One of the students in my writing classes in Manninpox is a striking young woman. The truth is that I started paying more attention to her when I realized she was Colombian. I think she immediately brought to mind María Aleida. It occurred to me that her pretty face must be similar to María Aleida’s, her smile and her hair like María Aleida’s, and above all the color of her skin. I couldn’t help imagine the prisoner free, far from Manninpox, back home in Colombia, dancing salsa and whipping up arequipe in a copper pot with a big wooden spoon.
Interview with Ian Rose
Aside from the scrawls composed in the dark, the manuscript from the person who wanted to be known as María Paz was written in very clear handwriting, as if from a printer, the type of handwriting of someone who wants to be understood, and yet Ian Rose had trouble figuring out the additions compressed into the margins and the arrows that pointed to where the passages belonged. There were also pages missing, seventeen in all; the page numbers on the upper right hand corner every so often skipped a number. Where had the manuscript been during its journey looking for its match? How many hands had it passed through before reaching Ian Rose’s? Why had there been such delays? And why did Socorro finally decide to send it? What had become of the seventeen missing pages, perhaps lost but probably confiscated? Rose didn’t know. What he did know was that the pink paper, the type adolescents use to write notes, brutally contrasted with what was written on it. It wasn’t a love letter at all, although at times it appeared to be. The author was apparently a young Latina, Colombian it seemed. And Ian Rose did not have to read long to understand that she was a prisoner in Manninpox, from where she wrote the story of her life to send it to the teacher of the writing workshop that had been offered for the inmates. That person was no other than his son, Cleve, and it just so happened that Manninpox was only ten minutes away from the house in the mountains. Which wasn’t a coincidence, after all — the reason Cleve had volunteered to teach there and not at some other state prison was because it was so close. There is no such thing as coincidence — just as it wasn’t coincidence that of all the prisoners with whom Cleve dealt, he became close with one who was Colombian. Apparently, the Andes had left more of a mark on him than his father had imagined.
Tearing into that package had been like opening Pandora’s box: hordes of phantoms escaped and perched on Ian Rose’s shoulder to stay. Each one of the lines written by that young woman directly or indirectly spoke to him of Cleve, and reading and rereading those lines offered an opportunity to discover things about his son’s life that he had never known. About his life and about his death. Here and there, Ian Rose thought he found signs, real or imagined, that the author had some connection to Cleve’s death. Some link, although Rose wasn’t exactly sure what. But she had to know something, even if she had written this before Cleve died, even if she had written it thinking that he was still alive, although in fact he may have already been dead without her knowing it. She must have known something, and Ian Rose sifted through those pages like an archaeologist looking for some clue.
The young woman even mentioned an incident that he was familiar with: Cleve had struck a bear on his motorcycle one moonless night when he was returning from the prison through the woods. Nothing had happened to him that time, miraculously, and apparently nothing serious had happened to the bear. Back home, when he had settled down a bit, he told his father what had happened. He said it had been very dark and after a forceful blow he ended up laid out on the road, stunned, confused, not sure what invisible and supernatural force had come over him and made him roll on the ground. Until he saw the black mass a few feet away. It was the bear, getting up, apparently unhurt as well and going into the woods. The following morning, during breakfast, the two Roses took up an old discussion. As he had done many times, the father insisted that the son buy a car. He’d give him the money. He wouldn’t take it? Fine, then he could have his mother’s Toyota. Every time Edith stayed in her ex’s house, she’d leave some item behind before departing, as if to assert ownership over that place although she had never lived there. Among the things that she had bequeathed, there were the dog Otto, the cello, and a red Toyota, all of which Rose had taken in lovingly and cared for with special deference, as if they were a promise that one day their owner would come back to stay.
The Toyota was in good shape, and the day after the accident with the bear, Ian offered it to Cleve in exchange for the bike. But Cleve wasn’t in the least bit willing to make such a swap. He said he’d prefer to ride out his life on his motorcycle, that’s exactly what he said, and on it he’d ride to his death some time later, not in the Catskills but in the outskirts of Chicago, after losing control, crashing violently against the metal railing, and flying through the air, bike and all. He broke his back in various places from the fall, and rolled more than 130 feet in the ditch bordering the highway, and his body was pummeled by stones and his skin torn by branches before ending up among some bushes. The road had little traffic; there were no witnesses to record what had happened. Because it was considered an accident, only the highway patrol and the paramedics attended to the body. But Ian Rose could not get out of his head that his son’s death had been less an accident and more the fulfillment of some doomed destiny.
“I think it was in the cards,” he tells me. “For me it was something expected, which could have been prevented. You understand. Something that I could have stopped.”
Before the package had arrived, Rose had always tried to ignore Manninpox prison, which hadn’t been easy. Like he told me, you need to do a lot of yoga and take very long walks in the woods to go on with your life when the agony of strangers is just around the corner.
“It’s not the most pleasant thing in the world to have a women’s maximum security prison up the road from where you sleep,” Ian Rose tells me. “If the concept of men locked up is perverse, women caged up is outright monstrous.”
He had bought the house not knowing what was nearby. The real estate agent hadn’t told him anything, perhaps knowing he’d lose his client. And indeed he would have. But Rose had fallen in love at first sight with the house; everything about it had seemed a fulfillment of his dreams: the beauty of the surroundings, stone chimneys, high ceilings, spacious rooms, oak floors, the silence and splendid views. And while he was looking at it, his dogs had taken over the surrounding woods and did not want to leave. Besides, the price was unbeatable, so Rose took the offer on the fly without investigating the reason it was such a bargain.
“I’m a liberal guy,” he asserts, “not sure I like the idea of locking up people as punishment so society can function. I find it appalling that two-thirds of the population of the United States trembles at what the other third can inflict on us, or that one-tenth of the population spends their lives in cages so the other nine-tenths can live in peace. And yet, if someone gave me the keys of all the cells of all the jails in the country and told me, ‘The freedom of the criminals is in your hands,’ I’d return the keys without using them.”