An Uninterrupted View of the Sky
Page 7
When she comes outside, I stuff her backpack inside mine and we head back to the prison. Papá doesn’t want us there alone while he’s at work, but we’ll make an exception today.
We go straight to our cell and lock ourselves inside. Together we spread a sheet over the stained mattress and plant three pillows at the head.
When Papá finishes at the wood shop, it’s like a holiday in here—the two of them ooohing and ahhhing over every little thing they pull out of the boxes, like an extra pair of socks or an old blanket is some amazing gift.
The whole thing turns my stomach, but I can’t spoil it for them. So I grab a towel and a bar of soap and head to the back of the prison to shower. I’ll feel better once I’m clean.
The bathroom is disgusting. There are two toilets in the prison for how many hundreds of us? And four showers. No way is Pilar showering in here. Ever.
Lukewarm water trickles down from a rusting showerhead, and I scrub and scrub, and the soap stings, so I know I’m getting clean, but this place is so vile I can’t tell until I’m out in the open air and taking the stairs up to our cell two at a time. Then I can draw in a full breath. Then I almost feel like myself.
I give my wet head a swipe and toss the towel on the mattress where Papá and Pilar are still sorting through their things. I step out onto the balcony. The sun beats down on the courtyard, so the place is empty except for a circle of guys my age—the only ones my age who live in the prison—playing futbolito in the dirt, juggling a ball so flat it isn’t so much bouncing from knee to foot to knee again as rolling from one limb to another. Pathetic.
It’s something, though. A small piece of the life I had before the prison, and the one thing I really had going for me. I head downstairs, and the guys make a space for me in their circle, like I’m one of them, just like that.
The ball moves, and we move with it. Flick and tap and roll—the ball has a sloppy rhythm that our bodies mimic to catch and cradle and pass it on again.
When it hits the ground at last with a puff of dirt, the game pauses and everybody looks at me—the new guy—like they’re waiting for me to say something.
I don’t.
I think we’re about to get the game moving again, but one of the prisoners walks across a corner of the courtyard and the guys all stiffen. His face is gaunt, and gray patches hide under the hard lines of his cheekbones. His shadowed eyes never seem to settle on anything.
The guys don’t look at him, not directly, but I do. I’ve seen him before. He’s the wiry one that walks with a hitch in his step—the one who pulled a knife on that prisoner outside the bathroom on my first day in here.
When he’s out of sight, the kid from school—José—leans toward me and whispers, “Watch out for that man. They call him Red Tito.”
“Yeah,” says another guy with a raised scar on his collarbone. “He did something bad last year, and he landed in the dungeon for a month. None of the adults will say what he did. They just make sure we know to stay away from him.”
The rest of the guys are nodding. And then they’re all looking at me again, like I’m supposed to start talking.
But I have nothing to say.
“So what—they got your father on the 1008?” José asks.
Like he knows anything about my family. “Papá didn’t do anything. He shouldn’t even be here.”
“Like he said,” snaps the guy with the scar, “the 1008.”
“Stop saying that.” My head is pounding. I slap the ball off José’s shoulder.
“What’s your problem? It’s the truth.”
The words are barely out of José’s mouth before my fist flies out and glances off his teeth.
In that second, I’m not just a sack of bones rattling around anymore. I can feel the muscles in my arms and legs and the blood coursing through them. I feel good. Really good.
It scares the shit out of me.
The circle closes around me, but José just wipes the grit off his lip, licks and spits the blood pooling on his tongue. He lifts his hands like a caught thief and slowly drops one onto my shoulder.
He says, “The 1008 doesn’t care about innocent or guilty. It doesn’t care about any of us. We’re all in here because of that stupid law. Get used to it. Unless you plan to fight the whole world?”
I back away. Whatever blood and bluster my swinging fists called up is gone.
• • •
When I get back to our cell, Papá’s eyes flick to my scraped and bruised knuckles. He jumps up and grabs me by the arms.
“What happened?”
Pilar looks back and forth between us.
“Nothing. It was just a little disagreement.”
“Francisco, look at me.” Papá waits until I raise my eyes to his. “This is not our old neighborhood, where scrapes and scuffles are no big deal. You cannot fight here. Do you understand me? You cannot fight inside the prison. Do you want a target on your back? Do you want to live in a place like this your whole life?”
I shrug off his hands, drop onto the mattress, and turn to the wall. If I was a skeleton before, I’m not even that now. I’m nothing.
October 16
Waking up in prison is a shock, every time. But waking in a cell with only Pilar and Papá is better. It’s almost privacy. It’s almost safe.
They’re both up already, heating water on the hot plate for some coca tea. Pilar is holding a half dozen cactus spines she collected yesterday in the plaza. I roll over, wince as I bang my bruised knuckles against the floor, and sit up. I drag over the box Mamá filled for me and begin unpacking. When I lift out my algebra textbook, a folded square of white paper tumbles to the ground.
I unfold the poem. I remember this one. Papá gave it to me a few years ago after I got into a fight at school.
I sneak a look over my shoulder, but Papá and Pilar aren’t paying any attention to me. I guess that’s our new version of privacy. No walls or doors or even a hanging bedsheet to divide the space. Just averted eyes, hushed voices, and bodies angling away from one another.
Out of Place
There are places in this world
Where a car with windshield wipers makes sense:
Cobija, for one.
London,
Laos,
Rio.
But here, all the wipers do
Is move the dust back and forth,
Smear sunlight across the glass,
Wipe the guts of all manner of bugs
Before my eyes.
How does a thing come to be so out of place
Where it has landed?
A polar bear in a Mexico zoo?
An air conditioner in Siberia?
My children in a city
Half mad with poverty,
Half mad with crime?
Does the polar bear shed his thick coat?
Does the air conditioner learn to give off heat?
Does my son forget
How kind his heart began in this world?
Yeah, Papá. I learned to fight. What else was I supposed to do?
All day, Pilar sits by herself, inside herself. Perched on a corner of the mattress, she draws overlapping circles on the ground with a rock. It doesn’t make a mark on the concrete, but she doesn’t seem to care. She just keeps drawing.
I never thought I would miss her constant questions. I guess I never imagined she could be like this.
“What are you making, Pilar?”
The circles don’t stop, and she doesn’t answer.
“Do you want me to find you a pen or something? You can have a page out of my notebook.”
She still doesn’t answer, so I scoot beside her and pick up a pebble of my own. Instead of circles, I draw overlapping clouds. Layers and layers of clouds crowding out the sky.
• • •
I only remember him doing something like this twice before. Once when Pilar was born, and once when he bought his taxi. Maybe Mamá didn’t want those kind of rituals in the house. Maybe he gave up that sort of thing willingly.
I don’t know exactly what he’s doing. But the words he’s speaking are Aymara, and the alcohol he flicks into the air is so bitter it singes the inside of my nostrils. When he’s done, he wraps his arms around our shoulders and pulls Pilar and me close.
“This is our home now.”
I’m relieved that we have a cell with a door and a lock—I am. But I can’t bring myself to call this place home, and I can’t fake happy. I carry our bucket downstairs and fill it in the sink at the back of the prison. I take my time, so I won’t ruin Papá’s moment.
When I get back to the cell, Papá and I lift up the mattress and lean it against the wall so there’s an open patch of concrete floor. In the corner of our cell, we hold up a blanket so Pilar can bathe and wash her hair. When she’s done, Papá combs through the tangles, the wet strands sticking to his wrist and twining around his fingers. As gentle as he tries to be, it hurts her—Pilar makes these little gasps every time the comb hits a knot.
She doesn’t complain, though, and somehow that makes it even worse. I’m so mad at Mamá I can hardly see the teeth of the comb sliding between strands of Pilar’s slick black hair. What kind of mother leaves an eight-year-old girl in a men’s prison?
October 17
Today is Sunday, so the kids in the prison spend the morning playing, or doing homework, or going out with their trays of toys to sell. I sit with Pilar on the balcony in front of our cell and watch the prisoners and their families below.
Halfway through the morning, José comes in through the gate carrying grocery bags. I watch him move through the courtyard and reappear on the third level, letting himself into a cell in the far corner. The scrapes on my knuckles have scabbed over, but the skin around the edges will probably be red and swollen for days.
Pilar chews on the side of her lip while she watches the mothers cooking in the open courtyard, children running around their skirts and grabbing bits of food when the women look in the other direction. My sister has this hungry look on her face, but it’s not the food she wants.
I can’t do this anymore. I have to get out, even if it’s just for an hour, to breathe in the unbroken expanse of the sky.
I go to Reynaldo’s, and he catches me up on what’s going on in the neighborhood. I tell him how I’m going to get Papá’s taxi back and how Papá wants me to take Pilar to live with my grandparents.
I don’t tell him everything, though. Not how my grandparents are basically strangers to me. How after Pilar was born, Mamá rarely went with us to visit them again. How once Mamá stopped going, Pilar and I stopped too, until only Papá made the yearly trip to the Altiplano.
Reynaldo hasn’t said it, and I haven’t said it, but even though he hasn’t dropped me like the rest, we’re not the same as we were before. I’m a prison kid now. And he’s—I don’t know. He’s different now, too.
Reynaldo hands me a catalog with all the new uniforms for next year’s club championship in Brazil. The trick is to buy jerseys for the teams that have the best chance of going all the way, so you don’t get stuck with a bunch of shirts for a losing team.
“It’s going to be Manchester United and Real Madrid in the finals, for sure,” Reynaldo says.
“What—you’re just going to give up on the whole continent right from the start?”
He dips into his father’s liquor stash, and for the rest of the afternoon, we take turns drinking straight from a bottle of cheap singani as we go back and forth, arguing about nothing, just so we don’t have to talk about what’s really going on.
I know what I have to do when I get back. I’m not looking forward to it, so I take my time walking to the prison.
José shares a cell on the third level with his three little brothers and his parents. Before the sun goes down, I stand outside the door, where they can’t see me, but I can hear them inside. It sounds like close spaces and overflowing smiles, like they’ve found a way to be happy because they’re together, even though they live here.
I know that couldn’t have been us—Mamá never would have settled for a life in prison. But it still stings to see a family that didn’t break apart when the father landed here.
I step into the open doorway and knock on the frame. José jumps up when he sees it’s me. The side of his mouth is bruised, and a deep red line slices down his lip.
I did that. Why did I have to do that?
I can’t hear the exchange between José and his mother, but the way she looks at me—I can tell she knows. José steps outside and closes the door behind him.
I say what I came to say fast before I change my mind. “I’m sorry I hit you.”
He leans back against the door frame and crosses his arms over his chest.
“You didn’t deserve that. I don’t know why I always . . . There’s no reason for it.”
José drops his arms and looks away from me. “Your mom ditched you in here, didn’t she?”
Like I didn’t already feel like shit, coming to him like this. But I guess I owe him some answers.
I nod.
“I’d be pissed too.”
“Yeah. Still, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have taken it out on you.”
“Okay.”
I shove my hands in my pockets. “Okay.”
And he goes back inside. Nothing has changed, not really. We’re still stuck here, and Mamá is still gone. But maybe it’ll be easier if I don’t have to live with my own shit too. Not when everything around me is rotten, inside and out.
October 18
I watch the gate when the police guard unlocks it Monday morning. A door opens down the balcony from ours, and the same figure in that floppy hat and baggy clothes hurries down the stairs, across the courtyard, and out of the prison. This time I get a good look at his face. Only it isn’t a him I’m looking at—it’s a her.
And I know who it is. I didn’t recognize her at first as the always-scowling one in the back row of all my classes.
She’s different from the other girls at school. She doesn’t wear a tie knotted between her breasts or a vest buttoned tight over her ribs. No black underlining her eyes. Just her uniform (that always looks like she slept in it) and long socks up to her knees, a flat, unsmiling line for a mouth, and darting, aggressive eyes. And, yeah, if she has lived in here all these years, I get it.
She’s the only teenage girl in the prison. Maybe the others had family they could go stay with. Or maybe they decided life on the street was better than this place. So why is she still here?
As I begin to turn away, a movement below catches my eye. Red Tito is lurking by one of the little stores, half in shadow and half lit by the morning sun, watching the gate and the figure who just passed through it.
After Papá sees us off, I pull a folded piece of paper out of my pocket. Since trying to talk to Pilar isn’t going so well, I think maybe Papá’s words will help.
I slow my steps so there’s some space between us and the rest of the prison kids on the sidewalk—I don’t want anyone else to hear this.
I unfold the paper, and Pilar peeks over my arm.
“Did Papá write that for you?”
“Yeah. A long time ago. Mamá packed it with the rest of my stuff.” And I start reading. My voice cracks, and at one point it takes a whole block for my throat to open up again. But I read the whole thing out loud, and for a while at least, it’s almost like Papá is there with us, outside the prison walls.
The Colt
Today’s fare took me far outside the city
To the grounds of an old h
acienda.
The buildings sagged with neglect,
Vines that had once been trimmed and trellised
Leapt from crevice to crack
Bearing a flower or cluster of grapes
Wherever they pleased.
The only living thing
Still trumpeting the exalted life of the hacendados
Was a colt, black as a mine shaft,
Sleek as a blanket
To swaddle a newborn child,
Proud as the men who brought his forebears
Across the ocean, in the belly of a ship
Laden with Spanish gold.
The colt ran beside me
As my dusty taxi crunched over the road
His tail aloft, his mane flicking defiantly
His hooves shucking tufts of sod behind him.
I wonder who brushes his coat to gleaming.
Who sits astride that tall back?
What son of a slave
Takes such pleasure in caring for the symbol
of a fallen master’s reign?
When I finish reading and I tuck the poem back in my pocket, Pilar ducks her head under my elbow and wraps her arm around my hip.
We’re going to be late if we walk more than a few steps connected like this, but I don’t pull away. And, yeah, it’s slow going, but it’s worth it.
I drop Pilar at school, but instead of going to class myself, I start the long walk across town to the Oficina de Tránsito. I shouldn’t keep cutting school, but I don’t want Pilar with me if this doesn’t go well.
In Cochabamba, there are walls around every building, pushing people through the streets with these little breaks in the press and run of the city, grassy plazas with fountains and benches or little parks with stone statues every so often. When you walk through the neighborhoods, you can’t see what’s behind those walls—maybe just a peek at a second floor if there is one, or at the water tank on the roof. But the wall says enough about who lives behind it.