Hot Sur

by Laura Restrepo

  So they didn’t give me your address, Mr. Rose. I’ll have to come up with another way to get this to you; it will be like sending a message in a bottle.

  Another little thing before starting, I’ll tell the story and you believe everything I tell. That’s something Dr. House doesn’t understand. He’s my favorite, that limp bastard, my favorite of all time. We hear inside that he has gone out of fashion in the rest of the world, that audiences grew sick of his insufferable pedantries, and it’s true the guy does think he’s hot shit. But in Manninpox, his fame is eternal, always the king, maybe because time stands still in here and what comes in never leaves. According to House, everyone lies. That’s why he doesn’t believe what his patients tell him or what other doctors recommend. He won’t trust anyone so he goes around suspicious, spying out deceptions, because he is absolutely convinced everyone lies, all the time and about everything. And although he’s wrong, he’s still my favorite; fucking House, he’s wrong. No one is better than he is at diagnosing an illness, nothing gets by him, but about the lying he’s way off. I know, because for many years I worked as a market investigator for a company that made cleaning products. That was before my life burst into a hundred pieces. I liked the job and I was good at it, one of the things I most regret was losing it. I had to go door to door asking things such as How many times a week do you clean the bathroom? or, Do you wash your lingerie in the machine or by hand? or, Do you think your house is cleaner or less clean than your parents’ house? Those types of things. Maybe it sounds dull to you, Mr. Rose, but it wasn’t. People are crazy at heart, as you know, and the topic of cleaning sets off their weirdness. They come up with some surprising responses, sometimes very funny. I was happy with what I was doing, till that dreadful thing took place. It happens sometimes: everything is going well and lightning strikes and tears you apart. I’m not even thirty yet and I’ve been to hell, there and back and there again.

  But as I said, in that job I found out a few things. For instance, I discovered that when people respond to a survey, generally, they more or less tell the truth. Maybe they exaggerate or play down things, but only up to point. A middle-class woman may tell you that she takes two trips a year when she only takes one. But if she goes to her mother’s house in South Carolina, she’s not going to tell you that she goes to the Ritz in Paris. That’s why, Mr. Rose, if you get inspired to write my story, it has to be as you hear it from me: I’ll tell it and you believe me. I might lie to you a little bit, exaggerate, so feel free to rein things in or delve a little deeper when you see that I skip over something. But in general you have to believe what I say. That’s our deal.

  There’s a novel called The Distant World of Christina, based on the painting Christina’s World by Andrew Wyeth, the American painter whom you know better than I do. Well, I found out about the painter and that portrait here in prison when I read the novel not just once, but three times. One, two, three. Three whole times from beginning to end before I met you. The author’s name is Jordan Hess and there was a picture of him on the back cover, big head with a ridiculous comb-over, all long on the sides and bald up top, should have just buzzed it all off like Andre Agassi, the divine bald. Who cares if he admitted to snorting heroin; to me he is still a god in sneakers. While I was reading that novel I told you about, The Distant World of Christina, I liked to think of Jordan Hess as Andre Agassi, even fell in love with him, I think. With Jordan Hess, not Agassi, or I should say, Hess as Agassi. I have that issue, sometimes I can’t separate fantasy from reality, maybe that’s why all this crap has happened to me. Anyway, I read that novel three times because it is one of the few that they have in the prison library. Of course, it wasn’t just because of that, but more because of what that paralyzed girl’s story meant to me, Christina, who in Wyeth’s painting drags herself on the dry meadow struggling to get to the home that glints in the distance where she can’t reach it. The artist painted the deadened legs lovingly, her hair long and black fluttering in the wind, her arms skinny. I don’t know if you remember this but my hair is long and black as well, and although you knew me when I was chubby, I’m skinny as a lizard now, like Christina or even skinnier. Her face is not completely visible in the painting because she’s mostly turned away, seated on the dry meadow in her pale pink dress. I imagined my own face on that disabled body, she paralyzed and me imprisoned, and I imagined that everything that happened to Christina was happening to me. I kept telling myself, if she could do it why can’t I, if she can get to that house glinting in the distance, why couldn’t I be free one day.

  It was because of that book that I decided to take your class. I signed up right away when they announced that a writer was going to teach a class in the inmate rehabilitation program and that enrollment was open. I did it not because I imagined I could learn how to write—that seemed like an impossible dream, a dream I hadn’t even dreamed—the truth is that I signed up because I wanted to meet a writer in person, just to see what a writer was in real life. Maybe you’d look like Jordan Hess, or better yet, like Andre Agassi. I have to tell you I was quite surprised when I did meet you, so tall, so scrawny, so pale, with the little lightning bolt on your forehead, your cute freckles, and those short-sleeved Lacoste shirts and canvas sneakers you wore, those light-colored pants that would have fallen off if not for the tight belt. It looked like you had been dressed by your momma or come directly from the campus of a very expensive university, or from an old-fashioned tennis court. I grew concerned because this was no place for you, buried in this dark world, breathing this rotten air. It seemed as if you had come from very far away, and you looked clean and innocent, always freshly showered, but as if someone had sent you here by mistake. You even told us yourself, not that first class but the fourth or fifth class, that white prisoners had three to four times the suicide rate of blacks or Latinos, because the whites weren’t used to such harsh conditions. Of course, you could come and go as you pleased, you’d be in the prison for your classes a few hours every night; but even so, coming into this place is not something everyone can take. Soon after, I began to look forward to your classes, and it was much easier to put up with that face of a seminarian freshly shaved and shirts the color of baby chicks, although sometimes baby blue, and sometimes white, but always the alligator brand. It had even become a running joke among us, taking bets before class on the color of your shirt that day. I always bet yellow, and almost always won. But the most intriguing thing was that lightning-bolt scar; you must have taken some motherfucking whack on the head to get such a scar, which I thought was a mark of intelligence. Someone with a lightning-bolt scar is one of two things: Harry Potter or some brainiac, which is what I thought when I first saw you, even though another inmate, old Ismaela Ayé, a superstitious witch, had spread the rumor that the scar meant you had the gift of prophecy. And it might be so, who knows, it doesn’t seem like such an off-the-wall theory, but I still prefer mine because I just don’t get along with Ayé the witch. Others said it wasn’t a lightning bolt but the letter Z, like the mark of El Zorro. As you will see, everyone had a theory.

  The marketing investigation company gave me a job right away. It was my first interview after having become free. That wasn’t so long ago, but it feels like prehistoric times or some earlier life. They noticed my good disposition and strong work ethic right away. Also, I was bilingual and the consumer survey business was made up of both Latinos and gringos. In the actual field, I had to deal with all types of people: blacks, Latinos, whites, Quakers, Protestants, evangelicals, Jews, hippies. Even Catholic priests. They probably hired me just because I was bilingual, but I made it a point to prove to them I was a good worker and that everything I did was done right, door-to-door surveys, focus groups, pantry checks. And don’t think it was easy; forcing your way into people’s houses and asking them questions about their personal habits required both talent and guts. It’s always risky because you’re out on the streets and the streets are the streets. In the bad neighborhoods
, you get robbed, and in the good neighborhoods, doors get slammed in your face. You rely on your coworkers for everything, the only ones who defend you and stand up for you. Anyone who goes off on her own is as good as dead, vulnerable to any kind of assault. My coworkers pretended to be the musketeers, all for one and one for all, and as I said before, it’s a job for warriors, in which you have to earn the respect of others. You have to be forceful to break down the resistance and then quick and wily as a fox to find the psychological give-and-take that will grant you access. You also learn to be tolerant and take everything as it comes and respond properly to all those who say I can’t, or to come back later, or right now I don’t have any time, or not really in the mood, or get the hell out of here.

  Mr. Rose, one time you said that I was intelligent. We were coming out of class when you said it. It was quite a surprise. No one had ever said that to me. I had been told that I was a good worker, that I was sharp, that I was pretty. But intelligent, never. I kept hearing the word all that afternoon, all that week, and to this very day. I like knowing that inside of me I have this little machine called intelligence, and that mine is working well, that it’s well oiled. I tell you things about my job as a market surveyor so that you know that this job was like the schooling that awoke an intelligence in me that perhaps had been dormant. Others begin their careers after they finish college, but I didn’t even graduate from high school. I was schooled as a market surveyor, house by house. And I was the best one on the team—well, one of the best. But what I did so well at work, I did not know how to do in the rest of my life. I haven’t been quite as smart about living as I have been about working. At work, everything was about precision and efficiency, while in my life everything has been about daydreaming, longing, and confusion.

  You have to have a pretty strong stomach to be a market surveyor, I can assure you, because sometimes the inside of a house is a disgusting mess, and you also have develop a talent for looking away, because there are some weird things hidden in some houses that could cause you quite a shock. One time, I was at a front door talking with the man who had opened it, and after a few words I realized a woman was moving around in the house behind him. At first glance, I didn’t notice anything, but the second time the woman crossed my field of vision, I saw that her hands were bound in wire. Wire tight on her flesh. Can you imagine? I backed away terrified and went to the nearest police station, where they said that this wasn’t their problem and that they couldn’t do anything. At that time, I had just begun at the job and wasn’t aware of the rules, so my coworkers took me aside and read me the riot act: “Look, María Paz, sear this into your brain, rule number one, never ever for any reason call the police. No matter what happens.” My job was not to make accusations, they told me, or to be a snoop for the authorities. “If you ever have a problem you call us, but don’t even think about the police.” Anyways, that was an unusual case; you’re not usually going to be seeing poor women bound with wire.

  What you do see everywhere is loneliness. An immense loneliness that can’t be fixed Sometimes when people let you in, it’s as if you are sinking into a well. It’s almost a physical sensation. Loneliness is like humidity: you can smell it; it sticks to your bones. There are times when you think, my God, I must be the first human being this person has spoken to in who knows how long. And they won’t let you leave, Mr. Rose. The survey is done, but they offer you more coffee, take out photo albums, anything to keep you there a few more minutes. One day, an old woman told me, “I’m so glad you came; early this morning I thought, I’m going to go crazy if I go one more day without saying good morning to someone.”

  And don’t think it’s just the poor. The rich are also alone. Before working as a market surveyor, before I had ever set foot in a rich person’s house, I passed every now and then through their neighborhoods, and saw them from outside, from the dark street, surrounded by their very green gardens and recently mowed lawns, the figures inside with their lights on, floating in those bright and inaccessible rooms, like in a fantasy, like in Good Housekeeping, as if those people had died and gone to heaven. This is what America is, I used to think. Finally I’m seeing it. America is in there, in those houses. I imagined they were truly blessed, but the truth is that this is not always the case, Mr. Rose, not so blessed after all. One of things I found out is that in the end the telenovela that fascinated us so much when I lived with the Navas, which we wouldn’t miss an episode for anything in the world, had it right: The Rich Also Cry.

  The unusual cases are just that, unusual; loneliness, on the other hand, is everywhere. And I learned another important lesson the time I saw the girl bound with wire. I learned to keep what I saw to myself, because my job wasn’t to be a Good Samaritan or to save souls. I never called the police or stuck my nose in people’s business, except when I noticed that children or animals were being mistreated: that’s where I drew the line. Children covered in filth because of parental neglect, dogs locked up in a patio howling from abandonment, those kinds of things. Those I did report, at least. Because if there is something I can’t stand it’s the smell of sadness in children and animals.

  Anything that has to do with cleanliness I’m interested in. I didn’t spend all those years investigating people’s hygienic habits for no reason. Hygiene and filth, two sides of the same coin. You might think that it’s nonsense to go around asking people whether they use OxiClean or Shout to wash out stains on their clothes, or if they buy toothpaste with fluoride or baking soda. Maybe you think it’s silly, not very interesting, but it actually was. One time I was questioning a graphic designer. It was unusual for men to agree to be interviewed, but you could get them by offering coupons as motivation. Coupons for food at a certain market or for gasoline at a certain station. Anyhow, this guy was around forty, divorced. His name was Paul, I still remember, his name is seared in my mind. We were in the kitchen of his apartment and I was asking him questions, nothing special, same as always. “Do you use anything to whiten your clothes?” Things like that, and the guy comes out with the following: he tells me that when he was a teenager he discovered that his mother would remove the pillowcases from his and his brother’s pillows and wash them. He and his brother snorted a lot of coke and their noses bled. At night, the blood would stain the pillowcases and every morning the mother would get up to wash them. He imagined that his mother did it so her husband wouldn’t see the stains, or maybe even so that he and his brother wouldn’t see them.

  On another occasion, I was right in the middle of the bit with the six undershirts, and the woman I was interviewing all of a sudden begins to weep buckets. The bit with the six undershirts entails arriving at a house with a bag that contains six undershirts of different grades of white. They’re numbered so that the person classifies them from the cleanest to the dirtiest. So there I was with this woman, young, very white features, comfortably middle class. I took out the undershirts, and as she inspected them one by one she told me, “This one is filthy, this one smells funny, this looks yellow under the arms, number three is not bad. In fact, I’d say number three is the cleanest, or wait, maybe not, when you look at it closely there’s a small stain here. Let me look again, perhaps the cleanest one is four.” And so on. I thought that she even looked like she was enjoying the whole game thing when she started crying and crying and crying, and there wasn’t anything I could do to console her. I asked her what was wrong, patted her on the back. “Please don’t cry; it can’t be so bad.” But she didn’t stop. So I called Corina, my colleague, who was surveying another resident in the same block. “Cori, girl,” I told her on the cell, “come help me deal with this case of major depression.” I stayed with the weeping woman while Cori went to the grocery store around the corner to get an apple treat, saying it would calm her down. As we prepared the tea after Cori returned, the woman I was interviewing strips off the turtleneck she’s wearing, unclasps her bra and takes it off . . . and she shows us. There was a bright red stain that sta
rted at her neck, covered the left side of her chest completely, and continued downward toward her waist. But it wasn’t a plain smooth red mark, no, not that at all. It was a fucking thing in and of itself, truly monstrous, the skin thickened and solid—think of the mark of Cain but a grotesque version. It was a severely malformed growth, to put it plainly, of such a nature that Cori and I grew pale when we saw it.

  “And this stain? How do I get it off? You know so much about stains, can you tell me how to get this off?” the woman asked Cori and me, continuing to cry. Now it was her asking the questions, so painful and fucked up that Cori and I had no idea how to answer.

  Those were the kinds of things we would see, not every day, but often enough. Cori told me she once interviewed a woman who told her that her boyfriend liked for her to urinate in his mouth, and that it wasn’t dirty for her but exciting.

  “You see?” Cori, who had been at the job longer than I had, told me. “See? Each human being has a way of deciding what’s dirty and what’s not, in that matter there are no rules.”

  And I’ll say it again, the best thing about that job was the friendships with my coworkers, especially the six closest: Jessica—although she worked somewhere else—Juanita, Sandra, Sofia, Cori, and Margo. And me, of course, I was the seventh, and the seven of us were inseparable, think of the days of the week or of Snow White’s dwarves. But my favorite one without a doubt was Cori. She wasn’t pretty but she was brave, sharp, supportive, a good worker, a good friend, and with a sense of humor. That was the best thing about Cori; she knew how to laugh. I’m talking about a big woman here, that’s what Cori was. Her full name was Corina Armenteros, and that’s still her name today, although she has returned to Chalatenango, in El Salvador. She had an Achilles’ heel, my friend, my friend Cori, a single weakness: she wasn’t pretty. Don’t get me wrong, she wasn’t ugly or unpleasant either, she simply wasn’t pretty, and this made her life harder. A hard life like the rest of us. She had been raped when she was fifteen, back in Chalatenango, and a child had been born of that situation, Adelita, who stayed with her grandmother when Cori decided to try her luck in America. Adelita was everything to Cori: her daughter, her life, her eyes, and her ears and only love. “Look out!” we’d say. “Run while you can. Cori’s at it again with Adelita’s pictures.” Because she’d pull them out at the slightest pretext to show them to whoever was there. Cori wasn’t my friend; she was my sister, even more so than my blood sister, whom I loved more than anything in the world. But you couldn’t count on Violeta, and I’m not condemning her, that’s just how she was, maybe because of her illness. On the other hand, I trusted Cori with my life and she trusted me with hers. But as bad luck would have it, I wasn’t there for her when she really needed me and that soured our friendship, and was ultimately, or at least I think this is so, what made her return to El Salvador.