I’m so hot, he thought, as he changed his pajamas drenched in sweat. He needed to calm down, find his point of balance again. Best if he left the bedroom, the scene of his nightmare, and went into the kitchen, which was always cooler, with bare feet on the cold tiles, open some windows, refill the dogs’ water dishes, have a nice glass of apple juice with lots of ice. By the time he went back to bed, he was afraid to fall asleep lest the hallucinations begin again, so he put on the television and for the thousandth time watched An American in Paris with Gene Kelly. He fought sleep for another reason as well: he feared that if he fell asleep he’d return to Manninpox, that place that he despised but that was beginning to ensnare him as it had ensnared Cleve. Awake, he could escape its influence, but if he fell asleep, who knows? He’d run the risk of being transported there, as if sleepwalking through the woods, hypnotized, betrayed by his own steps that led toward those porous walls and forced him through them against his will, past the secluded courtyards and through the gloomy hallways that smelled like the circus, a bad combination of urine and disinfectant, as his until recently loyal Taylor & Son boots, in a sudden display of insolence, led him to the very entrails of the place, to its feverish heart, the tight rows of cells, where the feminine breath stuck to the walls like water stains, and where the pride of caged lionesses would be waiting for him, him, Ian Rose, to lick his face and destroy it with one blow. In spite of the apple juice, the nightmares continued, and Rose had no choice but to take the Effexor he had avoided taking that day. He began dozing off around dawn and was sound asleep halfway through Some Like It Hot, another movie he knew by heart. In the end, he did not know how he had been able to defend himself, or what masthead he had held onto to withstand the siren songs of the inmates of Manninpox; but as it was, he awoke late that morning safe in his own bed, or rather he was awakened by the hounding of his dogs, who did not understand why at that hour of the day they had not gone out or been fed breakfast.
Later, while taking a shower, Rose got an idea. Although “idea” isn’t exactly the word, more like the flash of an image that assaulted him along with renewed uneasiness about his years in South America, the solitary figure of a man nailed to a cross. That was it: he knew it immediately. The murder of the policeman had not been a hate crime as the press had asserted. That phrase “racist pig” could have well been on the wall before the murder; such graffiti was likely common in a multiracial and troubled neighborhood like the one in which María Paz lived. It was no wonder the neighbors had been complaining. But the thing with the ex-cop was about something else. It had been a crucifixion without a cross. The wounds on the body were the same as the ones on the crucified Jesus, one on each hand, one on each foot, and one on the side of the torso. Rose knew what the stigmata was because he had learned about it in Bogotá. Rose wasn’t a religious man and had never been interested in such things, but the issue had become a priority the moment that his son, Cleve, then seven years old and likely because of the influence of school lessons in Bogotá, announced that he wasn’t only going to become a Catholic but also a priest. Edith was horrified, one more reason for her to hate Bogotá. But Ian had taken it as a joke. “Do it if you want, son,” he had told Cleve. “It’s your choice. You can be a Catholic if that’s what you want, as long as you don’t become pope.” But when the boy began to swear that he saw the Sacred Heart of Jesus in the bark of trees, Ian Rose realized that the issue was serious and decided to look into it seriously. The Christ that he came to know in the Baroque churches of the colonial center of Bogotá had nothing to do with the fair and incorporeal bourgeois of his Protestant family. This South American Christ was a man of the people, a working-class hero who attracted crowds with his melodramatic confrontations, a poor man who suffered and bled with them, a Lord of the Wounds, a Master of Sorrow, who fascinated crowds with his masochistic displays. Rose grew frightened that his son had been influenced by such mentality, which according to him was extremely twisted, and that was another reason that he did not prevent Edith from taking the child out of Colombia. And now, there in the shower of his house in the Catskills, Ian Rose thought he understood all of a sudden that Greg, the ex-cop, had been murdered by crucifixion, or something like it. The crime had been a ritual murder, that was the essence of it, and not a hate crime as the papers asserted. Why should Rose believe the newspapers anyway? Since when did they know anything? María Paz offered a different version of events, so in a towel and still soaking wet, Rose went to his desk, took out the manuscript, and reread that part a few times. She maintained she was innocent, and her argument was quite convincing. But if that was the case, who the hell had crucified her husband? A gang of wrathful white haters, as the NY Daily News assumed, or some religious fanatics? And what about that gift-wrapped Blackhawk they found in her apartment?
From Cleve’s Notebook
Paz—that’s what María Paz wants to be called. Paz. “Mi Paz,” I wrote the other day. I don’t know why I used the possessive when referring to her, given she’s her own person and no one else’s. “Mi paz os dejo, mi paz os doy,” recited the Colombian priest, and I thought he was saying, “Mis pasos dejo, mis pasos doy,” confusing “peace” with “steps,” but so I repeated at the top of my voice along with the others, feeling as Catholic as any of them. And then there was a very meaningful liturgical chant that was my favorite, dealing with the anxiety of souls, and that in its high notes exclaimed, “Yo tengo sed ardiente, yo tengo sed de Dios.” And the neo-Catholic I was becoming, a zealot like any convert, sang, “Yo tengo seda ardiente.” So I had burning silk instead of a burning thirst, that’s what it sounded like to me, and that’s how I repeated it, kneeling with my eyes closed, racked with emotion, in a complete mystical state, so much so that one day I confronted my parents, who are Protestants, I think, I’m not sure, maybe they’re nothing, but in any case I told them I personally would be a full-fledged Catholic. My mother grew very concerned, but my father simply laughed. And although I never became a Catholic—or, for that matter, a Protestant—I’m still somewhat possessed by the burning thirst and I struggle against the universal tendency to replace the gods of Olympus with the stars of Hollywood. A bad habit, that tendency to demystify. A bad habit for me, I mean, who is a novelist and convinced that the heart of any good novel is nothing more than a camouflaged ritual whose only great concern is forgiveness or condemnation. And all you have to do is dig a little to find the victim and victimizer, the crucified and the crucifier. I also think that its central theme, however varied it may be, always deals more or less with the same thing: guilt and expiation. Just ask Fyodor.
Interview with Ian Rose
Once he was a bit more calm, Ian Rose decided that the only option to overcoming his torment of doubts and shooing away the ghosts was to screw his courage to the sticking place, deal with the irreversible fact of his son’s death, and begin to investigate the not very clear circumstances surrounding it. I’m going to go crazy if I don’t do it, he thought, and they’ll put me in an asylum—and who’ll take care of the dogs then? That’s why at eight o’clock in the morning the following Wednesday, he was ordering orange juice, a cappuccino, pancakes with maple syrup, and fried eggs with sausage at the Lyric Diner, Cleve’s favorite breakfast spot in New York, a fifties-style bar and grill on Third Avenue and Twenty-Second Street.
“You’ll see, Pa,” Cleve had assured him the first time he took him there. “Here they only take six minutes to serve all the bad cholesterol you want.”
It was true: service did not take a second longer, six minutes exactly to bring everything to the table. Cleve timed them to show his father, and on top of that they were as efficient as they were sullen, something Ian Rose appreciated, because he disliked nothing more than that self-interested, syrupy kindness prevalent throughout the city. But not at the Lyric; there no one greeted you with a phony smile or said good-bye with a gelid “have a nice day.” The boys of the Lyric screamed from your table to the kitchen: “Blind eye
s!” for poached eggs, “Drop them!” for eggs over easy, or “Shatter them!” for scrambled.
This time Rose was alone and not very hungry, so he only ate a quarter of the mountain of food they brought him, then pushed his plates aside and brought out pen and paper to make notes about what he’d have to ask Pro Bono, María Paz’s attorney, in a few hours. Right away he felt as if the rude wait staff of the Lyric were sending disproving glances his way, not happy that he had turned the table into a desk. Because just as speedily as they served you, they rushed you out, with the last bite still in your mouth, so the next diner could be accommodated. Rose gathered his belongings without having written anything, because aside from the obvious he really didn’t know what to ask the lawyer; and besides, how much could he ask in ten minutes, which is what he had been granted for the meeting, not a lot of time, enough for a hello and good-bye and that’s it. After leaving the Lyric, he walked to the Strand, where they often had Cleve’s graphic novels, and he went in to see if they had any. He found a bunch of them in a remote corner of the store, marked down from $12.00 to $3.50, and he felt a stab in his chest. He put them all in his cart and walked to the cashier. There were fifteen of them and he was going to buy them all. He’d take them and keep them in the house because it had pained him to see them so marked down, almost given away. He felt it was an unmerited degradation, a premature push toward oblivion.
“Excellent!” the cashier told Rose when he saw all the copies of the same book. He was young and slight as a tadpole, with a red-and-black hankie tied around his neck and a small dragon tattooed on his arm. “I see you too are a fan of the Suicide Poet . . .”
“Are you?” Rose murmured, and his eyes watered.
“Of course. Bedside reading! And believe me, I’m not the only one. They’re going to be disappointed when they see we’re out of copies.”
“Then I’ll take only two,” Rose said. “Keep the rest; I don’t want to be a hog.”
He walked up Broadway with the two books under his arm and headed to Union Square, where he got on the subway that would take him to the lawyer’s office in Brooklyn Heights. In María Paz’s manuscript the man’s first and last name had been mentioned, although here he appears only by his pseudonym, Pro Bono, because as far as I can tell, everyone in this story has something to hide and I’d rather not reveal their true names. María Paz alluded to the fact that her defense attorney was retired, and judging by the fascination bordering on love with which she referred to him, at first Ian Rose had imagined the lawyer to be the old legalistic type with Don Juan airs, with a toupee to hide his baldness, a pair of shiny black shoes à la Fred Astaire, and strong men’s cologne to hide the acrid smell of old age.
“Not even close, Mr. Rose,” Ming, Cleve’s editor and friend, who had done Ian Rose the favor of setting up the meeting, had corrected him. “This lawyer is famous. World famous even. He’s not some schmuck.”
Ming, who had known about Pro Bono before all of this, had added to his knowledge by digging a little deeper here and there. Through Ming, Rose found out that in his glory days, Pro Bono had been the Sardinian heavyweight in global litigation over water rights, acting as defender of local communities against the multinational corporations that sought to commercialize natural resources. He had successfully blocked several multimillion mega-projects to privatize water supplies in places such as Bolivia, Australia, and Pakistan, and also at home, in California and Ohio. And it hadn’t been a little quarrel: Pro Bono had made a specialty of kicking some serious thugs in the ass, so much so that once, in Cochabamba, Bolivia, there had been an attempt on his life for going around as a spokesperson of a huge mobilization of indigenous women who would not let the water be taken from their ancient wells because the multinational banks felt like privatizing them as a condition of debt renegotiations.
“Well, well,” Rose said to Ming, “so I’m going to meet with the champion of the world’s hungry.”
As might be expected, not everything about the lawyer had been altruistic, because the fights he had won had also brought him significant wealth. So he had retired at seventy-five; tired of his philanthropic adventures and his pockets full, and facing a life of rose gardening, he had opted to take on lesser cases pro bono, that is, to defend people such as María Paz, who could not afford a private attorney, for nothing.
“That’s your man,” Ming said. “Unmistakable, as you will see, because of his physical appearance.”
“Why?”
“A little issue. Well, a particularity, but rather obvious.”
“Is he blind? Because he deserves a medal of merit if on top of everything he’s blind.”
“No, not that.”
“Deaf-mute? Lame? Cleft lip?”
“Hunchback.”
Hunchback. The word itself was taboo and therefore unmentionable. An only child, pampered and protected by his parents, Pro Bono himself had not been aware of the implications of his deformity until he was six, when he started school and others began to point at him. But even at that age he showed resources with which to defend himself. One day, he grew sick of another kid who pushed him to the end of his rope calling him a camel.
“Don’t call me a camel, you moron, don’t you know a camel has two humps, not one?” Pro Bono screamed at him, pushing him to the ground.
The fact that he was intelligent and came from a traditional rich East Coast family shielded him against any complex he may have developed about being lesser than. As a teenager, the fact that his defect was taboo became a motivation to openly flaunt it. He never avoided looking at himself in the mirror; on the contrary, he stood before a double mirror to make his peace with that strange, almost mythological body that had been his lot. He repeated the word “hunchback” to himself until owning it and knowing it was human, and also all the degrading insults—hunchbacked, camel, retard, hunchy, dromedary, humpbacked, humpy—and in removing their thorns, he neutralized the degradation they carried. He also repeated the euphemisms that were meant to sidestep his true condition—invalid, special, disabled—because he knew that if anything could harm him more than the deformity itself it was the misleading silence and the pious metaphors. Through books, he had developed a certain pride in the uniqueness of being a part of the family that included Victor Hugo’s hunchback Quasimodo, Hawthorne’s Aminadab, and Dickens’s Daniel Quilp. He was pleased that Homer had singled out Tiresias, endowing him with a hump, as did Shakespeare with Caliban from The Tempest and with Richard III. Literature had wanted to present all of these first cousins, his brothers, as hunchbacked and deviant, making their physical condition a manifestation of their spiritual defects. But this wasn’t the case. Pro Bono knew them very well and saw them otherwise, feeling affection for all of them, understanding their motivations, and from the time he was an adolescent he had set his mind to come to their defense and those of their like, clearing their names, making it evident once and for all that a hunchback need not be one of the miserable ones.
For María Paz, who didn’t yet have a defense attorney, Pro Bono’s physical appearance hadn’t been a big deal. Not having a defense attorney under the critical circumstances in which she found herself was like going to war without an army or arms, not knowing who her enemy was, or what she was accused of, and worse yet, not quite knowing exactly what she had become involved in. Caught up in the hubbub of the courtroom’s waiting room, María Paz hadn’t even heard her name when they called her over the loudspeaker to appear at the bench, and she was alerted only because another detainee, who had heard it, ran over to her to tell her it was her turn. Once before the judge, she could not understand what they were asking her; in her head the words sounded hollow, as if all her English had been forgotten in one swoop, and she answered whatever came into her head. Her nerves were killing her; she mumbled, contradicted herself. And slowly dug a deeper and deeper hole, incriminating herself until there was no way out. And just at that moment, as if fal
len from the sky, Pro Bono, the renowned veteran attorney, an expert in the arts and tricks of the trade, appeared and took over the messy case that seemed lost from the start: the Colombian woman accused of seducing and then murdering the American ex-cop.
“Take it easy, baby, I’ll take care of you” was the first thing Pro Bono had told María Paz that day, putting his arm around her and giving her a brief squeeze on the shoulder, just long enough so that she felt the warmth of another human being; she took that spontaneous gesture as a blessing, letting her know that she wasn’t alone. Amid the noise and confusion of the courtroom, those few words, the words everyone wants to hear in the middle of one’s troubles, miraculously reached her ears: “I’ll take care of you.” A generous and powerful offer, especially under these circumstances, coming from a stranger who was asking for nothing in return, a man of odd appearance but decidedly respectable, very elegant in his own peculiar way, someone who smelled clean and refined amid the thick stench of chaos. He was one of those skinny men with big bones and an angular face, an old-fashioned aristocrat with traces of vices long abandoned and a certain attractiveness battered by the years, and enormous, intense yellow-hazel eyes like a heron. A hunchback, yes, that too, an old gentleman bent over by the burden of his hunch, an individual painfully reduced in stature. But what María Paz noticed on that first meeting was that he came to her aid like a gentleman, conveying a sense of calm and self-confidence that inspired in her a rare sensation of relief, as if suddenly the weight that she also bore on her back was lifted.
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