Entered into what had been wall to him and bathed in the substance that composed it.
5
Much that is in the files is cryptic.
Told a special kind of truth. They didn’t lie, but they were formal.
Left out a lot of important things — often essential things — that local people would know and gossip about.
Though when he asks around the prison, the boy seems to have left little impression.
Don’t talk much.
Hollowness and neglect of somebody of no account.
Meagreness of his body merely emphasised by the blue overalls.
In jail a man has no personality. He is a minor disposal problem and a few entries on reports. Nobody cares who loves him or hates him, what he looks like, what he did with his life. Nobody reacts to him unless he gives trouble.
This his personal officer.
Personal opinion is that he wasn’t all there.
Wouldn’t apply for leave to attend his own mother’s funeral.
Grant him special parole but he stubbornly refused.
Though a good worker, according to the painting instructor.
Does be polite and say thank you.
Painting with his crew over the graffiti that will bloom again on the same walls tomorrow or the next day.
Quiet just because he ain’t have anything to say.
Ain’t no law about talkin’ or smilin’.
Though an old lag he consults gives him another perspective.
Didn’t know the boy, but knows the wings.
Plenty in here not right in the head.
Hideous howlings and yellings.
Confounded zoo.
But playing the fool can also be a method of survival. No one’s going to ask an idiot to deliver product or hide a tool in his cell.
Commandments of prison life.
Speak little and if questioned reply as briefly as possible.
Take up as little space.
Living very sparing on our provisions.
What you don’t order from the commissary can’t be taken from you.
Explains why the boy had cash to carry out.
Surplus earnings.
Religion a solace for some, but a bible has other uses. Roll-up paper, other kinds of paper.
Cleanliness next to godliness.
Though body odour has its benefits.
Feculence a barrier.
Prison its own belief system.
Method of accepting things without questioning the why and the wherefore.
The variable airs, the large and small events.
The only problem that after a while you can forget what it is like to be normal.
Men who are nothing allow themselves to become nothing.
What’s needed here, my friend, is discretion, a good nose, presence of mind, steady nerves.
Yes, indeedy.
6
In the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into spirals.
Chin nuzzled into his breast.
Prison was no more than a small walled village.
What does Caborca know of Huisiachepic?
Rise now and go about the city.
Fugitive’s trail.
In the streets and in the broad ways.
Eastern suburbs of the town.
Emerged at last into a small road lined with old gloomy houses.
Through a wooden gate.
Hammers on the brown door.
Hostel noted in the boy’s file, referred to in the newspapers as his last address.
Shabby genteel place.
On the walls were faded frescoes and faded traces of a painted dado.
Corridor smelt of formalin.
Figure of a woman blocked out the light from the office.
Warden of the hostel.
Can I help you?
Dimly remember him. Wasn’t there some sort of trouble?
Newspapers took up this curious case.
Not one of ours.
Hadn’t been in there, hadn’t passed by.
Might have been on the waiting list. Always have more applicants than we have beds.
Talk to his probation officer.
Lo siento.
Drizzle of rain.
Walked toward the phone booth.
Dialled the number.
Voice spoke through the lisp of the rain.
Seeing as he’s no longer with us I suppose it’s alright to talk.
Dead dog never bit nobody.
Put him in temporary accommodation until a place freed up at the hostel.
Residing at the time in furnished lodgings.
Only he didn’t reside very long.
Split for parts unknown.
What the hell you expect?
A dozen policemen disguised as sheikhs, cowboys and Spaniards on his tail?
Take down particulars but case like that so common.
Fifty like him on my books.
Poor little slum-bred hard guys that got knocked over on their first caper.
Authorities would have their work cut out if they were going to chase after every runaway.
Address she gives him is not far away and he sets out again.
Squat little streets.
Three small boys hunching knee to knee play cards beneath a black umbrella.
In a yard a plastic deer.
The lodgings, when he reaches them, spread across two houses.
Yellow vapour lights glowed high up in the air and a neon sign between them said, Welcome to Realito.
Number one cheap cheap hotel.
Watches the lights blinking.
Hell does he think he’s doing.
Monster crouched in the shadows.
Only knew that at the bottom of each breath there was a hollow place that needed to be filled.
Something in the story itself to tell him about the way the world was.
Pass through the door.
A desk was back in the dimness and behind the desk a bald-headed man.
Raises an eyelid.
Takes a key off the hook.
Staircase into the bowels of the building.
Hall unlit like a subterranean cave.
Room wasn’t much larger than a broom closet.
Bed, a chair, a coloured print of Killarney, and a barred window looking out on a wall.
What’s your grift then?
Think I can’t smell a dick when I meet one.
Where a man’s at ain’t necessarily for you to know.
Got my wallet unstuck from the lower part of my back and spread tired-looking dollar bills along the bed.
Stared at me for a long level minute.
Thin arse little man.
Week maybe two.
Gay Paree.
How should I know?
Fuckin’ AWOL.
Do know is that he left without signing his chits.
Care so much about him maybe you’d care to settle his debts?
Leaned forward and brought his face up close to mine.
Ever get socked in the kisser?
Nose into our business and you’ll wake up in an alley with the cats looking at you.
Beat it before I change my mind.
7
Slunk down the street.
Rain beatin’ on him and he don’t even know it.
Like one of those small men in gangster films who know too much and get killed.
Good that god kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they’d have no heart to start at all.
Perhaps that’s all that happened — the boy lost heart.
&nb
sp; Went to jail part of me had died.
Hills finished the job.
Knows too much and knows nothing.
Last name in his notebook.
Youth worker who signed the pre-sentence report.
Ring fifteen times.
Said he was in court and would not be available until late in the afternoon.
Walks the streets until the appointed hour.
Called at the offices.
Wait if he’s busy.
Walls have plenty notice hang up.
Carrying a knife isn’t sharp. Real men use protection. Get ahead not arrested.
Slick-haired blonde man opened the door.
Good god! he said. Haven’t you got anything better to do with your time?
Spare you a few minutes as you are here.
Voice was already down the hall.
Eastern tales of woe.
Comes from the squalor of their streets, the filth of their homes.
Murderers and robbers from their very cradle.
Though something different about the boy, he admits, when they are seated in his office.
Lives in a world all his own.
Monkey, you know.
Smaller one used by bigger ones to access properties.
Thing Felix could do.
Break and enter a window without smashing glass.
Convenient drainpipe.
Tickle the lock.
Supple pull-up Felix gets in.
Softly up the steps straight afore you and along the little hall to the street door, unfasten it and let us in.
Why he was the one put away.
Fingered by his prints on the window, the inside of the front door.
Not because he was the instigator.
Captain or corrovat.
Arrest were banal.
In lieu of the dogged black-visaged ruffian they had expected to behold there lay a mere child.
What were his motives, or did he have motives?
Attempts of the police and the public prosecutor’s office to find this out have been fruitless.
Never saw him with money or possessions.
Sharp clothes.
Brain worked in dim ways.
Claimed he didn’t know the old woman was hurt, that he went back out the window when she appeared.
Door closed behind the others as they fled.
Nobody don’t know nothing until the milk bottles start to pile up.
Broke her hip in the fall but it was dehydration that killed her.
Explained that to him, he said if he’d have known he would have gone back and given her a drink of water.
Odd thing to say.
Long sentence for a juvenile but a life was lost.
Refused to give any names.
Judges don’t like that, though it’s the law round here.
Anybody that belonged to the band told the secrets he must have his throat cut and then have his carcass burnt up.
Bonds that come with blood.
Never been able to discover who is his father.
Notwithstanding the most superlative, and I may say supernat’ral, exertions on the part of this parish.
As for the north I have wondered myself what took him up there.
Run a scheme sending kids kayaking, abseiling, orienteering.
Hills in the south.
Never went but perhaps he heard about it from someone who did. After his time away thought he’d have himself a holiday.
Prison is where you promise yourself the right to live.
Fulfil the dreams of one’s youth.
Only he bought a ticket to the wrong hills.
8
Still going into the prison, reading the men’s writings, listening to their talk.
Fascinating facts and tales from the poky.
Pale wall of dreams.
Standing in a cell one evening while its occupant brews tea in the wing kitchen.
Hung with old calendars and magazine pictures.
High narrow slit of a window.
Looked out on a bare courtyard lit by electric lamps.
Full of the melancholy which seeps into the bones in prison at night.
Always get into those places. What is hard is to get out.
Hole in the wall, a gap in the barbed wire.
The black-bordered finger-thick dividing line.
Except that the dividing line doesn’t always run along the concrete balustrade.
Two or three days and nights went by.
Cold grey day.
Headed for the projects.
Poke ’em where they live a little bit ’n’ see what happens.
Or at least where the boy used to live with his mother, according to his file.
Den in the farthest east of the city.
Said that premises retain some stamp, however faint, of their previous inhabitants.
Weather closing in as he arrives at the estate.
Milky fog.
Buildings looming like giant ghosts.
Woman points him the way.
No use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working.
Ungarnished staircase.
Hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats.
Dim-lit doorway.
Long time since he has stood at the threshold of any residence other than his own.
Bell which was so worn it rang only intermittently.
Door opened a crack. A woman’s face.
Who might you be?
Wrong place, I expect.
Peered through the chink.
Not place, time.
What did he imagine?
Tuberstirrings in the blacksweet duff.
The boy’s shape in the shadows.
This is where I used to sleep. My cot was against this wall.
This is where we used to have Christmas.
Though as the door closes he sees a movement in the window of the neighbouring apartment.
Curtain was drawn aside and a narrow intent face was close to the glass.
Snow-white hair.
Rang the bell, the door snapped open.
What you want young man?
Better come in.
Front room that had cotton lace antimacassars pinned on everything you could stick a pin into.
Can’t be too careful these days.
Have a seat over on the couch.
People really bad mind, you know.
Came here twenty-two years ago we didn’t lock our doors hardly.
Here when she brought the boy home from the hospital.
Little fellow in a bag.
Throat vibrating with a queer rasping noise.
When they took him away.
Local rozzers.
Fourteen hundred hours at the maternal domicile.
When they took her, too.
St John ambulance.
From that appointment she never came back.
Wasn’t exactly the sort you get to know.
Don’t have no visitors.
Floor dirty with footprint and cigarette butt.
Opinion is she drinks liquor.
As for his soul.
Ain’t sure I could put a name to it.
Hours standing at the window.
Gazing from the smoky room inside the glass.
Seemed to wait for something.
Whatever it was didn’t come, or turned out wrong.
Went and joined a set of thieves and bad characters and almost broke his mother’s heart.
Shook her head.
Stands himself and walks to the window.
Lawn of weedy grass.
In a few high windows of the apartment towers violet and reddish lights gleam.
Far off the banshee wail of police or fire sirens.
Worked in the launderette the other side of those blocks.
Take him with her when he was small and lay him in one of them plastic baskets they used for the washing.
9
Wanders the estate, past the launderette which is boarded up now.
Between a slop shop and a gin shop.
Through the nearby streets.
Veil of lightly falling snow.
Little two-storey houses with battered doorways.
Walls cracking like the last days of Pompeii.
One of these perhaps where the old woman lay dying on the floor.
Little window that he got in at.
What went on inside those buildings.
Divide up in little worlds and you stay in the world you belong to and you don’t know anything about what happening in the other ones except what you read in the newspapers.
Man beating their wife.
Lofts where families hide children.
Caresses of a murderer.
Police are pursuing their inquiries.
Complete story in tomorrow’s weekend edition.
Stops to write in his notebook.
Faces glaring in suspicion, steam rising from beneath the street in frozen wisps.
Pen pressing into the paper.
Not so easy to find a man.
Get to the true facts.
The inside details that the newspapers never mention.
What his feelings were whom I pursued.
Why he behaved as he did.
Nobody, my mother said, knows anything about anyone else. Not even about a close neighbour. Not even about the person you are married to. Or about your parent or your child.
Even about ourselves we know nothing.
Each still lives behind the wall.
Wall in our heads.
Fog closes in and blurs the edges of the moment.
Tell me the story in your heart.
Er läßt sich nicht lesen.
You catch the snowflake but when you look in your hand you don’t have it no more.
10
Well three or four months run along and it was well into the winter now.
Still living in one room in this break-down old house.
Like a cave with the ancient black stove, the iron sink, the green cupboards, the gas ring.
The divan where he frequently spent whole days reclining.
Felix Culpa Page 2