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  From María Paz’s Manuscript

  America doesn’t really exist, Mr. Rose. America is only in the dreams of those of us who dream of America. I know that now, but it took me years to figure it out. And to tell you the truth, it wasn’t me who discovered it but Holly, you know, Holly Golightly, my heroine, from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, although I’m nothing like her, or maybe just because of this, because it was you who taught me that not even Holly was like Holly, because Holly was in fact Lula Mae. After arriving in Manhattan she became chic and sophisticated, came up with the idea of the little black dress, the sunglasses to hide the all-nighter, and the cigarette case, all that. But the truth was that she had been born in Tulip, the shittiest little town in Texas, where she was known as Lula Mae. So Holly was a hick like me, which I didn’t like so much when I found out, I couldn’t see admiring a girl who was so much like me. Of course, that’s according to the book that you made us read, Mr. Rose, not according to the movie. If you remember, I made quite a scene in class because I was so disappointed with the ending of the novel. I thought it was a trick. I had seen the movie with Audrey Hepburn at least eight times, and it has a happy ending, one in which you feel as if you’re on air, dreaming, and then you come along telling us this is not the original story, because Truman Capote had not wanted for Holly to marry at the end, but to leave. Go far from there and continue looking for America, not finding it anywhere. And you also said that in the movie Audrey Hepburn opened her eyes too wide, as if they weren’t big enough already.

  “But she’s very pretty.” I stood up for her.

  “Yes, but she doesn’t have to keep her eyes so wide open. She seems to want to convince us that she’s a bit dumb, and is quite good at it.”

  “Holly is more sad than she is dumb.”

  “The one in the book. The one in the movie is dumber than she’s sad. Capote didn’t like her. He thought she wasn’t anything like the Holly of his novel,” you said, and that’s as far we got in our talk because the bell rang and I had to return to my cell.

  But now I have to ask you a favor, don’t reveal my true identity. That is, if this thing I’m sending you is ever published. And I’m sorry if it seems presumptuous to imagine such things, but it’s your fault. You told us in class that the story of anyone’s life deserves to be told, and the protagonists of novels are common everyday people like us. That’s what you told us, and of course it sets things off in our heads, fills us with ideas. Illusions. Anyway, please don’t use my real name, or any other people’s, or places, nothing that could be used to identify me. Give me another name; do me that favor. Not for me, for my sister, who is the sensible one and gets upset when she hears things she’d rather not hear. After all, Holly has others call her Holly when her real name is Lula Mae, and if changing her name works for her, it works for me too. I don’t know if you remember my name, it has been a while, or maybe not so long, although it seems like years, as if a huge chunk of time has passed since then, you out there on one side and me in here on the other. You don’t know how much you are still with me, though. Here in Manninpox, memory is our only plaything. But it’s better if you have forgotten my real name, and whatever the case, it’s better if I don’t remind you. I’ll only say this, I was christened with the name of a country. Is that weird? It’s a Hispanic thing, you know, as the Americans say, naming people after countries, or animals, or virgins and saints. But you might understand, because although you are a gringo you weren’t spared, with that last name of a flower. So call me whatever you want, as long as it is still a country, or a city, like Roma or Filadelfia, or Samarcanda, say. The fact is that it is a tradition in our family. I don’t have to go any further than my great-grandmother, poor woman, who was named America María. But she revenged herself by christening her five children with names also pulled from an atlas: the oldest Germania María; then Argentina María; Libia María and Italia María, who were twins; and the youngest, a wretched woman who in time would become my grandmother, was to be called Africa María, a name that apparently sealed her destiny. The tradition continued with my mother, Bolivia María, and reached me. Not even my sister, who is younger, was saved. The boys were given real names, like everyone else, such as Carlos José, my uncle; Luis Antonio, my other uncle; Aurelito, my aunt Niza’s husband; my cousin Juan de Dios. But all us girls were saddled with geographic names, as if instead of a family we were a map. A whimsical tradition, from people who never traveled, all of them solid country folk, until my mother, Bolivia María, decided to take off. She was the first one to discover the world. The rest of them, forget it. It was so bad that my aunt Libia didn’t even know on what side of the planet the place she was named after was, and you should have seen how enraged she was when she found out that Libya was a Muslim country, and a communist one to boot. They’re lying, they just want to shock me, she said, making the sign of the cross. She was so Catholic she’d rather have been named Fátima, or Belén, or at least Roma, but not the pagan Roma of Nero, but the apostolic Roma of Peter. As you will have noted, Mr. Rose, all of us ended up with the middle name María so that the Virgin would protect us, as they said. A Hispanic thing, I’m telling you, saddling people with this trail of names, all so weird, or the same name repeated for each member of the family, or a combination of both, as was our lot. I know it’s a provincial thing, ridiculous. You don’t have to tell me. But for some reason I’d rather not abandon it, maybe because behind each María with a geographic name there has been a strong woman not to be messed with.

  If you want, call me Francia. Francia María. Although I don’t actually look much like a Francia, a bit too sophisticated for me since I am more at home washing and ironing. Not Paris either, don’t want to be Paris Hilton’s namesake, what a disaster of a girl with a hotel’s name. Maybe something tropical, such as Cuba or Caracas, something that’s not my real name but that resembles it. As far as my little sister, let’s do something else, let’s exempt her from the family tradition because she hates to travel, venturing into the unknown spooks her. She gets a little lost if she has to move, or even switch rooms, or change her place at the table. If you move her bed a few feet one way or the other, she gets pissed off and throws a tantrum. And she was precisely the one who my mother named for the country that was farthest away. Don’t ask me which one because I can’t tell you, but imagine the most mocked and constantly remade of nations. Sometimes I wonder if the name marked her destiny as it had for my grandmother Africa, or if it was in honor of the country that my little sister behaved so strangely. Name her after a flower; she likes them: flowers, stones, trees, anything that’s bound to the earth, anything that remains in its place and doesn’t move or go. Call her Violeta, an aloof and temperamental flower. That’s what she’s like, my little sister, shy but tough. They might seem like opposites, shy and tough, but they’re not. I think the name Violeta will fit her well because it is a sweet name, silent almost, and yet it is only an n away from violenta. And the fact is, my sister Violeta can be violent. She bites. I have her teeth marks in my arm, a scar from one of her bites. My mother, let’s just leave her with Bolivia. I always thought the name fit her well, because Bolivia is a hardy country without any airs, a survivor. And that’s my mother, a survivor. She has passed away, of course. But when she was alive, she dealt with life without breaking down or complaining, until the day she died.

  But let’s see what we have so far, like you used to say in class. My sister, Violeta; my mother, Bolivia; and that leaves me. You can call me . . . Canadá? No, too cold. No Holanda either, not for me; I don’t know any Dutch people. Siria? Too much trouble, with all that’s going on in the Middle East. Not California—too long, and it doesn’t go with María. What if you call me Paz? Or Paz María? Or better yet, María Paz. I like María Paz. La Paz, capital of Bolivia, daughter of my mother. In the novel you write I can be María Paz, named after a city in the clouds, sixteen thousand feet high. I like it because no one talks about La
Paz and no one goes there.

  You and I will not see each other again, Mr. Rose, so you won’t be able to record my testimony as you said you would once. It’s better this way, I don’t like tape recorders; the cassettes always remain and end up who knows where. Anyhow, I’m asking you to care well for these pages I’m sending you so they don’t end up in the wrong hands. It’s ironic that I’m writing you these things on rose-colored paper, but I couldn’t get white. I wanted a more formal kind of paper, not one for children, but this is what they gave me and I shouldn’t complain because at least they gave me something. Anyway, it would be best if you burn all this after you rewrite it, I mean, change it as you see fit, you’re the pro here. Burn the papers so there are no traces of my handwriting, which is like my signature. The truth is that I’ve been dreaming of telling you my story for a while, Mr. Rose, the whole thing, because you know parts of it already.

  I don’t know if you remember the day they took away our shelves. It was two shelves for each inmate, four inmates per cell. Small shelves twenty inches long and eight inches deep, that’s it; and yet, we were never as demoralized as the day they took them from us. They called it PRSS: the Policy for the Renovation and Strengthening of Security. They pulled out that highfalutin name any time they wanted to fuck with us. Can you imagine? Just to take away our shelves, where we placed whatever little belongings we had: family pictures, hand lotions, a change of clothes, a bundle of letters, a little radio, a pack of chips or crackers, the small things any inmate was allowed to have. They took off the shelves and left the walls bare, as if to remind us that this is not a fucking home for anyone, not even a shadow of a home, nothing but a hole where we were locked up. While they were doing this, they had forced us to stay away from our cells all day long. When they allowed us to return, we realized all the shelves were gone. All our things were thrown on the bunk beds. They had torn apart the walls, confiscated most of our stuff, and whatever was left was just scattered there covered with dust. Like garbage. They needed us to feel we were garbage, that what belonged to us was garbage because we were no longer human. They were human, we were scum; those were the rules of the game. The day after that, we had the writing workshop with you, Mr. Rose, but our spirits were dragging. No one was paying attention, although you were trying, coaxing us from the blackboard, but we weren’t listening. We were furious and defeated, our minds poisoned and miles away from there. Until you stopped the class and asked what was wrong. And as if you had opened a dam, we let loose, cursing our fate and grumbling about our shelves and all the knockdowns we suffered every day in this deathtrap called Manninpox prison.

  You said you were sorry about what had happened with such feeling that we knew you meant it. Then you said that you could offer us a consolation prize, a very simple one: language. Language! We looked up at you as we did sometimes, as if you were a child who says outrageous things, and you blushed on that scar right in the middle of your forehead, really something peculiar, that pallid scar shaped like a lightning bolt that sometimes comes alive flashing in rabid red, no doubt your oddest feature. And because your skin is so white, you can’t hide it, and blush often, like that time you tried to dig yourself out of the hole by saying that language made up the shelves where we put the things of our lives, so that our lives would make sense. You told us that we had to think seriously about everything that happened to us so that we could translate it, and place it there, in some order, within sight and reach, because language is the shelving and without language everything is a mess, confusing, tossed anywhere as if it were garbage. Those were your words.

  I’m not going to lie and tell you that your words put us at ease, Mr. Rose, on the contrary, my hairs stood on end each time you started preaching, when you reminded me of a priest, sorry to say. Who did you think you were with your lightning-bolt scar, your precious little nose, and yellow shirts? It angered us when you tried to tell us what we had to do to pretend you were on our side, because when it came down to it, neither you nor anyone else was on our side; the rest of the world was out there, and we were in here, alone with our solitude.

  On top of that, that day we were like lionesses because of the shelves. Real shelves made of concrete, that’s right, hard concrete, you know, twenty inches long and eight inches deep, and all you could come up with was your philosophy. But I’ve always remembered what you told us that day about the shelves of language, Mr. Rose. And that’s where the good part starts, and the bad part, because what you put on shelves is there to be seen but some things I’d rather not have seen. Nobody can imagine what I have gone through, and it’s best if they don’t imagine.

  I’m always hoping that someday I’ll see you again, Mr. Rose. Imagine running into you and telling you my story so that you can turn it into a novel. You know some of it already from the exercises I turned in for the creative-writing workshop. I like to dream that your novel about me becomes a bestseller and they make a movie from it that wins an Oscar. It’s not that I want to be famous. For what? If you want a famous Colombian you have Shakira; I, on the other hand, am inmate number 77601-012. That’s the hard truth. I’m also not after money, and it seems you are even less so—if you wanted to become a millionaire you wouldn’t be sticking your nose in these deathtraps. That’s why I’m telling you, if they pay you a fortune for my story, which could happen, Mr. Rose, donate to a foundation for the preservation of the white-tailed deer, which is a god to the Tarahumara Indians and is in danger of extinction. It was you who told us about that, remember? You almost made us cry with the melodrama about the white-tailed deer. By then I was beginning to like your class, really starting to get the hang of it. There were only two things that I enjoyed about Manninpox those days: your class and the TV show House M.D., which was also on Thursday. From two to four in the afternoon your class, and at seven, reruns of House M.D. on TV. I spent all week waiting for Thursday.

  The reason I’m writing you, Mr. Rose, is to unburden myself of everything I know, a confession of sorts that will bring me forgiveness and peace. I remember your first classes, when you had us do exercises so we would learn simple things, like how to tell a verb from a noun; and once you had us make a list of ten verbs that were important to us. We had to do it quickly, jotting down the first ones that came into our head, and among my ten, I wrote “phobia.” You said that you couldn’t accept it because phobia wasn’t a verb, but I defended my choice, I insisted it was a verb, in a way, because a phobia couldn’t exist if someone wasn’t there to feel it.

  “Fine”—you were polite—“let’s say it’s somewhat a verb, but only somewhat.”

  “No, Mr. Rose.” I laughed. “You don’t have to give it to me. I get how phobia is no verb.”

  The next class you made us do another list, this time adjectives, writing the definition on the board. One of mine was “phobiaized” and I wrote beside it “consumed by phobias.” You asked if to be phobiaized wasn’t the same as to feel a phobia. And I responded that a person like you might feel a phobia, but one like me is fucked and phobiaized. That means that fear has gotten inside you, never to be released; it means that a person and her fears have become the same thing.

  “Touché,” you said, and explained that it was a fencing term, touché, and it meant that I had won.

  But in the following class, you struck back; you weren’t going to fall behind in the competition we had started. You came out with this thing about a philosopher who was called Heidegger, and this Heidegger talked about the difference between fear and anxiety. He said that fear was a feeling about something or someone, let’s say a barking dog or a cop who could arrest us, while anxiety was a state of mind about everything and nothing in particular, simply about the fact that we were in this world.

  “According to that then,” you asked, “what do you feel here in Manninpox, fear or anxiety?”

  “Fear about what we face in here?” I was the first to pipe up, “and anxiety over what we’ve left out ther
e.”

  You smiled, and I knew we were beginning to hit it off, to understand each other. Sorry to be so blunt, but the whole thing seemed as if you were just flirting with me, with this is this, and that is that, and this Heidegger, and that my mother’s ass, and if this means that and that means this . . . I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong, but I think if we had met in a club instead of in a prison, we would have begun to get it on, like they say, or to “feel each other out,” which is the same thing; I got that expression from Marbel, a girl who just got here a little while ago. But maybe we better drop this, could be a slippery slope.

  I like thinking that everything I have gone through will be kept inside an envelope, and that they will put that envelope in the mail so that it flies where you are so that I remain clean and light, like a blank page, ready for whatever may come. Me on one end and on the other end, far away, in that tightly sealed envelope, my panic and fear and phobias and anxiety. That’s why in my dreams, I imagine how you will recount each chapter, each detail. I’d like to think of everything that has happened to me as a novel, and not life that’s been lived. As such, it is loaded with pain, but as a novel it is a great adventure. I asked for your address to send you this package. I’d have liked to have given it to you in person, but they took us away from you before I had a chance to. And, of course, they didn’t give me your address. Who the hell are we, the inmates, to be given personal information about normal people, what right do we have, why else would I want your address if not to extort money or threaten you? I told them that it was to send you the novel about my life, and they cracked up. A novel—you gotta be kidding—and life? What life did inmates have?

  “You, what do you tell everyone one in your . . . novel? You tell them how you get up at six, eat at seven, and take a shit at eight?” Jennings, the most sarcastic, rotten guard asked me.