Laura Restrepo: Hot Sur

Once, during one of those concerts, in the darkness of the audience, Ian kept his hands busy playing with the silver lining of a pack of cigarettes as he concentrated on the music, or more specifically on Edith. His hands moved on their own, folding the paper until they had created a tiny star. And as it happened, after the performance, Ian went into a bar near the auditorium and almost fell over backward when he saw the magnificent Edith come in. She was alone, her beautiful mane of hair in a ponytail. She had removed her makeup, making her fairness look even more spectral, and had exchanged her evening dress for a pair of jeans and a leather vest. Edith sat on a stool at the bar and ordered a dry martini. Ian, who still had the silver star in his pocket, chugged down a whiskey to work up the nerve, walked up, and handed it to her.

“Who are you?” she asked. And in a burst of showboating that she’d still chided him for years later, he responded: “I’m the star giver.” He blushed immediately afterward, hating himself for speaking like such a fool, and to make matters worse, Edith, from her superior position seated on the tall bar stool, regarded the insignificant object in her hands and said, her head tilting to one side, “Come on, now you’ve put me in a spot; now I don’t know where to toss this thing you’ve given me.”

So for Ian Rose it was a miracle that in the middle of that fiasco with the paper star, when he had wanted the earth to open up and swallow him, Edith had asked him to have a drink with her. And not only that, but she had agreed to go out with him the following week; and not just that she had gone out with him, but in less than a month, she had fallen in love with him. So when they married and swore eternal fidelity to each other, Rose was a hundred percent sure of what he was doing and committed to keeping his vows. During the honeymoon, he performed admirably from a sexual perspective, even Edith was well aware of this, and from then on he devoted himself, body and soul, to the role of a married man. He kept his commitment and passion the entire length of the nineteen years of his marriage. Every morning, his eyes still closed, he stretched out his arms to touch Edith’s body, happy to confirm that she was still there by his side. Because Rose was the kind of man who was born to be married, and married specifically to this wife and none other. Although Edith had long before stopped playing the cello, Rose felt that he was first Edith’s husband, and second everything else: Cleve’s father, hydraulic engineer, employee of the British company that had transferred him with his family to Colombia, where he got paid double the salary for working in a location classified as extremely dangerous. Not once during his worst sleepless nights, nor on occasions when they had to be apart because of travel, nor during their domestic squabbles, did it ever cross Rose’s mind that Edith could conceive of their relationship any differently than he did. For Rose it was evident that if he was before anything Edith’s husband, Edith was before anything his wife. That is why he failed to make any sense at all of that night in Bogotá when he came home from work. She had stayed in bed all day suffering from one of those colds she got so often in that cold rainy city, ten thousand feet up in the Andes Mountains.

“Did you get the cough syrup and Vicks VapoRub?” she asked him, but he had to admit he’d forgotten.

Around midnight, he was awakened by a noise. There was Edith, with her red sweater over her pajamas, coughing into tissues and admonishing him in a nasal voice that he wasn’t anything but a star giver — that was all he had ever been for her, a sad little star giver who had brought her to live in this horrendous place where she’d not remain one day longer. If he wanted to stay that was up to him; if he cared more about the company than his family, then so be it, but neither she nor the boy would stay one more day in this catastrophic place in which any day tragedy could befall them.

“You’re delirious from the fever. Calm down, Edith; get back in bed. You have a fever, and you can’t leave me just because I forgot the Vicks VapoRub.”

Rose had insisted, and even had looked for a twenty-four-hour pharmacy in the phone book and ordered cough syrup and cold tablets to be delivered. But she did not stop packing until she had filled four suitcases and two carry-ons.

The next day, he found himself taking her and the boy, who would have been ten then, to the airport. They said good-bye in front of the Avianca jet for what Ian Rose thought would be a few months while he finished out his contract commitment with the company before returning to Chicago to join them. But it turned out to be forever, because shortly after their parting, Edith had begun seeing an anthropologist named Ned and had gone with him and the boy to live in Sri Lanka.

“Sri Lanka, if you can believe it,” Rose tells me. “She left me because she felt unsafe in Colombia, and she moved to Sri Lanka…”

His initial reaction had been one of surprise and disbelief. To a large extent that had not changed. During those same years Edith and Cleve had lived with Ned in Sri Lanka while Rose moved into the house in the Catskills with the three dogs; during the summers Edith and Ned had brought him the boy and they too had spent their summer vacations at his house, with Rose’s approval. They’d all lived together amicably, Rose suppressing his jealousy or any sign that he wasn’t having a good time. As a token of gratitude for his hospitality, Edith and Ned had sent him a magnifying glass with an ebony handle from Sri Lanka, which he put atop his desk, where it remained as a testament that his marriage had in fact ended and there was no going back.

Rose had always believed that he’d be married to Edith until the day of his death, or her death. And yet, something happened at some point, he wasn’t exactly sure when, and things turned out differently. Rose had been thinking about Edith that morning when the package arrived in the mail, and he left it unopened in the attic.

He’d rarely gone up to the attic when Cleve was alive, because he wanted to respect the boy’s need for solitude. Although truth be told, Rose wasn’t even sure how alone his son had been up there; perhaps not that much, according to Empera, the Dominican who came to clean twice a week, who had tried to insinuate that Cleve shut himself up there with a girlfriend whom he didn’t want to introduce to his father. But Rose had stopped Empera midsentence.

“That’s the last thing I need to hear,” he had said. “Cleve’s private life is his business and no one else’s. In this house, no one meddles into the affairs of others, and you should follow suit.”

“It’s true, neither of you meddle into my private life,” Empera, not one to mince words, had responded. “Not out of respect, but because you couldn’t care less.”

“And she was right,” Rose tells me. “Empera knew everything about me, down to the color of my underwear, and yet I knew little or nothing about her, except that she was Dominican, that she didn’t have her papers, and that she’d entered the United States illegally not once or twice but seventeen times, basically any time she felt like it. I never had the heart to ask her how she had accomplished that feat worthy of The Guinness Book of World Records .”

After Cleve’s death, Rose began to suffer horribly, not knowing more about his son, not having been closer to him when he had been alive, not having supported him or met his lovers; eventually, he asked Empera about what he had not wanted to hear before.

“Tell me, Empera,” he asked her. “Did you get to meet that woman who, according to you, visited Cleve secretly?”

But Empera, who had learned her lesson, wasn’t about to let that door slam in her face twice.