Maybe that’s why I never tell anyone I’m in prison, least of all Violeta. I don’t know. Or it could be out of shame. She never liked that I was with Greg, let alone Sleepy Joe. The farce of my marriage seemed ridiculous to her, and because she’s a sly one, few things get past her. It was as if she knew from the very beginning that all my dealings with the two Slovaks lacked substance, that it could only go from bad to worse and would end up just like it did. I damned Violeta by trying to be happy and she damned herself by not letting me. She’s a ruthless witness; the telenovela I was involved in did not win her over, as I supposed down deep it never really won me over either, and that’s why it bothered me so much to have her there at every minute, recording it all. It’s not that she said anything to me, or that she made demands or gave warnings, but she had her own annoying ways of letting me know. She knows just how to patiently exasperate a person to her limits. She began to pee in her bed every night, and wandered naked on the roof, and sat on the corner pulling out locks of hair. She couldn’t stand Sleepy Joe. I think she didn’t mind Greg, or at least she didn’t give him reason to quarrel, although it wasn’t all easy with him either. Greg was a cop, you know, a cop to the bone, with a very narrow notion of the law, even if covertly he did nothing but violate the very law that he upheld. But that’s another issue, the trafficking of arms, which I only came to find out about here, because believe me I knew nothing about it before. But I was telling you about something else. I was telling you that Greg’s disciplinary codes were strict, and he thought Violeta mocked them.
For example, he said to her, “Violeta, stop playing with that glass, you’re going to break it. Can’t you see you’re going to break it?”
“Yes,” she replied, continuing to do what she had been doing.
Greg took it as contempt, when it was simply the way Violeta naturally responded. As I said, she understood everything very literally; she could not sense subtlety or insinuation. The phone would ring and she would pick it up and someone would ask if Greg was there.
“Yes,” she’d respond and hang up.
“But why didn’t you get me, child?” he roared.
“Why didn’t you get me, child?” she repeated.
“But they asked if I was here!”
“Violeta said yes.”
One day, Violeta was trying to lace up some roller skates and could not do it.
“You’re drowning in a glass of water,” Greg said as he went to help her.
“Idiot,” Violeta said, striking him hard on the arm. “Violeta doesn’t fit inside a glass.”
Greg couldn’t understand that she wasn’t being offensive, just literal. Once, when Bolivia was still alive, she sent Violeta to the corner to buy cloves and cinnamon to make her the maizena my sister liked. Because that’s another drama. Violeta would only eat white food: rice, spaghetti, milk, egg whites, wheat bread, vanilla ice cream; she pukes if you try to give her anything else. That day, Bolivia wanted to make her the maizena, a cornstarch drink, which of course is also white, and that is poached in a bath of milk and water, with sugar and cloves and cinnamon.
“Go get me some clavos y canela,” she told Violeta and handed her some coins.
Violeta brought back the canela, the cinnamon, and for clavos, which is the word for both cloves and nails in Spanish, Violeta brought back a bag of steel nails. You understand? You ask her for a thing and she grasps it at the most literal level. And Greg, somewhat of a moron himself, could never comprehend that Violeta did not quite understand. And she didn’t help. If Greg got home tired, she was loud to the point of driving him crazy, or she got lost in the neighborhood and he had to go looking for her. Every day something. But like I said, Violeta’s major conflict wasn’t with Greg but with Sleepy Joe.
But it’s incredible, hard to figure out why she insisted on fucking specifically with someone like him who is so wicked. He is almost instinctually wired to do harm; he has a pressing need to commit wrongs, probably without even realizing it, a childish urge that makes him take pleasure in the pain of others as children sometimes do with creatures in that perverse manner. Except that Sleepy Joe is a child with an adult’s sense of perversity. Or I should say, an evil, nasty, bad adult. That’s what he’s like, or was like; I don’t know what has become of him. I haven’t been in contact with him from here. Perhaps the separation has helped me understand him better, to glimpse how his mechanisms functioned. That’s how things were, Mr. Rose, or at least that’s how I understand them now. All you had to was watch. Anything with a crack, Sleepy Joe pounced on to break, for the pure satisfaction of dragging it to that point, and because hurting others makes his balls tingle and his brain jingle. He had to hurt Hero because the poor thing was a cripple, had to make Violeta sick because she was already sick, had to rape Cori because she had already been raped. Sleepy Joe needed to avenge himself on them, crush them like insects, he a god and they insects beneath his feet. He remained strong and all-powerful; the problem was that he could only achieve this in comparison with the weak. He needed to break the chain at the weakest link, maybe so that he himself would not break, because in the end, he must truly be the weakest link. That’s how he was. Imagine a chicken with only one wing. But not a good chicken. But a mean son-of-a-bitch chicken, with a broken wing. I don’t know when he suffered his own harm, probably as a child, as is the case with most irreparable harm. He seemed like a wounded young man. And not just his spirit but also his body. You should have seen the number of scars on his back.