Hot Sur

by Laura Restrepo

  “One thing is for sure,” Wendy Mellons told Rose, “if they had not ruined that boy’s religious career, he would have become the pope, because he did not lack fervor and dedication, which he still has to this day. But they blocked him from his destiny and messed everything up. When the whites cast him aside, he sought to ingratiate himself with the Latinos, but they too rejected him. In the end, the only ones who remained true to him were us, the whores, and he grew up among us.”

  The brothel became his refuge. There he could be king again. Because he was so pretty, the girls fought over who would tend to him, comb his hair, hand feed him. They didn’t charge him when he was old enough to have sex with them and even provided him with spending money, because he was their pet, their precious doll, their pretty little boyfriend. And what else could come of such coddling? Joe got used to living off them, sweet-talked them to get what he wanted, threw temper tantrums if they denied him something, always knowing that in the end anything he did would be tolerated. Wendy Mellons explained that Sleepy Joe’s gift was to take from others as if every day was his last day on earth. Eventually things got complicated. The girls started to complain about his brutality and the cruel names he called them; they tired of hearing that they were nothing but sows and scavengers and evil bitches. He accused them of living in sin, and hated them for making him sin. He adored them and loathed them, and could only resolve this contradiction by resorting to threats and violence. The last straw came when he put a match to the translucent and highly flammable nightgown of one of the girls named Tinker Bell, who wasn’t burned alive, by the grace of God, but it left her with permanent scars.

  “He’s a horrible man but at the same time always very repentant about his actions,” Wendy Mellons tried to explain to Rose. “He didn’t want to sin—not out of love for his neighbor, but because he was terrified of the eternal punishment. Always very angry, that’s for sure, at everything and everyone. There is a very sick side in him. Disturbed since childhood. And yet, I still love him like a son.”

  “So are you still close to him?” Rose ventured, intuiting that this woman could serve as bridge to him.

  “Close? Yes,” she said. “As close as he allows anyone to get to him.”

  “Are you in touch with him? Do you see him?” María Paz blurted out, perhaps out of jealousy.

  “Do I see him in person, you mean?” Wendy Mellons countered, and to prove her case without having to answer these questions, she pulled out a photograph from a drawer. “Taken very recently,” she said.

  It had been taken with a Polaroid and, as she said, had to be somewhat recent, because Wendy Mellons did not seem any older than she was that day, even if in the picture she wore a sunhat festooned in flowers as if she were British royalty. It was a full-body shot, and she had her arms around a drifter type in jeans and a tank top, his face half hidden under Ray-Ban Aviators and a ten-gallon hat. The exposed portion of his face showed bruised lips and an imposing square chin. Rose could not connect the little Sleepy Joe in the first photograph they had seen with this moron in sunglasses with the brim of his hat pulled low. But María Paz said in an assured voice, “That’s him.” The couple in the picture leaned on the hood of a medium-size yellow truck, maybe a Dodge Fargo or a Chevrolet Apache. On the top part of the windshield, there was a transparent sticker with a message in iridescent letters. It read “Gift from God.”

  It was just the kind of clue that Rose and María Paz needed. Rose still had not confessed to Wendy Mellons the purpose of their visit, wanting to go slowly, not rush. Since they were throwing away that much money, the least they could do was make sure it arrived in the hands of Sleepy Joe. For the moment, they observed the woman and asked questions, letting her tell them about the life and work, address, real name and surname, and any other pertinent data about her surrogate son. They needed some time to discuss things among themselves, so they excused themselves and promised they’d return the next day.

  “You couldn’t invent a more absurd situation,” Rose tells me. “I never would have imagined I’d end up there. Amazing woman, María Paz. I think that’s when I really started to admire her. Her clarity of purpose, delusional in my opinion, but maniacally persecuted. She was convinced that this would ensure the safety of her sister, and nothing was going to stop her. And we’re not talking about some millionaire. Imagine the situation: a fugitive from justice, about to cross one of the most guarded borders in the world, launching into the unknown without a penny in her pocket. Admirable in some ways.”

  On the way to town to get something to eat, María Paz stopped to read a poster on a wall. “Concert: Molotov, tonight in Monte Vista,” she read. “Great. Not that far away,” she said.

  They drove into the desert toward Monte Vista, Colorado, and parked in front of a large tent that had been assembled for the event. “From the moment that we got out of the car,” Rose tells me, “we didn’t see another white person or hear anyone speak English.”

  It was as if clusters of brown people had crawled out from under the stones, what is known as the bronze race in spades, mostly men, almost all of them taking up a lot of space, robust, tattooed, with their hair nice and stiff and shiny black with hair gel, workers, gamblers, some in denim jackets and others in shirtsleeves in spite of the motherfucking cold, Aztecs, Nahuatl, Tepehuans, Mayans, from Mexico City, from the mountains, that is, what is better known as la raza, Benito Juárez’s raza, Cuauhtémoc raza, the whole damned raza, as if meeting up for a general conference, the big showing of the little bronze race, a hundred percent chicanos, truckers, Macheteros, mestiza chicas, chicos with straight hair, wetbacks, hombres, dudes, indigenous, maquila workers, mariachis, youth bands, Comanches, from one mother, from all mothers, druggies, fathers, pissed-off, shit-upon, dudes, suckers, field hands, evangelists, and beautiful nobodies. The raza, then, all of it, there in that tent. Long live the dark-skinned Virgin of Guadalupe and long live Mexico, you fuckers!

  María Paz and Rose buy their tickets and push their way into the expectant crowd, as restless and charged with energy as caged tigers, and watch your back because now begins the tug of war of everyone against everyone else, an all-out tugfest, shoulder to shoulder, and everyone cracking up, till the catcalls build up in an unstoppable wave aimed at the stage, summoning the band of the hour, the kings of albura dance and scourging humor, the bad guys of the border, with their expansive explosive alterlatino rock, cumbia, rap, funk fusion, and everything in between, and now, Molotov! The group appears under a barrage of applause and lasers, and to start things off, the leader lets loose with a merry greeting: “What’s up, you horde of illegals!” And the raza roars. The response to the greeting is a symphony of pure howls: the horde rises. And the tent reverberates with the heat and tension, and a thundering noise that could burst eardrums and unleash libidos till they become wounded, full-throated cries, and up there on stage there is El Gringo Loco at the drums and Miky Huidobro at bass guitar and Paco Ayala at the other bass, with lead singer Tito Fuentes, and now it begins, here comes the national anthem: “Yo ya estoy hasta la madre de que me pongan sombrero. No me digas frijolero pinche gringo puñetero.” And then, “Don’t call me gringo, you fucking beaner, stay on your side of that goddamned river.” María Paz fuses with that mass that is now all raw nerves, marinated in adrenaline, stewed in want, the shit happens and then more shit happens, and she rocks the Mexican power. Feel it! Feel it! All one as brothers! And Rose does not get it, and he can hardly believe his eyes. María Paz, who could tell he is a little freaked, elbows him and yells in his ear, “Easy, my mister, no need to panic, you’re not the only white one here. Look at the drummer!” And he’s up on stage, blond and rosy-skinned, born in Houston, Texas, and nicknamed El Gringo Loco, author of the famous anthem “Guacala que rica,” and the Latino fans love him. Now things begin to warm up and this mishmash comes together into a grand ritual of lowlifes, a baptism of wetbacks, those who had to put up with everything out
there and hang their heads, in here are possessed by the will to rave and riot, “Dame dame dame todo el power para que te demos en la madre, gimi gimi gimi todo el poder.” On the stage, Tito Fuentes grabs the mic and screams in jest, “Fuck, hit the ground, someone called Immigration!” And the crowd hits the floor, laughing riotously, hiding under the chairs like children at play, because here la raza is an insurgent, mocking, and powerful race. This is free territory, blue skies! For no one can stop this devilish mass, and there is no better mantra than those frightening words, and here many who had never amounted to anything would climb mountains, here they reach for things higher than the Alien Registration Number. Immigration Control, the Border Patrol, the Minutemen, and all the other racist mobs could go straight to hell, and bring with them the treacle of political correctness. Bring down the walls: as Pink Floyd said. The Berlin Wall, the Great Wall of China, the wall in Palestine, and the wall of Tijuana. “And down with the walls of Manninpox!” María Paz screams, though no one can hear her amid all that commotion, and as she rattles and shakes, she lets out a tear for Mandra X and all her other fellow captives. “Yes, yes, this is life, girls, and tonight you are all with me!”

  Outside, the desert glowed under a full moon.

  “Imagine the Three Stooges planning a coup d’état,” Rose tells me, “and that should give you a good sense of how María Paz, Wendy Mellons, and I spent the two days fumbling with ideas about how to get the money to Sleepy Joe. If yes this, then not that, not here but then where is here, and who can we and how.”

  Not that it was a complicated operation, more like a lottery: they were calling a guy to give him one hundred and fifty thousand dollars and asking nothing in return. But as Rose asserted, there was only one deck of cards and everyone was playing a different game, and betting accordingly. After the night of the concert, Wendy Mellons was finally able to get in touch with Sleepy Joe, and she made arrangements for María Paz to call him from a pay phone and make plans to give him the money, with the tacit understanding—very well understood by everyone—that he would not harm her sister, Violeta. Sleepy Joe, who had never had the desire to understand things that are well understood by everyone, immediately suspected it was a trap and thus insisted on his own conditions, principally, he wanted to see María Paz alone: he wanted the money and the girl. Twice, María Paz was forced to finish the call without having reached an agreement. The conversation that followed this one was short and sharp, and she gave him an ultimatum in regard to how the money would be transferred to him: “It’s like the lentils in the soup,” she told him, “you take it as it is or you leave it.” He’d take it, he said, he was no fool. He had succumbed to the jingle of coins: down the hatch with the lentils. If he had to drop his demand to see María Paz, then so be it; Wendy Mellons would hand over the money. “No problem,” he said. “I would trust her with my life, Wendy Mellons is my soulmate.” Hearing that, María Paz felt a pang of despair. But she kept her composure, she wasn’t there to be lovey-dovey, too much was at stake. There was one final condition: Sleepy Joe had to scan and e-mail to María Paz a receipt with his signature, stating and confirming that Wendy Mellons had completed the delivery of the full amount.

  “What is going to be the name of your e-mail address?” Rose wanted to know.

  “What name?”

  “The address you have to set up so he can write you, somethingorother at gmail dot com.”

  “That’s perfect.”

  “What’s perfect?”

  “What you said, somethingorother at gmail dot com,” she said, not giving it a second thought, because she was hurrying to town to buy something.

  “You’re kidding me,” Rose said flustered. “Do you need to go shopping at this moment? What the hell do you need?”

  “Just this thing.”

  “And you need it now? Are you nuts? This is no time for shopping.”

  But she insisted, got her way, and took the Toyota to do her errands, leaving Rose time to return to Wendy Mellons, which didn’t turn out to be a horrible thing, after all, because he learned a few things that would come to be very helpful soon.

  “It was an intense experience,” Rose tells me during our interview. “This getting closer and closer to the murderer of my son. Very hard, getting to know the people who were part of his life, seeing him in photographs, knowing he was on the other end of the telephone line, almost within reach.”

  When they were alone in the car again, Rose asked María Paz what the big deal was, what the hell she had to buy so urgently at such a moment.

  “A cheap backpack or something like that. And look, I found just what I needed, a red knapsack. You didn’t think I was going to hand over my Gucci bag to that old woman. No way! I put the money in the red knapsack, I’m keeping the Gucci.”

  What did Wendy Mellons hope to get from all this? Basically, she would do a favor for a close friend, and maybe get a tip as gratitude for her services. As for Rose, his shameless purpose was to use the money as bait to get close enough to Sleepy Joe and bombard him with bullets. Up to that point, he had meekly gone along and approved whatever María Paz wanted, ceding the reins to her and playing dumb, the “ignorant old gringo” of the Molotov. But he had grown wary of that role. Now he needed to break out on his own and take firm steps. To begin, they snuck out of Wendy Mellons’s place, and he took María Paz to Monarch Mountain, a safe distance away. Their lodging was a ski resort that he had visited in the past with Edith and Cleve.

  “I chose Monarch Mountain for a few reasons,” Rose explains to me. “First, I was sick and tired of driving all day and spending the nights in lousy motels. The plight of undocumented immigrants and the lower classes was no doubt interesting and very sad, but I had had enough. I wanted to sleep well, relax, eat well, and enjoy beautiful views from a hotel window. I was seized with a desire to spend my money liberally those last days, as simple as that.”

  “I don’t understand,” I say. “You were about to murder a man . . .”

  “Exactly.”

  “Exactly?”

  “Let me finish breaking it down for you. You asked me why I chose Monarch Mountain, and I told you the first reason. Second reason: I needed to keep María Paz distracted and clueless while I did my thing. More than once, she had told me she had always dreamed of going skiing, and I wanted to make sure that such a dream was fulfilled—so she would have at least one good memory of America before she left. Third reason: a guest is much safer and better protected in a five-star hotel than in some fleabag place by the side of the road.”

  They checked into the best chalet available at the San Luis Ski Resort, a large Alpine hotel complete with cheese fondue and cuckoo clocks, fireplaces in the individual chalets, and yodeling and accordion performances on Saturday nights. A minibus shuttled guests to the slopes, which were fifteen minutes away. Lying on the bed of their room, there was a spectacular view of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and of the surrounding forest crisscrossed by paths, on which they could take strolls with Otto, Dix, and Skunko. So there, in that ersatz Alpine hideaway, María Paz and Rose bided their time and waited for the handover of money, which would take place at some unspecified time whenever Sleepy Joe arrived in Colorado from wherever he was coming.

  “The hotel offered dog care,” Rose tells me. “A crucial detail because it allowed me to leave the dogs in good hands while I took care of my business.”

  Rose rented a full set of ski gear, clothing, and accessories for María Paz, reserved a whole set of private classes with a personal instructor, and while she took her first tentative steps on the magical white carpet, surrounded by the children also learning, he watched from the deck of Los Amigos Bar, seated under the outdoor heater, sipping on a frosty mug of beer, and picking at a plate of chorizo quesadillas with red sauce, because although the hotel was Swiss, the cuisine of choice at the food lounges was purely American-Mex. (“How fake can you get?” Cleve would h
ave snipped.)

  “I had never seen María Paz so happy,” Rose tells me. “Those endless expanses, with her hair blowing in the wind, must have felt like the opposite side of the world compared to Manninpox.”

  “And were you also feeling good?” I ask. “Had you abandoned plans to off Sleepy Joe?”

  “No, I never said that. What happened was that once I had dealt with the practical technicalities of the situation, it was simply a matter of waiting.”

  “But you must have been twisting yourself into knots with fears and scruples and doubts.”

  “None of that. Not even a little bit, actually. More like an astonishing sense of peace, quite astonishing, as the editorials said after Mandra X had told reporters about experiencing a similar feeling right before she murdered her children.”

  Rose is careful to stress that those days were quite peaceful for him. He read the papers, was endlessly amused by the antics of María Paz on the small hill with the other beginners, enjoyed every sip of his frosty beers. Today, a couple of years later, as I interview him in the dining room of the Washington Square Hotel in New York City, I ask him to elaborate on why he thinks he was overcome by this astonishing sense of peace, as he calls it, because it is both a general and hyperbolic assertion that I’m just not buying. He replies that it was simple: Sleepy Joe had to die, he would die, and Rose did not feel there was anything wrong with that at all. He felt only relief, as if the air had become milder. He even came to the conclusion that the most burdensome aspect of committing such an act was physical and not moral at all. When it came down to it, it was almost natural to kill another person, something that was almost inconsequential: a few days before, he would never have suspected this, so he felt it was some sort of revelation. Despite the cold, the Colorado skies were radiant. A splendid dome of the purest blue was suspended above him, and he says he remembers thinking, there on the deck facing the slopes, that if all people had to do was push a red button to eliminate anyone who annoyed them, the human race would have perished.