Hot Sur

by Laura Restrepo

  I think I miss being someone’s love and precious and doll. And how beautiful María Aleida looked when she went barefoot to teach me how to dance salsa or merengue, mocking my clumsiness and my lack of rhythm, not like that, doll, look, like this, like this, my dear, she showed me, swaying her hips, and me, paralyzed with love, incapable of following her lead. Aside from all the other names María Aleida also called me “mi negro,” which in Colombia is a term of endearment that could apply to anyone regardless of skin color. Maybe she called everyone else “my love,” but I was the only one she called “mi negro,” despite the fact that my skin was so white that it’s almost transparent. My mother would have panic attacks any time I went out to play in the garden without a shirt or sunscreen, because you’re going to fry alive, she said. Thinking about it later, such a horrible threat, frying alive, maybe that’s where my fear of burning to death comes from. “Come put your shirt on, Cleve, you’re going to fry alive,” my mother screamed at me from the window, and I went back into the house feeling vulnerable, ridiculously underage. On the other hand, I felt a sense of triumph and strength when María Aleida called me “mi negro.” Me, the Great Mi Negro, King of the Jungle and the Currulao, whom the beautiful María Aleida secretly loved. And soon my mother and I returned to Chicago, and there were no more suicidal trucks in the chasms of fog, no penetrating smell of green, no shots of adrenaline from machete duels, no “my love” learning to dance the salsa, no maracuya either, or guanabana or arequipe, and most importantly never, never again the spectacular María Aleida calling me “mi negro.”

  One of the students in my writing classes in Manninpox is a striking young woman. The truth is that I started paying more attention to her when I realized she was Colombian. I think she immediately brought to mind María Aleida. It occurred to me that her pretty face must be similar to María Aleida’s, her smile and her hair like María Aleida’s, and above all the color of her skin. I couldn’t help imagine the prisoner free, far from Manninpox, back home in Colombia, dancing salsa and whipping up arequipe in a copper pot with a big wooden spoon.

  Interview with Ian Rose

  Aside from the scrawls composed in the dark, the manuscript from the person who wanted to be known as María Paz was written in very clear handwriting, as if from a printer, the type of handwriting of someone who wants to be understood, and yet Ian Rose had trouble figuring out the additions compressed into the margins and the arrows that pointed to where the passages belonged. There were also pages missing, seventeen in all; the page numbers on the upper right hand corner every so often skipped a number. Where had the manuscript been during its journey looking for its match? How many hands had it passed through before reaching Ian Rose’s? Why had there been such delays? And why did Socorro finally decide to send it? What had become of the seventeen missing pages, perhaps lost but probably confiscated? Rose didn’t know. What he did know was that the pink paper, the type adolescents use to write notes, brutally contrasted with what was written on it. It wasn’t a love letter at all, although at times it appeared to be. The author was apparently a young Latina, Colombian it seemed. And Ian Rose did not have to read long to understand that she was a prisoner in Manninpox, from where she wrote the story of her life to send it to the teacher of the writing workshop that had been offered for the inmates. That person was no other than his son, Cleve, and it just so happened that Manninpox was only ten minutes away from the house in the mountains. Which wasn’t a coincidence, after all—the reason Cleve had volunteered to teach there and not at some other state prison was because it was so close. There is no such thing as coincidence—just as it wasn’t coincidence that of all the prisoners with whom Cleve dealt, he became close with one who was Colombian. Apparently, the Andes had left more of a mark on him than his father had imagined.

  Tearing into that package had been like opening Pandora’s box: hordes of phantoms escaped and perched on Ian Rose’s shoulder to stay. Each one of the lines written by that young woman directly or indirectly spoke to him of Cleve, and reading and rereading those lines offered an opportunity to discover things about his son’s life that he had never known. About his life and about his death. Here and there, Ian Rose thought he found signs, real or imagined, that the author had some connection to Cleve’s death. Some link, although Rose wasn’t exactly sure what. But she had to know something, even if she had written this before Cleve died, even if she had written it thinking that he was still alive, although in fact he may have already been dead without her knowing it. She must have known something, and Ian Rose sifted through those pages like an archaeologist looking for some clue.

  The young woman even mentioned an incident that he was familiar with: Cleve had struck a bear on his motorcycle one moonless night when he was returning from the prison through the woods. Nothing had happened to him that time, miraculously, and apparently nothing serious had happened to the bear. Back home, when he had settled down a bit, he told his father what had happened. He said it had been very dark and after a forceful blow he ended up laid out on the road, stunned, confused, not sure what invisible and supernatural force had come over him and made him roll on the ground. Until he saw the black mass a few feet away. It was the bear, getting up, apparently unhurt as well and going into the woods. The following morning, during breakfast, the two Roses took up an old discussion. As he had done many times, the father insisted that the son buy a car. He’d give him the money. He wouldn’t take it? Fine, then he could have his mother’s Toyota. Every time Edith stayed in her ex’s house, she’d leave some item behind before departing, as if to assert ownership over that place although she had never lived there. Among the things that she had bequeathed, there were the dog Otto, the cello, and a red Toyota, all of which Rose had taken in lovingly and cared for with special deference, as if they were a promise that one day their owner would come back to stay.

  The Toyota was in good shape, and the day after the accident with the bear, Ian offered it to Cleve in exchange for the bike. But Cleve wasn’t in the least bit willing to make such a swap. He said he’d prefer to ride out his life on his motorcycle, that’s exactly what he said, and on it he’d ride to his death some time later, not in the Catskills but in the outskirts of Chicago, after losing control, crashing violently against the metal railing, and flying through the air, bike and all. He broke his back in various places from the fall, and rolled more than 130 feet in the ditch bordering the highway, and his body was pummeled by stones and his skin torn by branches before ending up among some bushes. The road had little traffic; there were no witnesses to record what had happened. Because it was considered an accident, only the highway patrol and the paramedics attended to the body. But Ian Rose could not get out of his head that his son’s death had been less an accident and more the fulfillment of some doomed destiny.

  “I think it was in the cards,” he tells me. “For me it was something expected, which could have been prevented. You understand. Something that I could have stopped.”

  Before the package had arrived, Rose had always tried to ignore Manninpox prison, which hadn’t been easy. Like he told me, you need to do a lot of yoga and take very long walks in the woods to go on with your life when the agony of strangers is just around the corner.

  “It’s not the most pleasant thing in the world to have a women’s maximum security prison up the road from where you sleep,” Ian Rose tells me. “If the concept of men locked up is perverse, women caged up is outright monstrous.”

  He had bought the house not knowing what was nearby. The real estate agent hadn’t told him anything, perhaps knowing he’d lose his client. And indeed he would have. But Rose had fallen in love at first sight with the house; everything about it had seemed a fulfillment of his dreams: the beauty of the surroundings, stone chimneys, high ceilings, spacious rooms, oak floors, the silence and splendid views. And while he was looking at it, his dogs had taken over the surrounding woods and did not want to leave. Besides, the price wa
s unbeatable, so Rose took the offer on the fly without investigating the reason it was such a bargain.

  “I’m a liberal guy,” he asserts, “not sure I like the idea of locking up people as punishment so society can function. I find it appalling that two-thirds of the population of the United States trembles at what the other third can inflict on us, or that one-tenth of the population spends their lives in cages so the other nine-tenths can live in peace. And yet, if someone gave me the keys of all the cells of all the jails in the country and told me, ‘The freedom of the criminals is in your hands,’ I’d return the keys without using them.”

  He felt for the girls in Manninpox, but the truth was that he wouldn’t have liked to come upon one of them hiding in his garage, or rummaging through his kitchen. If Ian Rose didn’t want to think about Manninpox, it was because he did not know what to think. So he sidestepped the issue. The prison was some nine or ten miles from his house, up the road that blocked the view of the landscape those early mornings when he watched by the window. Even the name Manninpox sickened him. He hadn’t seen all of the prison’s structures up close, but he could imagine them; like all humans, he had a vivid impression of what a prison was. Where did such an impression come from? Maybe the movies or television, or some book or painting, or even some photograph . . . but he had the feeling that things went beyond this, that the issue was more complicated than he imagined.

  “The concept of prison is so clearly engraved in our minds,” he tells me, “it’s almost as if we were born with it. Same thing with the grave. That sensation of being buried under the earth, with all the terror it implies, must also be innate. It’s not philosophy; it’s just common sense. We know what it is to take a deep breath, and we know how much space we need to move around. Thus, we deduce negatively what it would be like not being able to do either; we can imagine what it would be like to suffocate for lack of air, or to suffer a heart attack from the claustrophobia of being squeezed into a narrow cave. The grave, prison: different versions of the same thing.”

  In Ian Rose’s mind, Manninpox was a series of stark, immense interior spaces, six or seven floors of cages pressed on top of each other like a vertical zoo where the animals were only allowed the minimum living space. The outside was probably a great bulk of dark concrete with sharp angles, surrounded by barbed wire and electrified fences. A simple, impenetrable, abject monument in the middle of that idyllic greenery of pine, maple, and birch. Compared to such an imposing structure, the natural inhabitants of those woods—the black bear, the red fox, or the white-tailed deer—were dwarfed. That corner of the universe had fallen under the shadow of that fortress of cement, in which who knows how many women were packed in, making the air heavy with their distress and overwhelming nature itself with their invisible but unavoidable presence.

  “It used to be that every time I thought about the place I’d get goose bumps,” he says, “as if its caged women were breathing down my neck. Knowing that they were locked up used to make me claustrophobic. That’s why I didn’t think about Manninpox.”

  Sometimes he couldn’t help but think about the prison, like when his dogs barked at night. During the day, he simply avoided looking in that direction and forgot it was there. He was successful at this for half of the year, but when the trees grew bare, its blackish silhouette loomed in the distance like a scorched field in the middle of the white landscape. Ian Rose knew this was an optical illusion, but it disturbed him anyway. And he was unlike Cleve, who wasn’t the kind to run away from things or stick his head in the sand. During their first winter after moving in, Cleve had tried to talk to his father about Manninpox.

  “He was obsessed,” Ian Rose tells me, “to the extent that I had to ask him to stop. I told him, ‘Forget about it, Cleve. It’s bad enough that it’s there; you don’t have to make it worse by reminding me.’”

  But Cleve seemed hypnotized by the place. He rode out on his bike, each time getting closer to the edge of the restricted zone; he started frequenting a dive called Mis Errores Café-Bar, right on the border between the free world and the fortress of the inmates. Rose the father knew that Rose the son had begun to spend odd hours of the day there, in that café with a Spanish name.

  “It had to be in Spanish,” he says. “My Errors Café—such guilt and remorse only work in Spanish, or in Catholic.”

  After Cleve’s accident, and especially because of the arrival of the package, Rose the father began picturing his son at Mis Errores with his cup of coffee, probably overwhelmed or dazzled by the nearness of the prison. He tells me that growing up Cleve was a shy kid, and he felt more at ease around dogs than around people. In that they were very much alike, but only in that. Rose the father had always felt that he was a rather average individual, but in his son he’d noticed a burgeoning sensitivity that allowed him to detect things that for others went unnoticed, and even beware of them before they happened. Like an earthquake, for example. Once, when they were living in Bogotá, Ian had heard his son say that there was going to be an earthquake, and sure enough a few hours later the earth shook dramatically, not in Colombia but in Chile. This left the father befuddled. He wasn’t sure if this meant that the child’s antennae of premonition were faulty or if in fact they were so sensitive that they could transcend borders. In any case, it was clear that a vibration as intense as the one emitting from Manninpox could not be ignored by Cleve, who had found at Mis Errores the passageway into that other dimension of reality, of women living in the shadows. It pulled him in like a magnet. He had set his mind on penetrating the walls and barbed wire and tried it a few times until he was hired as the head of a writing workshop for the inmates. How? Rose the father wasn’t sure how Cleve had done it. But he knew that’s where his son was headed each time that his son turned left into the road on his motorcycle.

  “You smell like cold soup,” he told Cleve when he returned. “No doubt you were sticking your nose into that place.”

  From Cleve’s Notebook

  I find the idea that salvation can be found through writing trite. I get annoyed when literature is treated as a cult, or culture a religion, or museums temples, or novels bibles and writers prophets. And I can’t stand those lefties who pretend to speak for “those who have no voice,” or those well-known, more “right-minded” writers who descend from their towers for a few hours every month so that America sleeps a little better thinking that in fact things are not so bad for prisoners in this country, that they have stopped being so bad and have become a little better because someone has had the charity of teaching them how to write. In the past, prisoners looking for a miracle recited an Our Father, studied the Talmud, or paid a good lawyer. Now they write memoirs. And that’s fine, as long as no one tries to sell them the fact that by doing so they’re going to be happy or rich or forgiven by a society that will take them in like black sheep washed clean by the sacrament of literature. The only truth is that being a prisoner is a fucking misery. And yet, I have great hopes now that they have hired me to teach a writing workshop for the prisoners at Manninpox. There has to be an honest way to do it, a simple way to serve as a bridge so that they can do it for themselves, tell their stories, forgive themselves for whatever they have done or failed to do. Walter Benjamin said that narrative is the language of forgiveness. I want to believe that. And I’d like to make it possible for them to at least try.

  Interview with Ian Rose

  When he finished reading the manuscript, that very morning Ian Rose went into town, made a few photocopies and sent one to Samuel Ming, the editor of Cleve’s graphic novels. Aside from being the boy’s best friend, Ming was striking in his indecipherable mixed-race looks; he looked Asian but had dreadlocks, with a pair of tiny slanted eyes alongside an imposing Arab nose and large square teeth behind lips of a feminine delicacy. Rose the father sent him the manuscript with a note asking if he thought it was publishable, perhaps as an eyewitness account, or a denunciation, or maybe even as a novel
. A few days later, when Ming let him know that he had looked at it, Ian Rose got in his Ford Fiesta and drove to New York City to talk with him personally.

  “I don’t know what to tell you, Mr. Rose,” Ming told him honestly. He felt bad to see how, since Cleve’s death, the father seemed to have aged ten years, poor old man. Why add to the pain by telling him more of this dark story, and how could he warn him not to dig around too much, lest he find skeletons in the closet, so he decided to feign ignorance and not tell the old man that he was already familiar with this story. “Let’s see, Mr. Rose, how do I put it? Look, I don’t think it’s worth it to dwell on this too much. Take a trip, go to a beach and get some sun, give yourself the gift of two weeks in Paris, treat yourself to that. As for the manuscript you sent, I suggest that we leave well enough alone. Look, it’s clear that this young woman wants the details of, let’s say, her autobiography, known. And it seems that Cleve would have liked to help her. But the truth is that I don’t see how it’s possible. The text is unfinished. She’s unknown, not to mention getting her permission, which we haven’t considered. Besides, it’s not my genre . . .”

  Ming, whom I have had the chance to interview also, assures me that in that moment he wanted to tell Mr. Rose about the dangers, lethal ones, that would come with publishing so much material, but decided not to burden him with more drama and simply said he couldn’t publish it.

  “I’m sorry; I’ve put you in a spot,” Rose said to the editor.

  “Not at all, Mr. Rose,” Ming replied, tapping him on the shoulder, which felt very bony, and thinking how true it was that there are sorrows that end up killing you.

  Back at the house in the mountains, Ian Rose placed the package with the manuscript back on the bed in the attic.