Now that I’m recounting all this, Mr. Rose, I realize there may have been different reasons. I didn’t want Sleepy Joe to guess the true state of my ruins, because it would prove costly, I was sure. He would be merciless, taking advantage of it to hurt me further. Getting naked in front of him would be like taking off my armor and exposing myself. But that’s what I think now, like I’m telling you, that night my head was somewhere else, so the next step was to let my hair loose and lower my head to brush it all forward, all of it, and then in one gesture, throw it all back so it fell down my back thick and frizzy. Do you see where I was going? Then I put on the mink that Socorro had given me, finally finding some use for that coat, throwing it over my skin and bones, bare naked under it. An old female trick, à la Marilyn Monroe, fill a man with wonder by appearing naked under a fur, also very useful to hide physical defects, in this case, my hyper thinness, so Sleepy Joe wouldn’t realize I was bony as a stray cat. Not to mention the hemorrhaging, so that he wouldn’t notice that especially. God forbid he thought I had my period, because then the whole seduction ruse would be fucked. There was nothing that terrified him more than menstrual blood. Like I’ve said, no one could outdo this man when it came to weird ticks and prejudices. I stripped down, threw on the fur, and went out to try my luck. My Greg, with his obsession with Christmas carols, had a video in which Eartha Kitt sang “Santa Baby.” Kitt is naked under her white mink in the video, or so it seems, and my poor Greg used to imitate her using a towel, clowning around, showing his bare shoulders as he sang along karaoke-like about seducing St. Nick to get a blue convertible for Christmas: “I’ll wait up for you, dear Santa baby, so hurry down the chimney tonight.” You can imagine. But first, let’s shoo Greg from my memory, Mr. Rose, so I can go on with my story. It’s hard to explain how much Greg’s memory weighs on me, all that time I had cheated on him. That was not right, my poor old man. Poor me too, left without love or company. But let’s move on. I went back to Sleepy Joe in my tattered mink, all seductive and stuff, cue the sexy music, a sexy little kitten moving in stealthily step-by-step through the hallway, humming “Santa Baby” and letting the fur slide ever so slowly down my shoulder. And the Neanderthal of Sleepy Joe, instead of focusing me, all of a sudden could see nothing else but the fact that I had a mink coat. Think about it, Mr. Rose, he realized I had a mink coat. He went nuts.
“You liar,” he screamed. “You do have the money! You took the hundred and fifty thousand. How else would you have such a coat? You bought it with that money, you fucking liar, admit it.”
Unbelievably, for Sleepy Joe that coat was proof that I had the money and was spending it on luxuries. That made him start to get violent. He grabbed me hard and demanded I tell him where the money was, with his big open mouth close to my face. “Where’s the money, you bitch? Did you spend it all already? You didn’t save even a little bit for me?” And liar and bitch, and liar and bitch. “Not even a little bit for your papacito? Huh, you bitch? Not even a little bit?” He had me by the hair and was tugging it so hard it hurt. This can’t be, I thought to myself, is life just a repeating reel? Before this it had been Birdie, now Sleepy Joe, both assaulting me for the same reason—the only difference that Sleepy Joe wasn’t smacking my face. He shoved me around but did not strike me. I just want to be clear on that detail, Mr. Rose: Sleepy Joe, the thug, the scrounger, did not smack me, while the FBI, who supposedly stood for law and order, had beaten me senseless. But the two scenes also had their similarities, and to think that so much fuss was about some money that I had never seen in my life, one hundred and fifty thousand blessed dollars. Son of a bitch, if I would have had that kind of money, none of these losers would have seen me or my shadow again. I would have taken off for Seville, Seville in the spring with the flowers blooming, that city I had never visited but dreamed about, fled to Seville where these animals couldn’t put a hand on me. I tried to think about that and only that, Seville and its blooming gardens, while Joe manhandled me and screamed, sticking his chest out and getting all machito on me, till I was in tears because of that deep and violent voice. All that show of manhood so I would throw myself at his feet and shrink like a worm. What did this asshole want? For me to apologize. Fine, I’d apologize, I’d suck him off if that’s what it took for him not to smash my face in, and was just about to beg forgiveness on my knees. But for what? I hadn’t even seen that money, much less had my hands on it. So beg for forgiveness out of sheer exhaustion, to save my neck, so this animal would think he had won, that the battle was his, that I was not even worth hitting anymore. Beg for forgiveness so Mr. Macho Man would stop his assault. But something in me didn’t want to go there, bend over, humiliate myself. I just didn’t feel like it. Hadn’t I just survived hell itself, where I had to learn to defend myself against real monsters? I wasn’t going to let this shitty little asshole bring me down now. I could give him a Swiss kiss that would rip the lips off his face. See if he stopped screaming then? I had never actually done the Swiss kiss to anyone while in Manninpox but I knew about it through the grapevine. Better to try a more proven method. So I head-butted him smack in the middle of the nose with such a brutal force that I heard something crack, like a branch breaking off, and when I saw the concern with which the moron took his hands to his blood-soaked face, I said to myself, now, María Paz, now or never! And I was off, without a hitch, as they say. Bone thin and naked as I was, I untangled myself from him, slipping out of the coat like a serpent from its old skin. He held on to the moth-eaten mink with one hand, more surprised than anything, his face covered in blood. He tossed the coat aside and tried to chase after me, but his feet got caught up in the extension cord and he came crashing down with a loud thud, like an armoire tumbling over, leaving the apartment in darkness again. I wish you could have seen that idiot, Mr. Rose. The way he came down as if struck again, in the end—it was comical. Too bad I didn’t have a video camera. The howling when for the second time that night that nose got smashed in was unforgettable. That gave me time to run into the bedroom and hide behind the stinky mattress leaning up against the wall, leaving a little space where I was just able to fit. There I waited, protected by the darkness, like I hoped brave Hero was, somewhere else, and listening to Sleepy Joe grope around in the darkness and bellow, looking for me. The night could not last forever, and soon light began to seep in through the window. A pale mist began to fill the room, and since it was so thin at first it didn’t quite reach my hiding place, but soon enough it spread and brightened the whole room, leaving me exposed. All Sleepy Joe had to do was stick his head in the room and he’d see me hiding there behind the mattress like a terrified, sorry-ass little mouse. That’s not how it was going to be, I decided. Instead of panicking, I grew very peaceful. If there was nothing to do, there was nothing to lose, I said to myself. If Joe was going to find me, he might as well find me ready to defend myself. So I came out from the hiding place, went to the closet, and grabbed a baseball bat that had been Greg’s since he was a kid, gripped it tight with both hands, and waited strategically behind the door, taking a good stance to be able to unleash the bat across Sleepy Joe’s head as soon as he crossed the threshold. Then I heard the tap of his yellow boots. Heard him coming. If he was out to hurt me, he had best be ready to be hurt twice as bad. Greg had made me watch his favorite video a thousand times: “The Twenty Greatest Home Runs,” which among others included highlights of Kirk Gibson’s glorious high fly-ball doozie in Dodger Stadium, Bill Mazeroski’s World Series slam, and the best one of all, the one that I had seen so often that I had memorized it, October 3, 1951, Bobby Thomson of the New York Giants battling the Brooklyn Dodgers for the National League pennant takes a pitch from Ralph Branca, and with all the soul and cojones he had in him line-drived the fuck out of that ball for the most memorable home run of all times. And that’s the exact position I was in behind that door, with a strong grip on the bat and ready to send this retard Sleepy Joe flying out the window so his head plunged into the asphalt and he bec
ame what he truly was, a little splatter of shit, a piece of garbage that everyone would simply step over like all the other garbage in this neighborhood.
Alas, I was no Bobby Thomson. What a loser of a ballplayer I turned out to be. Sleepy Joe came in and in a matter of seconds he wrestled the bat from me.
“Time to pray, my little hot ass,” he said, his face all drool and blood, and because his voice was all nasal with the broken nose, he sounded more dejected than enraged.
“Go ahead,” I said. “Go up to the roof and pray; I’ll wait for you right here.”
As if he was going to do as I said. He grabbed my arm and bent it behind my back in some jujitsu hold and led me up the stairs to the roof. It was dawn, the time the little Slovak boys performed their prayers. Once up on the roof, Sleepy Joe took off his belt and bound me to the railing with my hands behind my back and naked as I was.
“Let’s see if you can let me pray in peace, you two-timing whore,” he said.
“I’m cold, Joe,” I responded.
“Shut up, bitch, or I’ll warm you up with a beating.”
“But why are you tying me up?”
“So you don’t escape.”
“I’m not going to leave.”
“Bullshit, you bitch.”
I had never actually known what the brothers did on the roof during their prayers because they never let me up there, assuring me it was not for women. But this time I saw how Joe lit some candles, spread out some blankets, messed around with a bell, took out a Bible, incense, and I couldn’t tell what other knickknacks and placed them all very meticulously on a red cloth spread out on the floor as if for a picnic. What a dirty Mass, I thought.
“Stop playing around, Joe,” I called. “Come here, hon, untie me. Or at least cover me with something; don’t let me freeze to death here. And don’t get so close to the edge, baby, careful or you’ll fall off.” I said all this in a very sweet tone to see if I could win him over, but he was so focused on the whole ceremony that it was as if I wasn’t even there.
“Get over here, Joe, give me a little kiss.” I didn’t know what else to try. “Come on, let me go, don’t be such a bad boy to me. Let me clean up that nose, my poor little baby. Does it hurt a lot? Why don’t we just go back down, things were so good there—”
“Shut your mouth, you whore, I’m doing this,” he said without even turning to look at me.
Sure enough, he was doing that, on some cosmic voyage or some shit, as if he were in another world, tooth and nail with his god so nothing else mattered. Meanwhile, the city slept below, and I trembled naked in the cold. What could I do? Scream? Wake up the whole neighborhood, yelling for help by causing a scene? Not a bad plan. But Joe must have thought about such a possibility at the same time, because he interrupted his little Mass and came over and gagged me with a handkerchief. So much for my plan. After he was done muffling me, the nutcase moved away and knelt on the very edge of the roof—and because there were no parapets on the cement roofs of the buildings in this neighborhood, the edge was like the edge of a cliff. A wind swept across the roof, blew out the candles, and tousled my hair. The city was waking up little by little below, and I was a little stunned by the change in my brother-in-law. Just a little while ago, he had been a raging macho hyped on testosterone, and now he seemed to be some type of angel glowing in the divine light of morning. He was moving in slow motion, half monk and half yogi, and he began to chant, at first in a low voice with his head lowered and his whole body folded in on itself, like some giant fetus floating in the amniotic fluid of the first light of day. Then slowly his voice grew louder. He straightened up and let his head fall back theatrically, and his body went into convulsions or something, as if electrical shocks were coursing through his body. His body shook epileptically, but somewhat controlled, the petit mal, let’s say—I know too well about these things with all the psych wards I’ve had to visit for Violeta.
A song in two different tones now broke out from Sleepy Joe, first one tone then the other. For the first tone, a grand and serious voice emerged from his throat, a voice like Greg’s, I remember thinking, if I closed my eyes I could imagine it was Greg who was there, it was his Gregorian chant. Motherfucker, I thought then, I was hallucinating because of the incense that, not for nothing, smells like weed. What purpose did all this serve for him? What was the point of this ridiculous theater? Did he miss his brother? Was he summoning the spirit? I began to shiver. And then it was no longer Greg’s voice that was coming out of that throat, now it was a little thin voice, almost a child’s, that responded to the other one. Sleepy Joe’s voice as a child? The two brothers together and praying? Oh, God, so horrific I was getting goose bumps. They must have been very ancient chants from Slovakia, but so incomprehensible, son of a bitch, lightning over Tatras. In spite of it all, there was something very impressive about it, I had to admit. Sleepy Joe’s silhouette over the city was a potent sight. My loser brother-in-law had become a dark, half-naked priest, with the bloody face and the rivulets of blood dripping on the crucifix tattooed on his chest. He spread out his arms as if he wanted to hold the universe and let his head fall back. No laughing matter here—this was scaring the shit out of me. His back was tense, so arched that his ribs stood out like a vault. I was beginning to lose it, I don’t know, so much so that Sleepy Joe seemed to be emitting heat and brightness, perhaps burning, it seemed as if the air around him had caught fire. The veins in his neck popped out and his fists were so clenched that I could imagine his nails cutting into his palms. Could it be that he had some kind of supernatural powers? Greg used to say that his little brother was imbued with the Spirit, but I never believed that crap, because I knew that if his little brother had any powers they were located elsewhere. But now, watching this mystical display, I wasn’t so sure. Stop with this idiocy, María Paz, I told myself—what powers? what possession?—it’s just your asshole brother-in-law monkeying around with rusty buckets and pots and tin sheets. But the reality was that the man covered in blood celebrating this ancient ritual at times did seem more than just a man. Of course, I knew that wasn’t the case. He was just some maniac. Not a devil, just a man. It was a line from some movie that came into my head then. And it helped calmed me down, not the devil, just a fucking man. I repeated it to myself. This Sleepy Joe was like a coyote, mysterious and cowardly. A loser, all fucked up and defeated by life. But in that state he was in during the ritual, shaken by some sort of celestial orgasm, with his eyes gone white and fully raised to the heavens, Jesus, you had to respect it. I swear, Mr. Rose, more than a man. As if some high-voltage electrical shocks had transformed him, that’s what it seemed for a moment, and I began to understand some things then. I felt as if Corina were beside me and suddenly I got it. My Corina, I’m sorry for my stupidity. This is what you saw, Cori? This is why you fled, to save yourself. This is what frightened the shit out of you. This fear I feel now was your fear. These muffled screams were your screams. Oh, Bolivia, my beautiful mamacita in heaven, Corina in Chalatenango, have mercy on me and save me from this lunatic. Something has happened, now I can see that this uncouth man who had been my lover has been endowed with some horrendous power. He was a terrifying being, inside and out; he instilled fear in others and at the same time was devoured by it. His faith was nothing more than panic raised to a maddening power. But this was the first time I witnessed the full metamorphosis. I had known the signs. They were obvious every time we made love.
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