“It has been so long since I make any decisions for myself,” she had complained to her friend Juanita. “Everyone making decisions for me. Life has pushed me where it wants without consulting me, giving me little choice.”
Today, her fate would be decided by a flip of the coin, she knew that whether it’d be head or tails, the world would go on as it always did. In the end, what did this trial have to do with her, when she knew she would be nothing more than a spectator there? It would be others who decided, and she would have to attack. For the moment, she continued crossing the plaza toward the main entrance. Once inside, she would have to pass through the metal detector, submit to a pat down, show her appointment citation, and cross the huge lobby to find her courtroom. But before she got there, she had the impression that she was being watched from above. It was nothing but a slight disturbance, a vague intuition, someone’s eyes fixed on her, something like a silent scream from above that made her look up.
Above she saw Pro Bono leaning over a railing in the gallery. She was about to wave to him, but something held her back. She had never seen such an expression on the lawyer’s face, a stony and urgent look, as if he had been trying to get her attention forever. Why hadn’t he just called her name? All it would have taken was one little shout. But Pro Bono could only stare, Jesus Christ how he stared, a frightening gaze. When he finally got her attention, he made a tiny gesture that took but a second, and her veins grew cold. A secret gesture meant only for her among the crowd of people in the main lobby: he slid the tip of his index finger across his throat, as if he were slitting it. The message was loud and clear to María Paz: you’re fucked, he was saying, and there was nothing he could do. Pro Bono then shook his head, almost imperceptibly, but clearly signaling for her not to come any closer, now with a small shooing gesture, telling her to get out, to leave before it was too late. And then he repeated the first sign, as if to leave no room for misinterpretation, the index finger slicing across his throat. Everything was clear. Pro Bono was telling her, go, flee before it’s too late. While up in the gallery, Pro Bono adjusted the knot on his tie as if that was what he had meant to do when he brought his hand to his throat, down in the great lobby María Paz felt like she was going to barf, as if all the breakfast that Juanita had made for her was coming back up, the Rice Krispies, orange juice, and toast with a poached egg. Her head began to get hot, her heart thumped in her throat, her pupils dilated, and her legs grew wobbly. She was going to have to turn around and head out the way she had come, and do so unnoticed in that place watched over by a hive of undercover cops, secret agents, whistleblowers, security guards, and cops. She slowed down but avoided stopping altogether, which would have given her away, so she got hold of herself, straightened her posture, took a deep breath, put on a blank expression, and forced herself to take a few more steps forward. She got into the act that had been scripted on the spot: she was late, and with a dramatic gesture of a smack on her forehead with the palm of her hand, she realized that she had forgotten something. She pretended to look frantically for that something inside her bag and then murmured a reprimand to herself for being such an idiot. How could I have left that in the car? Now she had to dash back to get it, she simply had to. Her confidence grew and she even managed an embarrassed smile—I know, I know. I’m such a nincompoop; I didn’t bring the most important thing. She realized that her nostrils were flaring, a sign that she was beginning to hyperventilate, something that had first happened to her in Manninpox, and that now occurred every time she became too anxious. She made a concerted effort to breathe evenly, turned 180 degrees to head back, and exited the building, remaining very cognizant as she moved away that one false move meant her doom. Above all, she must not look back. She commanded herself: Do not turn around or your fate is ten times worse than a pillar of salt. To her surprise, she was suddenly very enlivened by an odd current of new energy rushing through her insides. No, she murmured, now everything is entirely up to me. She would no longer have to play as the visiting team, she could finally rely on her own strengths, and those at least she could trust. She sensed that a door had opened to a new world, and she was suddenly thirsty for life and desperate for the freedom she had not experienced in so long. Let’s see, you bastards, she challenged the world. Let’s see who comes up on top this time. Stand back, motherfuckers. You’re not going to snatch me this time. Serenity and control, those were the crucial twin elements in the moments that she left the plaza behind and headed toward the parking lot. She lengthened her stride a bit but did not shift into a run, emulating the brisk pace of top models on the runway instead. She was just someone who had forgotten an important document in her car and was in a hurry to get it. She made it to the parking lot, meaning she had gotten through the worst of it, had left the minefields behind her. And at that moment, she was overcome with a weird urge to return home. She missed the Nava sisters and yearned for Bolivia. She needed Mandra X and wanted to hug Violeta, pet Hero, find a coin to call Corina. Or to be holding the large, safe hand of her husband, Greg. Or her father’s hand, whomever it was that hand may have belonged to; even that bastard Peruvian seaman who was probably her father came out well in this hypnotizing script she was writing on the spot. If she could only close her eyes and return home. She was inundated with a sudden wave of nostalgia, an unforgiving depletion of adrenaline that left her exhausted. Where a few minutes before there was determination, there now followed a schmaltzy indifference that was no help at all. But the worst of it only lasted a few minutes because the revelation suddenly struck like lightning. Home? What home? What goddamned home have you ever had? How can you return to something that never existed? This lightning strike did not bring her down. On the contrary, it burned away the gauzy, drooly nostalgia that was hypnotizing her and debilitating her. She remembered a Juanes music video that had been playing a lot recently, Juanes in an orange jumpsuit whispering in a gringo prisoner’s ear, “No one left to account to, no one left to judge me.” And damn it, he was right. That’s how I feel, baby, with nothing to explain and no one to explain it to. I’m coming after you, Juanes, and God save those who try to judge me. I feel sorry for them waiting for me with the verdict that they can stick where the sun don’t shine, because it’s me, and I account to no one. There’s no love that will stop me or hate that will hinder me; even if I waltz straight to hell, I still win. Heads or tails, I win. She had all her powers under her control and was finally going to get ahead, two steps forward and one step forward, like her mother used to say, the Colombian Wonder Woman, fucking them all and blasting them into little pieces. She took out the useless keys to her apartment and made them obviously visible and jingled them, the keys of the car door she was about to open. The rows of cars before her became obstacles that she needed to overcome, that she was already overcoming. She walked past the first row, the second, the third. Someone approached her from behind, a man apparently from the heavy steps. He was getting closer and closer, almost directly behind her. María Paz chose a cherry-red car, a color that inspired confidence, and pretended it was hers. She placed her bag on the roof, pulled out her sunglasses and put them on, and turned to face the intruder.
“Do you have a cigarette by any chance?” she asked him.
The man pulled out a box of Marlboros, gave her a cigarette, and lit it with a Zippo before he moved along. Then and only then, while she pretended to smoke and tried not to cough, did she dare look at her watch for the first time. It was still ten minutes before the scheduled opening of the trial, 11:30 a.m. The alarm bells had not gone off yet; the hounds had not been let loose. She still had at least twenty minutes before they began to suspect she might not show and started looking for her. She stayed in place till her pulse recovered to normal. It didn’t matter if fires raged inside, as long as outside the air seemed calm. Purposefully, she kept the air of a well-dressed, handsome woman in her sunglasses on a cigarette break by her car—nothing so strange about that: Why would she smoke inside the car and
stink it all up? Anyone who saw her would think nothing of it, just a woman who now casually crushed the butt of the cigarette on the pavement, a regular person, maybe a secretary or a lawyer, or someone who worked in the administrative offices of the court, certainly not a former inmate at Manninpox; those folks did not look so decent, they did not own two-thousand-dollar Gucci bags.
From some nook in her mind, the elusive image of a dream from the previous night alighted: a huge vagina made of cloth, just the thing itself, unattached, the edges sewn together and round as a ball. Furry, rabbit-like creatures poke out of gashes in the vagina, but they are indeed not rabbits. Someone tells her that one of the creatures is ill, and she picks it out right away, because it is the one throbbing. She cuddles it in her hands and calms it down because she knows that this little beast, or whatever it is, will be safe with her. She gives it a three-letter name that she has never heard before: AIX. The little creature immediately responds to the name. And that’s it, that’s all she remembers, because the dream bursts and vanishes like a soap bubble.
But María Paz remembered the name, and before leaving the parking lot, she wrote it with her finger in the coat of dirt on the cherry-red car. At the last moment, she noticed that Pro Bono’s Lamborghini was parked nearby. It had to be his, there was no mistaking it, and it would have been too much of a coincidence that there were two of them there. Her first thought was to hide underneath it until the lawyer came back, ask him what happened, why he had made her flee, figure out what happened, count on him to escape, rely on him, take shelter under his wing. But she immediately thought otherwise. She didn’t have to ask Pro Bono anything. She had to believe him and go. He must have had his reasons and that was enough for her. Also, she couldn’t put him in a compromising position; the old man had risked all he could, and she couldn’t ask him for more. No, from that point on, she was her own boss; she was alone. From now on, I will depend on me. All she had to do, her main task, was to get the hell out of New York, the city that opened up before her like a sea. She left the parking lot, mixed in with the passersby on Melrose Avenue, and took the first bus that came along. She got off after a few stops, not really knowing where, and walked as fast as the tight skirt and high heels allowed her. Above all else she needed to be quick on her feet, so when she walked by the first cheap Chinese street vendor, she bought a pair of cloth slippers that she immediately put on, tucking the high heels in her bag in case she needed them later. It was like in those movies where the good guy changes clothes so the bad guys following him won’t recognize him. María Paz took off her coat with the same purpose in mind, pulled out the hairpins holding up her bun, and let her hair fall down her back, her exquisitely black long hair like that of Our Lady of Mount Carmel.
María Paz knew New Yorkers well: she was aware that a select few of them walked down the street in a hurry to get somewhere, well dressed, thin, attired in black and charcoal gray, while the great lot of the rest of them went around dressed as if for a carnival, a grandiloquent parade of ridiculous and absurd Third Worlders. And if only a few moments before she needed to look as if she were one of the snooty ones, now she needed to blend into the anonymous crowd. So at another vendor, she tried on an ensemble of green, red, and yellow scarves, hat, and gloves, an unsightly combination only worn by certain Caribbeans, curiously only where it was hot. She looked at herself in the mirror the salesman had handed her and laughed at the thought of what Bolivia would have said if she had seen her like this—Bolivia, who had always been so well kept, with her light, inoffensive colors—not to mention what Socorro Arias de Salmon, who was so afraid to seem different, would have said. And there was how she, María Paz herself, would have looked upon all this just a few years ago, when she was so terrified of being perceived as having bad taste that she couldn’t breathe, and her main goal was not to seem like Latina trash, so she dissimulated her accent, avoided mentions of her nationality, and made sure to stress time and again that Latinos were not all drug traffickers, not all terrorists or members of the Mara Salvatrucha or the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. Off she went, with the multicolored knit cap pressed down to her eyebrows, the accompanying wool scarf instead of the silk one around her neck, those ridiculous gloves on her hands, the cloth slippers on her feet, and, hanging above her head, the bench warrant and bad name and criminal history. Fuck, wearing all this, who was she going to impress or convince of her innocence? But she was no longer obliged to convince or obey anyone, or be anywhere on time, or look good for anyone, or buy anything, or cancel subscriptions, or pay bills on time, or be or not even be a good lover, or get good grades, or be prettier or skinnier, or show up for an arraignment, or pass any test. None of that, zilch, zero. Jesus Fucking Christ, she thought, putting on this goofy cap has been the most liberating action of my life. Of course, she still had the Gucci bag, which clashed badly with her new look. She thought she should just toss it somewhere, casually throw it out somewhere, or give it to a passerby. But then all eyes would be on her. It would be a major scene, even in a city that has seen everything; people don’t just give Gucci bags to strangers. And shit, why would she give away such a marvelous gift from her lawyer? No sir, she would never again own such a precious thing, that Italian aroma, the thick buckles and perfect size that molded to her hip in such loving fashion.
In one of the subways she took that day, someone next to her was reading the Daily News, and she had been able to get a peek at the pictures and headlines. What an exposé, right in the middle of the paper. On the right page, a picture of a very young and handsome Greg in his police uniform, and on the left page, Greg’s crumpled body in a pool of blood. An emotionally moving picture of Greg with Hero. And one last picture, darker and much smaller, of María Paz herself. The mug shot from Manninpox, her hair a mess, looking like a lioness in heat, the placard with the serial number hanging on her chest. The visual was very obvious: the demented Colombian versus the good American cop. Pro Bono had always told her that juries were very susceptible to the whims of public opinion, and this kind of publicity must have exacerbated their patriotic spirit. It would not have been difficult for Pro Bono to put the pieces together, and she guessed that Pro Bono had grown certain about which way the verdict would go. He must have been very concerned about what he saw in the paper, enough so to give her the signal to go. At least that was her theory. After spending some time making herself scarce among the shelves of bargains in a secondhand store, she took another bus, and when she got off, she slipped into a movie theater. Near dusk, she was attracted by Andean music that was coming from a schoolyard. There was a cookout where traditional dishes were being served, and María Paz bought a ticket. She mingled among the lute and charango musicians, kabobs, ceviches, pisco sours, and Inca dancers late into the night. Right there, among the members of the Peruvian community, she met a family that believed she had recently arrived in New York and offered her a place for the night. As the band grew weary, the guests danced a few more short waltzes and drank a few more pisco sours, because the organizers were about to make last call. The musicians put away their instruments and left, and María Paz looked at her watch. It was 11:20 p.m. In ten minutes, she would have been a fugitive of justice for twelve hours.
At that same time, in another corner of the city, I was freaking out knowing nothing about what had happened to her. And it would be another seven weeks before my uncertainty was eased when I received a Facebook message from Juanita one Saturday morning. The message said, “Two little ducks in front of Dorita.” Shit, it was not an easy message to decode. Two little ducks in front of Dorita. That’s it. Could it be referring to the duck pond in Central Park? The offices of the Ugly Duckling Presse on 3rd Street in Brooklyn, because I had once told the class at Manninpox that I did some work for them? Or maybe the Peking Duck in Chinatown? Nothing made much sense until a bell went off. The “two ducks” could very well be Colombian slang for the number 22, the shape of which resembles two ducks waddling to the left.
So maybe it was not code for a place but for the time, twenty-two hundred hours, or 10 p.m. “At Dorita’s” was much easier to figure out. There was only one Dorita who was known to us. María seemed to want to meet at 10 p.m. at Forbidden Planet, where I was going to take her the night of our reunion to show her the series of my graphic novels, The Suicide Poet and His Girlfriend Dorita, before Sleepy Joe changed things. If it wasn’t that, then I had no clue what it could be. A date maybe? I started thinking maybe it made more sense that it was a date. The 22nd of this month? No, it had to be the time. Forbidden Planet at 10 p.m.? But then on what day? The next day, a Saturday, I waited for her there from 9:30 p.m. to midnight. She didn’t show up then, or on Sunday, or Monday. On Tuesday, I was running late, and when I arrived there at 10:20 p.m., I thought I saw her at the front door. But the woman was wearing a strange cap pulled down to her eyes and the rest of her face was under a scarf, so it was only when I was very close to her that I knew it was indeed her. I had already decided that I would hide her in the house in the mountains; it was, for the time being, the best option. I had to get her out of the city, because they would be looking for her with a magnifying glass in places where you needed your identification documents and were reported for the slightest suspicions. God forbid she had tried in desperation to check into a hotel. I didn’t even ask her. There was no time for debates. I simply signaled that she climb behind me on my bike and took off. I only revealed our destination when we were already on the way. Her response was to ask where it was, and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when I told her it was just down the road from Manninpox.
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