Hot Sur

by Laura Restrepo

  Once, during one of those concerts, in the darkness of the audience, Ian kept his hands busy playing with the silver lining of a pack of cigarettes as he concentrated on the music, or more specifically on Edith. His hands moved on their own, folding the paper until they had created a tiny star. And as it happened, after the performance, Ian went into a bar near the auditorium and almost fell over backward when he saw the magnificent Edith come in. She was alone, her beautiful mane of hair in a ponytail. She had removed her makeup, making her fairness look even more spectral, and had exchanged her evening dress for a pair of jeans and a leather vest. Edith sat on a stool at the bar and ordered a dry martini. Ian, who still had the silver star in his pocket, chugged down a whiskey to work up the nerve, walked up, and handed it to her.

  “Who are you?” she asked. And in a burst of showboating that she’d still chided him for years later, he responded: “I’m the star giver.” He blushed immediately afterward, hating himself for speaking like such a fool, and to make matters worse, Edith, from her superior position seated on the tall bar stool, regarded the insignificant object in her hands and said, her head tilting to one side, “Come on, now you’ve put me in a spot; now I don’t know where to toss this thing you’ve given me.”

  So for Ian Rose it was a miracle that in the middle of that fiasco with the paper star, when he had wanted the earth to open up and swallow him, Edith had asked him to have a drink with her. And not only that, but she had agreed to go out with him the following week; and not just that she had gone out with him, but in less than a month, she had fallen in love with him. So when they married and swore eternal fidelity to each other, Rose was a hundred percent sure of what he was doing and committed to keeping his vows. During the honeymoon, he performed admirably from a sexual perspective, even Edith was well aware of this, and from then on he devoted himself, body and soul, to the role of a married man. He kept his commitment and passion the entire length of the nineteen years of his marriage. Every morning, his eyes still closed, he stretched out his arms to touch Edith’s body, happy to confirm that she was still there by his side. Because Rose was the kind of man who was born to be married, and married specifically to this wife and none other. Although Edith had long before stopped playing the cello, Rose felt that he was first Edith’s husband, and second everything else: Cleve’s father, hydraulic engineer, employee of the British company that had transferred him with his family to Colombia, where he got paid double the salary for working in a location classified as extremely dangerous. Not once during his worst sleepless nights, nor on occasions when they had to be apart because of travel, nor during their domestic squabbles, did it ever cross Rose’s mind that Edith could conceive of their relationship any differently than he did. For Rose it was evident that if he was before anything Edith’s husband, Edith was before anything his wife. That is why he failed to make any sense at all of that night in Bogotá when he came home from work. She had stayed in bed all day suffering from one of those colds she got so often in that cold rainy city, ten thousand feet up in the Andes Mountains.

  “Did you get the cough syrup and Vicks VapoRub?” she asked him, but he had to admit he’d forgotten.

  Around midnight, he was awakened by a noise. There was Edith, with her red sweater over her pajamas, coughing into tissues and admonishing him in a nasal voice that he wasn’t anything but a star giver—that was all he had ever been for her, a sad little star giver who had brought her to live in this horrendous place where she’d not remain one day longer. If he wanted to stay that was up to him; if he cared more about the company than his family, then so be it, but neither she nor the boy would stay one more day in this catastrophic place in which any day tragedy could befall them.

  “You’re delirious from the fever. Calm down, Edith; get back in bed. You have a fever, and you can’t leave me just because I forgot the Vicks VapoRub.”

  Rose had insisted, and even had looked for a twenty-four-hour pharmacy in the phone book and ordered cough syrup and cold tablets to be delivered. But she did not stop packing until she had filled four suitcases and two carry-ons.

  The next day, he found himself taking her and the boy, who would have been ten then, to the airport. They said good-bye in front of the Avianca jet for what Ian Rose thought would be a few months while he finished out his contract commitment with the company before returning to Chicago to join them. But it turned out to be forever, because shortly after their parting, Edith had begun seeing an anthropologist named Ned and had gone with him and the boy to live in Sri Lanka.

  “Sri Lanka, if you can believe it,” Rose tells me. “She left me because she felt unsafe in Colombia, and she moved to Sri Lanka . . .”

  His initial reaction had been one of surprise and disbelief. To a large extent that had not changed. During those same years Edith and Cleve had lived with Ned in Sri Lanka while Rose moved into the house in the Catskills with the three dogs; during the summers Edith and Ned had brought him the boy and they too had spent their summer vacations at his house, with Rose’s approval. They’d all lived together amicably, Rose suppressing his jealousy or any sign that he wasn’t having a good time. As a token of gratitude for his hospitality, Edith and Ned had sent him a magnifying glass with an ebony handle from Sri Lanka, which he put atop his desk, where it remained as a testament that his marriage had in fact ended and there was no going back.

  Rose had always believed that he’d be married to Edith until the day of his death, or her death. And yet, something happened at some point, he wasn’t exactly sure when, and things turned out differently. Rose had been thinking about Edith that morning when the package arrived in the mail, and he left it unopened in the attic.

  He’d rarely gone up to the attic when Cleve was alive, because he wanted to respect the boy’s need for solitude. Although truth be told, Rose wasn’t even sure how alone his son had been up there; perhaps not that much, according to Empera, the Dominican who came to clean twice a week, who had tried to insinuate that Cleve shut himself up there with a girlfriend whom he didn’t want to introduce to his father. But Rose had stopped Empera midsentence.

  “That’s the last thing I need to hear,” he had said. “Cleve’s private life is his business and no one else’s. In this house, no one meddles into the affairs of others, and you should follow suit.”

  “It’s true, neither of you meddle into my private life,” Empera, not one to mince words, had responded. “Not out of respect, but because you couldn’t care less.”

  “And she was right,” Rose tells me. “Empera knew everything about me, down to the color of my underwear, and yet I knew little or nothing about her, except that she was Dominican, that she didn’t have her papers, and that she’d entered the United States illegally not once or twice but seventeen times, basically any time she felt like it. I never had the heart to ask her how she had accomplished that feat worthy of The Guinness Book of World Records.”

  After Cleve’s death, Rose began to suffer horribly, not knowing more about his son, not having been closer to him when he had been alive, not having supported him or met his lovers; eventually, he asked Empera about what he had not wanted to hear before.

  “Tell me, Empera,” he asked her. “Did you get to meet that woman who, according to you, visited Cleve secretly?”

  But Empera, who had learned her lesson, wasn’t about to let that door slam in her face twice.

  “What woman, sir?” she responded dryly as she walked toward the kitchen, her sandals snapping loudly.

  On the day the package arrived, Rose spent the rest of the day out of the house doing errands, but he had not stopped thinking about the package he’d left unopened on his son’s bed. When he returned, he had the urge to go up and examine it, but some scruple about meddling in his son’s private matters stopped him. If there was something his son detested it was for anyone to invade his space, so Rose resisted the urge to open the package and went into the kitchen to m
ake a sandwich. But immediately he was hounded by a completely opposite sensation. Would he not be betraying his son by ignoring such a sign? As he downed his sandwich with a glass of lactose-free milk by the fireplace, he began to think that it would not be so absurd or disrespectful to open the package, which perhaps would be the last sign Cleve sent.

  “Alright, Cleve,” he said aloud, “just let me finish eating this and we’ll open it, see what this is about. You want me to do it, right? You’re giving me permission to open your private correspondence? Of course you do; at this point why would you care?”

  The package contained 140 pages of rose-colored stationery of the kind that adolescent girls used for letters. The manuscript was handwritten, in what Rose was fairly certain was feminine script. The pages had writing on both sides, tighter as it went on, as if the author had calculated that she might run out of paper.

  “Well, Cleve,” Rose said, “it seems as if a girl has sent you a very long love letter.”

  The person who had written it wasn’t the one on the return address, a Mrs. Socorro Arias de Salmon, from Staten Island, but a young woman who wanted to remain anonymous and who declared that she’d use the pseudonym María Paz. This María Paz wrote in the first person to confess something to Cleve, referring to him as Mr. Rose. The following dawn, Ian Rose was still awake reading the one hundred forty rose-colored pages in the attic, sitting up on Cleve’s bed under the blanket, still dressed, the two big dogs lying on the floor, and the small one, Skunko, beside him.

  “It’s his thing, that dog,” Ian Rose tells me, “I don’t allow him to go up on my bed, always been very strict about that, but not Cleve. And now without Cleve, his bed has basically become Skunko’s bed, so I didn’t tell him to get down. After all, if there was an intruder, it was me.”

  Whoever the real author was, she had placed all her hopes on Cleve, had entrusted him with the story of her life. Rose asks me if I agree, because maybe these are just his own speculations, he doesn’t know much about these things, but he can’t get out of his head the feeling that the story of a life is that life, precisely that life, which in the long run can only exist to the extent that there is someone who tells its tale and someone who listens to it.

  “Alexander the Great, who brought historians along to all his missions and battles, knew this well: what is not narrated might as well not have occurred,” Rose tells me, adding that the fact that he is an engineer doesn’t mean that he doesn’t like to read. “I’d say that the recipient of a testimony of a life becomes a kind of conscience before which the other unravels his deeds so that he may be condemned or acquitted. Or at least that’s what happens to me when I read a novel or an autobiography, fiction or something based on fact. A strange thing happened as I was reading it. I felt as if the life of that young woman, María Paz, was literally in my hands. She had chosen my son, Cleve, for that task, or I should say Mr. Rose. And it so happens that I too am a Mr. Rose, and as I read the manuscript I fell under the impression that this woman was also addressing me, and that by telling me her troubles, she was putting herself in my hands, because of the two Mr. Roses, I was the only one still alive. It should have been the other way around, me dead in the accident, while my son lived out what was left of his life. But that’s not how it happened. And at that moment, I was the only Mr. Rose who could read what that woman had written, revealing to me things not only about herself, but also about her son.”

  Parts of the manuscript were written in blue ink, parts in black ink, and sometimes in pencil. The parts that looked most scrawled had been written in the dark, as she herself recounted, or after nine in the evening, lights out in the prison. This had happened to Rose before, while he still lived with Edith, when in the middle of the night, he thought of something he had to add to a report he had been writing, some technical thing for the office, and so as not to wake her by turning on the light, he wrote a couple of paragraphs in bed, in the dark. The following morning he found a bunch of gibberish similar to what María Paz had written, scribbles and scratches climbing one upon another.

  The young woman expressed herself in an English splattered with Spanish, and Rose tried reading two paragraphs aloud to hear how it would sound. It was good, natural and good. The two languages blended together in a playful manner, like two young lovers with little experience in bed. Rose didn’t have any trouble with the Spanish, which he had learned to speak in Colombia, although not very well. Edith had learned almost none, her displeasure with Colombia fueling her unwillingness to learn the language. Cleve had learned it perfectly, the way children do, without being forced or making an effort.

  From Cleve’s Notebook

  For my mother, our stay in Colombia was marked by recurrent nightmares from which she’d awaken screaming things, and which persisted even after we had left. Things like the guerrillas were going to kidnap us, thieves were stealing the rearview mirrors from our cars, the volcanoes in the Andes were spitting rivers of lava, I had swallowed some red, poisonous seeds and they had to rush me to the hospital.

  I, on other hand, have felt a sense of nostalgia ever since we left, but I’m not exactly sure for what. I miss some indefinable thing, maybe that powerful damp smell of the color green that had stirred the senses of that repressed child I’d been, or the streams of adrenaline that shot through me when I’d witnessed a machete fight between two men, or the dangers of the mountain roads: trucks that sped suicidally through tight curves above an abyss of fog, and the fruit stands clinging by their nails to the roadside, so that travelers could buy the fruit from their cars, although that last memory is more my father’s than mine, that one about the exotic fruits, because I actually never wanted to taste any of them, and have to admit that since that time, to this very day, I’m still afraid to put strange foods in my mouth. Yet I remember the names of those fruits, names with a lot of a’s and y’s, and I pronounce them all in a row, one time and two as if it were a spell: cherimoya, cherimoya, papaya, papaya, maracuya. Memories. In Spanish, recuerdos, re-cordar, from the Latin, cor, cordis, the heart, that is, a return to the heart, so that memories of childhood would have to be pulled from the heart in which they’re kept.

  I’m convinced that certain childhood memories can begin to take over, ensconcing themselves in the niches of the mind like ancient saints in a dim church, and from there they emit a strange light, something mythical that little by little begins to take precedence over other matters until they become our primary and perhaps only religion. I think that deep within me many of those fruits glimmer with such a light, and I regret never having had the gall to sink my teeth into them, because perhaps it would have been for me like Communion for Christians, who consume God with each wafer. The names of those fruits were fascinating and difficult to pronounce, and of course all myths arise from what cannot be known, what we perceive as mysterious and fills us with panic and marvel. It’s not that today I secretly pray to a god called Guanabana or that I offer sacrifices to Cherimoya, not something as ridiculous as that, but that I refuse to end up as a simple Westerner and reject the more prodigious fruits for a diet of oranges and apples.

  Perhaps that is why I yearn for those years in the Andes, where life took place at such an astounding height above sea level and was a hazardous endeavor. Maybe that’s why I can again taste the arequipe in my mouth, the smoky, ambrosial candy the Colombian servants used to give me out of sight from my mother, who had forbidden me to eat anything sugary. But of all these memories, the best by far is of María Aleida, a beautiful black woman who had been crowned regional Queen of the Currulao in her hometown, and who was the nanny who cared for me in Bogotá. I never learned how to dance the currulao, but there was no doubt in my mind that María Aleida was the most beautiful woman in the world, and not only that, but she had the habit of calling others “my love,” which deeply unsettled me. My love this, my love that. Could this mean that María Aleida was in love with me? Was such a thing possible—that my s
hy skinny ass could attract the Queen of the Currulao, who was ten years older than me and more strikingly beautiful than I could have imagined?

  The situation was confusing, hard to interpret, because I wasn’t the only one María Aleida called “my love.” She called everyone in the Rose family that. And what was already complicated became even more so when I heard María Aleida gossiping about my father in the kitchen. I was spying on her—I was always spying on her—and she was telling the other employees that my father must have worked for the CIA, because all gringos who lived in Colombia worked for the CIA even though they might masquerade as diplomatic engineers. I was hidden behind a cabinet, and the news surprised me. Not that it made me lose respect for my father; on the contrary, my admiration for him grew, or at least it made him more interesting. I liked thinking of him as a spy and not an engineer. It wasn’t true, of course, all that CIA stuff, just gossip that María Aleida only dared whisper behind my father’s back, while to his face she called him “my love,” the same way she did everyone else. Álvaro Salvídar, the chauffeur, was for María Aleida “my love,” or “my precious,” and also “doll,” terms she also used with me. She called Anselma, the cook, “my love” and “my darling,” like she did my mother, who was her principal darling.