Free Hot Sur by Laura Restrepo Page B

day without saying good morning to someone.”
    And don’t think it’s just the poor. The rich are also alone. Before working as a market surveyor, before I had ever set foot in a rich person’s house, I passed every now and then through their neighborhoods, and saw them from outside, from the dark street, surrounded by their very green gardens and recently mowed lawns, the figures inside with their lights on, floating in those bright and inaccessible rooms, like in a fantasy, like in Good Housekeeping , as if those people had died and gone to heaven. This is what America is, I used to think. Finally I’m seeing it. America is in there, in those houses. I imagined they were truly blessed, but the truth is that this is not always the case, Mr. Rose, not so blessed after all. One of things I found out is that in the end the telenovela that fascinated us so much when I lived with the Navas, which we wouldn’t miss an episode for anything in the world, had it right: The Rich Also Cry .
    The unusual cases are just that, unusual; loneliness, on the other hand, is everywhere. And I learned another important lesson the time I saw the girl bound with wire. I learned to keep what I saw to myself, because my job wasn’t to be a Good Samaritan or to save souls. I never called the police or stuck my nose in people’s business, except when I noticed that children or animals were being mistreated: that’s where I drew the line. Children covered in filth because of parental neglect, dogs locked up in a patio howling from abandonment, those kinds of things. Those I did report, at least. Because if there is something I can’t stand it’s the smell of sadness in children and animals.
    Anything that has to do with cleanliness I’m interested in. I didn’t spend all those years investigating people’s hygienic habits for no reason. Hygiene and filth, two sides of the same coin. You might think that it’s nonsense to go around asking people whether they use OxiClean or Shout to wash out stains on their clothes, or if they buy toothpaste with fluoride or baking soda. Maybe you think it’s silly, not very interesting, but it actually was. One time I was questioning a graphic designer. It was unusual for men to agree to be interviewed, but you could get them by offering coupons as motivation. Coupons for food at a certain market or for gasoline at a certain station. Anyhow, this guy was around forty, divorced. His name was Paul, I still remember, his name is seared in my mind. We were in the kitchen of his apartment and I was asking him questions, nothing special, same as always. “Do you use anything to whiten your clothes?” Things like that, and the guy comes out with the following: he tells me that when he was a teenager he discovered that his mother would remove the pillowcases from his and his brother’s pillows and wash them. He and his brother snorted a lot of coke and their noses bled. At night, the blood would stain the pillowcases and every morning the mother would get up to wash them. He imagined that his mother did it so her husband wouldn’t see the stains, or maybe even so that he and his brother wouldn’t see them.
    On another occasion, I was right in the middle of the bit with the six undershirts, and the woman I was interviewing all of a sudden begins to weep buckets. The bit with the six undershirts entails arriving at a house with a bag that contains six undershirts of different grades of white. They’re numbered so that the person classifies them from the cleanest to the dirtiest. So there I was with this woman, young, very white features, comfortably middle class. I took out the undershirts, and as she inspected them one by one she told me, “This one is filthy, this one smells funny, this looks yellow under the arms, number three is not bad. In fact, I’d say number three is the cleanest, or wait, maybe not, when you look at it closely there’s a small stain here. Let me look again, perhaps the cleanest