Laura Restrepo: Hot Sur

By that point, Greg was trembling so violently that the melted wax from the candle he was holding rained in thick drops on his bare feet. In contrast, the younger one kept his composure. Another Brother approached them holding an open metal box, and they could see that inside there was an embroidered cloth wrapped around what seemed to be some gem or other valuable object. They might be precious stones, Sleepy Joe thought. Picador, the only one with his face entirely covered, removed the cloth and pulled out of the box a dark amber object sharpened like a shaving blade. Some of the other Brothers pulled the boys’ robes down from their shoulders so that the cloth hung from the ropes around their waists.

“We are going to break the Seal,” one of the Illuminated announced, and they ordered the two to lean forward and hold their breath.

Greg felt how the blade sliced into the skin of his back, three cuts on each side of his spine near the shoulder blades, and then turned his head to see what they were doing to his little brother. When he noticed the amount of blood coming from the cuts and soaking the robe, he tried to stop Picador by grabbing the blade, but the three godfathers held him back by force.

“I’m fine,” Sleepy Joe said, his eyes closed tight as he withstood the punishment.

Afterward, the Brothers gave each of the boys a whip soaked in water to make it heavier, and ordered them to lash their backs over the area of the incisions — one side first, then the other. On a horn and drum, two of the Brothers played a funeral dirge, slow at first, then increasingly faster.

“Keep the beat! Keep the beat!” they ordered, so that the thrashings would accompany the banging of the drum. As the boys complied, the whips became soaked with blood, growing heavier, and tore at the skin, until Greg fell to the floor, unable to withstand it any longer.

Sleepy Joe, however, seemed transported. After a certain point he became something outside of himself, committed to the task of ripping open his back with an unusual vigor, or perhaps conviction, or a kind of brutality. And when the music began to slow down, indicating that he should do the same with the whip, he seemed not to hear it anymore, so lost in the savagery of this self-flagellation that he paid no mind to one of the Illuminated Brothers who was ordering him to stop immediately.

“The child was in such a frenzy, whipping himself like that!” Wendy Mellons recalls.

Meanwhile, the others were standing there, not knowing what to do — Illuminated and Penitents equally frozen, seeing how the little demon had made the situation his own, beating the shit out of his back, assuming a dominant role, so enraptured that not even his own brother dared stop him, fearing he’d get a lashing if he crossed the perimeter of the whip, which snapped and hissed like a mad serpent.

A week later, each of the boys was given a small stone wrapped in a tightly bound handkerchief, with directions to open it in private. If the stone had a white cross painted on its face it would mean he was admitted. If there was no cross, it was a categorical rejection and there would be no second chance. Greg wasn’t surprised when he untied his handkerchief and found that there was no cross on his stone. He had been expecting this and deep down he was relieved.

Sleepy Joe had been acting strange all that week, reclusive, not eating, and not allowing anyone to change the bandages on his back or tend to the wounds, not even his older brother, whom he cut off when he tried to talk to him about what had happened in that place. Even between them, the episode was never mentioned again, as if it had never happened. With his stone still bound and held tightly in his hand, Sleepy Joe climbed a steep hill to a point named Eye of the Horse. He moved with the resolute step of someone who understood that from that point on he had an obligation, something to live for, a mission to accomplish: he’d be the most devout and selfless of the Penitent Brothers of the Sangre de Cristo. He didn’t undo his handkerchief until he had reached the top, when night had begun to fall. He was puzzled not to see a cross on the stone, and anxiously scrutinized it one side and the other, convinced that there had to be one somewhere. Perhaps it was a very small cross that he had missed, or maybe the excitement of the moment or the meager twilight was preventing him from making it out. But no. There was no cross on his stone either.

Thirty years later, in a hardwood forest in the heart of the Catskills Mountains in southern New York State, a man named John Eagles, a dog-food deliveryman, was murdered, his face torn off and exhibited in what seemed to be a ritual crime. The person who discovered the body was the young Cleve Rose, a neighbor who was the author of a serial graphic novel, The Suicide Poet and His Girlfriend Dorita , and the teacher of a writing workshop for the inmates of Manninpox State Prison. Cleve was riding his motorcycle home when he discovered Mr. Eagles’s pickup on the side of the road in the middle of the forest. He stopped to investigate and noticed a red cloth attached to what he at first took for a mask. After several moments he realized that the awful visage, with its vacant eyes and hair matted with blood, might well have belonged to a human being. And if it was Mr. Eagles’s pickup, perhaps the face was his as well.

“Cleve told me that he felt so sick at that point that he puked in the ditch,” says Ian Rose, Cleve’s father, a hydraulic engineer specializing in irrigation systems, the owner of a house not far from the scene of the crime. “Afterward, when he had composed himself and dared to look directly at the hideous mask, he thought that despite everything it still bore a resemblance to poor Mr. Eagles. It was the Halloween version of Eagles’s face, Cleve told me, or the apocalyptic zombie version. That’s exactly what he said. I remember perfectly. My son wrote graphic novels, and if you ask me, the Suicide Poet series is very clever and entertaining, but of course I’m biased. I was the number one fan of almost everything my son did, almost everything, I say, not all: certain things made my hair stand on end. But, in general, I was very proud of him that he dared to go far where I had always fallen short. Without a doubt, his graphic novels were very good, a bit gory, sure, full of stories of the walking dead and such things, you know. But the day he found Eagles in such a state, he was very affected. And so was I. I felt that it was an omen, a kind of warning. In the end, that was what the murderer had intended with the staging of such a scene: to warn us. Forecasting a horror that began that day and has yet to end.

“Cleve called the police, and some hours later they identified the body they had found a few steps away in the brush, and confirmed that it was Mr. Eagles. He was a good man, I can assure you, with no enemies to speak of. That’s what the widow said when they questioned her: Eagles did not have any enemies, and she didn’t know of anyone who would want to exact vengeance in such a savage manner. He was on his way back from my house, where he had dropped off a pair of packages from Eukanuba that I had asked him to bring over when I spoke to him on the phone the day before. Although he was a strong man, they said he didn’t seem to have put up a fight against his murderer, or murderers. He was alone when he came to my house. Emperatriz, the woman who helps me around the house, assured the police that she had seen no one else inside the pickup when he got out to give her the packages. Apparently, on the way back, Eagles had stopped, possibly to pick up the murderer, who perhaps had been hitchhiking. There is no other way to explain how the person, or persons, got inside the truck. People around here are not suspicious, you know, there’s no reason to be. If Eagles saw someone on the side of the road, he’d simply pick him up and give him a ride at least to the highway. That’s not unusual around here. Once inside the pickup, the murderer garroted him from behind so that Eagles could not defend himself, and then he did what he did, that horrifying stuff with the face.”