Hot Sur (53 page)

Rose didn’t know. That is, what could the next victims expect, or what had he done to other anonymous victims? For one, the cross was missing, the final and most drastic torment, the zenith of the expiation. And he must employ others as well; Christ had to endure all sorts of horrors on the way to Cavalry. This is where the album that Edith sent came in.

Rome, a summer twilight, years before. Edith and Rose are holding hands and in love, or at least Rose is in love with Edith, who wears a light-colored, low-cut dress, from which her tanned cleavage peeks out. They are crossing the Sant’Angelo Bridge, and the impressive vision of Bernini’s angels greatly affects them: their violent, androgynous, dark beauty; their unlikely wings, which seem useless for flight; their anguished compassion before the suffering of the Son of God. They are less agents of glory than provocateurs in a cosmic duel, and each one holds in its hands one of the initiation props, or deadly weapons, depending on how you look at it. In the duty-free shop at the airport, Rose had bought a Canon AE-1, and in his enthusiasm to try it out took many pictures of Edith, including on that day, nine of which survive in that album, one in front of each angel, not counting a tenth that must have come loose, leaving behind only little sticker slots where the photograph had been. Looking at those pictures, some many years later, was dizzying, transporting in some fashion for Rose. He recounts to me how he simultaneously relived his wife’s abandonment and the death of his son, and that the brutal grip of that twin loss dragged him against his will, threatening to break him. So he decided to let go of the reins and be taken, release the resistance and go with it, submissively, in a hallucinatory journey propelled by a torrent of violent images.

Looking back on it now, he feels it was a deep plunge that almost drowned him. He began to look at the pictures one by one, trying to focus on the angels and letting the figure of his wife fade into abstraction. “Get out of the way, Edith,” he murmured to her, “this has nothing to do with you.” In her handwriting, written on the back of each of the pictures were details of the date the picture was taken, the name of the place, and any other pertinent facts. “That’s how she is,” Rose tells me, “she has to document and classify everything; her books are full of marginalia.” The first angel holds up a small pillar, more like a miniature version of one with a corresponding caption,
Tronus meus in columna
, my throne on a pillar, according to Edith’s footnoted translations.

“Bravo, Edith,” Rose told her, “you were always so systematic and organized, with everything except our marriage; you put me away like some old apparatus and you couldn’t even remember where. But focus, focus.” It’s the pillar used during the whipping. Rose remembered it well. During that trip to Rome, they had seen the original, the very pillar, in Santa Prassede, just a few steps away from the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore. Just like the replica held up by the angel, the original is short and stout, as if the Christ bound there had been a pygmy. Tronus, Rose wrote over the head of the angel, Tronus meus in columna. “Your name is Tronus, and you did wrong, extremely wrong, by binding that pygmy.”

The following angel holds up a whip, and the inscription reads,
In flagella paratum
, ready for the whip. “Flagella will be your name,” Rose told the angel. “Break down the Christ Almighty with a lacerating whip of seven tails, because that’s your task: whip the chosen one until he bursts.” The next angel has two heavy large nails in his hand.
Quem confixerunt
, the things that perforated me. Rose wrote a name above the angel: Clavus. “Cleave and nail the angel with this name. Nail the victim to the wall, pierce it, perforate, like a dog: leave it crucified until it dies. Take a poor dog and transform it into a god, or take a god and deal with him as if he were a dog.” The angel on the next page in the album holds a cross.
A sanguinis lingo
, from the tree that bleeds. Cross, crossed, crossing, cruising, cruiser. Rose’s thoughts dashed to the cruise he had taken with Edith to the Greek islands.
Did you love me, Edith, that night in Santorini? Did you even love me then?
But he immediately caught himself and abandoned that memory. “Focus, focus,” he told himself. “Stay with this thing.” This powerful angel with barely a squint in his eyes is holding a cross, this is his
fragmenta passionis
, or at least that’s what Edith noted, good old Edith throwing around those Latin phrases. The great winged squinter holds up the cross as if it were nothing, as if it were weightless, as if the cross itself were also winged, the wood of death that curiously enough is also the tree of life, the conflux of the four cardinal points, the compass rose, rosa rosa rosam rosae rosae, of course, a rose is a rose is a rose, and that’s his name, Rose, Rosicrucian, the rose that hugs the cross, at the intersection, the crossroads, fingers crossed for good luck. The cross, object of danger and risk, doorway to other worlds, a dizzying reality of conflicting realities, life and death, heaven and hell, man and God. The point where the boundary between the zenith and the abyss vanishes. Wasn’t that more or less what old Ismaela Ayé wailed about behind the walls of Manninpox? If Ismaela Ayé could conceive it, so could Rose, who took up his pen and christened that angel Crux. “Hi, Crux,” he told him. “So you will be known.” The inscription on the angel who holds the spear with which they stabbed Christ on the side reads
Vulnerasti cor meum
, you have wounded my heart. A powerful phrase; the Lord Christ wasn’t a bad poet, or the credit would actually have to go to Bernini. Rose decided that angel would be called Cor, the angel revealed its own name, cor, cordis, the core; besides, the letters look perfect,
C
,
O
,
R
, spaced on the photograph, somewhat humorous to Rose because the
O
just happened to encircle Edith’s face as she stands on a pedestal in the picture.
Let’s see you escape that and fly away with Ned to Sri Lanka.
“Dismissed, Cor!” Rose ordered the angel. “I leave you with Edith, a very bad girl. You’re in charge of her. And let’s go on, everything marches on, I have pulled one string and now the whole skein is coming undone at full speed.” Cor: the name is also connected to Corina. “They drove that spear through your heart, Cori? No, he drove it through your pussy, the
axis mundi
, the heart of hearts.”

The next picture is a difficult one, because the angel is holding a sponge. Very strange, a sponge, something so common and removed from the sublime. What harm can you do with a sponge? Aside from tickling someone under the armpits with it, Rose couldn’t think of anything. “Read, idiot,” he told himself. The inscription says it all.
Portaverunt me aceto
, they gave me vinegar. How methodical of Edith, how precise, everything translated perfectly. “I see, I see,” Rose said. “The anguished Christ was thirsty and must have asked for water, and they gave him vinegar. Gross. Twisted, like they say. They dunked that sponge in vinegar and burned his lips with it, scorched his throat and laughed at him. Bad, bad, bad angel. You deserve a spanking, and as punishment you will be known as Sponge Bob.” Of course, Edith believed something else, as always, going against the current. At the bottom of the picture Edith had written
Posca
, a term Rose had never heard, but which Edith thankfully defined, “Posca, a popular drink in ancient Rome, a blend of water, vinegar, and aromatic herbs.” Can this be true? Could some charitable being have dunked the sponge in posca and reached it up on a stick to the parched mouth of the dying man? “Fine, Edith, we’ll call this angel Posca. Sponge Posca.” But this didn’t end there, something else. “That’s not you in the picture, Edith. Who is that standing at the foot of Posca but me, Ian Rose, wearing a T-shirt that bears the face of James Dean, a very clear impression of that famous face? However, the face of the angel has been cut off. You decapitated Posca with the Canon AE-1. It doesn’t matter. Decapitated angel, you will no longer be known as Sponge Bob or Posca; you have some luck. You will from here on be known as James Dean.”

“Picture after picture, and my fever kept rising,” Rose tells me, “as if my brain were on fire. Look, I’m a simple person; I don’t know anything about these altered states. But that night I was flying. And at the same time, everything seemed so real, I mean the angels, Edith, Edith’s absence, Cleve, Cleve’s death, his murderer, the shadow of his murderer, myself, Rome, the Catskills, they all took on the same kind of harsh reality, the same intensity, everything existed equally and at the same time, the fever brought everything together before my eyes, within reach.”

Next was the angel Rose most feared, the one he had been waiting for, the one that truly anguished him, the one holding the crown of thorns.
This is Cleve’s angel,
Rose thought, and shuddered. He found the inscription appalling:
Dum configitur spina,
as the thorns stab. Edith, not knowing that one day her son would suffer the thorns; Edith, not even knowing that one day she would have a son, noted that this angel enjoyed the privilege of being sculpted by Bernini himself, who left the creation of the other angels to his apprentices. “Thank you for the clarification, Edith,” Rose said. “You were always so studious.” This angel ensnared Rose like none of the other ones; he couldn’t stop looking at it, or maybe the other way around, the thing couldn’t stop looking at him. It is a terrible angel, Rose realized. “Cleve, my son, what kind of a father am I who was not there to protect you from this assault?” This was also the most anguished of all the angels. Bernini had made it easy to perceive the trapped scream behind his parted lips. That, and the threatening torment in the depth of its eyes, made it into a macabre figure. “You will be called Thorn,” Rose said with an unfathomable rage and scribbled the name various times, Thorn, Thorn, Thorn, stabbed the angel with the name, scratched it and scratched it and scratched it until the only thing visible in the picture were the scratches. The bridge had disappeared, leaving behind only scratches. The Tiber had disappeared—Rome, the angel, the crown, and above all Edith, all disappeared. All that was left were scratches from top to bottom; Rose had stabbed Thorn with a million sharp scratches, with thorns, that is.

The following page revealed an almost feminine figure gently holding up a cloth:
Respice facie,
look at the face. “What should I call this angel?” Rose asked himself, less frenzied, less aggressive, catching his breath. “Facies, of course. That’s what you will be called, look how I delicately write your new name in a corner of the picture.” This is the angel holding Veronica’s cloth, the handkerchief on which the face of Jesus remained engraved when the woman named Veronica went to wipe away the blood and sweat. But Edith’s note made something very clear: it was enough just to consider the etymology of the name to realize that this Veronica had never existed, that she was no more than Vero Icon, the true image of Christ engraved in Veronica’s cloth, that is, the cloth of the true icon. “Damn, Edith, you are a smart one!” But that wasn’t all with this angel either; on the contrary, things were just getting started. One: with a rag or a piece of cloth, someone cleans the face of a man. Two: the face of the man remains impressed there, like in a photograph. A face. The face. A face on a rag. On a rag? A red rag? John Eagles, the dog-food deliveryman, with his face ripped off and stuck to a rag? Did this finally explain the mysterious murder of John Eagles? But John Eagles had nothing to do with Sleepy Joe, didn’t know him, had never crossed him. Or had he?

Rose was exhausted, his overheated brain could not go on and demanded some rest, but he wasn’t done, the task not completed, one more angel remaining. The last angel in the album holds in one hand the tunic that they ripped off Christ before crucifying him and in the other hand the dice with which the Roman soldiers gambled for it among themselves.
Miserunt sortem,
they tried their luck. Fucking centurions, gambling for God’s clothes. “You will be called Alea,” Rose said. The whole scene has never really made any sense to Rose.
The Robe
, a movie Rose saw as a teenager, played up the incongruity by changing the coarse tunic for a more presentable, obviously expensive purple cloth, and Richard Burton, the lucky centurion who won at dice, walked away satisfied wearing the flamboyant robe. But you don’t have to be Richard Burton to know that purple is the imperial color, exclusive and sumptuous. That’s all well and good. But to gamble for a pitiful cloth woven by a poor artisan from Galilee, and then be dragged up the mountain, torn by stones and whipping, a thing of misery, all muddy and stained? It made no sense. But for Rose, it couldn’t matter now. No point getting lost in theological debates; that’s not what’s important. What mattered was to tie up loose ends, put two and two together, follow the scent. The scales tilted toward Maraya, Sleepy Joe’s other mistress. Rose, drunken with revelations, consulted María Paz’s manuscript. He wanted to find out what María Paz had said about Maraya, the table dancer at Chikki Charmers, who was boiled in a hot tub till the flesh fell off her bones; poor Maraya, who as a corpse had a die placed on each of her eyes while her friends fought over her clothes, a victim of the mania and obsessiveness of Sleepy Joe, a miserable fuck with some strange fixations.
Too obvious,
Rose thought.
All this was all too easy.
“Disgusting,” he muttered, and he felt his bile rise against the murderer so predictable in all his shit. “Motherfucker, Sleepy Joe,” Rose grumbled, “your shoddy puzzles are straight out of Paulo Coelho and Dan Brown, some shoddy mystic, how disgustingly you follow the pattern to the letter, that’s your bravery, your audacity, you kill with the instruments of the Passion of Christ, one after another, rising up those bloody steps. That’s your great invention. But you’re just a routine murderer at the end of the day.”