Laura Restrepo - Hot Sur

“So I stopped at one, the first one along the way.”

“The Blue Oasis…” Rose said. “It was important for you to remember the name, no?”

“Precisely. Illicit things happen in hotel rooms, my friend. Nabokov had Humbert take Lolita to one that is called Enchanted Hunters. Room number? 342. Memorable. And where does Tennessee Williams’s Night of the Iguana take place? In the Costa Verde hotel.”

“What’s the hotel in that song by the Eagles?” Rose asked. “‘Hotel California’—‘this could be heaven or this could be hell.’ And in Leaving Las Vegas , Nicholas Cage locks himself up in a hotel room to drink himself to death. The Desert Song Motel. And this one is a softball for you, Mr. Attorney, in the bathroom of a certain hotel, a secretary is stabbed to death in Alfred Hitchcock’s—”

“The Bates Motel!”

“Exactly, the Bates Motel. Memory is funny that way; it remembers the Bates Motel but forgets the Blue Oasis…”

“I’m a married man, my friend.”

“I understand.”

“Although nothing worth concealing happened that night.”

“Except that you were in a motel room with a girl, a girl who was your client on top of everything.”

“I was with her and I wasn’t. I was with her, but not the way you’re thinking. I watched TV while she locked herself up in the bathroom. That’s it.”

“Where did you watch the TV from?”

“From the bed. It was a motel room.”

“Did she watch from the bed too?”

“Yeah, maybe, I don’t remember, maybe.”

“So you were both lying down on the bed at the same time?”

“Have you taken a good look at me? I could never really be lying down lying down. But maybe we were in the bed, maybe even under the blankets, and maybe I even held her.”

But still, Pro Bono kept his clothes on. He never takes them off in front of anyone, not even Gunnora, with whom he has been for forty-seven years. Truth be told, he never even sees himself naked anymore. As an old man, he avoids mirrors to avoid the disgust.

“So you want me to believe that you got into bed with your suit on, and your watch, and your fancy shoes.”

María Paz needed to talk, needed to be loved, needed to be listened to, to be told everything would be alright. She was delighted with the quality of the mattress. She opened and closed the curtains with the remote control, went barefoot on the plush carpet, stretched out on the king-size bed, kissed the clean sheets, hugged tight the fresh-smelling pillows. She told Pro Bono that in Manninpox she had to sleep with her arms as a pillow because, for months, they had failed to give her a pillow, and when she finally got one, it was so disgustingly greasy she preferred not to use it. Pro Bono wanted to take her for a good meal in the city, to celebrate those first hours of freedom with a fine bottle of champagne. But she said she was happy there, didn’t want to leave. Why should they go anywhere else with the rain outside, and it was so nice in there. “Please, sir, let’s just stay here.”

“I would wager that at just that moment you let her place her head on your shoulder,” Rose said.

“I don’t remember.”

“If you don’t remember that means that you did.”

“There was a rerun of one of her favorite shows on TV.”

“So she was the one who turned on the TV and not you.”

“That’s right, she was the one.”

“What did you watch? House? ”

“I don’t know. Some show about doctors.”

“ House. In her manuscript, she mentions how much she likes it. So she watched House and you passed your hand through her hair, which was wet, first because of that walk through the silver confetti and second because she had just washed it.”

“It was dry. She had used the hair dryer. If your next question is going to be if we had sex, the answer is no.”

“Yeah, Clinton said the same thing. ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman.’”

“Let’s not go so deep into the gutter. I may have a hump like Richard III, but I am not a villain. And besides, I have my pride; I don’t put myself in situations in which I will appear more grotesque than I already am. I’m telling you things exactly as they happened, Rose. This is a voluntary confession, right? I suddenly felt like telling someone these things I have told no one before. What would be the point of lying? There was never the slightest indication that either of us were interested in what you’re thinking about.”

Pro Bono couldn’t relax inside that room. He felt guilty, couldn’t stop thinking about his wife, was annoyed at the smell of floral air deodorizer, terrified by the possibility of this pretty girl asking him for any kind of thing in bed for which he was not ready. In any case, he couldn’t get comfortable, so he told María Paz about Balthazar, the French bistro where he wanted to take her. The truth was that his handicap was making him more self-conscious than it ever had before, and he needed to find a way out of the situation. He had always been a man who distinguished himself more at a dining table than in bed, more a gourmet than a Don Juan. The name of the restaurant reminded her of the Three Wise Men. “What do you eat there?” she asked. And he told her that his favorite dish was filet mignon au poivre. She: What’s that? He: A big hunk of meat grilled and covered in pepper butter. She: Very spicy? I’m not into spicy food. As he explained to her she could order anything she wanted, the commercials ended, and she again became hypnotized by the program. When it ended, she announced that she was starving and couldn’t wait for the peppered meat: Why don’t they order room service instead? By then, Pro Bono had grown a little more at ease and considered the harm in staying. Examining it closely, it was a once-in-a-lifetime moment; the occasion called for what she desired, this young, beautiful, charming girl who had just come from hell itself and was now happy. Why not keep her so, when it was so easy? The whole scene was infused with a delightful candor, and it was in fact raining buckets outside. Hell, why not? “Room service it is,” he told María Paz, “order whatever you want.” Soon enough a cart with a white tablecloth appeared at the door packed with everything María Paz ordered, double portions of everything: chicken soup, club sandwiches with fries, caprese salads, and apple pie with vanilla ice cream. Pro Bono suggested she order wine but she preferred ice-cold Coke, so they toasted to her freedom with Cokes.

“Conditional freedom,” she specified with her mouth full of food. According to Pro Bono, that’s basically what transpired in that hotel room. She ate and he watched her eat.

“As if I had taken her to Maxim’s in Paris,” he explained to Rose. “She wolfed down that whole thing, her portion and mine — I barely had a bite. Then she burrowed down under the covers like a mole in its lair, and she went into a deep, quiet sleep that could have lasted a day, a week. I don’t know if you understand, my friend Rose, but given the circumstances, that’s as close to that thing called happiness as you’re going to get.”

Given that no happiness is everlasting, Pro Bono had to return home, where, likely, alarms had begun to go off. He was after all a married man with a daughter; he was even a grandfather. He called his Gunnora. “Hello, dear, I’ve run into a little trouble trying to get this prisoner out, but I’m fine, just letting you know, I’ll tell you the whole story when I get back, you know how these things go sometimes.” Before dawn, he and María Paz were in the Lamborghini on the way to New York. She was ecstatic and so was he.

“Did you talk a lot on the way?” Rose asked.