Parts of the manuscript were written in blue ink, parts in black ink, and sometimes in pencil. The parts that looked most scrawled had been written in the dark, as she herself recounted, or after nine in the evening, lights out in the prison. This had happened to Rose before, while he still lived with Edith, when in the middle of the night, he thought of something he had to add to a report he had been writing, some technical thing for the office, and so as not to wake her by turning on the light, he wrote a couple of paragraphs in bed, in the dark. The following morning he found a bunch of gibberish similar to what María Paz had written, scribbles and scratches climbing one upon another.
The young woman expressed herself in an English splattered with Spanish, and Rose tried reading two paragraphs aloud to hear how it would sound. It was good, natural and good. The two languages blended together in a playful manner, like two young lovers with little experience in bed. Rose didn’t have any trouble with the Spanish, which he had learned to speak in Colombia, although not very well. Edith had learned almost none, her displeasure with Colombia fueling her unwillingness to learn the language. Cleve had learned it perfectly, the way children do, without being forced or making an effort.
From Cleve’s Notebook
For my mother, our stay in Colombia was marked by recurrent nightmares from which she’d awaken screaming things, and which persisted even after we had left. Things like the guerrillas were going to kidnap us, thieves were stealing the rearview mirrors from our cars, the volcanoes in the Andes were spitting rivers of lava, I had swallowed some red, poisonous seeds and they had to rush me to the hospital.
I, on other hand, have felt a sense of nostalgia ever since we left, but I’m not exactly sure for what. I miss some indefinable thing, maybe that powerful damp smell of the color green that had stirred the senses of that repressed child I’d been, or the streams of adrenaline that shot through me when I’d witnessed a machete fight between two men, or the dangers of the mountain roads: trucks that sped suicidally through tight curves above an abyss of fog, and the fruit stands clinging by their nails to the roadside, so that travelers could buy the fruit from their cars, although that last memory is more my father’s than mine, that one about the exotic fruits, because I actually never wanted to taste any of them, and have to admit that since that time, to this very day, I’m still afraid to put strange foods in my mouth. Yet I remember the names of those fruits, names with a lot of a’s and y’s, and I pronounce them all in a row, one time and two as if it were a spelclass="underline" cherimoya, cherimoya, papaya, papaya, maracuya. Memories. In Spanish, recuerdos, re-cordar, from the Latin, cor, cordis, the heart, that is, a return to the heart, so that memories of childhood would have to be pulled from the heart in which they’re kept.
I’m convinced that certain childhood memories can begin to take over, ensconcing themselves in the niches of the mind like ancient saints in a dim church, and from there they emit a strange light, something mythical that little by little begins to take precedence over other matters until they become our primary and perhaps only religion. I think that deep within me many of those fruits glimmer with such a light, and I regret never having had the gall to sink my teeth into them, because perhaps it would have been for me like Communion for Christians, who consume God with each wafer. The names of those fruits were fascinating and difficult to pronounce, and of course all myths arise from what cannot be known, what we perceive as mysterious and fills us with panic and marvel. It’s not that today I secretly pray to a god called Guanabana or that I offer sacrifices to Cherimoya, not something as ridiculous as that, but that I refuse to end up as a simple Westerner and reject the more prodigious fruits for a diet of oranges and apples.
Perhaps that is why I yearn for those years in the Andes, where life took place at such an astounding height above sea level and was a hazardous endeavor. Maybe that’s why I can again taste the arequipe in my mouth, the smoky, ambrosial candy the Colombian servants used to give me out of sight from my mother, who had forbidden me to eat anything sugary. But of all these memories, the best by far is of María Aleida, a beautiful black woman who had been crowned regional Queen of the Currulao in her hometown, and who was the nanny who cared for me in Bogotá. I never learned how to dance the currulao, but there was no doubt in my mind that María Aleida was the most beautiful woman in the world, and not only that, but she had the habit of calling others “my love,” which deeply unsettled me. My love this, my love that. Could this mean that María Aleida was in love with me? Was such a thing possible — that my shy skinny ass could attract the Queen of the Currulao, who was ten years older than me and more strikingly beautiful than I could have imagined?
The situation was confusing, hard to interpret, because I wasn’t the only one María Aleida called “my love.” She called everyone in the Rose family that. And what was already complicated became even more so when I heard María Aleida gossiping about my father in the kitchen. I was spying on her — I was always spying on her — and she was telling the other employees that my father must have worked for the CIA, because all gringos who lived in Colombia worked for the CIA even though they might masquerade as diplomatic engineers. I was hidden behind a cabinet, and the news surprised me. Not that it made me lose respect for my father; on the contrary, my admiration for him grew, or at least it made him more interesting. I liked thinking of him as a spy and not an engineer. It wasn’t true, of course, all that CIA stuff, just gossip that María Aleida only dared whisper behind my father’s back, while to his face she called him “my love,” the same way she did everyone else. Álvaro Salvídar, the chauffeur, was for María Aleida “my love,” or “my precious,” and also “doll,” terms she also used with me. She called Anselma, the cook, “my love” and “my darling,” like she did my mother, who was her principal darling.
I think I miss being someone’s love and precious and doll. And how beautiful María Aleida looked when she went barefoot to teach me how to dance salsa or merengue, mocking my clumsiness and my lack of rhythm, not like that, doll, look, like this, like this, my dear, she showed me, swaying her hips, and me, paralyzed with love, incapable of following her lead. Aside from all the other names María Aleida also called me “mi negro,” which in Colombia is a term of endearment that could apply to anyone regardless of skin color. Maybe she called everyone else “my love,” but I was the only one she called “mi negro,” despite the fact that my skin was so white that it’s almost transparent. My mother would have panic attacks any time I went out to play in the garden without a shirt or sunscreen, because you’re going to fry alive, she said. Thinking about it later, such a horrible threat, frying alive, maybe that’s where my fear of burning to death comes from. “Come put your shirt on, Cleve, you’re going to fry alive,” my mother screamed at me from the window, and I went back into the house feeling vulnerable, ridiculously underage. On the other hand, I felt a sense of triumph and strength when María Aleida called me “mi negro.” Me, the Great Mi Negro, King of the Jungle and the Currulao, whom the beautiful María Aleida secretly loved. And soon my mother and I returned to Chicago, and there were no more suicidal trucks in the chasms of fog, no penetrating smell of green, no shots of adrenaline from machete duels, no “my love” learning to dance the salsa, no maracuya either, or guanabana or arequipe, and most importantly never, never again the spectacular María Aleida calling me “mi negro.”