My main problem was (and continues to be) the lack of money, so at night I stayed with my mother’s old friend, Socorro Arias de Salmon. I had given her my manuscript in Manninpox, and she assured me that it had been delivered, sent by mail to the proper address. That made me very happy, it has made me hopeful that you read all of it, which is why I continue to do my homework, writing whenever and wherever I can to finish my story for you. Like I told you once, I don’t like novels with wishy-washy endings, or worse, those kinds of endings that just tick off the reader. But staying with Socorro wasn’t easy, given her husband wanted to know nothing about me. This Mr. Salmon, also an immigrant, was an Olympic asshole, one of those who still believed that coming to America was the closest thing to going to heaven and spent his life making sure he wouldn’t get expelled from paradise. I’m talking about the on-their-knees, hypergrateful bootlickers who are more Catholic than the pope. I don’t know if you understand what I mean. So Socorro let me stay there, but hidden from her husband, and the neighbors as well, of course, and the whole world, because the woman had a serious case of heebie-jeebies and her skin broke out in hives because I was staying there. Hiccups, allergies—what didn’t she come down with? Shitass-scared, they call those kinds of people in Colombia, shitting on themselves about anything, that’s how they were, the Salmon couple, he with his adulteries and double standards, she with her breakouts and rashes, and me in a corner of the basement next to the washing machine as if I were a pile of dirty laundry. The poor woman twisting herself into shapes with all my used tampons, because I’m still bleeding, not as much as before but a little bit every day. Imagine poor Socorro, having to throw out all those tampons in the neighbor’s trash because of what her husband would say, how would she explain such a thing when years before she had already been the very figure of menopause on two feet, or rather menopause with her hair in a bun, skin breakouts, and nails painted a bright red, that was Señora Socorro. No sir, this was no life, some development, out of jail and into a hole. The worst of it was that I couldn’t have my dog with me. I could go claim him—but where would I take him? I had to work up the nerve to go back and live in my old apartment, me and my dog, and maybe someday my sister as well. There was an eviction notice plastered on the door of the place, and it had been sealed off with police tape, and it was still fire damaged—but so what? I would sneak in through a window and take it from there. I had learned that at least it was still empty. The owner had not rented it to anyone else. It’s not easy to find good tenants in those shitty neighborhoods today. “I would never put you out on the street,” old, sly Socorro said to me, though she was deep-down glad I was getting out. As a parting gift, she gave me this mink coat, pretty amazing, I have to say, a bit moth-eaten and such, way out of fashion and with the lining all torn, an old geezer of a coat that smelled disgustingly of mold, think Grace Kelly crossing the Atlantic to become the princess of Monaco. But hell, enough complaining; it was a mink, after all. Socorro probably gave it to me to soothe her guilty conscience, so that I wouldn’t leave empty-handed. She said it was for the cold or so that I could sell it and get some cash. For the cold? Yeah, sure thing, tightwad, I was going to go around looking like Cruella de Vil, so that the animal rights people would spray me with paint for skinning the good Lord’s little creatures. The only person who would have bought such a thing was Prince Rainier himself. Can you imagine the whole scenario? Coming back from prison without a penny to my name but wrapped in a fur? It was funny, given everything that had happened. Maktub, I know all fate is maktub—remember that?—written down somewhere, but whatever entity is in charge of destiny has a good sense of humor. Anyways, I got to my neighborhood with everything I owned on me, and my Hero, my little sweetheart of a dog, who had gone crazy mad when he saw me. I couldn’t tell who was squealing more when we first saw each other, Hero or me—enough to break someone’s heart.
It wasn’t easy to go back. I was panicking—the shitass-scared one was me now. I swear, Mr. Rose, I felt like Lazarus come back to life still stinking of the dead. Confinement in prison is hard, but it’s harder to poke your nose back out into the real world. I soon realized how maddeningly difficult it was going to be to return to real life, which was not the same one I had left and which wasn’t really mine anymore. What had been mine had come to an end. That day I returned will always remained burned in my memory, me hugging Hero tight, both of us trembling, as if he knew what I knew or feared finding Greg there, both of us in the same state, not being able to confirm the rumors about Greg’s death really until that day. Everything that led up to that day had been so unreal, beginning with his death, a bit of news that I wasn’t sure whether to believe. There I was, back home, slowly climbing the stairs of my old building and recognizing the old smells that were different on each floor. A scorched smell on the first floor from the time the owner tried to burn down the place to collect insurance, cat piss on the second floor, pine-scented disinfectant on the third floor, and cigarette butts on the fourth floor. I went late on purpose that night to avoid running into anyone. I had no wish to run into the other tenants and have to deal with their questioning and accusatory looks. There she goes, the woman from the fifth floor, the one from that huge controversy, with the murder and the bursting down of doors, who was sent to prison and now is back. I didn’t want them to look at me with suspicion or, worse, pity. I didn’t want to be that person, the one from the tragedy. Truth was, I didn’t want to be any other person either; I didn’t want to be anyone. Ideally, I would have liked to have been invisible and gone into the old apartment like a ghost. Fortunately, not a soul was around that night, not even the silent boy who always sat in the stairway between the second and third floors, perhaps asleep already, or his family had moved, leaving the building desolate. And I was a ghost as well, and Hero half a ghost, returning home. Except not returning, just getting there; we weren’t really returning, returning to what, to whom, because there was nothing left of what we had once had, ruins perhaps, embers, ashes, a profound hurt in the chest and stabs of disillusion. Although actually, everything was the same, difficult to believe things had changed so little. The same light-colored floor tiles, handrails with chipped gray paint, the meager light from the few lightbulbs that weren’t burned out. I paused at the last landing on the stairs before reaching the fifth floor to look for the keys in my bag. I’m going into my turf. And what is there to greet me?
A humid cold that encircles my legs and gusts of air that flow in through the broken windows, and that’s when I realized I didn’t need my keys—for what?—considering all the locks had been burst open, and the door knocked against the doorjamb, letting the wind pass like through the door of a saloon. That’s what it was like. And inside? A hole, a real shithole, like they say here. No water, no electricity, no telephone, because of course they had been cut off, the furniture all destroyed, grime and stink everywhere. Because the locks had all been broken and there was no way to shut the door from inside, I was at the mercy of anyone who wanted to come in. Unbelievable, I thought, all those bars and locks in Manninpox so that I wouldn’t open any door, and now not even a miserable little dead bolt to lock my house. I’m telling you, that maktub writer likes his laughs. A little bit of a downer, the whole scene. Downer and then some, but what was I to do? I wasn’t going to sit there and start crying. I had come from the depths of hell and this was supposedly a new chapter. “On the stairway to heaven blind with tears,” another of Bolivia’s sayings for you. Make the best of it, I told myself, and I got to it. I found an extension cord, plugged it to one of the public outlets outside, and ran it into the apartment. It was freezing cold, with no heater or anything, but I knew that in the basement there was always a collection of useless and not-so-useless things, piles of stuff—you know how the gringos are, even poor gringos, who use their things for a year and then just toss them. I went to down to dig around in the pile and found a small heater that didn’t look in such bad shape, and just as I thought, the thi
ng worked. Nothing outstanding that put out suffocating heat, but enough to survive, though only at night. During the day, I had to unplug the extension cord so the neighbors wouldn’t notice and complain. And for water? Well, I did it by the bucketful, like we used to do whenever we visited our family in the country as children. Whoever used the outhouse went down to the river and hauled up a bucketful of water for the latrine. That’s what I had to do now, but of course not from a river, I had to haul water up from the faucet downstairs. Don’t think that’s such an unusual thing around here. How many people make do without any money to pay for public utilities? You can pass by and everything seems copacetic, but just take a peek behind the façade to see what real poverty is. Guess what I did for food. Depended on the charity of soup kitchens: good hot soup, some fruit, often a bit overripe, and little cartons of milk . . . not bad compared to Manninpox. To sleep? Well, to sleep, Hero and I used a thin foam mattress I had found in the basement. We had to improvise in that area because the FBI bastards had disemboweled all the mattresses and furniture. Then the smell. That was the worse. Rotted food in and out of the fridge. There was no way to get rid of the stink, although I spent a whole day of scrubbing away with those steel pads and a whole bottle of Ajax, which I had to buy, because they had emptied the old ones on the floor, looking for cocaine probably. You have to understand, Mr. Rose, I don’t want to bitch, it would be a serious lack of appreciation, but I swear sometimes I even missed Manninpox. There at least we had electricity, and running water, and three meals a day assured. And if I start complaining about these days, how do I tell you about the days that followed, all that stuff that happened afterward that was much worse? One night, I got home late and put Hero on the floor—I took him with me everywhere, night and day, in a tattered old bag—and I searched for the extension cord to turn on the light. There were only a few days left till the trial, and I was hoping that everything would go smoothly and I would be able to reestablish my identity as a free individual, so I could go back to work for the cleaning supplies company, make some money, reactivate my credit card, pay the old bills to get heat and water and light again, fix up some of the furniture, and rid the place of grime and memories. Clean out, as they say, and learn to forget. I had been unexpectedly released and life was giving me a second chance. It wasn’t something you waste. If fate had forgiven me, I was going to have to learn to forgive myself. Maybe I could even get a loan to buy the apartment. Who knows, there had to be some program for ex-prisoners in such a great democratic country that helped with things like that. Of course, nobody came by this house anymore, not even the cops. It’s as if the place had been erased from the map. Not even the owner came around to collect the rent. Maybe he was dead or had just given up on this place, left it like all the other godforsaken places in this neighborhood. After “white flight,” it was we persons of color who stayed behind, or I should say persons of many colors. As I figured, all I would have to do was take possession of my apartment and get everything in order again. How difficult could it be to set up a place to lead a decent, independent human life? I would get in touch with my old work buddies, throw a dinner party, and I would tell them such strange stories about what had happened to me since they had last seen me, almost like I was telling them about an old movie, one of those that they showed on TV recently, but no one could remember the plot. Then after that, I would go get my sister, of course. That would be the true beginning of a new life. I would take Violeta out of the special school, thinking of the face she would make when I showed her I had fixed up the room on the roof, the one she had always liked, her refuge upstairs, and I would lead her by the hand to the bathroom I had fixed up just for her, with a Jacuzzi and everything. You don’t have to bathe using the sink, I would tell her. I hoped Violeta would listen to me and not make a scene, Violeta who hated to shower and instead loved to clean herself in the sink on the roof, not caring about the cold or about parading around naked where everyone could see her, no matter that I got tired of telling her, you’re not a girl anymore, you’re a woman, a beautiful woman, and should act as such.
All that would be later, though, all that was the dream I was building up high as the moon while living down below in the rubble. For the moment I had to give time its due, without becoming desperate or depressed, keeping my priorities in order, surviving as best as I could in the ruins of that apartment, and focusing all my energies on the upcoming trial that was getting closer each day. That’s where my head was that night I returned home late, put the dog on the floor, and began looking for a candle, when I tripped on the mattress, the one I had brought up from the basement and that on top of everything smelled of urine. I tripped on it and asked myself what it was doing out there. I had left it in the bedroom and not where it was now, crossways at the entrance. Very strange, and my first instinct was to grab Hero and get the hell out of there. I should have done it, Mr. Rose, I should have. But I didn’t, just one of those times when I didn’t listen to my instincts. Analyzing it, I can’t quite figure out why I didn’t take off right away, when it was very obvious something was wrong. I guess in the end I didn’t do it because everything seemed so wrong during those days, one more thing seeming wrong just didn’t register; I was immune to things that seemed wrong. I must have thought that the stray cats had broken in looking for food and moved things around. But Hero was also startled and growled. It couldn’t be clearer if a hundred roosters were singing, or more to the point, one dog growling, but I refused to listen to the message. In the end, I think I didn’t run away because I didn’t have anywhere to run to. Better just to stay there and deal with whatever I had to deal with. I kicked the mattress aside, grabbed a candle, and went searching in the darkness for matches to light it, when someone grabbed my arm and pulled me back. Hard. Ugly. A big hand covered my mouth. Someone breathing on the back of my neck, and pressed against my butt, a . . . a man’s thing. Horrible? Disgusting? Terrifying? Of course, it was a horrifying experience, well, at first a very horrifying and then not so much, not so much and not at all, because soon I recognized that hand, that smell, that breath, that other thing.
Have you guessed? If you bet on Sleepy Joe, then ding-ding, you win. Apparently, he had been there, waiting for me in the dark, crouching quietly in a corner. I don’t know how long he had been there. It’s possible that he came often, and stayed the night once in a while. So I arrived that night, and he jumped me. I almost had a heart attack at first. You have to understand, Mr. Rose, my thing with Sleepy Joe had been a torrid love, and you can’t simply delete those things. You can shove them completely out of sight or bury them under a mountain of forgetfulness, but when you least expect it, they come back full force. That’s just how it happened here, my old flame jumps me from behind, and before I knew it, we were back to the same old thing, embarrassing as it is to admit it. I’m not saying I still loved him or anything like that, the opposite, in fact. I knew better than anybody what an absolute bastard he could be. A do-nothing, an asshole of the worst kind, but he hadn’t done anything to his brother. Sleepy Joe adored his brother, Mr. Rose, and I was sure he hadn’t lifted a finger against Greg. Sleepy Joe was not the murderer. And he was still a hot little papacito, no use denying that, so with all those repressed desires built up from Manninpox, that long dry spell, that abstinence that made me want to explode, starving and with my man right there, like a pie cooling on a windowsill. But not as you may imagine it, because there was a lot to talk about first. It was obvious he only wanted one thing, a little toss in the sheets to get things going, but I needed to talk. I needed to know what had really happened to Greg, what Sleepy Joe knew about the murder and this mess I was in up to my chin. What role had Sleepy Joe played? How deeply was he implicated? Did he know about the arms trafficking? Who had killed his brother? Why the fuck did he not come to visit me in prison? How is it possible that he abandoned me at the lowest point of my existence? What was that whole muddled history of the knife, the one I had wrapped as a present like an idiot
? A whole rush of questions brimming with rancor, mistrust, and suspicion . . . and hatred. Because deep down, I felt a physical hatred for him, a primal hatred thickened with regrets. You would think that even the most feverish lust would cool under these circumstances. You would think. But Sleepy Joe wasn’t your run-of-the-mill character. He wanted me on the bed, or on that filthy mattress, and that’s it. But that’s not what I wanted. Well, maybe a little bit, because Sleepy Joe was no good to the core, but damn, he was fine. “Come here, my little hot ass, don’t waste this present I’ve unwrapped for you,” that’s what he said, the damn flirt, and I could easily confirm that he wasn’t kidding. He goes at me with kisses all over my neck, and I slowly get lost in his smells, a little bit saying no and a little bit saying yes. And right in the middle of all that he blurts out a very strange question, well, strange for someone in the throes of this kind of passion.
“You have that hundred and fifty thousand, right? Tell me you do, my love, tell me you have it.”
“What hundred and fifty thousand?” I said, pushing him away. “Don’t fuck with me, Joe. They almost fucking killed me for that, some hundred and fifty thousand I didn’t know shit about. So you tell me. What hundred and fifty thousand?”
“Whatever you want, my little hot ass.” He backpedaled, trying to calm me down to get back to business, “Take it easy, my love, don’t get all flustered, let’s just stay with this and we’ll talk later.”
I needed to think. Hit pause to take in everything that was happening, bring down the temperature to avoid making a huge mistake. We were still inside in the dark and it was cold, so I was able to convince him to go out in the hallway for a moment to plug in the extension cord. But he kept on coming at me when he came back, determined not to let me interrupt things, so the fever had risen instead of dropping. Although maybe not, maybe that’s not how it happened. I think I’m lying, Mr. Rose. Maybe writing is not a good medium to tell about these intimate things, or maybe I just shouldn’t be telling you in such detail. In any case, I think I’m not being clear. The confusing thing about the feelings we carry inside is that they never are what they seem, always something different. Here I am confessing to you that what I felt for Joe was physical desire, and yes, that’s partly true, but it’s also not true, because in those days what I really wanted was something or someone to return to after a long voyage, and the familiar and once-loved body of Sleepy Joe could very well have been felt as a home, a place where you are received with a hug. I don’t want to get entangled in my psychological ramblings, Mr. Rose. So be that as it may, the scene was sexual. Now another confession, this one a bit stupider. It has to do with female insecurity. The truth was that I was self-conscious about being so thin. The last time we had made love I had been some forty-four pounds heavier, and Sleepy Joe wasn’t at all attracted to the sylph type, and had always said he liked my body because it gave him something to hang on to. Now I’d come back looking like a scarecrow, all bones, and I didn’t want him to see it, to realize that the thing he liked about me was no longer there. I had an idea. I’m not sure if right at that moment or a bit later, but I had an idea. Maybe not such a great idea. “Wait here,” I said to him in a very seductive voice, “I’ll be right back.” Sleepy Joe stayed in the living room while I went into the bedroom and took off my clothes, all my clothes. The mirror in my vanity was broken. They had destroyed it with everything else when they had burst in, but for one jagged piece that still hung there. I caught a glimpse of myself there. Where before there had been a full and delightful body, as someone had once described it, now it was just a skinny thing, too skinny. And that wasn’t the worst of it. When I looked closely, I realized how evident the suffering was on me. Maybe that’s what I should keep Sleepy Joe from seeing, I thought. What I need to hide from him is not so much this thinness, but the pain and weariness I’m carrying inside. That person in the mirror looked like a piece of cow cud or something that had been put through a grinder. Everything that had happened to me had turned my soul into jelly. Something told me that I needed to keep that from Sleepy Joe. I’m not sure why. It just seemed like an anti-aphrodisiac. Who’d want to hook up with someone so beaten down? I didn’t feel very seductive, let’s just say, but at least with my clothes on it wasn’t so noticeable.
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