Laura Restrepo - Hot Sur

“What are you doing?” I shouted to her. “What are you tearing?”

“New chapters that I brought you. So what? Everything is fucked anyway.”

Quite the little scene she was putting on, right in the middle of the park, an unexpected tantrum by a spoiled brat and with the destruction of the manuscript in theatrical gestures à la Moses breaking the Tablets of the Law. If I had not been a writer or aspiring to be, I would have never understood the frustration of someone who had spilled her guts on these pages, and when I say on every page, I mean every paragraph, every line… and more so under such harsh conditions as she’d done because of what I had made her believe. So it felt like a violation when she was tearing up the pages, as if she were violating some part of her, and both of us remained still, shivering, and mourning.

It took a couple of minutes to react, but eventually I did. I moved to the garbage, and, like a Red Cross volunteer, I set off to rescue any of the surviving torn pieces of manuscript. Some had been smeared with organic yogurt, others with the remains of Turkish wraps, and the luckiest ones Van Leeuwen ice cream.

“Leave it alone, Mr. Rose,” she told me, “don’t.”

But that wasn’t going to stop me. I continued sifting through the garbage, which I was not disgusted with at all, until I had recovered most of the manuscript, and although all wrinkled and sticky, my girl’s chapters made it out of the sinking boat alive and ready for a little reconstructive surgery. I put the pieces in a plastic bag that I also found in the garbage and tucked the bag safely in a jacket pocket. I had hoped that after my heroic feat there would be some appreciation, or admiration, the kind of moment when Lois Lane finds out the geek Clark Kent is Superman. But that wasn’t the case. María Paz hardly reacted.

“Why would you bother?” was all she said to me, but I suspect that deep down the gesture had moved her.

After a while I asked, “Do you want me to go?” And she asked, “Where?”

“To your trial, María Paz. I want to go with you.” And she accepted, but accepted without much excitement, and so we remained there, acting like strangers. Me from a simple and calm world, she from one shaken by drama; me with a secure future, she with her fate hanging by a hair; me looking at her from between the ears of the White Rabbit, she sitting on the bronze mushroom beside the Mad Hatter; the two of us finding no way to break our deafness, or our muteness, because we had failed to articulate what we had wanted to say from the moment we met. In any case, I felt exhausted, defeated, convinced by that point that I had invented everything, that all that give-and-take at Manninpox had been unilateral, that any give had a corresponding take that was just a figment of my imagination. Standing there, it occurred to me to ask, “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” The riddle posed by the Mad Hatter in Carroll’s book. I guess I asked it because what else was there to say with us just standing there. María Paz knew how to respond: “I give it up. What is the answer?” she said. Exactly what Alice says. She must have read the book at least twice, because she knew exactly what I was talking about and kept to the script perfectly. “I haven’t the slightest idea,” I replied, just as the Mad Hatter did. Bingo! There was the magic, the connection, the key to the door that was closed until that moment.

Then finally we laughed, as if we had suddenly recognized each other. We hugged. Holy shit, what a hug, the great, long hug of two people who become one, using four arms to press in, to amass, until they find that they no longer want to let go. Her face buried in my chest, my face buried in her hair, a long-expected, long-awaited hug from eternity to forever. I mean, it was the hug of a lifetime. Things between us began to proceed as before, or much better than before; arguably, we moved the second stage of a narrative, which graphic novelists call “things go right” and that comes after “conflict begins” and before “things go wrong.” By now, we were starting to float in the bliss of “things go right,” and she told me she wanted to know something about my world because I had shared hers during my days at Manninpox, but she did not know anything about mine except what she had imagined from the few facts that I let seep in.

“We can do that later,” I said. “For now it is important you rest and get ready…”

“Perhaps there is no later,” she said. “I want to do it now.”

I asked her if she wanted to visit Dorita, and it upset her because she thought I meant my girlfriend. I explained that Dorita was not my girlfriend but the girlfriend of the suicide poet, and that she and the poet were the protagonists in my series of graphic novels. I suggested we visit the Forbidden Planet on Broadway, which sold manga and anime, retro and modern comics, pop-culture items, Japanese figures, and T-shirts and hoodies, and where both vendors and patrons were fans of my novels. I explained that Forbidden Planet was a heaven for nerds, a nostalgic corner that smelled of lost childhood, where children who were no longer children went to look for toys. It had been one of my places of worship and a great showcase for my Suicide Poet and His Girlfriend Dorita . She agreed to go but said she wanted to eat something first.

We went into the first diner on Madison Avenue that we passed and ordered spinach omelets and salad, and she began to recount, from beginning to end, the implausible events that led to her release from Manninpox and the multitude of things that had happened since. All of it was very emotional, and I thought she was going to break down and start weeping, but she didn’t: my girl was beyond tears. Though the trial was to take place the next day, we did not say anything, not a word, not mentioning it as if to not tempt fate. But, finally, the topic had to be addressed; it was unwise to continue avoiding it.

“The only thing that’s important now is the trial,” I said, very aware that it was not the best way to approach the issue. She remained firm and did not answer. Instead, she talked a lot about Sleepy Joe, her brother-in-law, and confessed that she had also been his lover. She harped so much on this guy, it made me feel lousy, because at the time, she seemed interested only in him. And what a story she told, a folksy and spooky version of the drama of Paolo and Francesca, the two kin who become lovers and dwell in Dante’s hell. The difference was those two had been killed by the husband, while in this story the husband was dead. According to the description María Paz offered of her brother-in-law, I saw him as a sexist, an abuser of women, an ultra-Catholic, an uneducated and violent man… an ordinary person. And then, I saw him for real. Speaking of the devil or its semblance. At first, I saw it in the eyes of María Paz, the flash of panic. She was facing the entrance to the diner, and I was on the other side of the table, facing the back of the room.

Suddenly she saw something, or someone, who appeared behind me, and the color drained from her face. I turned to look toward the door and saw this somewhat handsome thug with a hostile, sullen, pissed-off look on his face. He was white, muscular, and supple, but show-offy, cocky, wearing very tight jeans, the kind you have to put on using plastic bags, topped off with an ostentatious belt buckle that signaled he was ready to whip anyone. He avoided looking our way, though it was clear he saw us. He passed right by and sat at a table a few feet away with his back to us.

“That’s him,” María told me, grabbing her bag and getting ready to run out of there.

“Him?” I asked, although I had guessed already. “Who?”

“Him, Sleepy Joe,” she murmured his name as if it were an evil spell, and I, very nervous, was only able to respond that she should calm down. I suggested she should not let her fear show.