Laura Restrepo - Hot Sur

“What did he do to you that you get like this?” I asked several times, but she didn’t respond. She pretended to continue to eat but couldn’t even swallow one bite; it was obvious that she was not all there. I only had a view of the man’s back, and I noticed how he passed his hand through his ashy, dirty hair every once in a while; but then he turned as if wanting to catch my eyes. And I couldn’t avoid them, those eyes, inexpressive, fucking cold eyes devoid of feeling. At that moment, I realized that he was your typical neighborhood hoodlum, a good-for-nothing, but I sensed something very dark dwelled inside him. This poor devil could become the devil himself, I thought.

“What’s up with this horrible guy?” I began to ask María Paz, but she got up and dashed out of the diner before I could finish speaking.

She hurried up Madison Avenue with me trailing her, and pushed through the heavy glass door of an upscale boutique, running all the way to the back of the store like a soul possessed. In the shoe section, I finally caught up and grabbed her by the arm.

“Why is he following you?” I asked.

“Because he wants some money he thinks I have, but I don’t have it. Partly because of that, and partly because he loves me.”

We ran back to my bike and got on to try and lose this loser: a blurry sequence of turns and skids, me and María Paz going around in circles in the city, feeling this animal on our heels, disappearing into alleys and passageways to shake him off. Meanwhile, I was trying to get María Paz to explain things to me, to get me up to speed about this threat, this mystery. The realization hit me like a bucket of cold water, that unlike when we were behind walls of Manninpox, where I didn’t have to deal with the crimes she may have committed, here, in the real world, in the streets of New York, I was getting the whole package, the girl and the consequences, the girl and her past, the girl and her true story, the one that she had not wanted to tell me in the writing exercises I assigned for class — me insisting we should call the cops on Sleepy Joe, she insisting we could not.

“That son of a bitch is harassing you,” I said almost furious. “Why don’t you just fucking turn him in?”

She refused without offering any explanations, so I just tried to convince her to spend the night in my studio, where I knew I could take care of her. I told her I would sleep on the floor and she could have the bed so she could rest, that the following day I would make her breakfast. Then a nice hot shower that would leave her feeling like new, and I would take her on my bike to Bronx Criminal Division, escorting her safe and sound right up to the door of the courtroom. For some reason she refused. Unbelievable, just like a woman. According to what she told me, the only reason why she couldn’t stay with me that night was that she had clothes for the trial stashed away in some other place, and she wanted to look good. “We’ll get the clothes and then I’ll take you home with me.” I begged her, but she made the whole thing difficult, too much of a big deal, and there was no way to convince her.

“If everything goes well tomorrow, we’ll take off wherever we want to go,” she promised me, “but if things go the other way, well then, they go the other way.”

I knew that phrase was going to play in my head all night; I wasn’t going to be able to shut my eyes for fear of dreaming of the places I would take her if everything went well, the secret beaches, the cabins in the woods, Prague, Istanbul, Santorini, or Buenos Aires. But all those dreams would be overshadowed by the threat of this fucking shit Sleepy Joe. I would have to ask her for a few more details, tell her to paint me a more complete picture, so I wouldn’t have spent that most important morning in her life wandering around. Because she assured me she had a place to stay, I let her go against my wishes. The best I could do was to promise her that the following day I would be there in the first row, keeping her spirits up. I could not stop her from getting off my bike and running down the subway steps into the bowels of the city. She hadn’t given me a phone number or an address where I could reach her in case of an emergency. “What for?” she said. “We are going to see each other in a couple of hours at the trial.”

The following day, I arrived before there was anyone in the courtroom, all dressed up in suit and tie, and I sat in the first row like I had promised her. A pair of attendants came in to install microphones, move some chairs around, and do whatever else, their steps echoing in the empty chamber as they left.

María Paz was still not there. A little while later, other people started coming in, guards, a lawyer, a very peculiar old man who I imagined was her lawyer, everyone, except her. The minutes passed and she did not arrive, my nerves were a mess, everyone else was just looking at their watches. There was no sign of her. I chewed my nails to the nubs and no sign of her. It sounds unbelievable, but María Paz never came. For some reason she never showed up. Never showed up to her own trial, forcing the judge to declare her in contempt and issue an arrest warrant, setting the powers of the law after her. What the fuck had happened?

It was the strangest thing and I racked my brain trying to come up with reasons for such a disaster: 1) Sleepy Joe had found María Paz and killed her. 2) Sleepy Joe had found María Paz and kidnapped her. 3) María Paz was running from me and she went looking for Sleepy Joe because deep down she was still in love with him, and they decided to flee the country together. 4) Somebody else did not want María Paz to testify and offed her. 5) María Paz hit her head and came down with amnesia like in the movies. From the moment I left the courtroom, all those reasons kept turning in my head, driving me crazy.

I remembered the manuscript from the day before and I returned quickly to St. Mark’s, dashed into the studio, took out the pieces from the pocket of my leather jacket, cleaned them up as best as I could, spread them out on my desk and began to tape the pieces together like a jigsaw puzzle. A puzzle that was about life and death, and I almost couldn’t shuffle because my hands were trembling so hard. It was dark by the time I had something that I could halfway read. The story in that manuscript was alarming, like everything about that woman, but in the end, it shed no light on what would have led her to miss her trial.

There was nothing to do. I had run out of hope. María Paz had lost herself again in the world, and I had no other option but to wait, night and day, until I heard from Juanita on Facebook again or some other sign reached me. If that happened, then María Paz was still alive. In more optimistic moments, I imagined her as a fugitive, hidden in some hole looking for a way to contact me. Although it could be that by that point she could be in a bikini wandering the beaches of Puerto Vallarta, in the arms of the criminal Sleepy Joe. I was desperate, checking my e-mail and Facebook all the time, reading the papers to see if there was any news of her arrest or even her death. Anything was possible, and I was in a bad state, completely disconcerted, with absolutely no appetite, and consumed by anxiety.

I’m writing this in a hurry from the Catskills. This afternoon I have to leave for Chicago, and I want to write down the recent events, now that I have finally been able to reconstruct everything. I don’t want to let another day pass, so I don’t forget any of the details. What else can I do? It’s the dark part of this job. María Paz was going to be the heroine of my next series of graphic novels; the poetry before all, as Hölderlin said. In the end, the hand follows the heart. After our meeting in the park and running from Sleepy Joe, María Paz went to some place in Queens, to the home of her friend Juanita, an ex-coworker, who had the clothes that María needed to wear for the trial. Juanita caught her up on all the hot gossip from work, made sure she had a good night’s sleep and a full breakfast, helped her dress, and said good-bye to her at the door with a big hug. “Good luck, my dear,” she said. She didn’t go to the trial because she couldn’t miss work, but that night she waited for her at the Estrella Latina, the best place in town, where they were going to celebrate by partying all night long.