Laura Restrepo - Hot Sur

“This is where Sleepy Joe is from,” said María Paz, standing on a promontory overlooking the vast emptiness. Her hair flowing in the breeze caught a cluster of snowflakes and made her seem like a cherry blossoming in the wrong season. “This is his land,” she said. “Born and raised here. It’s no wonder he’s like that.”

“Like what?” Rose responded sharply, the harsh tone he used whenever she talked about her brother-in-law with a nostalgic air. “Like what?”

“Like he is, always chasing echoes.”

Night was beginning to fall over the Sangre de Cristo, and they began searching for a motel that would take them and the dogs — although it would be wrong to say that night fell, as if in a single stroke of a guillotine; rather the darkness appeared early and made headway slowly, almost moment by moment. According to Sleepy Joe, the fame of The Terrible Espinosas was so widespread that it reached New Mexico. It was the most amazing and jubilant tavern, no better party around the San Luis Valley, with live music by Los Tigres del Desierto and at dawn, a serenade by the trio from yesteryear, Los Inolvidables. Relying on these stories, María Paz encouraged Rose not to give up. Such a famed place couldn’t escape them. All they had to do was keep asking until someone gave them a clue.

“A most exclusive brothel, according to María Paz, but no one had heard of it,” Rose tells me. “As it was, we caught up with Wendy Mellons in the office of a Reiki practitioner, where she waited among other patients to be attended. She told us later that she visited the place every two weeks for an energy alignment and hands-on therapy for her swollen legs.”

She must have been pretty in her youth, but old age had snuck up on her, and she was wrapped in a thick winter coat, making it impossible to guess at her physical appearance, if not to say it was a bulky package that still may have been consistent with someone who in her heyday had wreaked havoc. It was no accident that her fighting name was Wendy Mellons. But the years had passed, the law of gravity prevailed, and when things had started to collapse, Wendy Mellons had abandoned that nickname, apparently abandoning her old ways also. She quit her job and moved to Cañon City, where she had lived for years working as a teller at the box office of the Rex Theatre. Rose could see plainly why Sleepy Joe would cling to that woman, who must have been for him like a second mother. The second mother, the coveted breast, the homeland, childhood, days gone by, memories, the first landscape, possibly first intercourse, ultimately, the only roots. In fact, Wendy Mellons told them that she was exactly the same age as Sleepy Joe’s mother, who had died young. She received them in her current home in the outskirts of the village of Santo Acacio, which itself was on the outskirts of everything.

“I thought it would be more like the boudoir of a madam, but the place was rather like a cemetery of tires,” Rose tells me.

Past the stacks of tires, they came to a habitable room with an attached shed, in which the snow came through a crack in the roof. Past this, there was a backyard with a small melting furnace, disposable pieces of junk chucked here and there, and a pair of skinny dogs scurrying around like rats. Wendy Mellons lived with a son, Bubba, a drug addict and thief of manhole covers that he hammered, pounded, tossed in ashes, and sold as antique iron pots to tourists. A wood-burning stove heated the habitable part of the structure. Clothing was piled on a rickety rocking chair, dishes with crusted leftover food were stacked on a table, and a bolt-action rifle hung at the head of a bronze cot. A variety of other objects covered with smoke and grease lingered in the corners of the room, including a pair of deer traps, a tricycle, a washing machine without a door, a box full of used windshield wipers, a blacksmith’s bench, and other tools.

Wendy Mellons wore a camisole, so now Rose could examine her in detail: her eyes were rimmed with kohl like some Babylonian whore; her rings were so embedded in her fingers they could probably never be pulled off, even with heavy greasing; she had chipped red nails, olive skin, and what could only be described as a heavy-duty body. There was no sense that anything about her had dried up from lack of use, but rather as if everything had been steeped in oil, smelling of incense and reminiscent of a sacred Mass. Rose could not take his eyes off the ripples of her skin, which created folds where moss could germinate. Impossible not to be reminded of Mandra X. According to Rose, both were heavyweights, each in her own style, and if placed face-to-face in the ring, you would have to bet on a draw.

The walls of the house were coated in newspaper, presumably to conserve heat, and few pictures hung from nails.

“The family of my comadre,” Wendy Mellons said pointing to a small photograph faded by age and sunlight.

“It was Sleepy Joe’s Slovak clan,” Rose tells me. “And there in the family portrait, in that old photograph, there he was, Sleepy Joe, the guy who killed my son. It was the first time I had seen a photograph of him. It’s a kick to the gut, let me tell you, to finally see the face of the man who killed your son. But there was something off; the person in that picture was not a man but a child. In fact, he was the smallest of the seven siblings. Don’t ask me why, but the image of that child got all jumbled in my mind with the memory of Cleve as a child. A very emotional fusion that completely upset me. I couldn’t channel all the hatred and urgency for vengeance toward the child in that photograph. I can’t really explain it. My hatred bounced off that child and boomeranged right back to me, forcing me to swallow mouthfuls of my own bile. So I stopped looking at the child and focused on the father, who was behind him, a gloomy man with drunken eyes and a cauliflower nose. I was able to hate him right away, wanted him dead. On this man, I could unleash my rage, perhaps because I saw Sleepy Joe as an adult in him. Moreover, at that moment, I could also wish for the death of the child Sleepy Joe, for the sole purpose of hurting his father. I had been robbed of my son, and from the depths of my soul, I wanted to rob him of his.”

When María Paz and Wendy Mellons chatted with their backs to him, Rose took a photograph of that picture, and now he hands me a copy. I hold it in my hand and scrutinize it, knowing that in it are encased the seeds of everything that would happen later: the germ of this story. In the picture of the picture, there is a large peasant family, Caucasian, mired in poverty and foreigners to joy. The father dominates the image of the group, with his broad shoulders and stony expression. He wears a turtleneck and has a biblical beard, looking like a middle-aged Tolstoy, but rattier. The mother is sitting in the foreground. The dark scarf that conceals her hair and neck makes her seem an almost monastic figure. Surrounding the couple and not counting Sleepy Joe, there are six children, all of them hardened by work. They’re not really children but short adults — have never known childhood. They have golden hair parted in the middle, the girls with braids and the boys with bowl cuts. Two people seem out of place in the group, the mother and the youngest son. Both seem separated, isolated, as if enclosed in an invisible bubble.

There is something beautiful about them, both in the woman and child, and that also sets them apart from the rest. But what’s different about them? Almost nothing, some minor detail, a slightly higher arch of the eyebrows maybe, or cheekbones that are an iota more pronounced, the brow a few millimeters wider, the chin a few less. Or perhaps what is perceived as beauty is only a matter of contrast. There was something lacking in the flat humorless faces of the others that failed to mask a general vacuity, the larger fossil of the angry father, the smaller fossils of the resigned children.