Hot Sur (11 page)

Visiting day has always been a delicate matter. At 5:00 p.m. the families leave, taking with them any illusion of warmth and affection, and the inmates return alone, freed into our cold reality. Some minutes later, around 5:15 or 5:20, begins the worst part of life in jail, because the prisoners tend to commit acts of desperation. It’s as if they had been emptied inside, grown even more desolate than before, as if their hearts, softened by the visit from loved ones, become more vulnerable to solitude. Sometimes it’s stabbings. Or beatings, rapes, that sort of thing. But not just that, which doesn’t happen every day; I’m talking more about gratuitous acts of intimidation. Imagine that apropos of nothing someone I haven’t even noticed, who has no relation to me, passes by and shoves me, or knocks my tray from below so all the food goes flying in the air, or grabs my ass, or lets out some obscene insult. It’s not as serious as a stabbing, and it likely isn’t serious at all, physically, I mean, but it strikes a chord, sets my nerves on edge, and triggers alarms in my head because it is clearly letting me know that a person detests me, doesn’t support me, and would feel better if I weren’t around. Why? Just because that person feels I’m stealing her air. The feeling of suffocation is constant in here. Air doesn’t circulate in these closed spaces, and you have to fight for every drop of oxygen against the others. Let’s say that person has pushed you or bit your lips. In the struggles between prisoners, it could be that one rips off another’s lips with her teeth, what they call a Swiss kiss here. That person is letting you know that you are reducing her space, that you exacerbate the desperation that is already inside her. That’s why on Saturdays, after the visitors leave, the best thing to do is to take cover, make yourself invisible in some corner, don’t mess with anybody or try to fix anything that ain’t broke. And to make the shit even worse, the authorities have decided that the visits need to be in English, no Spanish, and those who don’t obey get their microphones turned off. And there are the poor families, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Colombians, that often come from afar, that don’t speak a word of English and begin to cry helplessly when they’re forbidden from speaking Spanish with daughters they can only see through bulletproof glass. Words are forbidden, and so are hugs: they destroy all form of communication, so that fierce frustration and anxiety are all that lingers in those looks crossing from side to side, those hands that want to reach through the glass between them. I know what a visit means for a prisoner even though no one has visited me here. For some in here, the encounter with a loved one is reason for living, sustenance hour after hour, the only hope of the entire week. If they take that away from you, the only thing you want to do is die or kill someone. The banning of Spanish has been the worst, Mr. Rose, the most difficult thing of all, an injustice that rips away at the guts. People outside have become aware, and human rights groups have filed complaints. Mandra X, who is our inmate representative, has made sure the matter is being shouted from the rooftops, and the scandal is making the rounds in newspapers. That’s why the warden of this dump has begun to make accusations. She has said that we Latinas use our native language to traffic and make illegal pacts with family members, unnoticed by authorities. Or as Jennings said the other day, “Who’s to say that when you speak Spanish you’re not ordering a hit from the outside?” One of us responded, “Your mother might be a killer, but mine is an honorable little old woman.” Jennings, that garbage-digging rat, I don’t know why I have a feeling her days are numbered. The authorities also claim that we use Spanish to insult the guards without them knowing it. Imagine, coming up with such things, although they have a point because it’s true that in English, all of us respond, “Yes, ma’am, no problem, ma’am, I’m sorry, ma’am, I won’t do it again, ma’am.” But in the next line we mutter under our breath in Spanish to “stick it up your ass, you old bitch” or “eat shit, you filthy whore.” That is, there is no doubt that the guards are assaulted with a good motherfucker, or gross insult, or low blow, depending on whether the inmate is Mexican, Argentine, or Colombian, because here Spanish is defended in all its versions: in Argentine
che
, in Salvadoran
guanaco
, Guatemalan
chapin
, and Honduran
catracho
, in Nicaraguan
nica
, and Costa Rican
tico
, in all the Colombian versions of
paisa
,
rolo
,
costeño
, and
veneco
, in
boricuan
, in
newyorkrican
,
chicano
, and the Mexican
chilango
.

In the middle of this mayhem, Mr. Rose, it so happened that because your workshop was in English, to attend became an act of betrayal in the eyes of our Latina sisters who accused us of selling out, and they began to block the hallways to the classroom. The six of us tried hard to explain things to them. The little gringo was teaching us to write, the language it was done in didn’t matter. We are not siding with anyone, but they thought it was all bullshit.

“Well, from now on, I will conduct half the class in English and half the class in Spanish,” you announced when you heard what was happening.

“What do you mean in Spanish?” the students who only spoke English, who were the majority, piped up. “You don’t speak Spanish and neither do we.”

“But I do speak it.” You stood your ground defiantly and let out an impeccable Spanish that left us Latinas flabbergasted. Where the hell did this
gringuito
learn Cervantes’s language? And from that moment on, you conducted the rest of the class in our language, while the white girls stewed.

After the hour was done, you said good-bye and left, so you didn’t see how the Latinas all gathered on one side of the class with our backs to the wall, our hairs standing on end like fighting cocks: the vengeance of the North was about to come down upon us. We had been waiting for it since before you left, and who knows what would have happened there if not for the intervention of an inmate known as Lady Gugu, a radical white activist who led a gang that preached it was a waste of time for the races to be pulling each other’s hair. And because she’s quite charming and knows when to play the clown, Lady Gugu announced that she too was going to conduct half the class in Spanish and began a demented and nonsensical monologue that broke the tension and made both sides break out in laughter. Who knows what that madwoman was saying in a Spanish with the worst American accent, that
your ass is a great hat, and good morning, enchiladas, Antonio Banderas eats my cunt
, and anything she could come up with,
my little señorita whore, good mosquito tacos
, anything at all,
I’m very Mexicana, I’m a pretty little coco
. And the rest of us were disarmed, safe on first, because it was impossible to figure out who Lady Gugu was insulting, the white folks and the way they speak Spanish, or the Latinas by mocking our language.

The bad thing was that after that we never saw you again. That happened on a Thursday and the following Tuesday they told us that the course had been canceled. That’s all they said, canceled, that’s how they tell us things around here, just like that, without saying why or who, canceled, by God or a ghost, canceled, that’s it. That’s the way things are around here, they like to make us think that misfortunes occur on their own, and they can then wash their hands. But there was no need for them to say anything else, for us the reason you were fired was very clear.

Ever since they started fucking with us about the Spanish, the Latina inmates have been going around like lionesses, ready to scratch anyone’s face off, our halls always on the verge of exploding. They’re going to have to stitch our lips together if they want us not to speak our own language, which, as you yourself said, is the only thing they can’t take away from us. And so the game continues, sometimes they’re stricter and sometimes they relax the rules because they just give up, but they keep fucking with us, and if on Saturday they turn off someone’s microphone during visiting hours, the blood rises again and rage builds up. And what could not be reversed, Mr. Rose, was the thing with your class. They just canceled it, but I’ll never forget that Thursday when Lady Gugu decided to speak Spanish, talking about asses and hats and other nonsense. It was a euphoric moment, Mr. Rose. You should have been there, a kind of small victory, a few minutes of fun and games between the Latinas and the white girls, something very rare around here. It was as if the prisoners of all colors got together and decided to smack the faces of all those who hated us.

By night, that feeling had vanished. When you’re a prisoner you have to be skeptical about those moments of hope because they turn quickly, and the higher you jump the harder you fall. You go around with moods like a yo-yo, up and down, up and down, one moment you think you are saved and in the next you realize you are damned. That’s what happened to me that night, after that class that would be your last, although we didn’t know it yet. Alone in my cot I was struck by the reckoning, the name we have for the kind of depression that drains the blood, and what had seemed marvelous a few hours before now seemed tomfoolery, what hat or not hat, what enchiladas, I had never eaten enchiladas in my life, didn’t even know how they were made, probably something gross and spicy as hell. And Banderas was a bad actor. So much pride in his Spanish, which he didn’t even speak well because he was forgetting it. And me, so proud of being a Latina, and months before I’d have given anything to be married to an American? I’m telling you, everything seemed very forced. Which got me to thinking: while I was free, my goal was to wipe the Latina off me as if it were a stain, and in prison I’m becoming a fundamentalist of Latinohood. But what I’m going to do, on the one hand it’s something that’s spontaneous, it’s the face of my rage, on the other hand, I need it to survive, that simple. Here, you have to take sides not to get sandwiched in the eternal war between the races.

I mentioned that the Latina prisoners had a name for that blood-draining depression, that plummeting of the spirit; we called it the reckoning. The reckoning comes upon you like a bucket of cold water, soaking your bones and drowning you in despair. “The reckoning hit me,” we say around here, or “I have the reckoning in the brain,” or “Don’t talk to me, I have the reckoning.” The reckoning is the worst, you want to die, nothing interests you; you just want to be still, to isolate, as if locked up in yourself, a dead woman living. The reckoning is introversion, despondency, pessimism—all mixed into a deadly cocktail. In the second section I was in, 12-GPU, there was a black Cuban woman, under the full weight of the reckoning, always huddled up on her cot. An enormous woman abandoned in the narrow cot in which she hardly fit, like a mountain that had crumbled. Her name was Tere Sosa, but because she never moved, we called her Pere Sosa, which means the lazy one. The reckoning comes and goes for the rest of us, but it had swallowed her whole. She didn’t even get up to go eat, and after a while not even to go to the bathroom. She soiled herself and gave off a smell that wasn’t even human, as if she had decided to transform herself into a pile of shit, a heap of garbage. The guards couldn’t make her get up, not even by force, because there is no force as powerful as the reckoning. So they hosed her down with water and left her there, soaked and trembling from the cold. But even then, soaked and soiled and starving, the woman couldn’t care less. Recently arrived in that section, still inexperienced and ignorant of its laws, I passed by Pere Sosa and asked what she had done to be in such a state, why they had arrested her. Why did I open my mouth? I felt a shove behind me right away; someone was throwing me up against the wall with all her strength. Later, I was to discover that it was no other than Mandra X, one of the capos of the prison, a lesbian thug who was one of the leaders of a powerful gang, according to what I was told then.

“Listen to me good,” Mandra X told me that time, flattening my nose against her chest. “We don’t know what Pere Sosa might have done. And you know why we don’t know? Because we don’t ask. We don’t ask those things here, princess. So the next time I hear you asking them, I’ll break your face.”

The cure for the reckoning is work. Nonstop work, in handicraft, in whatever you can get, leather embossing, crocheting, knitting, making wooden objects, whatever, so you can rock to the whir of the routine of your hands and let them think for you, so that there is no other thought in you besides that trivial thought free of anguish that the hands think. It’s the best antidote. But it’s hard to get work in the prison. It they don’t trust you, you can’t have access to tools that can be turned into weapons, you know, so they only give them to you, if they give them to you at all, for a couple of hours and under surveillance. Only a small percentage of prisoners enjoys the privilege of manual labor, and most of them are white, because the black and Latino prisoners are always under suspicion. They let me make knapsacks from polyester fiber, tying the yarn by hand. That soothes my mind, and it is easy to get permission for because no tools are necessary. Making knots hour after hour is a compulsion that may save you if the reckoning has befallen you; at least it works for me, and I have become almost addicted to it, I could tie polyester yarn from here to eternity, thinking about nothing. The other recourse against the reckoning is to sign up to mop floors. They always need volunteers because never in my life have I seen such shiny floors. At all hours, there’s someone mopping the concrete, somebody cleaning what cannot be cleaned. No matter how much bleach they use the smell still lingers there, floating in the darkness, the stink of the urine and sweat and shit of the thousands of prisoners that for more than a century have inhabited this place, the miasma of the great sewer that runs under these floors that each day they mop and mop until they’re dazzling.

I at least remained in high spirits with the polyester knapsacks and the mopping, but the hemorrhaging has dwindled my strength and each day brings me down even further. There I go off on a tangent again. I begin to tell you something, but I’m dragged by a gust that blows and end up who knows where. I was asking you, Mr. Rose, how you would describe me physically in the novel, because in class it didn’t seem that you looked at us or were interested in me or any of the others, not in that way; you didn’t even seem to flinch when we sat in the front row and crossed our legs provocatively. We were about to give you up as a homosexual when you spoke to us about a girlfriend who was a teacher of deaf children. After you left, we gossiped about such a little saintly pair, her dealing with the deaf and you with prisoners. I think you never properly inspected us visually, undressed us with your eyes, as they say, out of good manners, and perhaps because you knew how persnickety the gringos are about harassment. So I’ll have to tell you what I look like myself, describe what I look like, in case you don’t remember.