Hot Sur (38 page)

“The more victim traits a person possesses, the more likely she will attract a bolt of lightning. But that’s not mine,” Pro Bono said. “I’m paraphrasing René Girard.”

Rose paid close attention to everything but said nothing. He didn’t dare look Mandra X in the eyes, but he could not stop looking at the blue lines that ran up and down her arms, and he wondered what they meant. Are they veins? he wondered. Veins tattooed over the real veins? But then he noticed that each of the blue veins was labeled with a name in minuscule letters running parallel to it, and although he wasn’t able to read them, he would have had to put on his glasses, he remembered that María Paz had recounted how the net of veins on Mandra X were a mapping of all the bodies of water of Germany.

“The theory about getting hit by lightning is correct. There are those with a lightning bolt on their foreheads,” Rose tells me. And while he doesn’t recount the story of his son’s scar yet, he tells me about Luigi, a boy from his neighborhood when he was growing up.

This Luigi, skinny and younger than him, was by all signs an evident victim, a poor shit, a sad little runt, whose mother screamed at him and beat him. And Rose did too, of course he did. All he had to do was hear Luigi cry and a committed cruelty arose in him like he had never experienced before—an exacerbation, an arousal even, that took over his person every time he heard Luigi wail. And Rose had never been a bully, the opposite in fact: the tough kids at school had abused and ridiculed him to no end. Rose could have said what Obama had said about the same type of experience: “I didn’t emerge unscathed.” Yet an almost sexual urge had led him to beat Luigi, make him howl, help fuck him up some more because he himself had been fucked up, and simply because Luigi’s mother, by beating Luigi, had passed him on and put him at the mercy of all his superiors. Luigi was a loser, and veritable sufferer, and Rose thought that abusing him was not only okay but also inevitable: his little whimpers were an invitation to mistreat him.

The other prisoners thought that María Paz attracted misery because of her tendency to lower her guard, to hide behind her favorite phrases: “I don’t know,” “I don’t remember,” “I don’t understand,” and with the modest habit she had of pulling down her shirt all the time, as if it were too short on her. The older inmates told themselves that María was a martyr for anyone to overtake, a value judgment about which they were almost never wrong. Manninpox exposed the weak, confused, and defeated ones, and chewed them up. It gulped down their blood. In María Paz’s case, all this wasn’t meant figuratively; her blood dripped warmly on the cold stones. At first, she appeared to live in the clouds, incapable of telling her story even to herself, incompetent when it came to putting together the pieces of the puzzle to make a whole. During her first weeks, she couldn’t even figure out what her downfall had been. She talked about things that had happened to her as if they had happened to someone else. The first time Mandra X talked with her in private, María Paz complained that they hadn’t given her panties. When she had arrived at the prison and traded her clothes for the uniform, they hadn’t given her panties. They left her without underwear and that upset her horribly. She complained about that as if it were her one and only problem, having to go without panties and feeling exposed and violated. Maybe if we get her panties this rag doll could become a person again, Mandra X had thought, and found two pairs, so she could wash one while wearing the other. That seemed to calm down the novice a bit. She had already been through a lot. After a confrontation, she had spent a few days in solitary, no one knew how many. She herself didn’t know, had lost count. It was understandable that she would be a little discombobulated after what had happened, but she was going to hit bottom if she didn’t react somehow.

“They didn’t even tell her about her husband’s murder, and if they had, it hadn’t registered,” Rose tells me. “Pro Bono had to tell her, more than a month after it had happened.”

“Sir, did you know María Paz was pregnant?” Dummy asked Pro Bono. “You didn’t know? Really? Pregnant, you know? Bun in the oven, little one inside. Does that shock you? Well, yes, she was fucking pregnant.”

“I had no idea,” Pro Bono said after a few seconds of silence, and Rose sensed that not having known about this truly upset him. “She never told me.”

Of course she didn’t tell him. María Paz never told anyone anything, especially if it was about her pain. But that’s how it was; she was pregnant. Although she hardly mentioned it, because she was incapable of admitting it, even to herself. According to the perception they had about her inside the prison, María Paz was a bramble of confusion, a goddamned bundle of nerves. Day by day less so, admittedly, and little by little she had been waking up, getting the hang of things, because whoever didn’t wake the fuck up wasn’t going to survive long at Manninpox, washed away by the current. But at first she was a babe in the woods, in utter denial of things and trembling all day.

“I take it you also don’t know that she lost the child after the beating that she took from the feds,” Dummy asked Pro Bono. “Not a clue, right? Or that this was the reason for hemorrhaging? No, you couldn’t know. The little princess never talked about those things because they hurt. Better just to remain quiet. Better not to say that the guards even refused to give her sanitary napkins, throwing it in her face that she had used up her tampon quota and the quota for the whole prison. But María Paz was one of those people who believed that if she didn’t talk about things it was as if they didn’t happen.”

“Foolish me for not having suspected it,” Rose says. “María Paz could have very well been pregnant, of course, with such a busy amorous life. And yes, of course, the beating they gave her when they arrested her must have caused her to miscarry. It must have really hurt her to lose the child in such a manner, who knows in what basement of what station at the hands of those sadists. And she was incapable of reasoning that the fault was theirs, those who beat her; I know the scene well, have lived through it myself. She created a completely new set of reasons to punish herself over that lost child, the same old beating on the chest with guilt:
It’s my fault my child could not be born, my fault I was a bad mother, my fault the child wasn’t Greg’s but Joe’s, or the other way, my stupid fault it wasn’t Joe’s but Greg’s.
”

Rose says he noticed something that was consistent throughout María Paz’s manuscript: she lingers in the present or dwells in the past, but leaves the reader hanging on the issues that are most pressing, that call most for resolution. But, of course, it could be that María Paz did talk about her pregnancy and that those passages are among the missing pages.

“Did you know, sir, that María Paz was sent to a hospital near Manninpox because the hemorrhaging wouldn’t stop?” Dummy continued to ask questions. “They scraped her insides. A curettage they called it, sir. No, you didn’t know. She didn’t tell you. She wasn’t capable of painting the whole picture. The way she sees her own life, it is full of holes, like a piece of fucking Swiss cheese. People think of things. People come up with ideas. Initiatives, as they say. The son of this man here, Professor Rose. He thought it would be a good idea for María Paz to write things down. So she would be more aware, as they say. Brilliant, your son, sir. A good person, but naive.”

“My son was an excellent teacher and he did what he could here,” Rose jumped in, leaving inhibitions aside when faced with the insulting of his boy.

María Paz’s problems hadn’t ended with that. According to Dummy, or according to Mandra X as related by Dummy, the medical care offered to the inmates at Manninpox, especially gynecological care, was shameful. The sick inmates were transferred to a special ward of a nearby public hospital, where, according to certain security regulations, they were kept in a separate wing and cuffed to their beds. They were forced to wait hours, sometimes days, then they were summarily attended, given a haphazard diagnosis, and treated accordingly. Nobody explained anything to them. What was wrong? What medication had they been given? The inmates remained ignorant of all details; they were simply acted upon as if objects. María Paz had not been an exception to this. They scraped her and she apparently recovered. The bleeding stopped, so they sent her back to her cell. But a couple of weeks later, the hemorrhaging started again, although not as bad as before. Every day little maroon spots appeared in her panties as a reminder that her insides were still damaged. Mandra X forced her to focus on the trial that she was waiting for, to prepare herself, to review the arguments in her defense, to make sure the chronology of events was clear in her head so that she wouldn’t contradict herself, wouldn’t lose hope. But María Paz wouldn’t come down from the clouds. She pretended to be out of it and got lost in dreams that had nothing to do with the facts, fantasies about that house with the garden she said she was going to buy.

Rose tells me he didn’t fully buy the picture of María Paz they painted of her in prison. He thought those women didn’t really understand her character. From what he had read, he knew the type of person she was. But, of course, when he was in Manninpox he didn’t say any of this. You don’t tease a pair of dragons when they’re sitting right in front of you. María Paz wasn’t one to be interpreted through ideologies, Rose thought, she need not be judged because she wasn’t aggressive, or proud, or forward like the rest of Mandra X’s militants. María Paz wasn’t of that brand; her style was more discreet, according to Rose, which didn’t mean it was any less effective. “Necessity has the face of a dog,” as she wrote in her manuscript, and Rose was beginning to understand that her personal code of conduct must have been guided by just such a maxim. He knew dogs well, their peculiar manner of slowly filling in the gaps with countless acts of humility and patience, and yet at the same time, with such guile and conviction that it made them by far the smartest of animals. That’s how María Paz went through life. She didn’t disgust anyone, and she didn’t bark or bite. No fuss or declarations, more or less going forward diagonally. Like a dog swimming. Rose had seen his dogs swimming. It wasn’t a crawl or a butterfly or a backstroke, but a freestyle paddling that was just enough to keep their heads above the water, yet so effective and persevering it would have allowed them to cross the English Channel if they had wanted.

Rose guessed María Paz’s character was the antithesis of a challenging and belligerent individual like Mandra X. He saw María Paz as pragmatic, measured, used to not asking for more than her share, to not exposing herself more than necessary, to moving efficiently below the surface, taking care of one thing at a time, without wasting her energies on causes or pointless issues. Mandra X was an agitator, a leader, a rebel with a cause. Not so María Paz. A survivor, as she herself had said about Bolivia, her mother, which suited her as well, Rose thought; she had become an expert at keeping her head above water without much ado, just like the dogs.

One day, the guards came to get María Paz in her cell to take her to court. The decisive moment of her trial had arrived. Mandra X had visited a few moments earlier and had seen her praying and pleading with all the saints to grant her freedom so she could find her sister, Violeta.

“To hell with the saints,” Mandra X told her, “and forget about Violeta for now. Worry about your own skin. Go fuck the asses of those sons of bitches who are keeping you locked up. The saints have nothing to do with this. You have to count on yourself.” And as María Paz walked down the hall heading for the bus that would take her to court, chained up like Houdini, Mandra X was able to yell one last thing: “You’re gonna get out of here because you’re innocent, Do you hear me? You’re innocent and you’re going to be free.” But that’s not how it turned out. María Paz had returned to her cell with a fifteen-year sentence.

A few weeks later, the shock of the tragedy lifted a bit when Pro Bono requested a mistrial from the supreme court because María had not been provided with a proper defense. In Pro Bono’s words, “the trial was shit, a sick joke, a series of fuckups.” And what happened? Pro Bono was successful with his petition, and the court ordered a retrial. A do-over. Back to the drawing board. Pro Bono petitioned that the defendant be freed in the meanwhile, but he was denied. She was considered a flight risk and remained in Manninpox.

It was during that time that María began to change. The other inmates noticed how some other person seemed to be emerging from the inside. They noted how she matured, getting stronger and distancing herself from the lost and defeated María Paz who had been at the first trial under those pitiable conditions and without any real defense. Pro Bono’s support and the solidarity with Mandra X, in combination with the hope of a new trial, animated and energized her in a way that she even developed a sense of humor. She went to bed at night with the hope that she would be found innocent and with the feeling that her freedom was just around the corner. She began to read everything she could and was excited about Cleve’s writing workshop. It was only sometime later that she got hit low again with what the Latina interns call the reckoning, especially after her sister, Violeta, refused to talk to her on the phone. Otherwise, María Paz remained active and in a good mood, consulting the dictionary to learn conjugations and grammatical rules, committed to improving her written English to leave behind some record of what she had lived through. But not everything was going as planned. The supreme court, which needed to set a date for the new trial, postponed it time and again. Why? Rose didn’t quite understand. Pro Bono explained it to him, but he was incapable of capturing the minutiae of it. Legal intricacies, asshole moves by the prosecutor, insufficient evidence, the give-and-take of Pro Bono’s negotiations with the prosecution. Months passed and the new trial started to become a mirage. And although María Paz’s mind apparently withstood the uncertainty and the accompanying stress, the same was not true of her body, and it began to falter again. María Paz internalized the issue and the hemorrhaging returned worse than ever, draining her of vital energy.