Laura Restrepo - Hot Sur

From Cleve’s Notebook

I hadn’t known anything else about María Paz since the workshop at Manninpox had ended. But I thought a lot about her, all the time, I should say. I was hooked to her pain, tangled to her hair, dreaming of her eyes, maddeningly wanting to touch her legs. Who knew if I would see her again, and the uncertainty was killing me. When I tried to visit her in prison, they told me she wasn’t there anymore. Her old friends couldn’t tell me anything about her because they had not heard from her. And then one morning, I’m on Facebook and I get a friend request. I always deny them, hating these intrusions from strangers. But this one said, “Juanita wants to be your friend.” I had no idea who this Juanita was, but it was a Latina name and I immediately thought that perhaps it might help if I became friends with her in relation to María Paz. Instinct? Premonition? Neither, really, more like desperate love. How many times had I answered the phone convinced it would be her, and nothing? How many times had I followed some woman down the street thinking it could be her, and nothing? And now another time, this friend request on Facebook, which I immediately thought could be connected to her. And it was. This time it was.

María Paz had been looking for me through her friend, this Juanita getting in touch. So we arranged to meet that afternoon in Central Park, and because I was coming from the Catskills, full of hope and very jittery, I almost killed myself on the way down trying to get there on time. The meet-up was somewhere she had proposed, near the statue of Alice in Wonderland, right in the heart of the park.

I can’t say that there was anything exciting about that first moment, anything romantic. Something wasn’t right, something had broken, and things were different than they had been in Manninpox. I had spent weeks going over in my mind each of those moments of shared complicity, those sudden bursts of excitement, those shocks of illicit attraction between us. But at the park, all that was gone. In the plain light of day, in an area reserved mostly for children, with her as free as I was, no guards watching us, no rules and regulations to follow, the magic had gone. We were a couple of strangers, she without a uniform, all made-up, her hair longer, a flashy pair of earrings. Perhaps prettier than before, I’m not sure, but definitely a lot thinner. And something strange about her, as if the fire of that raw beauty that made me so insanely attracted to her had suddenly gone out. Something missing, that’s how I would put it. She looked dazed, half-asleep. I felt as if I were looking at some creature that had just risen from the dead, some being from some other reality that hadn’t fully made it into ours. I tried to convince myself that the girl of my dreams and this stranger were the same person, but something faltered in me. I went to give her a hug, see if the physical contact would thaw things a bit, but she brusquely cut me off, and I felt horrible, mistaken, ridiculous, out of my element. Later, she told me of the sudden and miraculous turn of events that had led to her freedom, which I supposed had a lot to do with this new mood between us. This woman has just come back from the underworld, I told myself, so it was natural that our world would still be a little strange to her. And what had been her first impression of me? Couldn’t have been much better. I must have seemed just like any other guy, no longer donning the writing teacher mantle, instead wearing a threadbare leather vest and boots, which were white because I had bought them in a thrift store and that was the only color available, but which aside from being white were also bulky, as if they were made for an astronaut to walk on the moon, not to mention the ugly red mark on my forehead because my helmet was one size too small. Some motorcyclists take off their helmets, tidy up their hair, and look great in a matter of minutes. I am not one of them. When I take off my helmet, I look sopped and disoriented, like a plucked chicken. The first thing María Paz asked me was if I had received her manuscript. And I said I had no idea what she was talking about. What manuscript? A very long one, she told me, and it had taken her days and days to write it while she was still in Manninpox. She was horribly disappointed when she realized I didn’t even know about it. It was clear she had put everything she had into writing her story, and that the manuscript had been lost was like a blow to the gut, one more loss among so many others. I felt like an idiot consoling her, assuring her we could find it, could find out what that woman from Staten Island who was supposed to have sent it to me did with it.

“Why did you try to send it through that woman and not your lawyer?” I asked her, and she said that there had been rumors going around that everything was going to be confiscated and she had no choice but to hand it off to the first person who showed up to visit.

Be that as it may, things were tense there in the park. Maybe we had both been expecting too much, and when it came to it, things were just different. Maybe my expectations were just different from hers, but, whatever the cause, it was an anticlimactic scene. It seemed in fact as if the old connection was missing. The conversation was going in reverse, each exchange of words like giving birth, the kind of birth where you have to use forceps, and that was just on my part; I was doing all the heavy breathing and pushing and all the while she remained undaunted: silent and absent. There I was, putting on a show, playing ping-pong against myself. What a difference from those moments after class in the prison, the way we contained ourselves in front of the other inmates, the distress in front of the guards, the indirect communications between her and me, the little word games, disguised seduction, all that spilled energy, the sexual drive under extreme circumstances. All that illicit flirtation, that pseudo fucking right there in that jail, or at least that’s what it seemed to me, but now everything was flat, sadly antiorgasmic. We finally had a chance to tell each other everything we had kept suppressed before, but it was as if there wasn’t anything to say. María Paz was definitely acting strange. She seemed so dejected, so sad. I tried to change the mood with a rigorous interrogation: “When did you leave Manninpox? Have you been found innocent? Are you on some sort of parole? How have you been since then? Have you been able to get in touch with your sister?” Such basic questions seemed to puzzle her, or bore her, or something; in any case, she let them pass without even trying to respond. When I asked about her time in jail after the class was canceled, she responded with a gesture of indifference and said, “I told you about all that already in the manuscript that was lost. Everything was in there.

“Tomorrow is my trial,” she told me suddenly, and then a bulb came on inside my head: the eve of the trial, of course, that is the root of the problem, worst time possible for any kind of romantic connection. I told her that it was no wonder she seemed concerned.

“No, it has nothing to do with the trial,” she retorted.

“So, what is it then?”

“My writing, does that not matter to you? Do you know how many days I spent writing that? How many hours, with shitty pencils the size of a cigarette butt? Even in the dark, I wrote. Come on, Mr. Rose. I dreamed you were going to read all of it one day, kissing ass with the guards, to see if they could slip me any piece of paper, and now that all the shit is lost, all that work for nothing, and you’re telling me I shouldn’t be upset.”

“María Paz, I’m really sorry, me more than anyone, but don’t be like that with me, it’s not my fault.”

“It is your fault, who else’s? You were the one who put all these delusions into my head,” she responded, turning her back to me and pulling some papers out of her bag, which she tore into pieces and threw in a trash can.