Rose Torres

### Known Physical Features

wide brown eyes, "cascade" of black hair (circa 1973), straight short black hair (circa 1981), crooked smile, 5'0" tall

### First Mentioned

Season 7, Episode #1: Amarillo

**Rose** is the subject of season 7 of Within the Wires along with her daughter, Anita. She was the wife of Elena Jiménez and a travel writer for various newspapers.

> *"She loved the pink stone of the tall terrace houses. She even loved the rain. She claimed it was atmospheric, and that it made it all the more thrilling when the sun came out. “Don’t you get tired, El,” she said, “of the weather at home always being the same? Always the same sun high above the hot earth? The same cold, cloudless nights?”"* **--Elena in *Episode #8: Glasgow***
>
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## Biography

### Early Life

Rose grew up in a childhood centre in Texas surrounded by other children from the American continent, with a wide variety of different cultural heritages. She was told she had Colombian heritage and broadly what it meant to be Colombian without any specifics of her family history.

### Dating Elena

On the first (and only) night Elena went to The White Cat, a band called "The Omega Tones" or something similar was playing. Rose was standing behind Elena in line to get in, and when a stranger offered her weed to help pass the time, Rose asked to have some too. Elena liked her handmade jacket, embroidered with roses, and asked her about it, and the two flirted and danced together at the concert.

Elena and Rose began dating the same year they met, and Rose invited her on a handful of trips that she was taking for work as a travel writer, relatively close to home. They had only been together for a few months when Rose got commissioned to write about Aotearoa, and invited Elena along. They arrived just before Christmas, and stayed until April 1974. They traveled across both the north and south islands (Te Waipounamu and Te Ika-a-Māui), but spent the most time in Lake Tekapo. They visited Tāmaki Makaurau, though they only stayed there for a few days before going on to hire a camper van and drive up to the top of the island. They also went to the Te Rerenga Wairua lighthouse, the northernmost point of Aotearoa.

They traveled back down the mainland and eventually took the ferry to Te Waipounamu and explored it in the same way. At one point, they took a boat to Rakiura, the southernmost island. While in Aotearoa, the couple did sailing, surfing, hiking, whitewater rafting, horseback riding, and stargazing. For the last week of their trip, they stayed in Tekapo without any distinct plans, and just existed quietly in the space. They also met Thea there. They got fish and chips and ate them in the dusk light, and Rose laughed at Elena for diligently wiping her hands with napkins, while Rose licked her fingers.

As soon as Elena and Rose got home from Aotearoa, they moved in together. They often talked about going back to Tekapo, even planning to eventually retire there, but they never did. Thea was the only friend in Aotearoa they stayed in touch with long-term.

Rose was adventurous, going skydiving in Edmonton and venturing into the Sonora Caverns. During her travels, Rose wrote an article about her tour of Puget Sound, where the boat actually started to sink, and fishermen rescued all of the tourists. Upon realizing it was a sightseeing trip they were on, the captain of the fishing boat took them on a tour through the sound. Rose published the piece in the New Yorker. She also did work for *The Telegraph*, *Life* and *The Post*, and took all of the accompanying photographs. She once wrote an article about the 19th century California gold rush, and carved a wooden damselfly pendant that she gave pyrite (fool's gold) eyes.

#### Having Anita

In 1980, Rose and Elena traveled to Jakarta for two months, staying (and dog-sitting) in an apartment owned by a woman named Kirana. One night there was a heatwave, and the city lost power for twelve hours. Elena was kept awake by the heat and by worry when Rose didn't come back to the apartment, but she had just gone home with a man she had met in a new nightclub. A few weeks later, Rose discovered she was pregnant, and started referring to the baby as Anita.

They reported the pregnancy and after Rose - surprising Elena - decided to keep it, she was prescribed vitamins to take. Deciding that she did not want to deal with having multiple different doctors during her pregnancy, Rose chose to stop travelling so far for the duration, only taking short local trips alone, which Elena thought made her restless. She was annoyed that she could no longer stomach tamales, her favourite, and for a while couldn't have spicy food. She didn't talk about feeling Anita's presence, but Elena was sure she did.

Rose was fascinated by the traditions and practices of the old society. While she was pregnant, she had Elena read up on midwifery in the hopes that she could deliver at home, but Elena thought she was getting carried away, and there was no way the government would allow it. Rose eventually had her child in the hospital in March 1981, and went through the protocols which she passed with flying colours, although she did remember the name she had picked out.

After the pregnancy, Rose threw herself back into work, doing a year or so of travelling to places like Liverpool, Busan, and Jerusalem. She phoned and sent Elena postcards occasionally, and did not tell her that anything was wrong, but about eleven months in to her solo adventures, she was having severe panic attacks alone in her hotel rooms, sleeping poorly, and missing deadlines. When Elena found out upon her return home, she suggested taking a break from work, which she did for about a month. Rose began experimenting in the kitchen and Elena would come home to a cooked meal every day. Soon however, Rose suggested they take a non-work-related vacation, and for a few months, Rose and Elena lived in Adelaide. They stayed in an orange shack with a lilac door on the bank of Grange Beach. They would often walk the ruins to scavenge, and Rose was most interested in finding old novels. She did a lot of writing while there, mostly poetry and short prose, but none of it with the intent to publish.

Rose and Elena eventually got bored of Adelaide, and she reached out to one of her editors, who asked for a piece about East Africa. She pitched an account of hiking Kilimanjaro, and they set off for Arusha soon after. Rose interviewed guides and tourists, talked to and bought from local businesses, and hired a guide herself to take her and Elena up the mountain. Rose had to support Elena much of the way and remind her to breathe.

Soon after Arusha, Rose and Elena went to Venice. She would recite a section of a monologue from *The Merchant of Venice* every time they crossed a certain bridge and eventually took Elena to a production, though she confessed that she preferred the uncensored version. In Venice, Rose and Elena tried nougat which Elena regretted and Rose did not, saying it was all part of the adventure.

#### Terminal illness

In around 1997, Rose retired from writing out of fatigue, and a few years later, told Elena that she was ill. The last time Rose and Elena went to Miami was in 1998 or 1999. She was already starting to be ill then. During this time, people around Rose and Elena's age were falling ill at an alarming rate, potentially due to exposure to old battlefields contaminated with biological weapons from the Great Reckoning. It began with a rash, then headaches, fatigue, fainting spells and nausea, before eventually death. Their friend Ned, terminally ill himself, heard of a specialist at Glasgow University Hospital studying "latent contamination syndrome" so in 1999, Rose and Elena traveled to Glasgow.

Rose seemed optimistic, and was very patient with the process, but also seemed to Elena to have accepted and made peace with everything that was happening, including Elena's anger and grief. She professed her love for Glasgow even in its gloomy state and their circumstances. Both the illness and the experimental treatments were hard on Rose physically. During the millennium new year celebrations, Rose was an inpatient as the drug trial had completely exhausted her.

At some point, Rose decided to end her treatment and go home. Without the side effects of the drugs, she was less ill, and a few weeks after they left Glasgow, she suggested a last vacation, to Medellín. They stayed in the city for a month, learning a lot about its culture and trying its food, art, and dancing, talking to strangers. They both understood that Rose would be lucky to survive to see Palo Duro again, but it is unclear if she did. Rose seemed to have accepted her impending death completely and enjoyed her time in Medellín despite her fatigue. She died in around 2001, and had a plaque added to the monument in the middle of town which had been built as a tribute to those who died in the Reckoning and kept being added to since. There was a space next to her name for Elena's.

### Legacy

After Rose's death and her own terminal prognosis, Elena chanced to see and recognise Anita in Amarillo, and decided she wanted to give her the opportunity to learn about her mother. She spent the projected last months of her life constructing a worldwide "scavenger hunt" for her to complete, uncovering pieces of Rose's life at a time. Back in Palo Duro, Elena began growing roses in their garden.

## Additional info

* The name "Rose" typically comes from the flower of the same name.
* Rose was a Libra, meaning her birthday was between September 23 and October 23.
* Rose liked to garden, and wore the same red and white bandana while gardening for years.
* Rose and Elena had an open relationship, which was typical for the time, and both casually dated other people. Rose dated significantly more than Elena, but did not get especially close to other people as far as Elena knew. Her dating stories included a lady who believed she was a bird in a former life and started making ca-caw sounds in the middle of their dinner, and a novelist, who seemed great at first, but Rose realized that he was just trying to find material, not actually make a connection.

## References

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Season 7, Episode #10: Palo Duro
2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Season 7, Episode #2: Miami
3. ↑ Season 7, Episode #3: Tekapo
4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 Season 7, Episode #1: Amarillo
5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Season 7, Episode #4: Jakarta
6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Season 7, Episode #7: Venice
7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 Season 7, Episode #5: Adelaide
8. ↑ Season 7, Episode #6: Arusha
9. ↑ Season 7, Episode #8: Glasgow
10. ↑ Season 7, Episode #9: Medellín