For now, I have no intention of letting this bubble of blind, deaf, exclusive, and self-sufficient happiness in which we both float burst. Because I’m on vacation, I don’t have to go anywhere. No one bothers us up in the attic and we are together twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, with the exception of a couple of nights a week when I go down to have dinner with my father so as not to arouse suspicion. I return to the attic with a healthy portion of the meal. María Paz is effusive and generous when we make love, but I have not been able to get her to sleep in my arms. After we make love she turns the other way and curls in upon herself like a seashell, and I have to make do with the unconditional affection of Skunko, who has begun to sleep draped across both of us, and I resign myself to simply watch her for hours. I am astonished by her tendrils of black hair invading the pillows, and her long eyelashes silky as spider legs. I linger my gaze on the curve of her shoulder, on the protruding ears that she hates so much, on the soft splendor of her skin, the light hairs on her nape, the lapping waves of her breath, the white cotton panties that she wears, bigger than any other girl I have known — prison maxi panties, to be truthful, or more like orphanage maxi panties, that are far from sexy but still manage to turn me on, like everything about her. Now, I understand more profoundly what Boris Becker meant when he said that he only fully realized how dark-skinned his wife was when he saw her naked body on white sheets for the first time.
We never dare ask what is going to happen when we are brought down by force to face reality. When I asked her how she survived after fleeing from Bronx Criminal Division, she said that it was thanks to kind folks. She told me about the Peruvians she met at the cookout and a rich bachelor from Park Slope who allowed her to use his penthouse. She also recounted times when she panicked, lonely nights, times when she escaped just by a hair, about dangerous corners in some neighborhoods, and about a friend’s betrayal. There were also the two sisters who sold tamales from home and hired her to knead corn flour.
“I had never eaten so many tamales,” she said.
“Why didn’t you leave the country?” I asked the obvious question.
“Because of Violeta, my sister, Violeta, I can’t abandon her. I will not leave until I can take her with me.”
I found all this out during our first few nights together in the attic, when she spoke nonstop until the early hours of the morning, weaving together the disconnected episodes of her epic. On a particularly chilly night, she recounted to me the events around her husband Greg’s death. She spoke at length and candidly, and somehow we got into the Gothic scene about her friend Corina and the broomstick. She mentioned that event, but as with others was somewhat oblique around the topic of Sleepy Joe’s participation in it, as if she wanted to lessen his guilt, so I had to remain alert and insist that she make certain things clearer, that she couldn’t invent things because I knew more about all of this than she thought. I told her that I had taped together the manuscript she had ripped to pieces in Central Park, and so that I knew well the horrific actions that Sleepy Joe was capable of, like the abusive interrogation he had submitted her to and the death of her dog. María Paz’s response was to stop the story cold, and since then she has not told me about anything else in her past, as if the instinct had dried up, or she preferred to forget the content of those sections. We talk to each other a lot, but always sidestepping certain issues and keeping the conversation at surface level. She is allowed to ask me about heaven and earth, but I can’t ask her anything.
I see her floating in a state of grace and innocence, a nymph in the woods, or maybe more like a lily, a fawn, an odalisque. Too many things have happened to her, very serious things in a short span of time, so it’s understandable that she doesn’t want to torment herself by unraveling the treacherous twists of fate. It is almost as if she has gone into hibernation to regain her strengths and get ready for what is to come. Truth is I don’t know, don’t want to know, don’t want to think about it either. But at the same time, I am terrified of what she still may be keeping from me.
While she sleeps beside me, I remain awake thinking about it all, as fucking insomniac as they come. I sense her sweet breath and soft snoring, and I ask myself who this woman is who is so full of darkness and secrets. One night recently, I tapped her on the shoulder because I needed to know the answer to one question right then.
“Have you been lying to me?” I said.
“You have to believe me, Mr. Rose,” she said half-asleep.
“Why? Tell me why I have to…”
“Because when people tell you things, you should believe them,” she said, and curled herself up tighter than before and fell back asleep. I couldn’t help but think about her twisted relationship with her brother-in-law/lover. I have compiled a list of character traits and habits for him, such as sleeping during the day, visiting brothels, his obsession with María Paz, his taste for spicy candy, the useless purchases from infomercials, and, above all, the performance of bloody rituals. I have read that while bloodless rituals are at core symbolic or figurative, the bloody ones necessitate the spilling of blood of a sacrificial victim. With the exception of bullfights in Hispanic cultures, or of such things as fight clubs and ultimate fighting tournaments, this kind of bloodletting as spectacle is rare in the West, because people are horrified and disgusted by blood and can only deal with it on the screen, where it doesn’t hurt, stain, or infect. The peculiar thing about Sleepy Joe is the leap backward, the primitive, brutal ritual. And so, little by little I have begun to understand a few things. The problem is that my investigation is typically amateurish, and in reality it just follows a method I found in a blog that I came upon by chance in serial form called Killing Me Softly. That’s why I thought it would be better to get a more qualified opinion, so one day I left María Paz alone in the attic to head to New York, supposedly to hand in a manuscript to Ming, my editor, but in truth to ask him about Sleepy Joe, whom he didn’t know and hadn’t even heard of. But he asked how he could possibly help in gathering the information I required.
The fact is Ming collects everything and is an expert in a thousand things, the more bizarre the better. He’s an expert, for example, on the many varieties of caviar, ancient African bridal gear, and a sumptuous and fierce species of warriors called betta fish. But of all his obsessions, the one that he devotes the most time to is noir comics. Along with being an editor of one of them, Ming owns an astonishing collection of volumes on the occult that he has found all over the world. And folks who are expert on this subject are expert on the subject of murderers.