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He’d rarely gone up to the attic when Cleve was alive, because he wanted to respect the boy’s need for solitude. Although truth be told, Rose wasn’t even sure how alone his son had been up there; perhaps not that much, according to Empera, the Dominican who came to clean twice a week, who had tried to insinuate that Cleve shut himself up there with a girlfriend whom he didn’t want to introduce to his father. But Rose had stopped Empera midsentence.

“That’s the last thing I need to hear,” he had said. “Cleve’s private life is his business and no one else’s. In this house, no one meddles into the affairs of others, and you should follow suit.”

“It’s true, neither of you meddle into my private life,” Empera, not one to mince words, had responded. “Not out of respect, but because you couldn’t care less.”

“And she was right,” Rose tells me. “Empera knew everything about me, down to the color of my underwear, and yet I knew little or nothing about her, except that she was Dominican, that she didn’t have her papers, and that she’d entered the United States illegally not once or twice but seventeen times, basically any time she felt like it. I never had the heart to ask her how she had accomplished that feat worthy of
The Guinness Book of World Records
.”

After Cleve’s death, Rose began to suffer horribly, not knowing more about his son, not having been closer to him when he had been alive, not having supported him or met his lovers; eventually, he asked Empera about what he had not wanted to hear before.

“Tell me, Empera,” he asked her. “Did you get to meet that woman who, according to you, visited Cleve secretly?”

But Empera, who had learned her lesson, wasn’t about to let that door slam in her face twice.

“What woman, sir?” she responded dryly as she walked toward the kitchen, her sandals snapping loudly.

On the day the package arrived, Rose spent the rest of the day out of the house doing errands, but he had not stopped thinking about the package he’d left unopened on his son’s bed. When he returned, he had the urge to go up and examine it, but some scruple about meddling in his son’s private matters stopped him. If there was something his son detested it was for anyone to invade his space, so Rose resisted the urge to open the package and went into the kitchen to make a sandwich. But immediately he was hounded by a completely opposite sensation. Would he not be betraying his son by ignoring such a sign? As he downed his sandwich with a glass of lactose-free milk by the fireplace, he began to think that it would not be so absurd or disrespectful to open the package, which perhaps would be the last sign Cleve sent.

“Alright, Cleve,” he said aloud, “just let me finish eating this and we’ll open it, see what this is about. You want me to do it, right? You’re giving me permission to open your private correspondence? Of course you do; at this point why would you care?”

The package contained 140 pages of rose-colored stationery of the kind that adolescent girls used for letters. The manuscript was handwritten, in what Rose was fairly certain was feminine script. The pages had writing on both sides, tighter as it went on, as if the author had calculated that she might run out of paper.

“Well, Cleve,” Rose said, “it seems as if a girl has sent you a very long love letter.”

The person who had written it wasn’t the one on the return address, a Mrs. Socorro Arias de Salmon, from Staten Island, but a young woman who wanted to remain anonymous and who declared that she’d use the pseudonym María Paz. This María Paz wrote in the first person to confess something to Cleve, referring to him as Mr. Rose. The following dawn, Ian Rose was still awake reading the one hundred forty rose-colored pages in the attic, sitting up on Cleve’s bed under the blanket, still dressed, the two big dogs lying on the floor, and the small one, Skunko, beside him.

“It’s his thing, that dog,” Ian Rose tells me, “I don’t allow him to go up on my bed, always been very strict about that, but not Cleve. And now without Cleve, his bed has basically become Skunko’s bed, so I didn’t tell him to get down. After all, if there was an intruder, it was me.”

Whoever the real author was, she had placed all her hopes on Cleve, had entrusted him with the story of her life. Rose asks me if I agree, because maybe these are just his own speculations, he doesn’t know much about these things, but he can’t get out of his head the feeling that the story of a life is that life, precisely that life, which in the long run can only exist to the extent that there is someone who tells its tale and someone who listens to it.

“Alexander the Great, who brought historians along to all his missions and battles, knew this well: what is not narrated might as well not have occurred,” Rose tells me, adding that the fact that he is an engineer doesn’t mean that he doesn’t like to read. “I’d say that the recipient of a testimony of a life becomes a kind of conscience before which the other unravels his deeds so that he may be condemned or acquitted. Or at least that’s what happens to me when I read a novel or an autobiography, fiction or something based on fact. A strange thing happened as I was reading it. I felt as if the life of that young woman, María Paz, was literally in my hands. She had chosen my son, Cleve, for that task, or I should say Mr. Rose. And it so happens that I too am a Mr. Rose, and as I read the manuscript I fell under the impression that this woman was also addressing me, and that by telling me her troubles, she was putting herself in my hands, because of the two Mr. Roses, I was the only one still alive. It should have been the other way around, me dead in the accident, while my son lived out what was left of his life. But that’s not how it happened. And at that moment, I was the only Mr. Rose who could read what that woman had written, revealing to me things not only about herself, but also about her son.”

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 spell:
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.”

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.