“It’s something that comes from our indigenous ancestors,” I told him.
“I see,” he said. “So it’s Aztec.”
“Well, not Aztec, not really, you have to go down in the map a little further, from Central America to South America, you understand. Because although it might sound strange to you, there are three Americas: North, Central, and South — not just North, which is yours. The Aztecs are from Mexico. We Colombians are Chibchas. Me, I’m Chibcha, not Aztec. It’s not the same.”
“But almost the same,” he said.
In any case, my stew was a failure. Greg barely tasted it, a few spoonfuls and that’s it because he was overcome by a case of the hiccups. And he said offensive things that I wasn’t really expecting, me who always played along when it came to his kapustnica, which I think is atrocious but would never have said so to his face. But he, on the other hand, was the type that just blurted out any insult right in front of you, and told me that my stew was a very primitive dish. What do you think, Mr. Rose, Greg the peasant calling my things primitive.
“It’s not primitive,” I corrected him. “It’s ancestral, which is different. So have some respect. I already explained to you that this is a soup that they have been making since before Columbus, that is, from the pre-Columbian cultures, which in many ways were more advanced than the Europeans.”
“Oh yeah,” he challenged me, “tell me a single thing in which you are more advanced than the Europeans, one thing, and it’s definitely not soup. In Europe, this thing that you prepared is something very poor peasants would eat in the winter when all other foods have run out and there are only potatoes left in the cellar.”
I could have argued that potatoes are originally from the Americas, that without the Americas, his peasants could not have eaten any potatoes, but I bit my tongue so as not to get him riled up. Although I could have also asked him if he thought his crude scraps of fermented cabbage were a feast for a king. But I stopped myself. The truth was that I always stopped myself so I wouldn’t provoke him. My Greg was a calm guy, almost lethargic, but when he got worked up, he’d let loose with the biggest threat. He used it often and without much thought, as if drawing a gun: he said he’d make them take away my green card, because it was only thanks to him that they had given it to me. That kind of blackmail intimidated me. I grew meek, lowered my head, and even allowed him to say that my Colombian stew was disgusting, because in the end that’s what he really meant, that it disgusted him. I tell you, Mr. Rose, Greg was a calm person, but there were things that set him off, and the topic of food was one of them. I don’t know why food makes us so sensitive. Perhaps because it’s what we have inside, in our guts, and also what we shit, that is, what runs through us from our mouths to our assholes, what goes inside the top hole and comes out the bottom hole, what we are, to put it plainly.
Don’t worry, Mr. Rose, don’t think I’m going off on tangents again because I’m taking my time telling you these things; on the contrary, it’s a way of getting directly to the matter you are probably waiting to hear, the reason I ended up in prison in the USA. You might think that the kapustnica has nothing to do with that, but it does. It has everything to do with it; it is almost the heart of the matter. I know that you don’t know why I was imprisoned, I know because during the first class you asked us our names and nothing else; you said that what we had done or failed to do was exclusively a matter between us and the law. That’s what you said, and added that it was none of your beeswax and that we didn’t have to explain anything to you. And I’m almost getting to the matter. We’re on the right track, but let me talk about Hero a little bit first, the dog that went with us everywhere; when we were not at home, he was at work with my husband. He was crippled like Christina of that novel. His hind legs ruined like her legs, because apparently he had been used to detect plastic explosives in Alaska, where there are still independence fighters who set off bombs. And the independence fighters blew off Hero’s hind legs, so because of the accident, he got around on a little cart that Greg himself built for him, careful to make it as light as possible and attach to him so that it wouldn’t scratch off his hair anywhere. Hero’s martyred parts fit snugly in the cart that he pulled with his front legs as if nothing, and I never saw a dog more agile, more full of joy, or more excited fetching a ball, even if we threw it a hundred times. All in all, he was a dog like any other, normal size, I imagine, before they turned him into half a dog, with a coat that was black and yellow with a little white near his snout, and we adored him. The Association for the Protection of Retired Police Dogs had decorated him for canine services to the homeland and turned him over for adoption to good-guy Greg, who kept the name the dog had had in Alaska, although I always thought that we should change it. I wasn’t convinced that our Hero had fought on the side of the good guys. I suspected that the fighters for Alaskan independence had some just claims, like the brothers of my Puerto Rican friend Alissette who fought for the cause of Puerto Rico Libre. And anyway, I preferred a name without so much history for Hero, such as Tim or Jack, or maybe Lucero, the name of the Navas’ toy poodle.
For twelve hours every day, from eight in the morning till eight at night, Greg and Hero were stationed at the entrance of the building where we worked, checking bags, asking for documentation, giving passes, always very cordial and easygoing, Greg and his little dog. The little dog and the cart. And I, who had worn myself out with some tormented and unpleasant love affairs earlier, told myself, María Paz, muchacha, it’s time to think about things a little differently. This Slovak is no Adonis, nor is he a real American, but it would be enough that he is as loyal as his dog. Who was Greg really? For me, always an enigma. A good cop? But how good, I never knew. He swore that he wasn’t a racist, but he was. He’d see a white woman with a black man and claim that she must be a prostitute. And if he saw a black man driving an expensive car, he said it was likely stolen.