Hot Sur (22 page)

I grew to understand that Mandra X had real pull in this place and it would be a good idea to belong to her group. That’s why I’m part of the group, more or less. Don’t think I’m one of the zealots. In any case, she has become my protector and adviser, my sister, my “brotha,” and me, her “sweet kid,” her protectee. When it comes to matters of love, she’s imposing, jealous, randy, unfaithful, Don Juana-ish, fucked in the head, calculating; that is, she has all the defects of a man and more. But with her friends she’s solid as a rock. There is not a more dangerous lover or a sounder buddy. I’m not gonna tell you she’s my friend, she’s friends with no one, she’s up on her high horse, and no one can touch her. How should I put it? Mandra X is a fortress inside the prison, a place of refuge for her protectees, a horror for her enemies, a boyfriend to her mistresses, and a leader for her followers.

One time I told her I felt alone. It was naiveté on my part.

“Alone?” she harangued me. “What the fuck do you mean you feel alone when you just joined the ranks of a huge part of the population of the United States, the ones behind bars, that is? So you’re alone, my depressive little fuck, my sad little cunt, my pillow biter? So snap out of it, bitch, because you are also part of a quarter of all the imprisoned people in the world, who are here in these United States.”

Now I know that you shouldn’t talk nonsense here, or be guided by sentimentalism. I have learned to report my days as bad and not so bad, sometimes more bad than others. Sometimes the hemorrhaging stops, it disappears completely for a week or so, as if a spigot in my veins has been closed. Then I feel as if my life comes back, I recover my energy, my joy, who would’ve have thought it, my joy in spite of everything. On those days, I try to recover, I feed myself well, I write pages and more pages, I even grow calmer thinking that at some point everything will become clear and I’m going to get out of here and go directly to Violeta. I give myself to this vision, dreaming that one day I’ll buy her a house with a garden for her, for Hero, and for me, who knows with what money, but who cares, money doesn’t exist in dreams. And Mandra X, who is Mandra X? Where does she come from? No one knows. She doesn’t utter a peep. She’s white but she speaks Spanish; she’s male but she has tits and a pussy; she’s a justice-seeker and a writer of legal writs and she knows everything there is to know about the law, but she mocks American justice, asserting it is the worst and most corrupt in the world. But she knows it inside out. Imagine decades locked up in here, studying the penal code, looking for a way around it, finding loopholes and resources. But all this knowledge is useless when it comes to her case, because she’s sentenced to life, and from that, no one, not even she, can save herself. She doesn’t allow questions to be asked about her and doesn’t gossip, yet she knows everything. She’s the living memory of this place. According to her, forgetfulness and ignorance are the worst two enemies of a prisoner. Look at my case, the most horrible things that happen to me are the ones I forget about the quickest. Since the night of my husband Greg’s birthday, I have lived through a chain of horrors, but there are blank spaces where the sequence of events should be, like you used to say, on display on its corresponding shelf. But not me, I hide pain and confusion when they’re still fresh in these nebulous zones. Mandra X won’t tolerate that one bit. She forces me to write about what has happened, to go over it, make it worth something, and learn from it. She stores away facts about you that your own memory has forgotten; then she gives them back to you, forcing you to confront them. That’s rare in here. Here, things are set up so that you grow apart from yourself, divide yourself in two, and mop both sides of the hallway at once.

A few weeks after you left, Mr. Rose, you were replaced by a lady with a lot of titles. We showed her what we had done in your workshop, not to betray you, but to provide a sense of continuity to the class. Well, she just went off, talking about goals, and motivations, and achievements, and gains. According to her the whole thing was a glorious race toward becoming better. It was more like she was directing graduate students at Harvard or something and not some fucked-up prisoners shit on by fortune, and no more gains than two or three steps in a circle and no more goals than pressing your cheeks to the bars. What a bunch of crap, this fucking self-help self-improvement, they want to make you drunk with that and expect you to believe it. But that doctor they brought to take your place, Mr. Rose, was the reigning queen of it all. And on top of it she gave us a warning: “Write about whatever you want, girls,” she told us, “any topic, you can write about anything that comes into your head, whatever, it’s all fine, everything is welcome, except what happens in this jail. That is strictly prohibited. I will not accept any writing about life in the prison, episodes in the prison, or criticism or complaints about what happens here.”

“Listen, ma’am,” we asked her. “Where do you think we live? You think we hang in the city and come to Manninpox to hand in our little homework assignments about life outside?”

What an idiot, that lady. She said there were a bunch of other topics. That we could write about our childhoods, about our lives before prison, our loved ones, our dreams—constructive things and positive memories. We told her that we made suppositories with the positive and the constructive, and we never went back to the workshop. At least I never went, and neither did a few others. For now, Mandra X is my reader. She forces me to think about things seriously, to learn new words, and to call things by their name. Maybe it’s true that every door closed opens a new one, because I have had the best teachers of my life here in Manninpox: you and Mandra X. She doesn’t have family that visits her, just human rights people and defense lawyers for other inmates who come to talk over things with her. I imagine that Mandra X is their contact in here. She works for them, I think, or maybe it’s the other way around.

Anyway, it was her, Mandra, who hooked me up with my amazing lawyer, my little saint of a lawyer, my talented and intelligent protector, my dear old man, what would I do in this life without him? I tell him that anytime I see him. “You are the man of my life.”

He laughs. “Get one your own age,” he responds. “One who stands up straight and not a humpbacked old man like me.”

“But you’re the one I like,” I say. “You and only you, always dancing to your own beat, always true to yourself, different from the others, more dignified and elegant than anyone.”

“Hi there, baby,” he told me the first time he saw me, right in the middle of that horde that gathers in the lobby of the courthouse. That’s what he told me, before we had even met, “Hi there, baby.” An affectionate greeting, kind, playful. I began to cry like the Magdalene. Because all of a sudden, I felt like a person again and not a criminal on the way to the gallows, just a person with problems who needed help. Since then, the old man has become my defender, my solace, my ally, my powerful lawyer. I’m pinning all my hopes on him. He says he’s going to get me out of here. Every time we see each other he tells me. And I believe him; I cling to his words as if they were the Our Father. In the end, what is the Our Father but a string of words?

Mandra X is not someone who ever talks about where she was born or where she lived, what kind of life she had, how she was hurt, or what ankle she twisted. When she was still free, did she have a husband or a wife? A mystery. Did she ever have kids? There is a story that was going around that I’d better not repeat. Mandra X. What kind of a name is that? Like a bug, or a robot, or medicine for a migraine. A clownish name for a clownish old lady. That’s what I thought at first, before I knew her. Her tattoos and weirdness alone could have you talking about her for hours, if you dared. Here everybody gets inked. And you see every kind of tattoo, broken hearts or hearts plunged with arrows, names of men and women, Christs, skulls, Baby Jesuses. A tattoo is the only luxury and the only jewelry allowed for inmates. So paint yourselves, eyes on shoulders, spiderwebs in the underarms, tears on the cheeks, butterflies, dragons, birds, pictures of loved ones, Mickey Mouses, Betty Boops, self-portraits. Anything you can think of, even initials on the soles of your feet and drawings on your ass. There are those who even call themselves artists and are expert inkers, setting up businesses with inks and needles. They are never short of customers; here everyone uses their bodies as sketchbooks. Some have poems on their thighs or revolutionary symbols. One named Panterilla had a whole stanza of “Imagine” by John Lennon inked on her back from top to bottom, and Margarita, the Peruvian girl I told you about has that written on her arm, “Mother, I don’t deserve you, but I need you.” The thing is, in Manninpox your body is the only thing that belongs to you and they can’t stop you from doing with it what you want. That’s why many also pierce themselves. There are those who even purposefully mutilate themselves, and Mandra X is the queen of them. That kind of thing makes me shudder, leaves me speechless. I can’t understand why someone would voluntarily amputate a finger, like it happened the other day in the ward where the white inmates are. But Mandra doesn’t disapprove. She thinks they’re gestures of freedom and independence, and that actions that might be wrong or even atrocious when you are free become the complete opposite when you are locked up in prison. That’s what she says, and I listen. She says that in our circumstances, orgies, blood pacts, and even suicide are acts of resistance.

“Then let me bleed,” I ask of her, when the fatigue of the anemia makes me melodramatic. “Come on, Mandra, it’s an act of resistance.”

But she forces me to stand up. She finds some medicine and makes me sign letters to the authorities demanding proper medical attention immediately.

“Let me do it,” I beg her. “I’m fine here. I want to rest.”

“You’ll be surrendering.” She shakes me. She brings a ball of snow from the courtyard, packs it tight, and puts it on my belly so the bleeding will stop.

Her gang, or I should say, our gang, is called
Noli me tangere
: that’s why they call us Las Nolis. It’s a Latin phrase that Jesus uttered to Mary Magdalene after he was resurrected. It means don’t touch me. Don’t get near me, leave me alone, don’t mess with me. See, you learn things. Even in Latin. Now that I’m a Noli, I know the meaning of words like skirmish, independence, liberty, rebellion, rights, resistance. Well, I also learned the meaning of the word clitoris; it embarrasses me to know what it is. Can you imagine? Years and years of tapping and tapping that little button without knowing what it was called. But going back to what we were talking about, I don’t have any tattoos, not even one. I write only on paper. Many sheets of paper because I have a lot to say. Maybe I don’t do it on my own skin because I’m terrified of needles. Sometimes I think I should do it, it would be braver on my part, more daring, more permanent. But what if I regret it later, what if something feels stupid that the day before seemed extraordinary? I imagine you have the same fear, Mr. Rose, when you publish your stuff. There’s an inmate who has “live valorously” tattooed on her shoulder, but both words are written with a
b
so she’s going to have to libe balorously until the day she dies. And then there’s Greg and Sleepy Joe, who are Slovaks, and who have tattoos on their chests that say, “Lightning over Tatras.” Lightning over Tatras? What the hell is that? Not me, thank you very much, I’ll stick to pencil and paper, at least I can erase it that way, or cross it out, throw it in the garbage, and start anew. Mandra X inspires me. She tells me that Miguel de Cervantes was locked up when he dreamed up Don Quixote. Aside from you, Mr. Rose, she’s the only one who knows that I write, and I ask her about spelling and other such issues. You were a teacher who liked to please us, you put up with anything, congratulated us about everything, but she doesn’t let me get away with anything. She tells me write down everything I lived and to describe things in detail, even if they burn, even if they sting. But I forget, maybe because of the anemia.

“I don’t remember, Mandra,” I apologize. “That little bit is not clear. I’m not sure what happened at that moment.”

“You’re a woman and you act like a girl,” she tells me and leaves.

Mandra X’s tattoos? They’re different. Imagine blue snakes slithering across her back till they hug her belly, going down her thighs and her calves, and twisting into each other like ropes. They go down to her feet and down her arms to her fingers. Her skin is like one of those laminated figures in anatomy books with veins and arteries, but some who know her say that it is not about veins or arteries, but about rivers. All the rivers of Germany with their respective names, so a map, of her native land. It’s difficult to believe that Mandra X belongs to another place that is not this one. She got here before all of the rest and she’ll be here when they’re all gone. According to these versions, her very white skin is a living map that illustrates the course of the rivers of her country. The Rhine, the Alster, many others that I don’t remember, and the biggest and fattest, the one that goes down on Mandra’s spinal column, the Danube.

“In Spanish, it is Danubio?”

“Ah yes, el Danubio. Greg spoke to me about that river, but for him, it is called the Dunaj.”

“Don’t listen to him. Your husband was a Slovak, that’s why he called it the Dunaj. The river is called the Danube and your husband is dead; they killed him.”

I change the topic immediately. They’re saying that Greg was killed on the night of his birthday, but I don’t believe it. If they also say that I did it, and I didn’t do it, how am I supposed to believe them?

Hey, Mandra, that Danubio, or Dunaj, or Danube, that runs down your back and goes all the way down there? Does it go up your asshole? Is that where it empties? And inside, do the waters of that river find beds in your veins?
I’d like to ask her, but I don’t dare because if she gets angry she can flatten me with a single blow.

There I go on a tangent again. What I want to finish telling you, Mr. Rose, is what happened that day in the dining room. The others kept their distance, as if they had decided beforehand that they’d gather in a circle around me.