Hot Sur

by Laura Restrepo

  “Don’t be worried, Mr. Rose,” María Paz told Mr. Rose when they were alone again. “Dr. Huidobro is very good.”

  “Very good? That soccer player with a baker’s cap? Listen, María Paz, this is a dive. There isn’t the least of sterile procedures that I see; no appropriate medical equipment. You are making a serious mistake. Staphylococcus aureus must be rampant around here. You’ll get an infection that will kill you. This so-called doctor, this Huidobro, is an impostor, an abuser of women. I’m asking for the last time that we go to a decent hospital, a place where they will care for you as a human being, attended by professionals.”

  “Dr. Huidobro has all the qualifications and specializations he needs. Don’t worry, Mr. Rose. What happens is that because he’s South American, they don’t give him a license to practice in this country. Don’t be insulting, Mr. Rose, I’m telling you, a lot of gringos come here too, full American citizens, to have surgery, more than you suspect, just as white as you, only without insurance or money to pay for a regular doctor.”

  Rose didn’t dare go back to the East Village for the night. He had to remain nearby, just in case. So he stayed in a hotel not far from the hospital. He didn’t sleep a wink, hour after hour tossing and turning, disturbed by all kinds of dark musings. What if the police were tipped off and they rounded everybody up, including him? What if María Paz died on the operating table, which was actually nothing more than a kitchen table, probably? What would they do in such a case with the body? What guarantees could they offer in that hole, what insurance or permits? Rose couldn’t understand how he had come to accept all this, how he had allowed them to stoop so low, and the worst was going to come if something happened to her. He and the tango singer would be jointly responsible for her death, and he already saw himself sharing the death row with the Uruguayan impostor and Sleepy Joe.

  Early the next morning, he dressed without showering and showed up at the place determined to get her out of there, his alleged daughter, or wife, or daughter-in-law, whatever she was, though he didn’t really have any way to prove his relationship to her or to assert any authority over her.

  “You can go in and see her. The operation went well. She’s stable and already in recovery,” one of the comadres from the previous day told him. Rose followed her down a narrow corridor, still full of misgivings, bringing María Paz a macchiato and cookies from Starbucks.

  After going through the back door, the offices, desks, and gray carpet vanished. The dividing walls also vanished, and suddenly Rose found himself in a wide-open space—clean, white, and well lit, with a row of hospital beds behind screens. An entire secret hospital in the heart of New York. Good God, thought Rose. Who would believe the country had grown into a gigantic strudel cake with layers hidden upon layers beneath the surface? All you had to do was dig a little bit to discover the most unexpected realities. How had it come to this? American society, solid and unquestionable until yesterday, was now an empty bread crust eaten by weevils. Rose approached María Paz, who was resting in one of the beds, still wearing the disposable green robe and a bit pale, but smiling.

  “Look at it, Mr. Rose! Here it is!” she said, making a noise with the jar that held the little clamp they had just extracted and displaying it proudly, like a child showing off some strange bug.

  Rose tells me that he took María Paz to the mountains to recover from the operation, and that when they got there, Empera greeted her with a hug, and the dogs leaped all around her as if she were an old friend; of course they did, since they knew her so well from before. “That’s life,” Rose tells me. “All that time I was looking for her, and she had already found me. I was searching for her all over the place, unaware that she had been in my own home. As soon as we entered, she wanted to look around the ground floor and wanted me to start a fire. She said that during the week she had been hiding in the attic she could tell when I lit a fire by the smell of pine burning. Then I walked with her, taking little baby convalescent steps, to the place where Cleve had buried the ashes of her dog Hero, and I confessed that they had been dug up but quickly agreed that we should bury them again in the same place, and we did. So that she did not have to walk up and down the stairs, I suggested that she stay in my room, and I’d move to Cleve’s room, but she said no. She preferred to stay upstairs, because there were so many treasured memories.”

  Together, they spent some time without mishaps, Rose taking care of her and María Paz allowing him to do so, alone in the house with the dogs, because Empera had gone on her annual pilgrimage to Santo Domingo to spend the holidays with family, trusting she could return to the United States in late January, probably violating for the umpteenth time in her life the rigid border controls against undocumented immigrants. On top of that, there was a heavy snowfall in the region that almost completely isolated them; no one could come into or leave that area of the Catskills without running the risk of encountering some dangerous road conditions. In that sense, María Paz felt safe and could relax; it helped her to calm down and recover. For Christmas she wanted to make a Colombian ajiaco and was pleased to find out that Rose had already tried the dish during his family’s stay in her country, and he had liked it enough to dare to brave the elements and go get the ingredients, insofar as it was possible, because the local corn was too sweet, and forget about finding the three kinds of Andean potatoes, which had to be replaced by Chieftain, Dakota Rose, and pale Idaho potatoes. There was also no way to get the herb called guascas, so they used marijuana leaves instead as she had when she made the ajiaco for Greg, which they plucked from the emaciated and yellow plants Cleve had grown in the garage and that since his death nobody had cared for.

  “For some reason, making that soup was very important to her,” Rose tells me. “It wasn’t like the original in Bogota, only remotely similar, but it didn’t matter to María Paz. She was really happy when we set up the Christmas Eve table.”

  They were very easygoing days for the most part, Rose tells me, even enjoyable, because the girl was really smart and charming, and they had a common topic that brought them together, Cleve. The admiration and affection with which María Paz spoke about Cleve brought Rose to tears. But there was another topic that set them against each other, with each standing at opposite ends and neither of them ever completely lowering his or her guard, generating between them a kind of double-sided game, never fully resolved, and leading them to constantly oscillate between familiarity and mistrust. That other topic was Sleepy Joe. Any hint about his criminal nature turned the tide against Rose. María Paz was closed to such discussions, defending her brother-in-law with an irrational stubbornness that he couldn’t understand. He tried to make her see that Sleepy Joe was responsible for Cleve’s death, but he had no hard evidence, and she refused to accept even the possibility. At the most, she called him the bastard brother-in-law, or a bully and thug, euphemisms that hurt and wounded Rose, because they suggested a solidarity that was intact between María Paz and Sleepy Joe, and this was too much like a betrayal.

  Rose realized she contacted other people with a lot of whispering and mystery, in the rare and brief calls she made from one of those prepaid cell phones. Rose was watching, it could be said spying, and through those calls he learned that although she had postponed her trip in no way was it canceled, and she remained in contact with the cyber-coyote who would help her escape the country through the Canadian border. Rose didn’t ask her too much; he let her be, but occasionally she let some of the specifics seep out, and they sounded to him like details of a delusional and crazy plan, crossing the forests of Indian territory in the middle of winter, traveling by boat on the lakes, with the native people of the area guiding them and providing them with food and accommodation. Regardless, Rose remained vigilant, hoping that sooner or later she would lead him to Sleepy Joe. He was sure the guy was following them systematically. He could sense his closeness and imagine his stalking.

  “During all this, Pro Bono came bac
k from Paris,” Rose informs me, “and he started calling me to see if I had news about María Paz. I dismissed his inquiries, making believe I was disgusted by his desertion. I told him I didn’t know anything about María Paz and didn’t want to know anything about her. You see, I had my own plans in mind. I was following my own game plan, an uncertain one, of course, but I was very stubborn about sticking to it, and I did not need Pro Bono getting in the way. Better to mislead him and keep him away. In one of those calls, Pro Bono told me that several days before, a former New York police officer had been killed in Queens, on 188th Street and Union Turnpike. Interestingly, according to Pro Bono, the deceased had belonged to the same unit as María Paz’s husband and was being investigated for alleged involvement in a string of arms trafficking within the institution. There must have been something there connected to Greg’s murder. That was more than evident, but Pro Bono did not know exactly what. I asked him about the crime, particular details about it, that is, if it looked like a ritual thing. He said he didn’t think so. The report spoke of two shots to the head fired from a motorcycle, nothing that sounded very peculiar.

  “I didn’t say anything to María Paz about the reappearance of Pro Bono and his calls, especially that last one, not a thing. I don’t know if you get what I mean, but every day I grew more and more fond of the girl, and I was sure she was growing more fond of me. Still I couldn’t trust her completely. She did not quite feel like an accomplice.”

  The appointed day of departure arrived quickly, and María Paz seemed as if she was fully recovered by then, or that’s what the pirate surgeon Huidobro told them when they went for a checkup. But before leaving the United States, she had to go to Vermont to pick up her sister, and asked Rose for one favor, the last one, she assured him: to take her to Vermont. After that, the two sisters would continue on their own, under the aegis of the cyber-coyote, and Rose could return home. Those were her plans. They didn’t quite match Rose’s plans. If he stayed with her, he thought there was always the possibility that they would find Sleepy Joe. He wanted to find the bastard at any cost. He needed to settle accounts with him. Yet, something told him that this was not the time to undertake such a mission, just now, when he had started to feel calm and make peace with his memories. The pain of the death of his child, that hurtful little blade of burnished metal that had been stabbing at his flesh and cutting his bones, was losing its sharpness.

  Instead, a new presence had been surging, less intense but in some ways more real: the memory of Cleve when Cleve was alive. Every day, Rose cried a little less and remembered Cleve a little more, as if he were finally recovering his son: Cleve at eight wearing one of Edith’s sweaters, enormous on him; Cleve at fifteen riding a camel during a walk along the Nile Valley; Cleve going to his first school dance with Ana Clara, the Portuguese girl next door; Cleve reading Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra in a hammock on a hot day; Cleve very small, playing in a corner of the room with his dolls Skeletor and He-Man; Cleve in early adolescence, his face dotted with Clearasil acne cream; Cleve at three, emerging miraculously unscathed after a cabinet toppled on him; Cleve going down the slopes in Aspen on a snowboard; Cleve fleeing his mother’s house after a fight with Ned. And especially Cleve asleep in his bed with his dog, and what Edith had said when she saw them: “This boy will never be as happy as he is right now.” These and other memories from the life of his son returned in droves and with a decisive element in common: in all of them Cleve was free of his own death; Cleve’s death still had nothing to do with Cleve.

  Even the incident of the jump into the empty pool had begun to be seen in more positive light by Rose, the tragedy that could have been but was not. No, definitely not a good time, this was not a good time to go with María Paz on this crazy adventure, even if she was the only path toward the retaliation that Rose believed was necessary.

  “What he had done to my son made my blood boil and I couldn’t wait to get my hands on the culprit. At the same time not so much, not so much, if you know what I mean. It just wasn’t me, chasing a murderer with a pistol that had belonged to the bodyguard of Pancho Villa, or whatever other pistol I had chosen. Every day that passed I saw just how contradictory the whole scenario was, and certainly I was not a professional avenger, no matter what ups and downs I had suffered. I have to admit all this to you, even though I’m afraid that’s not what you’re looking for. Perhaps you were hoping to get this spectacular story about serial murderers and superdetectives, like those that run for five seasons on television, where everyone is clear about their roles and the rest is pure action. Maybe that’s what you expect, so sorry to disappoint. This is a true story about ordinary people, full of doubts, mistakes, improvisations. There are dates that do not square and loose ends that may never be tied up, a poor father and a poor murderer: not much more than that, actually. This is not one of those heartless stories; those who have lived through it have left behind a little bit of our lives at every step.”

  Rose mentioned to María Paz an insurmountable obstacle regarding the proposed trip to Vermont: the three dogs. They could not be left at home because Empera was on vacation in her country and there was no one to care for them.

  “Not a problem,” María Paz said, “we’ll take them with us. A little trip with everyone.”

  “Are you out of your mind?” Rose said. “In the middle of winter?”

  “It’ll be wonderful, with all the snow.”

  “How the hell are you supposed to fit three animals in a Ford Fiesta?”

  “Good Lord, Mr. Rose, it’s like you create a problem for every solution. We won’t fit in the little car, but we’ll fit in the Toyota.”

  “The Toyota? No! The Toyota belongs to Edith.”

  “It used to belong to Edith. Anyway, it’s perfect for us.”

  “But that car is practically an antique.”

  “The dogs don’t care about that.”

  There was no winning against the stubbornness of this woman. Rose ended up bringing the car to the mechanic for a new battery and tires, and to check the brake fluid and change the oil. They took off on a Saturday morning, packing a bundle of Eukanuba, a few jugs of water, and thick blankets on which Otto, Dix, and Skunko could sleep in the back. Ming’s grandfather’s Glock 17 was hidden among Rose’s clothes inside a suitcase. Violeta’s school was almost on the border with Canada, near Montpelier, Vermont, and although María Paz was anxious to arrive, Rose was more than willing to go slow. He took the chance to drive her through the forests of the Adirondacks, a northbound journey through snow country, through the high mountain terrain and lakes of a landscape that the mist turned blue, stopping from time to time to contemplate the wonder, getting out here and there to let the dogs run loose as if they were wild horses on their native land.

  Impossible not to talk, not to let the tongue loosen and fall into the confessional mode, with María Paz and Rose sitting close to each other, protected from the icy expanses by the warm and fragrant condensation of humans and dogs packed inside the car, motivating María Paz to trace something on the foggy window with her index finger.

  “What? What was she writing?” I ask Rose, too tempting a question to pass up.

  “Well, there were three letters forming a word, or so she told me, because I asked. I remember because I noticed and became curious. Like you just did. The letters were AIX. María Paz said that it had to do with something between her and Cleve, a kind of inside thing between them. But she left it at that.”

  Rose wanted to know what she expected when she crossed the Canadian border. “They are frightening, the Canadians,” he said. “The Royal Canadian Mounted Police are famous for being real bastards, more animals than the horses they ride.” María Paz said she wasn’t worried, that for them Canada would be just a stopping place, the important thing was to get through the border completely undocumented, with no trace of her identity or her history in the United States. So no one would know that
Violeta was crazy and that she herself was a bail jumper.

  “What if you get caught?” Rose asked.

  “The idea is to get caught, but in Toronto or Ottawa, only when we have crossed and are rid of the past. But not before that, no way. Look, Canada has signed treaties and conventions in which they adhere to UN policies. The coyote explained everything to me in detail, and according to these conventions, refugees are provided protection, shelter, and food.”

  “And if they don’t do it?” Rose asked.

  “Even better, because then we’ll be deported. Let them deport us, not a bad thing, wherever we end up is not important, it’s just a stop on the road to Seville. Because if I stay here, it’s to die.”

  “What if they find out who you really are?”

  “They won’t. We’ll put on the poor Latina act that we don’t speak English and just dream of sneaking into the US. It’ll be easy. They are convinced that all Latinos will give their lives for that. They can’t imagine the opposite. They go hunting for people desperate to get in, not determined to get out.”

  Once parked outside the school, María Paz gave Rose some directions. He should be the one to go in and ask for Violeta. She couldn’t, afraid that the school may have heard about her troubles with the law and alert someone, or prevent her from seeing her sister; who knew what could happen. It was better not to risk it. It was a semi-open confinement, anyway; those who lived there were considered guests and not patients, and as guests, they were free to have any visitor they wanted, and even go out for a walk to the neighboring village. They managed their own spending money and could buy things at the local drugstore or 7-Eleven, or have lunch at one of the restaurants. They could leave to spend weekends and holidays with their families, provided they notified the school first. All Rose had to do was ask for Violeta at the reception desk and bring her outside.