Hot Sur

by Laura Restrepo

  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 arra
nged 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.