“Not my classes, my son’s, Cleve. I am Ian Rose.”
“Yes, of course, you’re not him, his father. I understand, and I’m very sorry. Please accept my full condolences. And the thing is that María Paz had written all the stuff in the manuscript to give to your son, who was her writing professor, but since she wasn’t ever going to see him again, she gave me the papers in an envelope asking me to send them to your son.”
“How long ago was this that she gave you the papers?”
“Oh, heavens, a few months ago, definitely a while, I’m not exactly sure how long… She urged me to get it to him as soon as possible. But you know, I had my doubts about passing off packages from a convict, because who knows what you’re getting into. Besides, what a filthy, dirty mouth that girl has, cursing on every page; she should be ashamed of herself. Fortunately, I overcame all that and finally did as she asked. I spent a good chunk of change on stamps, but what was really important about it from my end was my decision to send it in spite of everything. I hope she remembers me when money starts pouring in from the book.”
“Well,” Rose said, trying to correct her misconception, “it hasn’t been published yet, ma’am. I’m going to keep on trying, I know my son would have liked that, and of course she would too, but I still haven’t been able to do anything. I think that…”
“There’s no hurry, Mr. Rose. If it’s in your hands, things are as they should be. I sense you have a knack for these things,” Socorro said, winking. “My neighbor Odile has read every book in the world, probably your son’s also. I haven’t yet; I’m not a book person. But now that I have had the honor of meeting the father of the man in question, I’m definitely going to read them. I’m going to tell Odile to lend them to me. She probably has them because she buys every book, and as she herself says, if I haven’t read it, it hasn’t been written. And when you come back to this place you should consider your home, I’ll have them here for you so you can sign them. It doesn’t matter that you’re not the author, but the father of the author, which is also very important.”
“Cleve didn’t write books, ma’am, they’re graphic novels,” Rose said, but he went unheard.
“Oh, how exciting,” she continued. “I can imagine María Paz recovered from all her troubles and legal problems and signing books like a star. I’d see her picture under a headline that says, ‘From Convict to Successful Author.’ Too bad Bolivia isn’t here to see the triumph of her daughter. Who would have imagined it by looking at her, a writer, she who always seemed so lost?”
It was impossible to shut the woman up. Rose had thought of passing by her house for ten or fifteen minutes, just long enough to get a sense of Cleve’s activities before his death. But this pass-by on Staten Island threatened to go long, an eternal visit, because there was no holding back the tongue of this woman once let loose. And there was Rose, bound hands and feet, although even before he had been asked to come inside he had regretted making the visit. He began to feel ill. He felt as uneasy there as he had in Pro Bono’s office, even becoming nauseated, as if suddenly particles from the old landfill had gone down his throat. What the hell am I doing here, he asked himself, when all I want is to be home with the dogs? Then he answered his own question: I’m doing this for Cleve, or rather for me, to find out what happened to Cleve.
“Bolivia and I liked to watch as the waves took our Peruvian lilies and swallowed them,” Socorro continued. “They were simple flowers, nothing more. But the important part was the gesture, our way of expressing gratitude for being in this country.”
While she chattered away, Rose asked himself how old this woman could be. Sixty? A well-preserved seventy? She made him sit in one of the couches in the tiny living room, upholstered in white jacquard and covered in see-through vinyl, and explained with tears in her eyes that Bolivia had been the most industrious and motivated woman you could imagine, and that she had not deserved the fate that befell both her daughters, both of them so pretty, the image and likeness of her, the mother. Then she sang something softly in Spanish, taking both of Rose’s hands in her tiny cold ones with long red nails, because as Rose knew, Latinos like to touch, they touch other people, even those they don’t know, they hug them, they kiss them, because they’re not afraid of a stranger’s flesh. Socorro finally let go of his hands after a while, but Rose thought it excessive, because although he admired that nice custom of touching, he never really practiced it — let’s just say that he wasn’t a militant member of the group Free Hugs, those loving young men and women giving out hugs and human warmth on the streets to people who are not necessarily interested. And then Socorro asked him if he wanted a tinto, explaining that’s what they called coffee in her country, something he already knew.
“Bolivia’s two daughters, so beautiful and so unfortunate. The first one pursued by the law, the second one sick in the head,” Socorro said as she disappeared through the kitchen door to make the tinto, while Rose brought his hands to his nose to inhale the strong scent of the moisturizing cream that Socorro used on her hands.
He looked around, somewhat dazed by the countless pieces of porcelain, not one portion of a wall without a shelf and not one shelf that wasn’t packed with figurines, those nostalgic tributes to an unimaginable pastoral era: girls wearing wide-brimmed straw hats and holding geese in their arms; couples in love and gazing into each other’s eyes on park benches; tiny chocolate houses; barefoot shepherd boys, poor yet wholesome; shepherd girls, poor yet pretty, in wooden clogs. It was a strange sensation to be amid that porcelain world, but Rose grew accustomed to it, and before long he and his host were talking as if they had known each other for ages, two old women drinking tintico in their respective white jacquard chairs protected from grime by plastic.
“Parallel fates,” Socorro declared, “Bolivia’s and mine. But at the same time not so much, don’t believe it, Mr. Rose. More like crossed fates. You be the judge.”
Bolivia and Socorro had both been born in Colombia in the same town and in the same year. They went to the same grade school run by Salesian nuns and were friends from the very first. A bit later, Socorro’s family, which was better off, moved to the capital, and this left Bolivia trapped in her little provincial sinkhole. Socorro graduated from grade school and the family celebrated with a black-tie affair at the local social club.
“I had a silk shantung dress in the imperial style custom-made,” she said, “and my hair was put up in a loop bun, that was the style then, the loop bun, very big ones, and I complemented it with aquamarine earrings I was given for the occasion. By this point, Bolivia had decided to start working, you see, she had decided to forsake her studies before the third year of high school. She became a stylist, manicurist, and a beautician and was hired to work mornings at the D’Luxe Salon and during the afternoons as an assistant at a dress shop.”