“In the end, I relented and I went up,” Rose tells me. “Maybe because I needed to do it, although I’d have never admitted that. I had to see all that with my son’s eyes. I wasn’t being morbid; I can assure you of that. I imagine the tourists wasted a dollar for three minutes of voyeurism. But that wasn’t why I did it. I went up to see the place that had captured the attention and stirred the passion of my son in the months before his death. That’s why I went up, because that place spoke to me of Cleve, and on top of that, the girl María Paz was still locked up there, and I had been trying to figure out her story, thinking over what I’d read in the manuscript and asking myself questions about its author.”
When Rose went up to the roof of Mis Errores to look, he had to admit that the owner had been right. The thing wasn’t just a gray uniform block; it was an architectural spectacle in the middle of the woods, in the shape of a European castle of an indeterminate style, somewhere between the medieval and Renaissance periods. Before his eyes there appeared an ostentatious stone castle with massive walls, round arched doorways, narrow windows with iron bars crowned with spear tips, shuttered balconies, a chapel, and a dry moat all around. He wanted to compare it to something that would be familiar to him, and he found that the structure was sort of an American replica of the fortress of Pinerolo, where they had locked up the luckless Man in the Iron Mask, or a New World version of the Tower of London. The whole thing, created with a morbid attention to detail, looked something like a Disney World of horror. Rose thought that the only thing missing was a chorus line, with the prisoners kicking up their legs in unison, like the Radio City Rockettes, but wearing black-and-white striped miniskirts. To finish the sick, hyperrealistic scenario, the only thing missing was a tour of the torture chamber, or a light and sound show from the public gallows for a fascinated crowd. The whole thing could have been a new kind of wax museum, one in which they’d charge twenty-five dollars for admission for adults, fifteen for children, and free for seniors over seventy and kids under four. “Come see a cavernous prison from the Middle Ages, a one-of-a-kind experience. Don’t miss it!” With the added attraction that it would not be inhabited by wax figures but by flesh-and-blood prisoners. As seen from the outside, Manninpox prison was an ersatz, a trompe l’oeil, conceived and built to attract attention, to cause an impression, and finally to entertain.
Rose didn’t know how to explain the raison d’être of that amazing display of judicial power and coercive force, that manifestation of the greatness of authority, judges, district attorneys, wardens, guards, honest neighbors, and other good citizens before the alleged insignificance and baseness of the prisoners. The American state had spent a fortune building that monster to make an impression and teach a lesson. But to whom? Hard to say, if you took into account that the portentous structure wasn’t visible to anyone unless you went up on the roof of Mis Errores, certainly not to the prisoners themselves, for whom the punishment was meant, because once inside they could not see the exterior. They’d see it perhaps once, briefly, on the day they were brought in, and with any luck a second time, on the day they were released, when Manninpox would appear in the rearview mirror of the bus that would take them away from there.
From Cleve’s Notebook
“Why do we kill people who kill people to show that killing people is wrong?” Norman Mailer is said to have asked. It’s a good question. Not to even mention making a public display of the punishment of some as a show for others. That’s how we are—until very recently civilized humankind made a show of hangings in the public plazas, the last such case well into the twentieth century. In the end, how much more advanced is the lethal injection, that aseptic hypocrisy in which the condemned is put on exhibit behind glass before the carefully chosen audience that gets comfy in the little theater to witness death. How far have we really come from the ancient sacrifice nailed to the cross, today’s condemned tied down with leather straps, arms spread crosslike? The grotesque senselessness of Manninpox disgusts me, even the structure itself; I loathe its bizarre and pretentiously aristocratic architecture. And for what? Who are we? How fake can we get? How much buffoonery and cruelty are we willing to tolerate to anchor ourselves in a prestigious past that is not ours?
Interview with Ian Rose
Compared to the breadth and scope of the strange fortress of Manninpox, Rose found that the Best Value Inn and the nearby buildings looked like tiny cardboard houses, and that Mis Errores seemed small and ramshackle, a truly miserable joint, as if all the desolation of the world were condensed around the few tables, or as if all the flies of the world had agreed to shit on the red plastic lamps that produced such a measly light it wearied the soul.
“We’re empty now because it’s not visiting time. That’s on Saturday, at two in the afternoon, and the place gets packed then with family members coming to see the girls. They used to come by train, but now there’s no more train, so they come in buses or cars. Or they take taxis.” The owner of the bar, with his back to Rose, recited the string of events as if he were a tourist guide. “Many come by taxi, spend the night in the Best Value, and wait till one, when the white minivans from the prison come to pick them up and take them in. It’s sad watching them. The guards treat them as if they too are delinquent, no patience, insulting them when they don’t follow instructions. It’s just that the majority of the prisoners are Spics. Or African-Americans. Most of them are black or Latinas; you won’t find too many white girls. Some families come from far away, particularly from Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico. And Colombia. Every day there are more Colombians, snatched because of drugs—you know, Pablo Escobar, the cartels, that whole story. By six the families are back, because visiting hours end at five. It’s a tragedy having a loved one in prison. People feel pity for the prisoners, but they don’t think about those in the family, who almost always are old folk and children. Many of the prisoners’ children end up with the grandparents. And remember, they have to pay the fare to get here and back. The taxi drivers are my best customers, the ones who consume the most. They stay here watching a soccer game on TV or playing cards, and with the fares they have just made they can afford anything on the menu. The families, on the other hand, are often the worst, I hate to say it. They arrive broke after having paying for the journey, which sometimes includes a plane ticket. So guess who takes the hit. Me, of course. Because they set up camp inside the bar, take over tables for hours, use the bathroom, shave and groom in the bathroom sinks, fall asleep on the benches, and pay for just coffee and soda, because they don’t have much else. The worst are the poblanos, you know, the ones from Puebla in Mexico. They come by the dozens and bring food from their homes, chili peppers and other spicy things and tortillas, they’re nuts about tortillas. I had to forbid them to come in with food and even hung a sign outside warning them: ‘Prohibido entrar con comidas y alimentos.’ Just like that, in Spanish, because I put it up mostly for them, the poblanos. Roco wrote it out for me and I copied the letters on the wooden sign; you can say he did the brainwork and I did the handiwork, but it was no use when it came down to it. ‘Oye, señor,’ I try telling the poblanos. ‘Yo vender comida, tu comprarlo.’ Ever since Roco left, it’s hard to get them to listen. They pretend not to understand and order a single dish: ‘Give to us a spaghetti with meatballs.’ One dish for all of them. You can understand how I can’t run a business like that. And the worst of it is that they push the pasta to the side of the plate, take out the bag of tortillas and fried beans, and make tacos with my meatballs, they just can’t help it. That’s why I get along better with the taxi drivers, yes sir, much better. You can even have a conversation with them, so much better to deal with people who speak your own language and behave properly, folks you can trust, knowing that if they order spaghetti and meatballs, they’re going to eat the meatballs and the spaghetti.”
“What about the name of the place?” Rose asked, remembering he had seen the name mentioned in one of Cleve’s grap
hic novels.
“I didn’t name the place, Roco did. His parents are from Costa Rica. It was his idea.”
When he got back home, Rose hid the polyester pouch in his sock drawer and immediately went up to the attic to look through Cleve’s papers. He had never done that before, had never even thought about doing it, believing it to be a violation of privacy, but now he needed to know more. He wanted to know more about the world in which his son had become entangled where women prisoners engraved leather mandalas in the towers of their medieval castle. Cleve was an organized young man who had kept his things in order; Rose imagined it wouldn’t be difficult to find the papers relating to the time Cleve taught the workshop at Manninpox.
The task took Rose less than an hour. María Paz’s real name was there, as were her surnames, her astrological sign, her age, her nationality, and even the exercises and homework she did for the class, pages and pages with new autobiographical fragments that amplified what Rose had already read. There were even copies of her admission papers to the prison, the mug shots with the prison ID number held over her chest, which revealed a rather striking young woman, with a gloomy look, big lips, and brow so furrowed that the eyebrows touched. So this was María Paz. He could finally have a close look at her: defiant, contrary, and wild haired—possessed by some demon. This little fireball must give them hell, he thought. But at the same time Rose had to admit she was attractive, seductive, which Cleve must have certainly noticed. She was dark-skinned, with evident Latin features and untamed hair that refused to remain pinned behind her, as they must have ordered her to do so that her ears were visible in the picture. But hers wasn’t a mane of hair that would remain still or that would obey orders from those who would presume to identify individuals by their ears. This was hair that would escape in rebel tresses like creeping vines, or serpents that could strike if you got too close. Hair like Edith’s, Rose thought.
“Good Lord, Cleve, what a creature,” he said aloud, looking at the picture. “What a don’t-mess-with-me look your little friend has. This is a caged animal that has just realized that the fight is to the death.”
Rose had found out the true identity of the girl, had seen her picture, knew what she looked like, and now he needed to know more. He had to learn what her crime had been. He found nothing on the Internet under her real name, but he kept looking.
“I’m not saying that I was looking to blame her for Cleve’s death,” he tells me. “That couldn’t be, since she was in prison at the time of the bike accident. No, that couldn’t be. I was simply being guided by a scent, and everything seemed to indicate I was on to something.
“You want to know the only thing that I found on the Internet about María Paz’s crime?” he asks me. “It appeared months earlier in the NY Daily News; I Googled it. I printed it here if you want to read it; it refers to her as ‘the wife of the deceased,’ and she’s directly accused of the murder of her husband. Here you go. Make a copy if you want. I only ask that if you make it public, change the names. I know they’re on the Internet already, but I just don’t want them to become public because of me. Cleve would never have forgiven me. Just replace the names with XXXX.”
Retired Ex-Cop Murdered, Victim of a Hate Crime
On Wednesday night, at the corner of XXXX and XXXX, the lifeless body of retired police officer XXXX was found, apparently gunned down by gang members in a hate crime. According to forensic reports the victim, who was white, was struck by seven bullets, one of which fatally pierced his left ventricle. Upon the removal of the body, five other wounds were discovered, apparently inflicted postmortem with a blade instrument, one in the belly, on each hand, and on each foot. The ex-police officer, 57, had been retired from public service for eight years and been recently employed as a manager in a market polling organization. He was unarmed and wearing slippers on the night of the murder. Before fleeing, the assailants scrawled the phrase “Racist pig” on a wall at the crime scene.
XXXX, wife of the deceased, was arrested hours later in the apartment the couple shared a few blocks away, where a Blackhawk Garra II knife with which the deceased had been wounded was found and is now being held as physical evidence by the authorities. The knife had been wrapped in gift paper and was accompanied by a birthday card addressed to the deceased. The woman, 24, is Colombian-born, and worked as a pollster in the same company in which the victim was a manager. They had met there years before, and almost immediately afterward had been married in a Catholic ceremony. It has been confirmed that because XXXX was undocumented, she had obtained her job at the market research company using false papers and that she had afterward gained citizenship through her marriage with the retired police officer, who was an American citizen.
Shit, slippers, Rose had thought on reading the article the first time. What most stayed with him was that “human detail,” as the owner of Mis Errores would have put it. An old cop who goes out in slippers to meet death. Rose asked himself if Cleve had known, or at least suspected, that his little kitten was a cold-blooded murderer. Because at the least, the victim should have been afforded the dignity of being dressed properly and wearing a pair of shoes. That human detail. Not to mention the spine-chilling gesture of gift-wrapping the murder weapon for the victim on the very day of his birthday. What kind of a monster was this María Paz?
“My, my, your Colombian was a deranged knife-wielder. What did you get into, boy? Who were you dealing with?” Rose asked the memory of his son, before going back to Googling the Blackhawk Garra II knives, like the one they had found gift-wrapped in María Paz’s house. As always, Googling revealed something, and according to the pictures in a catalog, it was a loathsome thing with a curved blade, a folding knife that was shaped like a claw as its name indicated, a claw to claw, a nail that pricks and penetrates. Made of black steel, the disgusting thing, sharpened so fine it was almost blue, with dips in the handle for the perfect grip, was a sadistic little toy that in the blink of an eye must have sliced through the cop’s flesh, as if through butter.
It was quite conceivable how a pretty girl would have grown bored of her old husband, how she’d have used him to make her situation legal and grown to hate the price she had to pay for it, such as the need for Viagra and other such limitations. Up to that point, there was a certain logic to the whole thing. But to go from that to knifing him when he was in his slippers? To get together with her friends, dark-skinned and young like her, salsa dancers all, to stab the fat husband to death with a Blackhawk Garra II? Rose began to feel uneasy in his own room, that friendly cavern in which he sought refuge since Edith had abandoned him, and where he wasn’t always disappointed, if the truth be told, because sleeping alone had its advantages. He was the kind of person who snored, hacked, and farted at night; and it was much easier to do it without anyone else there. But that night, not even his bedroom could bring him peace of mind, and he fell asleep troubled by that sinister story of a cop massacred by his own wife; he was distressed by the horror that his son, Cleve, could have had anything to do with that, even if indirectly.
He awoke at midnight thinking that Emperatriz, the Dominican cleaning lady, could hate him the way that Colombian woman had hated her ex-husband, the white ex-cop, that Emperatriz was friendly and helpful only to his face, that she brought him his slippers hiding nefarious intentions, that behind his back she muttered all the reasons for her contempt, that white man who treated her as a slave for a fistful of dollars, or something like that. And then a graver doubt struck him. Had Edith been right, all that time ago, to flee with the child from Bogotá? Had all the servants there hated them, the little white rich folks for whom they had to drive the car and mop the floor and go to the market and cook and clean the bathrooms and make flower arrangements? Had Rose and his family provoked in them a hidden anger, a shameful urge for violence, just as Edith had suspected? One thing was certain, guerrillas had infiltrated the group of workers in his company, and they were more than willing to k
idnap the first gringo boss who got careless. It had not been easy for the Roses to live with that sword of Damocles hanging over them, and that is why Ian had not tried to dissuade Edith when she announced that she had had enough. And now, so many years later, in the Catskills Mountains around two in the morning, amid the sleeplessness and the jumble of sheets, the Latino conspiracy was growing at an exponential rate in Rose’s feverish brain. María Paz, Emperatriz, and the servants from Bogotá conspired with workers and guerrillas to attack the Anglos, whom they planned to assault and stab to death as soon as they were careless and put on their slippers or whenever they fell asleep.
There was no defending oneself, Western civilization was being overcome by the whole of the Sur, the volatile and backward Sur, the wild and awful Sur, with its thousands of gringo haters who were rising in hordes following María Paz and Emperatriz, the leaders of the great invasion that surged up from Panama, crossed Nicaragua, grew into a tsunami in Guatemala and Mexico, and the Sur was unstoppable as it poured through the holes in the vulnerable American border. The North was already flooded by the black tide of the Sur; it was within, cleaning its houses, serving food in restaurants, filling cars with gasoline, harvesting pumpkins in Virginia and strawberries in Michigan, day after day repeating “have a nice day” with a terrible accent and a sly smile . . . hiding Blackhawk Garra IIs in their pockets, envious of the gringos’ democratic systems and ready to seize their property. The good guys, who had already lost Texas, California, and Florida, now would lose Arizona and Colorado. New Mexico and Nevada were already strongholds of the enemy, and one by one, the other states would fall into the hands of the bad guys. Unless, of course, Ian Rose managed to react and hold back the onslaught of this anxiety crisis. That’s what the doctor had told him he was going through, an anxiety crisis that had its origins in the death of his son, and to control it, he was prescribed Effexor XR, which Rose didn’t like because it made him dopey and because he held on to the hope that with time things would get better on their own.
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