Hot Sur

by Laura Restrepo

  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.