“Hi, Empera,” I say to her back, and she almost has a heart attack she is so startled. “It’s a good thing to see you don’t nail dogs to the wall.”
“God Almighty, child, the things you say. Why would I do such an awful thing? Dogs stink to heaven, but they are God’s creatures also.”
“Okay, so tell me what you think about this, Empera, you who know so much about life… What’s going on inside the head of a man who nails a dog to the wall?”
“Nails a dog to the wall?”
“Yes.”
“Well, it’s an atrocity. The only thing a person like that has in his head is madness, and the best thing is to lock him up in an insane asylum. Nail a dog to the wall like they nailed Christ to the cross, that’s heresy. How can you nail such a dirty beast as if it were Lord Jesus? To die nailed is a privilege of the Almighty. That’s heresy, no doubt. As far as I see it, such a person does not believe in God.”
“Thank you, Empera! That’s exactly the kind of thing I was talking about,” I say, and I go back upstairs. “I need to see one thing.”
Suddenly, I have the urge to check this one book, and it has to be now, not when I get back, it has to be right now, even if my mother kills me for being late.
“So,” María Paz asks — she’s by the window, waiting for Hero’s funeral to begin—“not yet?”
“That’s next,” I say kissing her. “I have to jot down something first.”
I know exactly the location of all the books on my shelves, I could pick one out with my eyes closed, and especially if it is Borges, who I am always reading and rereading. But shit, it’s not where it is supposed to be, and immediately one party becomes suspect. I ask María Paz, and she pulls out the book from under the bed. It’s the second volume of the complete works of Borges, and it’s not difficult to find the passage I am looking for, all underlined as it is with my notes on the margin. Page 265. It’s Borges’s commentary on John Donne’s Biathanatos. I read the note I scribbled on the margin a few years ago: “Biathanatos, one of those improbable and cursed books that every so often cast its shadow over humanity, like the Apocalypse of the false John the Evangelist, or the Necronomicon that Lovecraft conceived but never wrote.”
According to Borges, the purpose of Biathanatos is to expose that the death of Christ was in fact a suicide. Therefore, the entire history of humanity, from Christ and to Christ, is nothing else but the staging of a spectacular and self-induced deicide, accepted by the Son and promoted by the Father, who created the earth and the seas as a setting for the torment of the cross on a stunning cosmic gallows. And if it’s true that Christ died a voluntary death, according to what Borges claims Donne says, and here is Borges’s quote: “This means that the elements and the worlds and the generations of men, and Egypt and Rome and Babylon and Judah were formed from the void to be destroyed. Maybe the iron was specifically created for the nails, the thorns for the crown, and the blood and water for the wound.” There it is; Old Man Borges gets it just right, as always, and before Borges, Donne. And this leads to the corollary, the cherry pie.
After this passage, all I have to do is turn the corner to get to Sleepy Joe. The result is surprising. More than surprising, dazzling. If Borges is right, and if John Donne was right before him, each one of those ritual crimes or imitations of crimes must mean a step toward the greater ritual for Sleepy Joe, the definitive one, the one that expresses the culmination of all his anxiety, the apotheosis liturgy he has been so insistently pursuing, his own immolation. His own homicide — that must be what he is ultimately searching for. “How nicely you throw people off, you bastard,” I would tell him, “how expertly you disguise yourself, a small barrio thug, aficionado of indoor tanning who goes around showing off your six-pack, but who is shaken by sublime tempests inside, you fuck. I’ve figured you out, you damned punk, now I know that your minicrimes are reaching for perfection. What you did with the broomstick to Corina, the postmortem cuts on your brother’s body, the martyrdom of little Hero, and who knows what other perversions I don’t know about… Go ahead, you asshole, keep on climbing that ladder, giddyap, many steps to go, move ahead, man, go for your highest level yet, put your soul into it, no stopping until you have made it, put more heart into it, almost there. Your last victim will be you.”
9. Interview with Ian Rose
“In the woods near the house, Buttons dug up a box with a medal and ash remains,” Rose tells me.
“Whose ashes were they?”
“Not a human’s but an animal’s: Hero, María Paz’s dog. Who knows why it had been awarded the medal, some heroic deeds in Alaska, apparently.”
Rose learned from Buttons who had killed that dog and how, and the pieces of the puzzle began to fall into place in Rose’s head. It was becoming evident he was involved in a horror story unleashed by a lunatic. Cleve had been murdered, and it had not been an isolated deed. Rose had to accept this. He couldn’t let the pain cloud his judgment. He had to do something, and do it on his own. “It’s too personal a matter,” he tells me, “not the police’s, not Pro Bono’s, not anyone’s but mine, my issue, because Cleve was my son and I owe him at least that.” Buttons had offered to help, but it just didn’t seem right to Rose, and he began to shake him off. When it came down to it, he didn’t know who any of these people really were — Pro Bono, his assistant — or what they really wanted. He trusted no one and saw ulterior motives everywhere.
The unearthed medal made one thing very clear: María Paz had been in the house at least once without Rose having known about it. It had been at some point between the death of the dog and Cleve’s death. She may still have been there, for all he knew. Rose began to look for her everywhere on his property. He became obsessed with her presence, which he sensed here and there as if she were a ghost. He checked the same places again and again, although it was evident that the trail had gone cold. But she had to have been there, God knows how long, and with Cleve’s blessing. Of course, it was too late to give him the third degree, and the dogs kept whatever they knew to themselves. María Paz needed another accomplice, someone who surely must have known she was there, because that someone had her antennae tuned to every nook and cranny of the house.
“Emperatriz, the cleaning lady,” I say to Rose.
“I knew Empera must have met María Paz. When I saw that medal, I became convinced that there was some connection there. It would have been impossible for María Paz to have been there, stayed there, and eaten there, without Empera knowing. It was different with me. I never wanted to meddle into Cleve’s affairs; the attic was liberated territory and I never went up there. Empera, however, has always been a little bit nosy. And I don’t have to tell you how things are among you Latinos; not to be offensive, but when you live in a foreign country you behave like a big clan, everyone is treated as part of the same group, you hug, kiss, and are instant blood relations the first time you meet. You establish a solidarity pact with anyone from the homeland, even if the homeland extends from the Rio Grande to Patagonia, correct me if I’m wrong. Empera must have known something about María Paz’s stay with us. Maybe a little bit, maybe a lot, and whatever she knew I had to coax it out of her. I had to be tactful, like I said, because I had no idea who was involved in the death of my son, directly or as an accomplice. It could have been anyone from María Paz to Empera. It was also possible that I was on the hit list, and not just me but my dogs as well. Remember this maniac killed people and dogs, so I couldn’t decide whether to leave the house for their safety or to remain in the house to deal with things head-on. Finally, I decided to stay. I felt as if I could handle anything except letting someone who had hurt my boy so badly escape.”