Laura Restrepo - Hot Sur

My husband had his things. Odd ticks of a cop, but a Catholic ex-cop. He belonged to an order of retired officers called the Most Holy Name of Jesus. He’d bring me there on the first Sunday of every month to take Holy Communion and then we’d have breakfast with his old coworkers, the Catholic cops. And I sat there quietly, listening to them talk about everything, but foremost about how to live your life so as to not offend the most holy name of Jesus. On top of that, three or four times a year we’d go to these nighttime ceremonies in which they’d give each other awards, for courage, devotion, or any other virtue. Greg would don his uniform on those occasions, which despite the alterations barely fit him. And I’d put my hair up in a bun and wear a long evening dress. The whole thing would end with a dance and fireworks. I looked like the daughter of even the youngest couple there, and Greg showed me off with pride. In the summer, we would meet with the same group for a commemorative picnic in one of the national parks, and that was about it. But these occasions were mandatory. My Greg would never skip out on the sacred host of those first Sundays, or the sandwiches in the national parks, or the cannellonis of the evening dances.

Why did he marry me and not a white girl? The first answer is the obvious one: I was young and pretty. And I doubt that a white girl who was young and pretty would ever want to marry the likes of him. But on top of that he thought that white girls were a bit too whorish. And he knew a thing or two about whores. He had been part of an anticrime unit in which he’d worked the streets undercover. This was the most unsupervised and fucked-up part of the police force, I’m telling you, but I’d have never said such a thing to Greg’s face. Greg was only rude to me once — he who was otherwise so gentle and delicate — only once, and for a very surprising reason. It must have been eight or nine at night, and I was stretched out on the sofa, watching a movie that I had just gotten at Blockbuster. He arrived home in a good mood, as always, asking me what I wanted to do with dinner, because, like I said, he was the only one who cooked. Everything was fine up to that point, but his face grew contorted when he saw the movie I was watching, one with Nick Nolte, playing a corrupt cop with his hair gelled and a thin mustache. Q & A it was called, remember? Nothing special, a convoluted plot I’d already lost track of and was just looking at the pictures, thinking about other things. Well, Greg dashed toward the TV to shut it off, pulled out the DVD, and went to return it to Blockbuster right away, screaming that he’d not allow this thing to be in his home one second longer. Which by the way wasn’t his home but mine. And all the furniture was mine, bought by me, beginning with the TV. The only thing that was his was the crucifix, which I could have done without. That little bloodied figure hanging from the cross wasn’t anything to get aroused about, if you know what I mean. And here you may ask yourself, Mr. Rose, why Greg didn’t have a house in spite of his police pension and salary as a security guard. But he did have one, a house with three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a studio, a garage, and a garden in a nearby town, where according to the plans we would go live in a couple of years. Not yet, we couldn’t leave the city yet, because there were no jobs in the town and it wasn’t enough with only the pension, especially because of the extremely expensive school that I paid for, for my sister Violeta, and because I didn’t want to stop working — I had made that quite clear to him. Anyway, that time with Q & A , Greg slammed the door on his way out and I was left confused. But then he came back and he was the same as ever, just Greg, with a pizza from Sbarro and a six-pack of Coors. While we were eating, he apologized and explained that he hated the morbidity of people who enjoy the stories of bad cops.

“They think a corrupt cop is something funny,” he said. “They like to play up cops who kill and get killed. They’re motherfuckers, those directors that line their pockets talking about spilled blood when they wouldn’t even know what it smells like.”

“What does it smell like?”

“It’s metallic. And sometimes it emits steam, because it still contains some of the heat of the life that has escaped the deceased’s body.”

But what I was telling you about, Mr. Rose, is that working for the anticrime unit made Greg value prostitutes. He told me they were his strongest allies, because they were the only ones who knew everything that was happening on the streets, the ones who knew the goings-on and snares of the underworld best. That’s why he valued them. But of course he’d not have wanted to fall into their clutches. Greg had too high a regard for the sacrament of marriage. He went the whole Catholic route with his first wife, and repeated the process with me. I guess he thought that because Latinas were so Catholic, we would be less likely to cheat on him. Something like that, or maybe he was affected by having grown up in a Latino neighborhood. Of course, with me he made a mistake, not because I cheated on him, although not from lack of wanting to.

Let me stop there, because I’m lying. I did cheat on Greg, Mr. Rose. I cheated on him in a bad way. Even though it hurts, I have to tell you the truth, because if I omit that fact, you’re not going to understand the mess that followed. I slept with my brother-in-law. And not once, but a thousand times. There you have it. It’s out. I’ve said it. Now you know why I doubted Corina’s story, that whole thing about the rape? Because I knew how the man handled himself when it came to sex, knew it by heart, and I didn’t have any complaints — just the opposite; that wasn’t a problem. But the whole situation was bad, sleeping with two brothers, terrible idea. And now you understand why I wanted Sleepy Joe and Cori to hit it off? I needed to rid myself of him, Mr. Rose. Get him off me, toss him from my bed forever, before the shit hit the fan. All this adultery mess was beginning to weigh on me. I lived terrified that my husband would catch us, and that was the least of it; the worst part was that the guilt was eating me alive. But I couldn’t do anything by myself, I went soft just seeing my good old brother-in-law, my will and my conviction vanished as soon as that boy walked through the doors of my house. I also didn’t dare tell anyone. The best thing I could come up with was to pawn off my lover on my friend, my best friend, as if asking her without saying anything, Cori, free me from this mess, you take him. But apparently that was a big mistake, a major screwup on my part, and as I should have known, it turned out bad for everyone. First, Corina comes with the rape story, the broomstick, all that horror. But how was I supposed to believe her when I knew Sleepy Joe’s sexual habits so well? Me and my brother-in-law. My brother-in-law and I. We were obviously not playing some kids’ game; it was full-fledged sex, hot stuff, twenty-one and older, full-frontal nudity, no-holds-barred pornography, whatever you want to call it, every position and transgression, anything you can imagine. But in spite of his tantrums and horrible temper, our sexual relations always remained within the bounds of human rights, so to speak, and whatever violence there was, it was consensual and moderate.

The blind date with Cori sent Sleepy Joe into a frenzy and let loose some lunacy that had been previously kept in check. Greg told me months later that this was exactly what they were talking about in Slovak at the restaurant. Joe was accusing his brother of disrespecting him, the insult, the indignity, and who knows what else. “What do you think I am?” he screamed at Greg, with me and Cori sitting right there having no idea what the quarrel was about. “What do you think I am? Your little whore?” he screamed at Greg. “You think you can just pawn me off on anyone? Huh? Tell me to my face, brother. Is that what you think of me?” He made quite a little scene. My poor Greg who had to put up with it. Fortunately, they were quarreling in Slovak; that left me and Cori with our gin and tonics out of the loop. It would be too late before I found that Joe had felt stung and humiliated by the whole episode. I imagine he didn’t feel it was right that I, his lover, would dispose of him by hawking him off on someone else. I’d have liked to have given Cori a heads-up about this, asked for forgiveness, talked about these things openly, confess my dirty little scheme. But she had already left for Chalatenango and hadn’t left an address. Maybe mistreating Cori was Sleepy Joe’s way of getting back at me, his revenge, which was much harsher than the offense, as could be expected from Sleepy Joe, who doesn’t believe in an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. If you knock out a single one of his teeth he will punch out all of yours and poke your eyes out with a pencil. But there’s still one more question. Why such an indirect way of letting me know that he was hurt? Pride probably, and probably because that’s just the way he is, Sleepy Joe, full of resentments and coded messages.