It wasn’t easy to go back. I was panicking — the shitass-scared one was me now. I swear, Mr. Rose, I felt like Lazarus come back to life still stinking of the dead. Confinement in prison is hard, but it’s harder to poke your nose back out into the real world. I soon realized how maddeningly difficult it was going to be to return to real life, which was not the same one I had left and which wasn’t really mine anymore. What had been mine had come to an end. That day I returned will always remained burned in my memory, me hugging Hero tight, both of us trembling, as if he knew what I knew or feared finding Greg there, both of us in the same state, not being able to confirm the rumors about Greg’s death really until that day. Everything that led up to that day had been so unreal, beginning with his death, a bit of news that I wasn’t sure whether to believe. There I was, back home, slowly climbing the stairs of my old building and recognizing the old smells that were different on each floor. A scorched smell on the first floor from the time the owner tried to burn down the place to collect insurance, cat piss on the second floor, pine-scented disinfectant on the third floor, and cigarette butts on the fourth floor. I went late on purpose that night to avoid running into anyone. I had no wish to run into the other tenants and have to deal with their questioning and accusatory looks. There she goes, the woman from the fifth floor, the one from that huge controversy, with the murder and the bursting down of doors, who was sent to prison and now is back. I didn’t want them to look at me with suspicion or, worse, pity. I didn’t want to be that person, the one from the tragedy. Truth was, I didn’t want to be any other person either; I didn’t want to be anyone. Ideally, I would have liked to have been invisible and gone into the old apartment like a ghost. Fortunately, not a soul was around that night, not even the silent boy who always sat in the stairway between the second and third floors, perhaps asleep already, or his family had moved, leaving the building desolate. And I was a ghost as well, and Hero half a ghost, returning home. Except not returning, just getting there; we weren’t really returning, returning to what, to whom, because there was nothing left of what we had once had, ruins perhaps, embers, ashes, a profound hurt in the chest and stabs of disillusion. Although actually, everything was the same, difficult to believe things had changed so little. The same light-colored floor tiles, handrails with chipped gray paint, the meager light from the few lightbulbs that weren’t burned out. I paused at the last landing on the stairs before reaching the fifth floor to look for the keys in my bag. I’m going into my turf. And what is there to greet me?
A humid cold that encircles my legs and gusts of air that flow in through the broken windows, and that’s when I realized I didn’t need my keys — for what? — considering all the locks had been burst open, and the door knocked against the doorjamb, letting the wind pass like through the door of a saloon. That’s what it was like. And inside? A hole, a real shithole, like they say here. No water, no electricity, no telephone, because of course they had been cut off, the furniture all destroyed, grime and stink everywhere. Because the locks had all been broken and there was no way to shut the door from inside, I was at the mercy of anyone who wanted to come in. Unbelievable, I thought, all those bars and locks in Manninpox so that I wouldn’t open any door, and now not even a miserable little dead bolt to lock my house. I’m telling you, that maktub writer likes his laughs. A little bit of a downer, the whole scene. Downer and then some, but what was I to do? I wasn’t going to sit there and start crying. I had come from the depths of hell and this was supposedly a new chapter. “On the stairway to heaven blind with tears,” another of Bolivia’s sayings for you. Make the best of it, I told myself, and I got to it. I found an extension cord, plugged it to one of the public outlets outside, and ran it into the apartment. It was freezing cold, with no heater or anything, but I knew that in the basement there was always a collection of useless and not-so-useless things, piles of stuff — you know how the gringos are, even poor gringos, who use their things for a year and then just toss them. I went to down to dig around in the pile and found a small heater that didn’t look in such bad shape, and just as I thought, the thing worked. Nothing outstanding that put out suffocating heat, but enough to survive, though only at night. During the day, I had to unplug the extension cord so the neighbors wouldn’t notice and complain. And for water? Well, I did it by the bucketful, like we used to do whenever we visited our family in the country as children. Whoever used the outhouse went down to the river and hauled up a bucketful of water for the latrine. That’s what I had to do now, but of course not from a river, I had to haul water up from the faucet downstairs. Don’t think that’s such an unusual thing around here. How many people make do without any money to pay for public utilities? You can pass by and everything seems copacetic, but just take a peek behind the façade to see what real poverty is. Guess what I did for food. Depended on the charity of soup kitchens: good hot soup, some fruit, often a bit overripe, and little cartons of milk… not bad compared to Manninpox. To sleep? Well, to sleep, Hero and I used a thin foam mattress I had found in the basement. We had to improvise in that area because the FBI bastards had disemboweled all the mattresses and furniture. Then the smell. That was the worse. Rotted food in and out of the fridge. There was no way to get rid of the stink, although I spent a whole day of scrubbing away with those steel pads and a whole bottle of Ajax, which I had to buy, because they had emptied the old ones on the floor, looking for cocaine probably. You have to understand, Mr. Rose, I don’t want to bitch, it would be a serious lack of appreciation, but I swear sometimes I even missed Manninpox. There at least we had electricity, and running water, and three meals a day assured. And if I start complaining about these days, how do I tell you about the days that followed, all that stuff that happened afterward that was much worse? One night, I got home late and put Hero on the floor — I took him with me everywhere, night and day, in a tattered old bag — and I searched for the extension cord to turn on the light. There were only a few days left till the trial, and I was hoping that everything would go smoothly and I would be able to reestablish my identity as a free individual, so I could go back to work for the cleaning supplies company, make some money, reactivate my credit card, pay the old bills to get heat and water and light again, fix up some of the furniture, and rid the place of grime and memories. Clean out, as they say, and learn to forget. I had been unexpectedly released and life was giving me a second chance. It wasn’t something you waste. If fate had forgiven me, I was going to have to learn to forgive myself. Maybe I could even get a loan to buy the apartment. Who knows, there had to be some program for ex-prisoners in such a great democratic country that helped with things like that. Of course, nobody came by this house anymore, not even the cops. It’s as if the place had been erased from the map. Not even the owner came around to collect the rent. Maybe he was dead or had just given up on this place, left it like all the other godforsaken places in this neighborhood. After “white flight,” it was we persons of color who stayed behind, or I should say persons of many colors. As I figured, all I would have to do was take possession of my apartment and get everything in order again. How difficult could it be to set up a place to lead a decent, independent human life? I would get in touch with my old work buddies, throw a dinner party, and I would tell them such strange stories about what had happened to me since they had last seen me, almost like I was telling them about an old movie, one of those that they showed on TV recently, but no one could remember the plot. Then after that, I would go get my sister, of course. That would be the true beginning of a new life. I would take Violeta out of the special school, thinking of the face she would make when I showed her I had fixed up the room on the roof, the one she had always liked, her refuge upstairs, and I would lead her by the hand to the bathroom I had fixed up just for her, with a Jacuzzi and everything.
You don’t have to bathe using the sink, I would tell her. I hoped Violeta would listen to me and not make a scene, Violeta who hated to shower and instead loved to clean herself in the sink on the roof, not caring about the cold or about parading around naked where everyone could see her, no matter that I got tired of telling her, you’re not a girl anymore, you’re a woman, a beautiful woman, and should act as such.