile and she wasn’t, and that it was painful to compare her sickly lean figure with the brimming roundness and spectacular smile of her rival. No doubt Bolivia had noticed, sensed something was wrong, that the tension as the months passed had become way too evident, almost tangible, as Socorro had mentioned.
Socorro told him that one night, when she and her husband returned from a party, they noticed that Bolivia had packed up her suitcase and gone, leaving a note that said, “Love you, thank you very much for everything, thank you and see you soon and may God give you many years of wedded happiness.” From then on, Socorro only saw her once in a while, and of her life and adventures only learned fragments. “She was a survivor, that’s what Bolivia was, a survivor,” Socorro repeated various times to R
ose, and he remembered reading the same phrase in María Paz’s manuscript, and asked himself what it meant exactly, and if perhaps it had to do with the seventeen pages that were missing from the manuscript.
“There’s seventeen pages missing?”
Socorro pretended she didn’t know, but she turned red and drops of sweat moistened the bleached fuzz under her nose.
“Do you know by any chance what happened to those seventeen pages?”
“Sometimes things get lost, you know . . .”
“Mrs. Salmon, I’d appreciate it if you told me the truth.”
“You have to understand, Mr. Rose, those pages were the most compromising part of the story. I was afraid that . . . in the end . . . Look, the truth is I burned them, Mr. Rose.”
“You burned them.”
“Yes. I admit it. There were revelations about things that were too personal and serious and that affect me directly. Painful things for me. And others that I don’t remember. Things that would damage the memory of my best friend, you know what I mean. Let’s drop this topic, please, Mr. Rose.”
“Of course, we’ll leave it there. Just one more question before I say good-bye. What made you decide to finally send off the manuscript?”
“That’s an easy question. I did it because María Paz asked me to, and I didn’t feel I could deny her request.”
“But it took you a few weeks to mail it.”
“I suppose remorse, which bites like a dog, got the best of me, and I had no choice but to look for your address, Mr. Rose. Odile, my neighbor who reads a lot and knows her way around, helped me with that. She has a computer and found you on that goggle thing, is that what it’s called? And then I sent off the manuscript right away. Better late than never, right?”
“Do you think you did it because you were afraid that María Paz may have found out if you hadn’t?”
“What makes you think that? It has been a while since I’ve seen her. Haven’t seen her since the last time I visited her in prison. You do favors. If you can, you do favors. I once gave María Paz a mink coat so she could keep warm in the winter, or so that she could sell it if she needed the money. Doesn’t that count? I’m not going to say that the mink was in the best of shape. But in any case it was a nice gesture on my part. Like I said, we do what we can. And do you know who got Bolivia her first job in the United States after she got here without papers? Yes sir, it was me. It was a humble job, but a job still, cleaning the apartment of an old woman who lived on West Fifty-Fifth Street. But I’m boring you, or do you want me to keep going?”
“As long as you don’t lose your way, Mrs. Salmon.”
“The woman’s name was Hannah and she was Jewish. And it took Bolivia a while to realize that when she got to the apartment everything was clean and organized. Bolivia asked her one day, ‘Ma’am, how do you expect me to do my job if you do it for me beforehand?’ The old woman responded that she could not stand the thought of someone coming into her home and finding it dirty. So Bolivia came to understand that her boss was just looking for company, because there’s nothing worse than loneliness, as you know, Mr. Rose. So Bolivia never asked again and learned how to quickly clean what had already been cleaned and organize what had already been organized. Afterward, they went for a stroll in Central Park, always talking about trees or the color of the leaves according to the season.
“‘I’d say that is a poplar leaf and it is viridian in color,’ Hannah ventured.
“‘I don’t know what viridian is, I’d say it’s emerald green,’ Bolivia countered.
“‘Same thing, Bolivia, viridian and emerald are the same green. And this leaf from a weeping willow—isn’t it chrome green?’
“‘More like a lime green.’
“‘What about a swamp green?’
“‘Agreed, Señora Hannah, a swamp green.’
“And so it went, with sycamores, maples, elms, exchanging opinions on the range of greens, lemon green, mint green, malachite. Further on in the year they tackled the possibilities of the ochres and golds of fall, and in the winter the only things left were gray and white.
“‘Do you know that Eskimos can distinguish nine shades of white and have a name for each of them?’
“‘That’s over the top, nine shades of white!’”
After their daily walk in Central Park, having worked up a hunger, the two women, the illegal Colombian and the lonely American, walked arm in arm to the Carnegie Deli, where they had pastrami with dill pickles or matzo balls, often finishing everything off with a strawberry cheesecake. Señora Hannah always paid, of course, and since neither of them ate very much, there were mountains of food left over, which the waiter wrapped in aluminum foil so that Bolivia could take it with her on the 7 train from Times Square, which left her off almost at the door of her place, a room in Jackson Heights that she shared with a Dominican woman and her niece, who often had temporary guests or family members and friends who stayed longer. The interesting thing was the food chain that formed from that point on, because in that room in Jackson Heights an average of five people dined nightly for four and a half months without any of them once setting foot in a supermarket; they had enough with the water from the tap and the doggy bags Bolivia brought from Carnegie Deli.
“A terrible influence on Bolivia,” Socorro told Rose. “Trust me when I tell you. A horrible influence, those two Dominican women. They were called Chelo and Hectorita. They came here a couple of times with Bolivia. Chelo was the aunt, Hectorita the niece.”
Bolivia sent almost all of the salary from Fifty-Fifth Street to Colombia to support her two daughters. She lived on what was left, and tried to put some aside for savings. But very little remained, and there was never enough left for the main purpose: to pay the visas and plane tickets for her daughters. To that end, she had opened a savings account that remained meager, an anorexic account that emptied any time one of the girls got sick or had a birthday.
“‘There isn’t going to be a year in which your girls won’t get sick or have a birthday,’ the Dominicans insisted. ‘As long as you are a servant, you’ll never save. Drop that, girl, get up off your ass and look for something better.’
“‘And poor Señora Hannah?’ Bolivia protested.
“‘Poor Señora Hannah is rich. You’re the one who’s poor.’
“‘And what are we going to eat without the pastrami and matzo balls?’
“‘We’ll figure out something.’
“‘But Señora Hannah and I are friends . . .’
“‘Friends, my ass. Let’s call things as they are. Señora Hannah is the señora and you are the maid. But from now on you are going to be a factory worker.’
“‘A factory worker?’
“‘We’re going to take you to the supervisor where we work. You’re going to work at the factory. And we’re going to get drunk to celebrate.’
“It was a blue-jeans factory, one of those sweatshops where the workers are reduced to semi-slavery and which supposedly had been closed down in New York and fined, but that in reality was still operating full force. So Bolivia would be ready for the interview, the Dominican women prepared her psychologically, calmed her nerves with homeopathic drops, and instructed her on the questions she’d have to answer. ‘Take it nice and easy,’ they advised her, so that she wouldn’t be intimidated by the bitter character of the supervisor, who was named Olvenis and was one of those dry, hard-edged guys, with quills like whiskers who would scratch you if he grazed you; an origami made out of sandpaper, that was Olvenis.
“‘When he asks you if you know how to operate industrial machinery, you say yes.’
“‘But I don’t have a clue,’ Bolivia grumbled, ‘never in my life—’
“‘You listen to us and say yes.’
“‘And how am I supposed to respond with my shitty English?’
“‘No problem. His is worse
because he’s not American. The owner of the place is Martha Camps herself. You know her, right? You don’t? What world do you live in? Martha Camps, the TV star. But she’s never there. That’s why she has the supervisor who speaks almost no English. Here in New York, English is not necessary, so don’t stress out, there’s always someone who speaks it worse than you. Don’t you know how to say yes? Anything he asks, just say yes. Or is it too hard to say yes? “Yes, of course, Mr. Olvenis, thank you, Mr. Olvenis, thank you very much.”’
“‘How much do I ask for pay?’
“‘Don’t ask for anything. Just take what he gives you, and then it gets better, and if doesn’t get better you quit and go look for another place. That’s how these black-market jobs work here.’
“‘What if he asks if I have papers?’
“‘He’s not going to ask. He knows none of us do and that’s the thing, that’s how they run the business. Without papers they can pay us bad, or not pay us, depending on the mood that month.’
“They took her to a building closed off and crisscrossed with yellow tape that said ‘Police Line, Do Not Cross.’ On the front, official notices reported default for tax delinquency, and there was a heap of garbage out by the building. The windows were all broken and boarded up, and if you didn’t know better, you’d swear there were only rats and dirt inside.
“‘It’s here,’ they told her.
“‘Here?’
“‘Yeah, we go in through the back.’
“They passed through a dark wooden structure attached to the building, Chelo and Hectorita leading, Bolivia behind them, and then groped their way step-by-step up a creaky stairway.
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