Hot Sur (56 page)

“Do not run. That’s the last thing you should do,” she heard Rose telling her, his body pressed against hers. In that fashion, holding her, protecting her, Rose led her to a spot in the front row among the crowd that gathered to witness the police action as if it were live television, a little Sunday show for a mob thirsty for some excitement, everyone looking around trying to figure out who the cops were after—a shoplifter? a child molester? a credit card thief?—who would soon be smacked with a club across the head, or shot in the leg to be brought down, then handcuffed and humiliated before the eyes of all, with cell phones and security cameras catching every second of the shame. In the first row, as if part of an audience, Rose and María Paz stood with the rest of the spectators ready to enjoy the show. It hadn’t been since Greg, or Cleve, that she had felt protected in the arms of a white man, arms that lifted her from the risk zone and put her on the safe side of society.

“Take off that hat,” Rose whispered, without loosening his grip on her, “it’s too showy.”

As soon as she obeyed, he regretted having asked: from under the cap sprung her untamed mane of hair, even more eye-catching than the motley cap.

“You’ll have to cut it,” Rose whispered in her ear. “Or dye it.”

“Never,” she said. “Over my dead body.”

The policemen ran past and soon were out of sight. With the show disrupted, the crowd dispersed. After realizing that the cops had not been after her, María Paz suffered from a crash of adrenaline that left her limp and docile as a rag doll, and Rose took advantage of this to guide her toward the parking lot.

“From now on you’ll be better off with me,” he told her once they were in his Ford Fiesta.

“I was scared shitless when I saw the cops running toward us,” Rose admits to me. “But I found the courage somewhere to take María Paz into my arms to protect her, knowing that in the eyes of the law this gesture could send me to die. Not that she was very grateful later, hardly said anything about it, but things changed after that. From that moment on, she accepted me as an ally. I just had to show her what I was willing to do for her.”

As they fled Garden City, María Paz said she was starving and they stopped in a nondescript, out-of-the-way restaurant in Deer Park, one of those “all you can eat” places, where Rose only had a coffee, because he had eaten lunch shortly before, and she had a plate of fried eggs with bacon, a green salad, and potatoes with melted cheese, plus a slice of obscenely rich chocolate cake, with two Diet Cokes.

“Jesus Christ, girl, you were famished,” Rose told her as they cleared the table.

“You have to take advantage when it’s offered; you never know when the next big meal will come.”

“Are you full?”

“About to burst.”

“So let’s talk seriously. You have to understand. They left a clamp inside you, that’s the cause of the bleeding.”

“Don’t worry about the bleeding; it’s gone down a lot. Maybe because there is no more blood inside. I’ll put the clamp thing on hold until Seville.”

“Don’t you believe me?” Rose pulled out a pen and drew on the paper tablecloth—a drawing similar to the one Dummy had sketched on the table in the conference hall, back in Manninpox. “There you go. This is your uterus, and this is the clamp. Look at it. It’s metallic, and it can be very dangerous.”

“But it’s soooo tiny,” María Paz said. “A little shit clamp. The truth is, Mr. Rose, of all the problems that I have, those little tweezers seem like the least of them.”

“But it’s not, and we’ll remove it. Don’t worry about anything, I’ve got it all planned out. You’ll need a week to recover. Your cyber-coyote can wait; call his Blackberry from the pay phone here and tell him things need to be postponed. Did you pay him all the money?”

“Only half.”

“Then no problem. Money makes the dog dance.”

María Paz went to the pay phone by the bathrooms, and from the table, Rose watched her call and then talk and gesticulate wildly.

“He says he gives me eight days,” María Paz told Rose when she came back to the table. “Eight days, Mr. Rose, and after that, come what may, I’m out.”

Good. Rose had it all planned. He had his ex-wife’s ID in the car and her health insurance documents that he kept updated, never a month late with payments, not really sure why. An unhealthy fixation, if you will, paying health insurance premiums year after year for a woman who abandoned him, perhaps because he still believed that when he least expected it, she would return and would need health insurance. Maybe that was the reason, or even simpler, the act of not paying the fees anymore would have been like a permanent separation, as if he were burying Edith. Whatever the explanation was, the futile effort now could prove useful; it would help with María Paz’s operation. Edith was young when the ID picture was taken; both women had dark hair and eyes, Edith a more pronounced nose, María a rounder, brown face, but smudge the date of birth with a coffee stain and force things a bit, and they could be the same person. Not that Rose didn’t want to pay for the operation; he would have done so willingly; it was more for reasons of security. Shielded by Edith’s identity, who would imagine María Paz in the operating room of a good private hospital?

Rose told her of his master plan, and she fiercely refused to participate. She said it was a crazy and absurd idea, a risk they shouldn’t take under any circumstances. Someone would catch them and turn them in. She didn’t look like the woman in the picture, at all; there was no chance.

“You’ll see, Mr. Rose. I know a better way. Have you ever wondered how the thousands of illegals in this country go to the doctor?” she asked Rose, and he admitted that he hadn’t. “Do you think we don’t get sick?”

“I guess you do.”

The following day, after spending the night in the studio on St. Mark’s, María Paz and Rose went to a building in Queens. Nothing too unseemly about the place, a couple of dour-faced porters not wearing uniforms, people coming in and out, the smell of air-conditioning with a tinge of bleach and vinegar. Rose looked around and noticed that everyone looked like immigrants; perhaps the only discordant note was an occasional white person in the mix of dark people coming in and out. In the badly lit lobby, there was an ATM, vending machines, bathrooms for men and women—nothing that would draw attention.

“Comadre!” María Paz told the receptionist. The two embraced effusively, bemoaning how long it had been since they last saw each other. And how is your sister? And your husband, still unemployed? And remember Rosa, from Veracruz, what a tragedy, and this and that and that and this, until the receptionist passed María Paz off to another comadre, who also hugged her excitedly and made her fill out a questionnaire. What happened to you? And María Paz explained about the clamp, carefully avoiding any mention of Manninpox. Can you imagine it was just a simple curettage and such and such? Who’s the gringo with you? Two other nurses, or assistants, or just gossips flitting about wanted to know. He’s like a father to me, María Paz informed them. Ah, well, okay, he can be trusted then. Yes, no worries, very nice people, helped me with everything, no drama there. Ah, well, good, then the coast is clear.

María Paz was eventually whisked off by the gang of comadres, and Rose was directed to a waiting room with a dingy gray carpet and an old TV with a fuzzy image. “Everything has been arranged, sir,” they assured him, “don’t worry about a thing, they’re going to treat her like a queen, she’s like family, like a sister. Relax, relax, María Paz. Everything is good,
mija
. Good ol’ Dr. Huidobro will do that procedure in the blink of an eye. Who is Dr. Huidobro? Oh, you don’t know him? An Uruguayan—new, marvelous. You’ll see what a doll he is.”

“Let’s get out of here before it’s too late,” Rose managed to tell María Paz when he checked on her, or rather he begged her. The whole thing made him horribly uneasy. What kind of place was this anyway, a clandestine clinic in the middle of New York? They should just go; she was adding one more illegal act to the many hanging over her head. But she had already changed into the green robe tied in the back that left her butt exposed, and they were taking her to radiology.

Rose went back to the waiting room, uncomfortable and frightened, staring at the carpet stains, not knowing where they stood and feeling as if his apprehensions were multiplying like rabbits.

Never in his life had he been in such a suspicious place.
Holy God,
he thought,
this really is the third world in all its glory.
He was mulling over all this when he saw María Paz in the hallway, accompanied by a tall, sharp-looking guy, a telenovela hunk, in coat and tie and wearing a white surgeon’s cap. He spoke Spanish to Rose, introducing himself as Dr. Huidobro when Rose joined them. Judging by the accent, he was from the Southern Cone.

“Are you from Argentina?” Rose asked, and María Paz opened her eyes wide to indicate that he was committing a faux pas, that those kinds of questions were not asked in this place.

“More or less,” the man said. He held on to one of María Paz’s hands with his left hand, and with the right held up an X-ray.

Not letting go of María Paz’s hand, this Huidobro pointed to the clamp on the X-ray, on the right side just as Dummy had indicated. He informed them that the operation would be performed the following morning at 7:30 a.m. It had to be done as soon as possible, but it was a simple procedure. It would be done under local anesthesia and María Paz would be released the same day.

“Will you perform the operation?” Rose asked in a somewhat aggressive tone, because what he really wanted to say was
Let go of her hand, motherfucker, who the hell do you think you are?

“I’ll perform the operation, of course, not to worry, me personally,” Huidobro assured them, and immediately afterward presented him with a bill of $2,500, which Rose ran to the nearest bank to withdraw. Without providing a receipt, Huidobro grabbed the wad and in the blink of an eye, it disappeared into the pocket of his pants.

A pig,
thought Rose,
nothing but a pig, I hope he washes those dirty money-grubbing hands before operating, and that he is as handy with the scalpel as with the cash.
Rose didn’t trust him at all, with the look of a tango singer or a soccer player more than a surgeon. But there was nothing Rose could do. María Paz had already decided to put herself unconditionally in his hands and behave with the docility of cows to the slaughter.

“You’ll be fine, we’ll take good care of you,” Huidobro told her, holding her hand again, and explained that they would take her blood pressure, draw some blood, and put in her IV.

“Don’t be worried, Mr. Rose,” María Paz told Mr. Rose when they were alone again. “Dr. Huidobro is very good.”

“Very good? That soccer player with a baker’s cap? Listen, María Paz, this is a dive. There isn’t the least of sterile procedures that I see; no appropriate medical equipment. You are making a serious mistake.
Staphylococcus aureus
must be rampant around here. You’ll get an infection that will kill you. This so-called doctor, this Huidobro, is an impostor, an abuser of women. I’m asking for the last time that we go to a decent hospital, a place where they will care for you as a human being, attended by professionals.”

“Dr. Huidobro has all the qualifications and specializations he needs. Don’t worry, Mr. Rose. What happens is that because he’s South American, they don’t give him a license to practice in this country. Don’t be insulting, Mr. Rose, I’m telling you, a lot of gringos come here too, full American citizens, to have surgery, more than you suspect, just as white as you, only without insurance or money to pay for a regular doctor.”

Rose didn’t dare go back to the East Village for the night. He had to remain nearby, just in case. So he stayed in a hotel not far from the hospital. He didn’t sleep a wink, hour after hour tossing and turning, disturbed by all kinds of dark musings. What if the police were tipped off and they rounded everybody up, including him? What if María Paz died on the operating table, which was actually nothing more than a kitchen table, probably? What would they do in such a case with the body? What guarantees could they offer in that hole, what insurance or permits? Rose couldn’t understand how he had come to accept all this, how he had allowed them to stoop so low, and the worst was going to come if something happened to her. He and the tango singer would be jointly responsible for her death, and he already saw himself sharing the death row with the Uruguayan impostor and Sleepy Joe.

Early the next morning, he dressed without showering and showed up at the place determined to get her out of there, his alleged daughter, or wife, or daughter-in-law, whatever she was, though he didn’t really have any way to prove his relationship to her or to assert any authority over her.

“You can go in and see her. The operation went well. She’s stable and already in recovery,” one of the comadres from the previous day told him. Rose followed her down a narrow corridor, still full of misgivings, bringing María Paz a macchiato and cookies from Starbucks.

After going through the back door, the offices, desks, and gray carpet vanished. The dividing walls also vanished, and suddenly Rose found himself in a wide-open space—clean, white, and well lit, with a row of hospital beds behind screens. An entire secret hospital in the heart of New York.
Good God,
thought Rose. Who would believe the country had grown into a gigantic strudel cake with layers hidden upon layers beneath the surface? All you had to do was dig a little bit to discover the most unexpected realities. How had it come to this? American society, solid and unquestionable until yesterday, was now an empty bread crust eaten by weevils. Rose approached María Paz, who was resting in one of the beds, still wearing the disposable green robe and a bit pale, but smiling.

“Look at it, Mr. Rose! Here it is!” she said, making a noise with the jar that held the little clamp they had just extracted and displaying it proudly, like a child showing off some strange bug.

Rose tells me that he took María Paz to the mountains to recover from the operation, and that when they got there, Empera greeted her with a hug, and the dogs leaped all around her as if she were an old friend; of course they did, since they knew her so well from before. “That’s life,” Rose tells me. “All that time I was looking for her, and she had already found me. I was searching for her all over the place, unaware that she had been in my own home. As soon as we entered, she wanted to look around the ground floor and wanted me to start a fire. She said that during the week she had been hiding in the attic she could tell when I lit a fire by the smell of pine burning. Then I walked with her, taking little baby convalescent steps, to the place where Cleve had buried the ashes of her dog Hero, and I confessed that they had been dug up but quickly agreed that we should bury them again in the same place, and we did. So that she did not have to walk up and down the stairs, I suggested that she stay in my room, and I’d move to Cleve’s room, but she said no. She preferred to stay upstairs, because there were so many treasured memories.”