Laura Restrepo - Hot Sur

“Or maybe I was thinking a bit about my childhood, or Cleve’s,” he tells me. “You see how it goes, old rails bring back memories of childhood, even if we haven’t seen any as children or been on a train.”

The first sign that the spell was about to break was the fur standing on his dogs, who then pricked up their ears and began to act nervous, as if they smelled something in the air they couldn’t figure out. A bit later, they came upon signs that said, “No Trespassing, Violators Will Be Prosecuted,” and then powerful floodlights that cut into the shadows of the woods with stabs of light. Rose called back his dogs with a loud whistle, and when they abandoned the rails to take up the path again, they came upon a silent patrol car watching from a bend, its windows foggy. Five minutes later, he saw another patrol car, and farther on a third one. “Let’s get home! Home!” Rose yelled at his dogs, to quicken their pace and move away from that guarded zone.

They tried taking a shortcut that didn’t work and soon were lost for a good quarter of an hour until they came out to a paved road on which there was a squad of police cars. Officers on foot were blocking the way, and they were under the surveillance of a dozen cyborg-looking guards, dressed in black like Darth Vader but with Mausers instead of light sabers. Above the squad, a huge sign spread from one side of the road to the other, and on reading it, Rose felt a chill: “MANNINPOX STATE PRISON.”

Unwittingly, he had been walking toward the prison after spending years evading it, avoiding even the mention of it. It was as if a magnet had drawn him to its very doors, or as if that inmate’s manuscript had already begun to assert its spell.

Downhill from the police cars was a disparate collection of commercial enterprises, clearly geared to the visiting families of prisoners: a generic Best Value Inn, a greasy spoon that served Thai fusion cuisine, a Best Burger, a Mario’s Pizza, a Laundromat, and a faded beauty parlor called The Goddess that featured haircuts, depilation, and massages. A strange name, Rose thought, given that it was so close to hell on earth. There was, aside from this, a stand where photographs could be developed, advertised by a large picture washed out by the sun of a bride wearing yards and yards of tulle. Rose headed into the nearby gas station’s mini-mart, where something caught his attention.

Aside from the ice cream, soda, magazines, gum, snacks, greeting cards, phone cards, condoms, and other such commonplace items was a group of peculiar objects for sale. Handmade and overwrought, they seemed to come from an underworld that lacked any kind of aesthetic notion or practicality and were displayed separately in their own somewhat dusty cabinet, each one painfully useless. There were embossed leather Bible covers, carved wooden circles that were supposed to be mandalas, beaded medallions with the signs of peace and love, embroidered cell-phone covers, key chains with the signs of the zodiac, grocery bags made of woven polyester. The price tags identified them as craft pieces made by the inmates of Manninpox. Rose examined the objects carefully, one by one, a bit shaken by the fact that those things came from in there, emissaries from that hermetic world that had climbed over fences and walls to reach this side of reality. He was overcome with curiosity about whether any of those objects had been warmed by the hands of María Paz. One of the medallions perhaps? The mandala? Or one of the polyester bags? That blue one with white and red? Could she have made it? Maybe María Paz had soothed the anguish of her days behind bars keeping her hands busy with that series of knots that would calm her nerves and kill some time. That exact bag? It was a one-in-a-million chance, but Rose bought it, paying $8.50 plus tax. He can’t quite tell me why he bought that one and not something else; it could have been the Aquarius key chain, which was his astrological sign, or a cover for the cell phone he had never wanted to own. But he chose that bag to leave on top of Cleve’s bed.

“It sounds creepy when I say it this way,” he tells me, “but after the death of my son, everything had become some sort of sign for me. Or amulet, or whatever. It was as if everything had a hidden meaning that I was urged to discover. I clung to whatever it was, as long as it allowed me to get closer to Cleve. Do you know what I mean? I can’t quite explain it. In any case, I bought the bag to bring it to him. Of course, in the end I couldn’t quite bring it up to the attic — like I said, too creepy. I just put it away in my sock drawer. I guess I put it there because I started thinking what my son would have said if he saw me come in with such a thing. Are you crazy, Pa? And yeah, I was a bit crazy. More than a bit. After his death, what could you expect?”

From Cleve’s Notebook

The Colombian prisoner surprises me. She’s annoyingly intelligent, a mixture of common sense and street smarts that unnerves me. She’s determined to learn how to write, according to her, so she can tell the story of her life. I don’t know what crime she could have committed, and it’s difficult to see her in those terms. Of course, around here you don’t ask that; you don’t pry into why any of them are here. Sometimes they’ll volunteer the information; they get a longing to confess and just let loose. But others are very reserved. So it’s a matter of principle not to meddle; each inmate is simply paying an outstanding debt to justice, and aside from this, each is a human being. Not just innocent or guilty, but a human being, period. But the more I like this María Paz, the more the possibility that she’s a true criminal disturbs me, although it’s more a probability than a possibility. When it comes down to it, I met her in a prison, not in a damned convent. Of course, her crime, if she did commit a crime, could have had something to do with drugs. Colombia and cocaine, cocaine and Colombia, they practically go together. And that would certainly be an extenuating circumstance. Clearly a big capo, a cartel assassin, a corrupt DEA agent, or a banker who has laundered millions would be incompatible with my moral parameters, but a girl who gets three or four years in prison for bringing a few grams of cocaine into the country hidden in her bra? That’s a forgivable sin. Who am I to judge her? Me, who smoked all the dope in the world when I was a teenager, specifically the Santa Marta Gold that came, yes, from Colombia. I’m going to dismiss her for drug smuggling, me, who every once in a while does a few lines myself that I buy in Washington Square Park right under the arch and the noses of the police? But that’s if she indeed was caught smuggling. I don’t know. Maybe it wasn’t because of that, and her case is more serious. But damn, she’s so gorgeous, that morena has such a pretty face… I pretend, do my best to fake it; it would be gross to use my job to pick up an inmate; forget it, that would be a big mistake, a cosmic fuckup. I think no one’s yet noticed how much I like her, not even her, but who knows? They’re little fiends, her and her friends, their looks full of innuendos; and I feel that they want to devour me with their eyes during class. They’re dangerous seductresses, like Circe, all of them, young or old, skinny or fat, white or black. Me, a momma’s boy, and each of them, hundred-year-old totems. Homer described Circe’s dwelling place as a mansion of stone in the middle of a dense forest, a perfect description of Manninpox. I feel as if the Colombian inmate places a lot of hope in me and it pisses me off knowing I’m going to let her down, but there’s nothing I can do about that. I enjoy reading the exercises she does in class. I feel good sitting here alone in my attic, reading her stories; the crazy things she writes about help me endure the silence of these mountains. I’d like to tell her that she’s the powerful one, that I drink from her strength, that she’s the one who helps me, there from her cell, and not the other way around. Between the two of us, she’s the real survivor. Her stories are somewhat gloomy, but she gives them a human grace that illuminates them, and her Scheherazade voice carries me from night to night. So funny, I write “Scheherazade” and the autocorrect on my word processor changes it to “schemer.” I write “Scheherazade” once more and again “schemer” appears, in which case, I give up, the thing’s right: it is trying to call my attention to the ridiculousness of my choice of words. Let’s just say then that the Colombian girl has become my nocturnal schemer.