Hot Sur by Laura Restrepo Read Free Book Online Page A

overwhelming nature itself with their invisible but unavoidable presence.
    “It used to be that every time I thought about the place I’d get goose bumps,” he says, “as if its caged women were breathing down my neck. Knowing that they were locked up used to make me claustrophobic. That’s why I didn’t think about Manninpox.”
    Sometimes he couldn’t help but think about the prison, like when his dogs barked at night. During the day, he simply avoided looking in that direction and forgot it was there. He was successful at this for half of the year, but when the trees grew bare, its blackish silhouette loomed in the distance like a scorched field in the middle of the white landscape. Ian Rose knew this was an optical illusion, but it disturbed him anyway. And he was unlike Cleve, who wasn’t the kind to run away from things or stick his head in the sand. During their first winter after moving in, Cleve had tried to talk to his father about Manninpox.
    “He was obsessed,” Ian Rose tells me, “to the extent that I had to ask him to stop. I told him, ‘Forget about it, Cleve. It’s bad enough that it’s there; you don’t have to make it worse by reminding me.’”
    But Cleve seemed hypnotized by the place. He rode out on his bike, each time getting closer to the edge of the restricted zone; he started frequenting a dive called Mis Errores Café-Bar, right on the border between the free world and the fortress of the inmates. Rose the father knew that Rose the son had begun to spend odd hours of the day there, in that café with a Spanish name.
    “It had to be in Spanish,” he says. “My Errors Café—such guilt and remorse only work in Spanish, or in Catholic.”
    After Cleve’s accident, and especially because of the arrival of the package, Rose the father began picturing his son at Mis Errores with his cup of coffee, probably overwhelmed or dazzled by the nearness of the prison. He tells me that growing up Cleve was a shy kid, and he felt more at ease around dogs than around people. In that they were very much alike, but only in that. Rose the father had always felt that he was a rather average individual, but in his son he’d noticed a burgeoning sensitivity that allowed him to detect things that for others went unnoticed, and even beware of them before they happened. Like an earthquake, for example. Once, when they were living in Bogotá, Ian had heard his son say that there was going to be an earthquake, and sure enough a few hours later the earth shook dramatically, not in Colombia but in Chile. This left the father befuddled. He wasn’t sure if this meant that the child’s antennae of premonition were faulty or if in fact they were so sensitive that they could transcend borders. In any case, it was clear that a vibration as intense as the one emitting from Manninpox could not be ignored by Cleve, who had found at Mis Errores the passageway into that other dimension of reality, of women living in the shadows. It pulled him in like a magnet. He had set his mind on penetrating the walls and barbed wire and tried it a few times until he was hired as the head of a writing workshop for the inmates. How? Rose the father wasn’t sure how Cleve had done it. But he knew that’s where his son was headed each time that his son turned left into the road on his motorcycle.
    “You smell like cold soup,” he told Cleve when he returned. “No doubt you were sticking your nose into that place.”
    From Cleve’s Notebook
    I find the idea that salvation can be found through writing trite. I get annoyed when literature is treated as a cult, or culture a religion, or museums temples, or novels bibles and writers prophets. And I can’t stand those lefties who pretend to speak for “those who have no voice,” or those well-known, more “right-minded” writers who descend from their towers for a few hours every month so that America sleeps a little better thinking that in fact things are not so bad for