Laura Restrepo - Hot Sur

“Drop dead of a heart attack already, you fat shit,” he screamed at him. “Do the world a favor and drop dead.”

Any class of persons with defects or problems drove him crazy and put him in an almost hyperventilating state. One time I went with him to get dinner at the Pizza To Go on the corner, and he called the cashier, a not-so-bright woman who did things at her own sweet pace, a damned bitch. That’s how he was, out of control. He felt a blind hatred for all beggars and thought that they needed to be wiped off the face of the earth. When he expressed these ideas, he grew very excited; I remember once he grew red in the face, and his body shook, recounting how the Spartans tossed crippled newborns off a cliff. Another case in point: Sleepy Joe couldn’t help but be glued to the TV screen when they broadcast the Special Olympics, but not because of any admiration for those athletes who made such great efforts, but because he wanted to grab them, shake them, and make them pay, as if they were guilty of something. He even professed that babies were abhorrent. But of course, it wasn’t always that way. There were days when he seemed normal, even charming, seductive, now and then telling some good jokes and proving generous in his gift giving, which he ordered by credit card during the TV promotions of It Has to Be Yours . And there were other days in which he seemed frenzied, bewildered, even beside himself. I don’t know, maybe I judged him too harshly, and maybe he was just a stunted adolescent, full of aggressions because of his many insecurities and fears. I don’t know. In any case, I had started to look at him in a different manner in regard to what had happened with my friend Cori, that episode with the broomstick. And I couldn’t forget the warning that she had given me right before she left: “Open your eyes, María Paz, open your eyes and be careful. That boy is sick. I know what I’m talking about.” That’s what Cori had told me, her last words before she left, and I hadn’t forgotten them. And when Sleepy Joy began with his string of foul language, I’d begin throwing cushions at him until he shut up. Or I’d leave him there alone and lock myself up in my room.

“Come back out with that pretty ass, come back out to Papi. It was a joke,” he screamed from the living room.

But I didn’t think it was funny. If Greg was there, Joe never dared to give Hero a Pica Limón, or look at me, or talk to me in that tone; in the end, he was terrified of his older brother. And there was a reason. If things got out of hand, Greg would have probably ended up on top. Sleepy Joe was nothing but smoke and mirrors, while Greg, in spite of his deterioration and the indignities of age, was still a formidable two-legged beast. I noticed that one Sunday in which they decided to bet on a game of tossing bracelets on the kitchen table. Greg won toss after toss rather effortlessly till he had accumulated twenty dollars and left his brother with a sore arm.

What were my brother-in-law’s favorite TV shows? None. As far as I could remember, he didn’t watch any shows regularly. No series, no reality shows, and definitely no news. Not even sports or pornography. It was on all night tuned to guess what, guess, I just mentioned it. Sleepy Joe’s passion was those shopping channels with shows such as It Has to Be Yours , which hawk all kinds of miraculous products and send them to wherever you may live — Asunción, Managua, Miami, you name it. There wasn’t a city on the continent that didn’t have a corresponding number to call on the screen. You just had to write it down really quickly, because in a blink of the eye they were already pushing something else. Sleepy Joe was hypnotized by the fat burner that would leave you slender as a sylph in two weeks, an ecological microwave that didn’t use electricity, the shaping girdle that took away what’s extra and put in what was missing, the stairs that transformed into a bed, the bed that transformed into a closet, and the facial lotion that gave you a lift so you could look fifteen again without surgery. Sometimes I sat with him, and I would start to say something about a product that interested me. Sleepy Joe would stop me and always bought it for me as a gift. He ordered it, paid for it by credit card, and less than a week later, it arrived. Most of their merchandise was for the home. One time he gave me a vacuum cleaner to get rid of the dog hair floating everywhere, and one December he ordered a Santa Claus with blinking lights that took up half the living room because it came complete with reindeer and sled.

“You know why Santa has so many reindeer?” he asked me. “Because he eats them. In the long winter nights, when the old man can’t find anything else to eat, he lights a fire and pit roasts one of his precious reindeer. The others, meanwhile, mourn their brother. And if the old man needs a woman and there are none in those wide spaces, he helps himself to one of his cheery reindeer. While the others look on and snicker slyly.”

I was intrigued by Sleepy Joe. He kind of scared me, but I was also half-fascinated by him. In any case, it was strange that a truck driver would have money to buy so many gifts, all the ones for him, sophisticated and expensive products to prevent baldness, such as castor oil, and Amazonian ointments, because the thing he was most frightened about in life was going bald. At some point, he became interested in my work, and asked me if he could take the multiple-choice survey so he could see what it was about.

“Which of the following smells bother you the most?” I began, and was going to read him the options when he cut me off.

“Do you want to know what stinks?” he said. “My life stinks, just like everyone else’s who live near the pier.”

I was shocked by his response.

It’s true we lived in a working-class neighborhood in one of the most dangerous areas in the city, and that we were swimming in garbage every time the sanitation workers went on strike. All that was true. But the apartment was my pride and joy, so I let Sleepy Joe’s response pass as if it had nothing to do with me. I scribbled his response in my notebook in the panels reserved for additional commentary. And as I went to move on to the second question, he said furiously that he wasn’t finished with his response to the first.

“It stinks not having money,” he said. “Money cleans everything, poverty is motherfucking filthy. People like you buy detergent, soap, lotions, thinking life will be better with them. Pure bullshit.”

“Look who’s talking,” I retorted. “You’re the one who is like that, hypnotized by television commercials, they show any little thing, and it is as if you had been given a way to acquire it.”

“We are sunk up to the tits in crap,” he said with the air of a fanatic and such fierceness in his eyes that I even got scared. “Everything is miserliness, scabs, grease, and drippings,” he added, signaling his surroundings with a circular gesture as if he were talking about the entire universe.

“Maybe the world is muck and debris,” I said, upset. “But do me a favor and tell me what’s dirty at all about this house, aside from the candy wrappers you throw on the floor instead of putting them in an ashtray, where they wouldn’t fit, of course, because all the ashtrays are overflowing with your butts.”

“Everything is disgusting,” he said. “Everywhere you look, filth. Go out on the street, grab a little stick, any stick, and dig a hole. Then get down on your knees, face to the dirt, ass in the air, and look through the hole. What do you see? You see an ocean of shit. This city, all cities, floats on a sea of our own shit. Every day we add to it. We send it from the toilet through the sewers. The system never fails. We wisely store our shit below like the banks store gold in their vaults. We have been storing shit for hundreds of years. Go ahead, finish washing dishes up here, tidy up your apartment, fall for lies, cleanse your skin with creams and lotions, use a lot of toilet paper every time you shit, and remain in control of your personal hygiene. But I’m going to repeat: all we have below us is shit. When a volcano erupts, do you know what spews out?”