Cori never forgave me for not believing her, not supporting her, not telling her: You’re right, my friend. I’m with you, one hundred percent, I understand the horror you must have lived through that night, and it pains me as if it had happened to me. My brother-in-law is an asshole, garbage, a sad lump of dog shit. I’ll ask my husband to forbid him from ever entering our house again. Because that’s what Cori expected of me, and I knew it. But I had my own opinions on the matter. The truth was that I was fascinated by Sleepy Joe despite his weirdness and his rudeness. Worse yet, frequently I dreamed that we made love. And in those dreams what need was there for a broomstick? With what he was naturally endowed, the man performed extremely well.
What can I do? I’ll never get Cori back, but I do have to drag along with my own life. So I might as well make an effort with this writing thing, because telling you offers some relief and clears my mind, and you might as well know that these days it is my only support along with the Virgin of Agarradero. So I go on with my task, and listen to another story, something that I heard from a widow I interviewed, who lets out that she doesn’t wash her bedsheets because her husband, who had been dead for seven months, slept in them, and that at night she wants to reencounter his smell, his presence in the bed. Hearing this, I managed not to say anything; such drama needs to be infiltrated slowly, so I began asking tactfully: “How do you do it, señora? Aren’t the sheets a little bit filthy after so much time?” And she says that they aren’t, that they’re just as he left them, because she’s the one who washes herself every night before she goes to bed. Every night she washes every part of her body, even her hair, and puts on a fresh clean nightgown, so that she won’t have to wash the sheets. Isn’t that crazy? Cori was right that everyone draws their own line between the clean and the disgusting. You know what the Arabs think of someone like you or me who uses toilet paper? They wash themselves well after number two and they consider toilet paper a dirty Western habit. They may be right.
I’m wondering if you’ll be able to see me as character material after finding out all these ordinary things about my life. You introduced us to Lizzie from Pride and Prejudice and Poe’s Eleonora. These are protagonists; I’m just one other woman from the bunch, or worse than that, I’m merely 77601-012 in the last hole on earth. Well, I’m also one who has lived through a tremendous drama, but I’m not so sure that is enough to make a character in a book. I also wonder if someone at some point will be able to read about me with the same passion that I read about Christina, you know, from The Distant World. When I told you once how much that book had fascinated me, you grimaced and told me it was a young adult book, that is, of minor literary value. I responded that it was the first novel I had read and therefore of major value to me, incomparable, even. To this day, I still believe that I’d be content to simply be the protagonist of a minor little novel, someone like Christina. I’d like to tell Jordan Hess that I read his book in a trance, feeling great tension, as you would expect from a prisoner devouring a book in her cell, well, a prisoner who enjoys books, like me, because there are others who despise books, fear them even. In any case, I suspect a writer has no idea how close he can become with a reader. I think it would frighten the writer if he really knew. Because a book is not just a story and words, it is something physical that you possess. The Distant World of Christina was locked up in the cell with me, and lying on the bunk with me, and when they allowed us to go to the courtyard, it sat beside me in the sun. It absorbed my tears, was splattered with my drool and stained with my blood; that’s not a metaphor, it was literally stained with my blood, you’ll see why later. I often caressed the book. Jordan Hess would probably be upset to learn all this, and maybe you are also, because writers think of readers as ghosts. Shadows out there, far away, nameless, blurry, of whom they will never know anything about. A writer goes to a bookstore and asks, “How many copies of my books have sold?” And maybe the writer is told, “Two hundred and fifty thousand.” There it is, two hundred and fifty thousand readers. But that’s not how it is. Each reader is a person, and each person a knot of anxieties. While I read The Distant World of Christina, I put my nose to the pages to smell the paper, but also to try to smell him, Jordan Hess himself. I’d have liked to tell him how much I liked the book and protest that the ending wasn’t very convincing. This one too, I’m always dissatisfied with endings, I’m always expecting something more, a kind of revelation that never comes. When I finish a book, I feel a kind of unease, that there was something important there I missed, but not knowing quite what. It must be very difficult to finish a novel. I wonder how you will end mine, and I hope it’s nothing tragic. In any case, I’d rather it be a weak ending than a tragic one; I should just tell you once and for all.
One day you made me laugh in class and I always laugh again when I remember the episode. We had gone through several classes working on a story you had assigned and I just wanted to finish it, no matter what. But my story had too many characters and each of them had too many things happening to them, so there was no way.
“Read it, Mr. Rose,” I asked you, “and advise me on how to finish it.”
“I don’t know, María Paz, I really don’t know,” you said after you had read it. “This thing you’ve written is too tangled up.”
“Just dictate an ending to me,” I insisted, “because I can’t take it anymore.”
“Alright, I’m going to give the advice that my friend Xavier Velasco offers for such cases. You have a pencil? Then write: ‘And everyone died.’”
So I was telling you about how I wanted to complain to Jordan Hess. But how would I get in touch with him if I didn’t know him and didn’t have his phone number or e-mail address? When it came down to it, all I had were the words that he had written. No matter how many questions I asked him he was never going to respond, and that was as disappointing as praying to God. The real miracle was you, Mr. Rose. A women’s state prison is the last place in the world you’d expect to find a writer. That’s why I’m giving you this story that I wrote for you. So you revise it if you like it, and publish it under your name if you think it’s good enough. Or at least that you read it, just that you have read it will make me happy. Pretend that it is one of the exercises that you assigned for class, just somewhat longer than usual.
And now, let me tell you a little bit about my sister, Violeta. Pretty and strange, given her appearance. Different. Sometimes unbearable and sometimes likeable, shy at times and at times wild. I was almost a teenager and she was a little girl when we were finally able to meet, or I should say meet again, on the plane to America. Five years before, my mother, Bolivia, had left for America to fulfill her dream and to make some money, because there wasn’t enough to support us. She wanted us to have a good life, that’s what she said, and the good life was only over there, in America. Or I should say here, but, back then, for us America was very distant and unreachable. Violeta was my only sister, she with one last name and me with another, but both of us with map names, like all the females in our family. It was on that plane that I began to know my sister. I had met her just a few hours before, at the airport, and she clutched her stuffed giraffe as if her life depended on it. But she didn’t want to hug me, not even to turn around and look at me, although her godmother told her, “Go on, say hi; it’s your sister, María Paz.” But she seemed to need nothing but that giraffe and wasn’t paying attention when I showed her the chain around my neck.