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The Land of Fear
The Land of Fear
The Land of Fear
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The Land of Fear

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El pais del miedo (The Land of Fear) was received to great acclaim in Spain and was the recipient of the Premio Fundación Jose Manuel Lara in 2008.

The Land of Fear is Rosa's first novel published in English, and one of three forthcoming English publications from Open Letter Books.

Isaac Rose received the prestigious Premio Romulo Gallegos in 2005 for his novel El Vano Ayer.
LanguageEnglish
PublisherOpen Letter
Release dateMar 21, 2016
ISBN9781940953328
The Land of Fear

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    The Land of Fear - Isaac Rosa

    The first time could have been neglect. Maybe the waiter gave back the wrong change or a bill fell out while paying for breakfast. The second time, however, couldn’t have been carelessness. A quick review of the purchases since the last withdrawal from the bank confirmed the inconsistencies. It didn’t add up: twenty euro were missing. The third time made it seem like it could have happened at work. Everybody left their bags hanging from the backs of chairs whenever they went to the bathroom or had a meeting in another office. It would have been easy for someone to take advantage of such an absence by reaching into the bag, pulling out the wallet and taking a bill while being careful not to steal too much—just the right amount so that the shortage would go unnoticed. There was no reason to suspect anybody although many of the co-workers remained strangers. Department turnover was at a high and people didn’t last long in this company. This fueled the detachment and bitterness necessary for someone to decide on stealing at their place of work. But today, being the fourth time, Sara is sure that it wasn’t anyone from work who robbed her. She had been so busy running errands and delivering paperwork that she didn’t set foot in the office all morning. And it couldn’t have been the art of a subway pickpocket: it seemed unlikely that a thief would remove her wallet, take a bill of such little value, and then return the wallet back to its place. It could only have been taken from her own home.

    There is, of course, that maid who comes to clean a few times a week. Sara tries to remember the dates of the previous oddities and they seem to coincide with the days that the maid was in the apartment. She is quite young, Moroccan, and her name is Naima. Sara knows nothing else about her. The girl works in other homes in the area and she had been recommended by numerous neighbors. They told Sara that she is quick, clean and quiet. She works without a contract, gets paid by the hour and doesn’t have a key. The maid comes in the afternoon when either Carlos or Sara is there, although they often leave her alone in the apartment or under Pablo’s watch. It’s true: she works fast and hardly speaks, only to ask whether Sara prefers she clean the bedroom or the kitchen first or for permission to use the bathroom or to get a glass of water. She is very polite and soft-spoken, and even though Sara speaks to her informally and asks that she call her by name, Naima insists on referring to her employer as la señora.

    In regard to her suspicion, Sara checks the apartment before the maid arrives. She goes through the drawers of her bedroom and discovers many absences that had previously gone unnoticed: a couple of bracelets that were only worn on special occasions, several pairs of earrings and a worthless pendant. She considers that perhaps she misplaced them, but when she continues searching she realizes that other things have gone missing as well. Always jewelry, everything low in value. She proceeds with rummaging through the rest of the home and finds more absences that, until today, had gone undetected: movies whose disappearances are hardly distinguishable among the extensive collection, CDs, knickknacks, a few bottles of liquor and what was left of a Christmas basket.

    She doesn’t think that she needs any more evidence but decides to convince herself with one last experiment. She grabs her purse, takes out the wallet, counts the money inside, puts a few bills in her pocket, returns the rest to the wallet and puts it in plain sight on top of the bedroom dresser. The maid arrives immediately afterward, greets her politely and goes into the bathroom to put on her uniform and sneakers. When she reappears, Sara already has her jacket on. She tells Naima that she has to go out and that she won’t be back for a while, leaving her alone in the apartment. Sara spends almost two hours out of the building. She walks to the shopping center nearby, makes a few purchases to justify her leaving and then sits down at a cafe. She has a few cups of coffee, smokes four or five cigarettes, browses a newspaper. When Sara believes that she has given the maid enough time to muster up the courage, she returns home.

    Upon her arrival, she finds that Naima has already left—a bit earlier than usual. Carlos is preparing dinner and Pablo is doing his homework. Sara goes into her bedroom and finds the wallet in the same spot she had left it. She examines it without touching; it seems to be in the same position, or perhaps lightly turned toward the right—she’s not sure. Sara doesn’t dare open it yet. She would rather wait until they eat and put Pablo to bed, as if to protect his innocence. She puts off the moment of truth as long as possible. After dinner, with Pablo already asleep, Carlos and Sara watch a movie until they get bored enough to go to bed. She undresses, brushes her teeth and only after Carlos has turned off his bedside lamp and starts dozing does she decide to grab the wallet and open it. She counts the bills. She had left two twenties and three tens. Now one of the ten-euro bills is missing. She counts quickly in order to avoid having to give an explanation to Carlos should he see her at this hour. But since Sara won’t be able to sleep unless she is absolutely sure, she takes the money out of the wallet, separates the bills carefully, and counts them intently, sliding her fingers over each one to make sure there are no bills stuck together. Now there is no doubt; one is missing. She recognizes the caution of the thief: she had taken one of the three smaller bills in hopes that the absence would be overlooked. Ten euro. Sara thinks of how long the girl could have been stealing from them. The maid has been working for the family for three months, so she does a quick calculation of five or ten euro stolen each week, occasionally including a twenty.

    She gets into bed. Carlos is already snoozing, but since she delays in turning off the light, he rolls over and asks if something is wrong. She tells him everything. The whole story is explained to him from the beginning as if the conspiracy were divided into doses. She talks to him about her initial suspicions, about the small shortages, about the missing objects, listing each of them in the same order they had been identified. She tells him about the trap she prepared this afternoon and the result she had just found. Sara could have been direct: listen, this maid, Naima, is stealing from us. But she preferred to tell him everything the way she had lived it. She waits for him to deliver the verdict, to suggest the allegation she expected, so that she might feel confident in her suspicion and even relieved of not being the accuser. However, Carlos listens in silence, and when she finishes, he remains quiet. He waits a few seconds as if he doesn’t know the story is over and thinks a few things are left to be said. And what do you think, he finally asks. What do I think, repeats Sara, and adds, are you serious, for me it’s very obvious. But he remains silent. It has to be her who plays judge, jury and executioner.

    Before going to sleep, Carlos usually conducts a routine pass through the apartment while Sara is in the bathroom. He locks the main door, checks the sinks, closes the blinds. Afterward, he brushes his teeth, pees, tucks in their son, and sets his alarm clock. Finally he gets in bed, takes the book out of Sara’s hands (who has fallen asleep), and turns off the light. The neighborhood is calm and the windows are double-paned, so the bedroom remains very quiet. There are slight domestic sounds: creaks of furniture, the motor of the refrigerator, random dripping of the shower, the plumbing, the deep voice of a neighbor who is arguing with his wife. But each night, around the same time, a car flies down the street at high speed, tires screeching as it takes the curve, and fades away with a clamor of braking and accelerations. He knows that there are cars broken into every night in the city as well as a history of underground urban street races, although it could just be a regular guy who’s always in a hurry. Some nights—very few—he’s heard somebody scream. It’s an unrecognizable scream, brief and far away, that could be someone bidding farewell to others, just as well as somebody celebrating without consideration for the neighbors. But it could also be a cry for help. One time, the cry was followed by dialogue, and Carlos thought he could sense an increase of aggression: two people arguing, maybe even fighting. He got up and squinted through the cracks of the living room shades without daring to raise the blinds and risk being marked from the street as an undesirable witness. He couldn’t see anything and the shouts ended seconds later. Maybe they reconciled after the last insult and began to speak in low voices, or maybe one of the two fell from a fatal attack—a stab that silenced his speech. Nothing more was heard. As he returned to bed, he waited for police sirens; there’s always a neighbor that calls in an emergency. Although, perhaps tonight it’s his turn, the only witness awake at this hour, and if he ignores his responsibility there would just be a blackened stain on the sidewalk the following morning that would take days to disappear.

    At times, in the middle of the night, after two or three hours of calm sleep, he wakes up startled. Not knowing whether he has been jolted out of a nightmare or beckoned by some noise from the street, he awakens all of a sudden, frightened. The apartment is calm; Sara is sleeping and turns her back to him. In this moment, his consciousness is keen enough to realize he is awake but not stable enough to recognize the normality of the world. They finally got in, he thinks, and the adverb finally marks the end of his waiting, the completion of something on hold. They finally got in. In other instances, his thoughts recycle another adverb: still He wakes up frightened and asks himself if they are still here. He can see shadows in the hallway from his bed; the streetlights offer a deep glow that filters through the living room shades and glosses over the furniture. He waits a few seconds to truly wake up and, when he pulls himself together, his fear regresses, reducing to its customary size, and he calms down. They haven’t gotten in. They couldn’t have gotten in. He gets up and enters the hallway on his way toward the living room, recalling one of his oldest, most prominent fears. It’s sort of a nightmare, but it never comes in a while he's asleep—it’s pure mental elaboration. It’s that moment when, after advancing a few paces into the darkness, he discovers that the bend in the hallway (although he hasn’t yet reached the stretch) is illuminated by a brightness that enters through the back door of the apartment, which is wide open and leads to the internal staircase. He doesn’t believe that he has ever dreamt something like this—he has only thought it, imagined it—but his fantasy has the visual force of a frequent dream, or even a blurry memory from his childhood. He takes a step, peers around the corner and sees the open door and, beyond that, an outside that could be either threat or salvation: dark stairs and the light coming from the elevator cab waiting on his floor—a vertical rectangle of bright yellow that’s enough to illuminate his part of the hallway. He has recreated the moment in his mind many times, as if it were a way to prepare for when it actually happens, although he knows that his premonitions would be in vain.

    First, he would have to figure out if they were still inside. He thought in plural because the news always seems to mention numerous assailants when there is a break-in, even though we’ve all heard of that solitary Spider-Man who accesses the first-floor apartments by hanging down from the roof. The best-case scenario would be to find that they had already gone: that they had finished quickly—a clean, professional job—and had simply forgotten to close the door when they left. Or, they had preferred to leave it open in order to avoid making noise by closing it and waking the inhabitants of the home—a much appreciated courtesy. But then, what is the elevator cab still doing there? It’s odd that they would have used it to come up; the normal decision would be to take the stairs, even though there are six floors. They wouldn’t risk alarming some insomniac with the elevator motor. They’re professionals; they don’t make clumsy mistakes like that. Most likely, the elevator cab has been there since the last resident (who always seems to come home late) arrived and nobody else had used it since. In reality, the lit presence of the elevator is unnecessary—an misdirected detail taken from cinematography. Logically, the door of the apartment would be closed, regardless of whether they were still inside or had already left. A wide-open door would result in a call to the police and less time to escape. Carlos decides to modify his nightmare by eliminating this open door—not only as inappropriate for professionals, but as a personal favor, as if the assailants would just be trying to terrorize him with this type of detail. It’s not normal for them to try to scare him, they don’t have to do that.

    The next step is to enter the living room. The most desirable outcome would be to just find everything messed up. He has never seen what a living room looks like after an actual robbery, but he’s familiar with what novels and movies have depicted: everything disheveled, drawers pulled out of furniture, books tossed to the ground, papers thrown about, chairs turned over. It’s probably better to expect something less scandalous, something less noticeable: the absence of some accessories, the dusty outlines where the television, computer, and stereo system used to be. Drawers opened carefully, a few papers out of order. They’re just looking for objects of immediate value—nothing with contracts or bank codes; they prefer jewelry, cash, gold, expensive electronics. In that case, they wouldn’t normally limit themselves to just looking in the living room. Everything interesting tends to be in the bedrooms: jewels, rent money, wedding rings—the loot is always close to the bed.

    In this situation, we move to the second version of his conscious nightmare—the worst part. He wakes up startled, too afraid to even open his eyes. They’re here, they’re in the bedroom. He remains still with his eyelids shut, wrapped in his quilt, turned toward his nightstand. He listens in vain: there are no footsteps, no breathing, no whispering, no rustling of clothing. He finally opens his eyes: nobody’s there. Carlos has thought many times what he would do if there were someone in his room. He imagines that one night, he opens his eyes and as soon as his pupils adjust to the darkness, he identifies a man—two men—dressed in black and wearing either hoods or ski masks, going through the dresser drawers, sifting through the socks and underwear, holding a small flashlight providing a dim glow. It’s better to pretend you’re asleep, he thinks, and even better to actually be sleeping. Don’t wake up, don’t listen to anything. He would gladly welcome the sedation of an opiate haze of a handkerchief soaked in chloroform shoved under his nose, only to wake up five or six hours later with a headache and dry mouth. Carlos prays they finish soon and leave, and only tomorrow, after the morning routine of going to the bathroom, putting on a pair of pants, even having breakfast, would the family notice the missing items: where are the earrings I left on the table, I can’t find the car keys, have you seen my purse. But if the men are still there when he opens his eyes—if he surprises them at the worst moment—then what will he do? He wouldn’t bother confronting or attacking them. It would be two against one—two strong men who know how to fight; they’ll be armed and he is still weary from sleep, disoriented. He’s a pacifist who can’t throw a punch and the floor is cold on his bare feet. He doesn’t have a blunt object within reach and he can’t hit them with the lamp from the nightstand or give them a smack with a rolled-up newspaper. He could scream in hopes of scaring them away, but what do you scream in these situations? Emergency seems very theatrical, just like danger, and help is no better. Police is impractical and will really screw everything up; they’ll freak out and react more and more aggressively. Maybe just a regular scream—a drawn-out ahh! hoping for a yell so resounding that they make a run for it. But if he shouts, their priority won’t be to escape; we aren’t expecting thieves so cowardly or submissive. Their goal will be to shut him up by hitting him or putting a sock in his mouth or smothering him with a pillow. At the same time, Sara will wake up—something will have to be done with her, too. You deal with the screamer, I’ll take care of this little sweetheart.

    Of course, it’d be better if they don’t even realize that he is awake—that would only end in brutality. But there’s no guarantee that his sleep will avoid that, either. He's read stories about overzealous thugs who prefer violence to theft and get pissed off about the lack of valuables they find in the homes. These savages torture the victims into giving up their secret stash, hidden safes, and codes to credit cards. At times, they’re even known to be sadistic; they wouldn’t waste the opportunity to terrorize a family. They break the fingers of the husband and force him to watch his wife and children be violated. In such a case, he might be expected to do something more than provide a hysterical screech that, due to his frantic state, wouldn’t even leave his throat. Sacrifice and heroics would be expected of him; maybe he would throw himself at these assailants and suffer the consequences so that Sara and their son could run to the stairway and call for help, even though there's always a lookout on reserve who blocks anybody trying to escape. And so it would be Sara’s turn to make a sacrifice and save Pablo. If tonight we have the misfortune of being dealt some sadistic, pathological lunatics, hardened by prison time and intrigued by fresh, slumbering skin, we should at least pretend to stay asleep. All we can hope for is that we're knocked out before even waking up. Out cold, we might mercifully experience only the physical consequences of their abuse without the addition of conscious terror. If we escalate this nightmare one step further, we could substitute some deranged individuals—more psychiatrically unhinged than jail-bound—who enjoy the pain of others and would never wake up a married couple by torturing them with heinous violence. They would prefer doing it softly, even delicately, lightly touching their hands and running their fingers sensually through their hair, speaking in a low voice: come on, wake up, come on, sleepyhead, we’re finally here.

    But they aren’t here. He finally opens his eyes, gets up, walks down the hallway, checks the lock on the door and the shades, tucks in his son, pees, drinks some water, and returns to bed, not knowing whether he is more ashamed of his vast imagination or of his likely cowardice, until he finally falls back to sleep.

    One afternoon, on her way home from work, she finds Naima sitting on a bench waiting for her in front of the doorway. She is accompanied by a young man who appears to be Arab just like her. Sara pretends not to have seen them, but is delayed by not being able to find her keys and the girl approaches her. Her companion remains a few meters behind, standing with his arms crossed. She stammers through a few words she must have rehearsed, but Sara asks her to leave her alone. Finally, she finds her keys but fumbles around trying to unlock the door while Naima interjects with a few unintelligible phrases—a mixture of Arabic and Spanish that combine into one as she begins to weep. She finally pushes the door open and turns to check if it shut securely behind her, but the male steps forward and uses his foot to keep it ajar. Please, señora, listen to her for one moment, he says. Sara excuses herself, I’m in a hurry, sorry, and looks toward the elevator. It appears to be occupied and she considers whether it would be better to wait for it to return or to take the stairs, where they might follow her, begging, for six floors. She is not a thief, says the man, acting as the speaker due to the inability of the girl who moans loudly at his back. You, señora, are wrong about her, she is good, a very hard worker, give her another chance, we need the money, help us, please, and the threatening tone at the beginning seems to relax as he pleads. Sara looks at her watch: eight o’clock, the time most people come home from work, a neighbor will appear at any moment. Let me close the door, please, she says in a firm voice, I have nothing else to say to you. The male removes his foot and Sara closes the door softly. While she waits for the elevator with her back to them, the pair remains stationary in the doorway; she crying and he, perhaps, consoling her.

    When she enters the apartment, the intercom rings. Carlos gets up from in front of the computer but Sara cuts him off and picks up the receiver. Who is it? she asks. She hears the accelerated voice of Naima’s friend, who seizes another opportunity to state his argument. We’re not interested, thank you, she responds kindly while she makes a calming hand gesture to Carlos, who sits back down in his chair. Naima raises her voice above that of her companion but, between her sobs, the incoherence of her speech and the simultaneous words of her associate, hardly anything is understood. Please, she is not a thief, what are we going to do, we do not have anything, they have fired her from the other apartments because of you, please, she is good. I’ve already told you that we’re not interested, thank you, says Sara and hangs up. The intercom sounds again, but she touches Carlos on the shoulder and kisses him hello: don’t get it, it’s an annoying insurance salesman, he’s calling all the apartments, just let him bore himself.

    Carlos is fearful. Of what? Of whom? Of the night, as we have already seen: nocturnal assaults—a violent guy in a hood that swings a bat at both of his legs (the sheets hardly soften the blow) and sentences him to a life of insomnia. But that’s a very sporadic fear, not continuous. He’s not afraid of every night: actually, only a few, just once in a while, when some alarming news (a band of thieves being arrested, information about a horrific night that a married couple was assaulted in their sleep, the robbery of an apartment on the same street) makes him consider the vulnerability of his apartment and opt to use the conventional deadbolt. He once locked himself out of his home and a neighbor opened the door with a credit card, quick and easy, without realizing that the friendly gesture increased Carlos’s sense of insecurity just as much as it saved him two-hundred euro for a locksmith. Since then, on top of the occasional fear of night, whenever he comes home—especially after being away for a while—he dreads that he might find the door busted open and the whole apartment ransacked. But that’s not his only fear, and definitely not the biggest: Carlos has others—some permanent, others isolated and cyclical. Some are intense and others minor, always with certain tangents and combinations—all tolerable when separated—that, in reality, have a continuous but

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