Laura Restrepo - Hot Sur

“You can’t fit six humans in the false bottom of a Buick LeSabre or any car,” Rose said.

“You can if they are Asian.”

“And how does the Buick handle the roads, with all the snow?”

“If there is a lot of snow, they use a snowmobile. That’s a big part of the problem, the cold. Most of the clients come from warm climates, cotton dresses. Elijah wraps them in blankets, so they don’t die on him. Once they’re on the US side of the border, he literally leaves them out in the cold to fend for his own. He is a hell of a snakehead.”

“Snakehead?”

“Those on this side are called coyotes; the other side, snakeheads.”

“Cyber-snakeheads,” Rose said.

“If you could see all the little people that sneak into this country. They pass under the McDonald’s arches and touch the sky with their hands.”

Rose soon grew weary, as bored with miniature golf as he was with tales about the Onondaga, and there were still a few holes to go to complete the nine. Rose didn’t know how to get out of his commitment with the sweaty, fat man, who sweated so much in winter that he must have caused floods in the summer. Add to it his mouth: now there was someone who could talk up a storm. It was at that point that María Paz came running, waving the stuffed giraffe.

“Come, Mr. Rose! Come see!” she shouted.

“Shhhh!” Rose tried to signal her to be a little more discreet, but she was too worked up to notice, in a frenzy almost. “Come on, Mr. Rose! To the room, come, come, quickly, sir, don’t drag your feet!”

A few hours earlier, María Paz, disconsolate, had gone to bed still dressed, hugging the stuffed giraffe her sister had given her in the front of the school. Her life had suddenly become impossible, the crossroads not crossable. So much waiting, holding on, pedaling in place, just to get to this. If she didn’t get out of the country very soon, they would catch her. If she left, she would be leaving her sister at the mercy of Sleepy Joe. Neither option was acceptable, and no other choices seemed possible. María Paz couldn’t even cry. She didn’t even have that consolation, because crying comes from a broken heart, but here there was nothing, not even that, just a dry heart, lack of responses and hopelessness. In the dark, because she didn’t even have the energy to turn the light on, she curled up like a snail in the motel bed, the bed that so many had passed through, at once such a beautiful and sad thought, that transitory bed. She pressed her chest against the giraffe, which, by the way, smelled horrible, like it had soaked in piss, making it clear that Violeta was still peeing anywhere she chose and using the giraffe as a sponge. María Paz hated that her life had just been going around in circles, that she was chasing her own tail, sticking it in front of her face every time she was ready to take a new course so that it just kept her going round and round. Once again, she was clutching the giraffe, just as she had years before on the flight to America, when she had snatched it from Violeta because the girl had just peed on it. Only the giraffe wasn’t that cute, faded toy anymore, but a filthy and disgusting lump, amorphous, eyeless, earless, looking more like some prehistoric bug, half the stitching undone, missing a leg, but just as smelly as before.

It was an amazing coincidence, or rather terrifying: the stuffed animal that marked that long-ago trip they took together, the arrival, loomed again now, on the eve of another journey, the farewell one. A sudden fear of that object that somehow had appeared and reappeared at these critical moments struck María Paz: Was it just a simple fetish or something more like magic? María Paz thought all this had to mean something. But what? There was some message from destiny, but she couldn’t figure it out. It could not be that she would trip up right before the finish line, all the escape planning, the heartache, just to fuck it all up a few steps from Canada. And there was nothing she could do because she had tripped up almost within reach of her goal, and there was no going forward or backward, no going alone or accompanied, no going north nor south, so it was best just to be there, quiet and in the dark, hugging the stinking giraffe.

And to think that Violeta had given her the thing she most treasured, which she had lugged around with her since she was a baby, her strongest emotional anchor, so much so that she would become nauseated whenever someone took it from her, as happened to Linus when his sister Lucy wrestled his blanket away. But despite all this, Violeta had willfully handed the giraffe over. It was a selfless gesture of love that María Paz had never before experienced from her sister. Then had come their parting without hugs, because Violeta did not tolerate any kind of physical contact, and the way she said good-bye sounded so final and definitive that she may as well have said good riddance.

Outside it was completely dark, and the room was still dark, when María Paz, unable to withstand the smell of the giraffe anymore, got up to go to the bathroom, thinking that she would give it a good wash and scrub. If this whole episode was indeed proving to be some kind of ritual, if Violeta had wanted to suggest that their lives were indeed circular, and if she did say through this gift what she couldn’t express in words, if all that was so, then María Paz was going to make an effort to show respect to the love she had been shown. The North Star was a shoddy motel that offered no amenities such as shampoo, and the bathroom was equipped instead with a previously used chunk of pink soap that was stingy about creating foam. But there was warm water from the tap and María Paz filled the sink to dunk the giraffe and give it a good scrubbing.

“I abandoned the fat man in the middle of our game and ran after María Paz, expecting the worst,” Rose tells me. “Now I’m going to try to describe my shock, there in the room of that fourth-rate motel, during one of the harshest nights of the coldest winter of the last five years, well beyond a hundred miles from Montreal and more than three hundred miles from New York City. It was dark inside, except for the glow of one bulb coming from the bathroom. I mean, the light was off in the room itself when María Paz led me in, and when I tried to turn it on, she stopped me. It was the first thing that occurred to me: turn on the light — what anyone would do upon entering a dark room. But she wouldn’t let me. And there was something inside that room that glowed like a will-o’-the-wisp; it emitted the kind of halo of brilliance that have shone from other treasures — the Amber Room of Catherine the Great, the Ark of the Covenant, and the cave of Ali Baba. What I saw there with my own eyes on María Paz’s bed had a mythical luminance. It sparkled, I’m telling you, like a nest of salamanders or a stack of gold coins. At least that’s how I remember it.”

“How much is there?” María Paz asked Rose, ensuring that the blinds of the room were completely drawn and that she locked the door. “How much?”

It was impossible to calculate, Rose tells me. How could he add all those hundred-dollar bills strewn on the bed, some wrinkled, others bound into stacks, others tied into larger bricks? All wet, though. Rose could not say a word, not even a murmur. The shock had left him speechless. But María Paz responded to her own question.

“There’s one hundred and fifty thousand,” she said softly. “Can you believe it? One hundred and fifty thousand dollars, Mr. Rose. One hundred and fifty thousand. I counted every single bill. They were inside Violeta’s giraffe, all stuffed tightly in. I found the bills when I wanted to wash it.”

“One hundred and fifty thousand, eh?” Rose managed to say.

“It has to be something connected to the people looking for Sleepy Joe,” María Paz said.