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  I wasn’t with her, and did not behave my best under the circumstances. She had been thinking for a long time about returning; from the day I met her, she had dreamed of going back because she couldn’t stand being so far from away from her daughter, the thought of not seeing her grow, not being by her side to protect her in case of need. What happened that night pushed her to take action. And it was my fault. What happened that night. But I’ll tell you one thing, Mr. Rose. Cori didn’t deserve it. Nobody deserves things like that, least of all her. You’ll see. It’s not as if Cori had an explosive sex life. I imagine a lot of factors could have influenced what happened: the rape at such a young age, the lack of confidence in her body, a life dedicated to work, all of this combined to make her a rather demure girl, not a lot of parties, drank very little, no sex. Greg, my husband, liked her; he, who watched over even my female friends, was always glad to see Cori because she knew how to talk to him. She asked him about his time as a policeman, talked to him about politics, Vietnam, and Korea. Like I said, Cori was bright and well informed. One day, I decided to introduce her to Sleepy Joe, my brother-in-law, Greg’s younger brother. She was single and so was he, although you never could tell with him, his civil status has always been uncertain and fluid. But at that time he wasn’t seeing anyone on a steady basis, at least not publicly. So I had the brilliant idea to introduce them and I began to devise a plan to bring them together. Greg had no opinion either way; it was all the same to him, although he did warn me that these things don’t usually work. “He’s a peach,” I told Cori about Sleepy Joe, and told Joe the same thing about Cori. And I wasn’t lying, at least about Joe I wasn’t lying, damn, if that boy wasn’t fine, a tasty papi by any measure. A white boy, but yummy, looked like Viggo Mortensen, one of those who arrived from the poor side of Europe, a country named Slovakia, where his parents were from, although he had been born in Colorado, just like my Greg. That’s the picture I painted for Cori when I proposed the blind date, but she didn’t know who Viggo Mortensen was, had never seen one of his films or heard of Slovakia. We would go to the movies at four, Greg and me, her and Joe.

  I had my reasons for setting up Joe with someone, and they were pretty important reasons. Maybe later on, I’ll explain. For now, Mr. Rose, be content in knowing this: it’s not easy to have a brother-in-law like that, especially if your husband is thirty years older than you. Cori was very hesitant about the whole thing; first she’d say yes, then no, then this, then that, making one excuse after another, but I’d spur her on and slowly she began to get excited about the whole thing. Because she was always so disheveled, I took her to the beauty parlor to get highlights and a cut. The hairdresser was a Portuguese woman who brandished her scissors asking, “Scaladinho? Scaladinho?”

  And we responded, “Yes, yes, scaladinho.”

  So the hairdresser dug in her scissors in with gusto and the locks of Cori’s hair fell to the floor. “Scaladinho?”

  “Yes, go, woman, don’t be afraid, scaladinho! Don’t be afraid to give that hair some life. Make it rise!” But after all of this, the cut did not come out as well as expected. This haircut was awful, no style. Her head looked like freshly sucked-on mango seed, the tufts of fiber standing on end, and my poor Cori looked uglier than before. But there wasn’t anything we could do then, aside from laugh about the catastrophe. I told my friend that to make up for it I’d buy her some black pants with a tight stylish cut and very sexy high-heeled sandals, because she was one of those girls who buys her getups in the Salvation Army, and if I left it to her she might show up in a coffee-colored suit, with white nurse’s shoes, and a black purse. She didn’t know a thing about updating her wardrobe, not my Cori, nor about the latest fashion trends, because every fucking dollar she made, she’d send directly to Adelita in Chalatenango.

  We chose a Friday for the big date, and that afternoon we left work together for my house and made her undergo a session of “extreme makeover.” Eye shadow on the lids, eyeliner, mascara, rice powder, perfume, lip gloss, the works. I pulled out whatever I had in my kit in the drawer and threw it all on, and to top it off, I lent her a pair of earrings and tried to rearrange as well as I could that nightmare on her head.

  “So?” I asked, when I finally let her look at the mirror.

  “Unrecognizable” was all she said.

  And what was the result of our little conspiracy? Let’s just say Greg was right. Sleepy Joe didn’t make it to the movie theater. He called to get out of it with whatever excuse and to say he’d catch up with us at the restaurant. He made it alright, but he might as well not have, the jerk went off and started talking to Greg in Slovak, because that’s how they were, with everyone else, they spoke English, but between them always Slovak. And rude Greg, instead of calling him out for it, instead of making things easier, began to play along with his little brother, and the two of them got lost in their own private exchange, completely forgetting us. We got even by loading ourselves up with gin on the rocks. Corina made me laugh that night. Because of her awful pronunciation in English, the waiter could not understand her when she asked for a gin, which came out the way she said it as “tzin.”

  “Please, one tzin.”

  And the waiter: “What?”

  “Please, one tzin.”

  “What?”

  Until Cori got pissed off and ordered in a defeated tone: “One tzin and tonic without tonic.”

  I will never get over her absence. I have not turned to any of my friends during this jam I’m in right now, fucked and locked up in this hole, but Corina, I’d have called right away, and I know she’d have done anything to get me out of here even if it meant kicking down these walls. I comfort myself with memories of her, going over the days of our friendship, so playful, so joyful, so true, regretting what happened that night, which was partly my fault. You have to understand, anybody else may not have been affected as much, but Cori was heartbroken. Her soul was shattered, as they say, and bruises appeared over all her body. That Friday in the restaurant, Sleepy Joe and Greg threw back their beers. No interactions with us at all. Think of the Tower of Babel but as a table, the Table of Babel, with the two of them on one end chatting in their hellish language, and the two of us facing them, going at it in Spanish and having a good time at our end, above all because we were using our language, which always makes things easier. Until it grows late and the time comes for everyone to go home, and my rude-ass brother-in-law, who all this time hasn’t even turned to look at Cori or spoken a single word to her, throws his arms over her shoulders and takes her away. They left the restaurant together, Sleepy Joe half shoved her into a car and took her. I didn’t even get a chance to say good-bye, or to ask her what she thought about the unexpected turn the blind date had taken at the end. Like I said, she’d had a few drinks, but nothing outrageous. She was a little buzzed, but walking fine, although granted, with that good bit of tzin still in her. Greg and I walked back to the apartment, which was a few blocks away, and that weekend we didn’t hear from Cori and Sleepy Joe again.

  “Should I call her?” I wanted Greg’s advice.

  “Leave her alone, woman!” he responded. “Let her be, she’s not a child.”

  On Monday, Cori didn’t show up to work, so when I got out, I went to her house. She opens the door and makes me come in, but something’s wrong. I don’t know; she’s acting weird, different. Quiet and evasive, she who was always so cheery. It took some effort to get her to tell me what had happened Friday night; actually at that moment, she did not tell me anything, some time had to pass before she told me that Sleepy Joe had raped her.

  “The strange thing is that he didn’t have to,” she told me, “because I’d have let him have sex with me anyway, I was ready. I had made up my mind not to let all that makeup and the tight pants be for nothing. It was me who suggested he come to my place. That was the purpose of the date, no? That’s why I put on heels and drank all that gin. That’s what it was about,
no? It was all about getting laid, wasn’t it? And yet, your brother-in-law raped me and abused me, not once but various times, very brutal, you know. I begged him to stop, begged him no more, but it was as if he was possessed. There came a point when I thought he was going to kill me.”

  That’s what Corina told me, and I have to tell you, Mr. Rose, I didn’t know how much of it to believe. It’s a fact that she was no sex expert, that she didn’t have much experience in the field, and the little that she had had been precisely the rape back in Chalatenango when she was barely fifteen. That’s why I had my doubts. It did seem as if she had been beaten, that’s true: with bruises here and there, but not wounds or anything. The biggest damage seemed to be psychological, and she seemed so hurt, so depressed that I took her to the doctor, and it was there how I found out how Sleepy Joe had violated her, hurting her in the front and tearing her a bit in the back. He penetrated her in whatever hole he could find and left her with her breasts, mouth, and genitals swollen. “But what can you do, that’s the way passionate sex is,” or so I tried to explain to my friend Corina.

  “Look, chica,” I said to her. “Sometimes after a good fuck you feel as if you’ve been crucified, barely able to sit down, walking like a duck, your jaw a bit unhinged from so much sucking dick. And maybe your man is in bad shape too, bruised from top to bottom, holding his balls in his hands, his cock turned to compote, his back all scratched, his tongue scalded, his neck with bite marks. That can happen. But sex doesn’t stop being pleasurable because of that. You get what I’m saying, chica? You understand?”

  “This was different,” she said.

  “Haven’t I heard you yourself say that some things that are clean for some people are dirty for others? Maybe some things that seem terrible to you might seem normal to someone else.”

  “This was something else,” she repeated.

  I had read somewhere that a woman who has been raped relives the rape every time she has sex. That’s the picture I had in my head about Cori, and that’s why I was talking to her as if she were a little girl. Me, the know-it-all, the experienced one, and she, innocent, ignorant, and psychologically damaged.

  “He used a stick,” Cori told me. “A broken-off broomstick. He shoved a stick in me.”

  “A stick? He shoved a stick in you?”

  “A broken-off broomstick.”

  Mother of God. Then it was possible that she had gone through her own Golgotha. But what kind of monster commits rape with a broken-off broomstick? What pleasure can he get out of that? I didn’t understand. Sleepy Joe, a sexual maniac? An impotent one? It didn’t make sense; I couldn’t see such a masculine guy as someone who was impotent or who had to replace his natural equipment for something artificial. I couldn’t let it go and finally decided to ask him directly, and of course, he denied everything.

  “Your friend is a prude,” he told me. “Doesn’t know how to have fun. She’s a tight-ass.”

  I didn’t know what to believe. Everything could have been the product of your fears, I repeated to Cori, and she ended up admitting it was possible. Maybe she said it so I’d leave her alone about the issue, because she didn’t like discussing it. Who knows in what cubbyhole of her mind she archived it, because even so she let out a few words about it now and then.

  “I think he was praying,” she told me one of those days.

  “Praying? Who was praying?”

  “Your brother-in-law.”

  “You mean he prayed that night in your house? Before he did what he did, or after?”

  “During . . . like in a ceremony.”

  “Of course, those Slovaks are worse Holy Rollers than us Latin Americans. For them religion is like a mania, they bless themselves, they kneel, they carry rosaries in their pocket, and the children dream about becoming pope and as adults use their savings for pilgrimages to the Virgin of Medjugorje. They’re fanatics; there’s no other word. Each nationality comes with its defects.”

  “No, María Paz, it wasn’t that. What he did with me was an ugly ceremony.”

  “An ugly ceremony?”

  “What he was doing to me. Ugly, very ugly. I mean the fear more than anything.”

  “Oh, I know, you must have been so afraid. Poor girl, it was all my fault, for letting you go with such a brute.”

  “That man knows how to make you feel fear. He delights in watching you tremble with fear, María Paz, for hours. He takes you to the limit, little by little, systematically. An expert at it.”

  I insisted on comforting and indulging her as if she were a frightened little girl, and after that, Corina did not want to or could not tell me any more, probably disgusted that I was never actually listening, and after that I didn’t see her again because she quit her job and returned to Chalatenango, El Salvador. Just like that, all of a sudden and without the slightest warning, without giving me a chance to beg her to stay, not to leave me, because we were like sisters. Because she was my biggest support, and I’d have wanted to explain to her that an incident could not invalidate such a strong and hardy friendship, because these things pass and are forgotten but the friendship remains. But she didn’t even give me a chance. Corina made the decision out of nowhere and afterward there was no going back. She did offer a word of warning. When she called me to say good-bye from the airport, minutes before she got on her plane.

  “Open your eyes, María Paz,” she said. “Open your eyes and be careful. That boy is sick; I know what I’m talking about.”

  Sick, my little brother-in-law? Back then, recently married, I’d have said exactly the opposite; he looked very healthy. True, he was strange, off his rocker, fierce, and a gangster, but what child from a poor neighborhood doesn’t grow up to be somewhat like that? Corina had been my teacher, Mr. Rose, to deny that would be absurd and ungraceful. Just as you showed me how to write, she showed me how to live. At work, in the streets, how to deal with people and behave in America so that you were accepted by the Americans, how to be a friend: she was the teacher and I was the apprentice. But in this particular and delicate case, the episode with Sleepy Joe, I was convinced, or, better yet, I knew that I was the one who was right. She was the novice and I was the veteran.

  Cori never forgave me for not believing her, not supporting her, not telling her: You’re right, my friend. I’m with you, one hundred percent, I understand the horror you must have lived through that night, and it pains me as if it had happened to me. My brother-in-law is an asshole, garbage, a sad lump of dog shit. I’ll ask my husband to forbid him from ever entering our house again. Because that’s what Cori expected of me, and I knew it. But I had my own opinions on the matter. The truth was that I was fascinated by Sleepy Joe despite his weirdness and his rudeness. Worse yet, frequently I dreamed that we made love. And in those dreams what need was there for a broomstick? With what he was naturally endowed, the man performed extremely well.

  What can I do? I’ll never get Cori back, but I do have to drag along with my own life. So I might as well make an effort with this writing thing, because telling you offers some relief and clears my mind, and you might as well know that these days it is my only support along with the Virgin of Agarradero. So I go on with my task, and listen to another story, something that I heard from a widow I interviewed, who lets out that she doesn’t wash her bedsheets because her husband, who had been dead for seven months, slept in them, and that at night she wants to reencounter his smell, his presence in the bed. Hearing this, I managed not to say anything; such drama needs to be infiltrated slowly, so I began asking tactfully: “How do you do it, señora? Aren’t the sheets a little bit filthy after so much time?” And she says that they aren’t, that they’re just as he left them, because she’s the one who washes herself every night before she goes to bed. Every night she washes every part of her body, even her hair, and puts on a fresh clean nightgown, so that she won’t have to wash the sheets. Isn’t that crazy? Cori was right tha
t everyone draws their own line between the clean and the disgusting. You know what the Arabs think of someone like you or me who uses toilet paper? They wash themselves well after number two and they consider toilet paper a dirty Western habit. They may be right.

  I’m wondering if you’ll be able to see me as character material after finding out all these ordinary things about my life. You introduced us to Lizzie from Pride and Prejudice and Poe’s Eleonora. These are protagonists; I’m just one other woman from the bunch, or worse than that, I’m merely 77601-012 in the last hole on earth. Well, I’m also one who has lived through a tremendous drama, but I’m not so sure that is enough to make a character in a book. I also wonder if someone at some point will be able to read about me with the same passion that I read about Christina, you know, from The Distant World. When I told you once how much that book had fascinated me, you grimaced and told me it was a young adult book, that is, of minor literary value. I responded that it was the first novel I had read and therefore of major value to me, incomparable, even. To this day, I still believe that I’d be content to simply be the protagonist of a minor little novel, someone like Christina. I’d like to tell Jordan Hess that I read his book in a trance, feeling great tension, as you would expect from a prisoner devouring a book in her cell, well, a prisoner who enjoys books, like me, because there are others who despise books, fear them even. In any case, I suspect a writer has no idea how close he can become with a reader. I think it would frighten the writer if he really knew. Because a book is not just a story and words, it is something physical that you possess. The Distant World of Christina was locked up in the cell with me, and lying on the bunk with me, and when they allowed us to go to the courtyard, it sat beside me in the sun. It absorbed my tears, was splattered with my drool and stained with my blood; that’s not a metaphor, it was literally stained with my blood, you’ll see why later. I often caressed the book. Jordan Hess would probably be upset to learn all this, and maybe you are also, because writers think of readers as ghosts. Shadows out there, far away, nameless, blurry, of whom they will never know anything about. A writer goes to a bookstore and asks, “How many copies of my books have sold?” And maybe the writer is told, “Two hundred and fifty thousand.” There it is, two hundred and fifty thousand readers. But that’s not how it is. Each reader is a person, and each person a knot of anxieties. While I read The Distant World of Christina, I put my nose to the pages to smell the paper, but also to try to smell him, Jordan Hess himself. I’d have liked to tell him how much I liked the book and protest that the ending wasn’t very convincing. This one too, I’m always dissatisfied with endings, I’m always expecting something more, a kind of revelation that never comes. When I finish a book, I feel a kind of unease, that there was something important there I missed, but not knowing quite what. It must be very difficult to finish a novel. I wonder how you will end mine, and I hope it’s nothing tragic. In any case, I’d rather it be a weak ending than a tragic one; I should just tell you once and for all.