“Teibolera after all,” Socorro moralized. “My husband says you don’t play with that. Breasts are like mean dogs, you only let them loose in the house at night.
“With the spray for the jeans, Bolivia misted herself on her face and back, and in the days when she was most suffocating, she even stood in a tub of cold water. She made herself at home in the little ironing room, the only place where she could feel fresh in the summer, and warm in the winter, while the others shivered in the hall without heat. And she had always liked ironing and had done it well since she was a child. Her grandmother America had taught her to moisten the cloth with starch, perfume it with lavender water, and go over it with one of those heavy irons filled with hot coals, because the grandmother insisted on using it even though someone had given her an electric one, and it was with that iron that she taught her granddaughter, who years later would use the skill to survive in that country of dreams, which happened to have the same name as her grandmother. So Bolivia, while she took care of the mountains of jeans in the tiny ironing room, remembered her grandmother and took pains that each pair of jeans came out perfect. ‘Look, abuela,’ she said aloud, ‘this one came out nice, only fifty more, abuela, and now forty.’ And the grandmother seemed to respond from the beyond, Way to go, mi niña, don’t fade, there’s only thirty now, twenty, ten, you’re almost done. Alone there, in that small and enclosed space, miraculously private, Bolivia could even afford to dream and think of her daughters, imagine a reunion, once and again and again, a thousand times envisioning each detail of the moment when they’d reunite and become a family anew.
“But I’m testing your patience, sir. These women’s things must bore you — starch, ironing, lavender water, sewing machine. How can you be interested in all that?”
“They’re important, it’s work, life. I’m not bored. It’s what a person does to survive. They’re not women’s things; they’re human things. Go on, Mrs. Salmon. How long did Bolivia work in that factory?”
“Until she died, señor, until she died. My poor friend, Bolivia. I hope she has been able to rest in peace.”
“One last thing. The most important thing. The main reason for this visit. Can you tell me where she is?”
“Of course, she’s buried in St. John’s Cemetery. If you want to go visit, I’ll go with you. It’s been a—”
“María Paz is dead?”
“Not María Paz! God forbid! Bolivia. Bolivia died a while ago, and she is buried in St. John’s, St. John’s Cemetery in Queens.”
“But María Paz is alive?”
“Yes, as far as I know.”
“Please tell me where I can find her. It’s very important for me, for reasons that are difficult to explain.”
“You want to talk to her about the book, right?”
“Not exactly, but if it were about the book, would you tell me where she is?”
“Oh, my dear, if I only knew… I really have no idea, I swear. Didn’t I tell you that the last time I saw her was when I visited her in prison?”
“Didn’t you say that the lawyer brought her here one day in a red sports car?”
“Mr. Rose, pardon me, but perhaps it’s best if you go. I don’t mean to offend you. If it were up to me, I’d love to continue our pleasant chat. But my husband is about to arrive, you know…”
On the return trip on the ferry from Staten Island, Rose went off on his own, away from the other passengers, his eyes fixed on the wide foamy wake the color of tar trailing the ferry. He had bought an extra-large bag of popcorn and was tossing it in the water piece by piece without eating a single one and when he was finished threw the bag as well and watched it get caught and swallowed by the whirlpool. That night, he stayed in the studio that his son had rented, a room with a bathroom, a closet, and a mini kitchen packed into an area of less than eighty square feet in a battered building on St. Mark’s Place. It had not been more than twelve hours since he had said good-bye to Socorro Arias de Salmon, or rather since she threw him out. The phone rang. It wasn’t yet dawn. Rose answered half-asleep, not knowing who the man’s voice could belong to at such an hour.
“Are you asleep?” the voice asked.
“Not anymore.”
“Forgive me, my friend, but this is urgent. We have to leave in one hour,” someone, whom Rose finally recognized, ordered. It was Pro Bono.
From Cleve’s Notebook
Paz has become a disturbing creature with two heads. A kind of bicephalous monster that I need to figure out, just to understand the tangle of feelings that she sets off in me. The Paz of the first head comes from a distant world that once, over there in Colombia, opened its doors for me, someone who I feel is a lot like me, my equal or even my superior, a hardy and tough woman who lives life with more intensity than I do, who is skillful at dealing with the other side of the tapestry, and at the same time more vulnerable and joyous, someone with whom I’d love to have the liberty to sit and talk for a few hours. Or go to the movies with and then to dinner. Or share a bed, that above all. Why not, what’s so strange about madly desiring a pretty girl, even if she’s your student, or is a prisoner and a delinquent? Of María Paz of the first head, I can say she’s dark-skinned and dark-haired without fear of offending, dark-complexioned and dark within because she’s impenetrable and because of that she’s disquieting. She’s someone who tears me away from my usual weariness of struggling against the obvious, what’s clear and pure and cryptic. My friend Alan, who lives in Prague, invited me to visit him. “Come quick,” he hastened to say in the letter, “before capitalism polishes off everything.” Maybe that’s what I’m searching for in Paz, someone who has not been polished off by capitalism. I want to touch her skin, which is different, feel her dark skin on my fair skin, confront the threats and promises of such contact, submit myself to the dreadful and almost sacred initiation it implies. Cross the threshold. The Song of Songs talks about the union with a woman as “dark and beautiful… as the tents of Qedar.” That’s how I see this first Paz, dark like the tents of Qedar, dark like Othello, whom Iago calls the Moor (from which comes morena). I once read in a sports magazine a quote by Boris Becker, the tennis player who is white as milk and married a black woman, in which he astonishingly confessed that he had not realized how dark his wife’s skin was till the morning after their first night of love when he saw her naked on the white sheets.
The matter of the second head is more complicated because it is rooted in old fears and prejudices from which I cannot honestly say I’m exempt. This Paz of the second head is the same as the other one but seen from a different perspective, and so there’s an abyss between us. She’s someone who comes from a distant and incomprehensible universe comprising impoverished, famished, violent lands that were never properly liberated. And she also belongs to another race, and there’s the key, someone with a sign on her forehead indicating her race, which is not the same as mine, and of a color different than mine. Someone whom I’d be afraid to take to bed because in private she might behave differently and would have other sexual customs, and perhaps would emit a strong and foreign odor. Someone who is nourished by things I don’t even dare put in my mouth. Someone with a pending debt to justice, capable of committing misdeeds I can’t even imagine. Another kind of human being altogether, like those who walk barefoot in the stone-paved streets of their towns in religious processions, who farm corn in tiny parcels to feed their countless children, who become guerrillas and are tortured by some military dictator. And if that were not enough, this María Paz of the second head has an intense gaze that goes right through me. Deep down for us folks with light-colored eyes, those black eyes can hold a wickedness, something perhaps beautiful but also wicked. Think of a trap; all you have to do is watch Penelope Cruz in a mascara commercial to understand that those types of eyes can hypnotize you then molest you, or at least steal your cell phone or wallet. You would think that someone with blue eyes like mine would think twice about trusting a child, or a credit card, to someone with eyes as dark as my Paz’s. Before I could think of her as a person, this second María Paz would be a foreigner, an extrañero, with all the implications of suspicion and neglect the word connotes, coming from the Latin extraneo, disinherited, and extraneus, external, from the outside, strange, unusual, something that is not familiar. She’s a foreigner, from the Latin foras, outside, from beyond, someone who has come a long way, someone who has come from far off, the exterior. Or forastera, from fouris, door, entrance, someone who remains on the other side of my closed door, who doesn’t cross my entrance. And forastera again, from the Latin foresta, forest, jungle, someone from the forest, a savage, a jungle beast, and as such a threat to the peace and security of my house and what is mine. Someone, in the end, who we keep in a prison like Manninpox, like thousands of other Latinos and Latinas and blacks, simply because they fit the type I have just described.