“Why did you try to send it through that woman and not your lawyer?” I asked her, and she said that there had been rumors going around that everything was going to be confiscated and she had no choice but to hand it off to the first person who showed up to visit.
Be that as it may, things were tense there in the park. Maybe we had both been expecting too much, and when it came to it, things were just different. Maybe my expectations were just different from hers, but, whatever the cause, it was an anticlimactic scene. It seemed in fact as if the old connection was missing. The conversation was going in reverse, each exchange of words like giving birth, the kind of birth where you have to use forceps, and that was just on my part; I was doing all the heavy breathing and pushing and all the while she remained undaunted: silent and absent. There I was, putting on a show, playing ping-pong against myself. What a difference from those moments after class in the prison, the way we contained ourselves in front of the other inmates, the distress in front of the guards, the indirect communications between her and me, the little word games, disguised seduction, all that spilled energy, the sexual drive under extreme circumstances. All that illicit flirtation, that pseudo fucking right there in that jail, or at least that’s what it seemed to me, but now everything was flat, sadly antiorgasmic. We finally had a chance to tell each other everything we had kept suppressed before, but it was as if there wasn’t anything to say. María Paz was definitely acting strange. She seemed so dejected, so sad. I tried to change the mood with a rigorous interrogation: “When did you leave Manninpox? Have you been found innocent? Are you on some sort of parole? How have you been since then? Have you been able to get in touch with your sister?” Such basic questions seemed to puzzle her, or bore her, or something; in any case, she let them pass without even trying to respond. When I asked about her time in jail after the class was canceled, she responded with a gesture of indifference and said, “I told you about all that already in the manuscript that was lost. Everything was in there.
“Tomorrow is my trial,” she told me suddenly, and then a bulb came on inside my head: the eve of the trial, of course, that is the root of the problem, worst time possible for any kind of romantic connection. I told her that it was no wonder she seemed concerned.
“No, it has nothing to do with the trial,” she retorted.
“So, what is it then?”
“My writing, does that not matter to you? Do you know how many days I spent writing that? How many hours, with shitty pencils the size of a cigarette butt? Even in the dark, I wrote. Come on, Mr. Rose. I dreamed you were going to read all of it one day, kissing ass with the guards, to see if they could slip me any piece of paper, and now that all the shit is lost, all that work for nothing, and you’re telling me I shouldn’t be upset.”
“María Paz, I’m really sorry, me more than anyone, but don’t be like that with me, it’s not my fault.”
“It is your fault, who else’s? You were the one who put all these delusions into my head,” she responded, turning her back to me and pulling some papers out of her bag, which she tore into pieces and threw in a trash can.
“What are you doing?” I shouted to her. “What are you tearing?”
“New chapters that I brought you. So what? Everything is fucked anyway.”
Quite the little scene she was putting on, right in the middle of the park, an unexpected tantrum by a spoiled brat and with the destruction of the manuscript in theatrical gestures à la Moses breaking the Tablets of the Law. If I had not been a writer or aspiring to be, I would have never understood the frustration of someone who had spilled her guts on these pages, and when I say on every page, I mean every paragraph, every line… and more so under such harsh conditions as she’d done because of what I had made her believe. So it felt like a violation when she was tearing up the pages, as if she were violating some part of her, and both of us remained still, shivering, and mourning.
It took a couple of minutes to react, but eventually I did. I moved to the garbage, and, like a Red Cross volunteer, I set off to rescue any of the surviving torn pieces of manuscript. Some had been smeared with organic yogurt, others with the remains of Turkish wraps, and the luckiest ones Van Leeuwen ice cream.
“Leave it alone, Mr. Rose,” she told me, “don’t.”
But that wasn’t going to stop me. I continued sifting through the garbage, which I was not disgusted with at all, until I had recovered most of the manuscript, and although all wrinkled and sticky, my girl’s chapters made it out of the sinking boat alive and ready for a little reconstructive surgery. I put the pieces in a plastic bag that I also found in the garbage and tucked the bag safely in a jacket pocket. I had hoped that after my heroic feat there would be some appreciation, or admiration, the kind of moment when Lois Lane finds out the geek Clark Kent is Superman. But that wasn’t the case. María Paz hardly reacted.
“Why would you bother?” was all she said to me, but I suspect that deep down the gesture had moved her.
After a while I asked, “Do you want me to go?” And she asked, “Where?”