Pilar must see that I’m worthless—stuck to my chair like a lump of flesh. She takes the papers, slides them into my backpack, and thanks the woman. Then she grabs my hand and pulls me up and out the door.
If Soledad sees it in our faces when we get outside, she doesn’t pry. Maybe she never expected much to come of all this. I did, even though I should have known better.
Don’t lose hope. What a joke. I could cover the whole world in green ink, and still there wouldn’t be a speck of hope to be found.
It’s late. Pilar is drawing and labeling some life cycle diagram. Birds maybe? Or bats? Papá is rolling a glinting gray rock the size of a fingernail around in his palm.
“What is that, Papá?” Pilar asks.
“This?” He holds it up to the light, and it winks at us. “This is fool’s gold.”
I don’t like the way he says that.
“My father carried this little rock out of the mines and gave it to me when I left the Altiplano. Look, it’s sparkly and yellow in places, like gold. But it’s worthless.”
“I never saw it before.”
“Yeah, well, I forgot about it, for years.” His lips twist from a grimace to an unconvincing smile. “Your mother packed it for me. She must have wanted me to have something of my father’s while I’m here.”
Pilar nods, matches his smile, and goes back to her drawing. But she’s not stupid. She can see through those skin-deep smiles, same as me.
I grab my notebook and a pen and lie on my stomach, my pillow over my head so no one can see what I’m doing.
It looks like gold:
yellow and shiny
pried from the bottom of some
dim mine shaft.
It looks like a promising journey:
out of the hills
down to the city
into a new life.
It looks like a real marriage:
a house
two kids
a pair of decades together.
It looks like hope:
a trial
a verdict
the chance to be free again.
But it’s only fool’s gold.
All of it.
November 2
Sometimes going to school, we take the long way on purpose. I steer Pilar away from all the other prison kids and onto a side street. It takes longer, so after I tuck her doll into her backpack, smooth the flyaway hairs that have come loose since breakfast, and wait until she gets inside, I end up running with Soledad all the way to school just to get there before the first bell.
But it’s worth it, to get a few minutes away from it all. To walk down a street that hasn’t quite woken up yet. To pretend for a few minutes that life is normal, peaceful even, and that prison is the last place we belong.
• • •
Profesora Ortiz is calling us up one by one to privately go through the poems we have turned in so far. While I wait for my turn, I’m supposed to be writing a new one. I could write about how I never get the chance to play fútbol anymore, and how missing the thing that set the rhythm of my days is like skipping heartbeats. I could write about Pilar, or Papá. But all that’s coming out is more about Soledad.
She sits a couple of seats behind me and to the left. The thought that she might somehow see what I’m writing makes heat spread like a rash over my neck and ears, but I don’t stop. It’s like I can’t.
There is nothing smooth or tame about her.
She is tangles
and mats of fur
yowls that raise the hair on my neck,
and fangs.
I wonder, what does a wildcat want?
What would make
her tail swish against the floor?
What would loose a low rumble of pleasure
inside her chest?
When we get to the biblioteca after school, Pilar and Soledad curl up on the pillows by the window and I go straight to Officer Torres’s desk. “Why don’t they change the 1008, then, if everybody knows it’s wrong?”
“Hello, there. Francisco, isn’t it? I am so glad to see you here again.”
I don’t echo the greeting. I don’t do the niceties.
He sighs. “Changing the law is not so easy. Why don’t you have a seat?”
I sit on the edge of the wooden chair. I don’t want to settle in with this guy.
“If you think the police are corrupt, you should spend a day in the halls of our government. They do what benefits them, more often than not. They do what is popular. They do what the wealthy ask of them. Is anyone of consequence banging down their doors and asking for prison reform? Are any of the elite calling their offices to protest the backlogged legal system?”
The whole time he’s talking, his hands are clasped in front of him, his thumbs circling around each other in slow revolutions. How can he be so calm when this is my life he’s talking about?
“Hey, I’ve got an idea. Why don’t you do something about it, if you know so much? Stop the police from making pointless arrests. You’re one of them. Make them stop.”
“I could certainly try,” Officer Torres says, nodding like he deserves everything I’m putting on him. “But who would be here in my place?” He sweeps his hand around the small room, at the children tucked into the corners and crowded around the tables. “We each serve where we are called. When I’m not at work, I’m volunteering here, so these kids have a safe place off the streets and away from the gangs and the pimps and the drug dealers. You think I should give that up?”
No. Obviously. But I’m not going to tell him that.
“What do we really need? Young people. Committed young people who will wade into the high waters and reroute this stream. People with the smarts to go to university. People with the energy and the motivation to fix this mess.
“Me? I do the best I can by this community. I enforce the laws of this country. If the laws need changing, well, I am not equipped for such a task.” His hands clasp together again, and his thumbs resume their circling. “I wonder who might be?”
I hear the grunt I give in answer. I look over my shoulder. Pilar and Soledad are both watching me, like they can feel the tension rippling off my back. I can’t help it. This guy makes me feel like my own skin is on too tight.
“Time to go, Pilar.”
The three of us step out onto the dusty street, into the rusty almost-sunset sky that bleeds over the bricks and onto my burning cheeks.
When we walk past the guards and into the prison, the air in the place is different. The prisoners have set out extra plates for their ancestors, and the little stores around the courtyard sell tantawawas in the shape of swaddled infants and ladders so the souls of the dead can climb into the sky at the end of their visit.
There’s no Día de los Muertos feast in prison, but while Papá and Pilar make dinner, he talks about his grandparents and his brother who died as a child as if they were right here with us.
I don’t have space in my head for ghosts.
After dinner, I look over the notes I took at the law library. It’s all jumbled on the page and tangled up in my head. It feels like the low ceiling of our cell is pressing down on me, and I don’t know if it’s because the dead are looking over my shoulder or if it’s just the long, frustrating day, but I’m having trouble pulling in a full breath. I stare at the page in front of me, and the words seem to twitch and sway.
I rip out a second page and let the ideas reshape themselves.
People in another country,
that big-stick-carrying country to the north,
don’t like what our coca leaf becomes
when it is crushed and strained,
crystallized and euthanized.
They don’t like how the tiny rocks pulverize
the minds
of pusher
s and prostitutes;
how all the money and power in the world still
can’t keep their people clean.
They brought their big stick to our government,
they wrote quotas that have the prisons in this country
overflowing
with men and women waiting
for a sentence, hoping
for a trial, knowing
they’ll never get it—
knowing they’ll never again see
an uninterrupted view of the sky.
This one I’ll turn in. I don’t mind showing Profesora Ortiz angry. I let the whole world see that part of me.
We’ve been waiting a while for Papá to get back from the showers. Pilar looks like she’s going to fall asleep sitting up, but she won’t go to bed until we’re all safe inside the cell for the night. Finally, the lock turns. Pilar rubs her eyes, and we both look up to see Papá sidle inside and quickly shut and lock the door behind him. His shoulders rise and then fall again, and he turns to face us.
His knuckles are bloody. His shirt is ripped. One eye is purple and swelling shut.
“Papá!” Pilar cries.
He motions for her to stay seated and sinks down to the mattress beside us.
I jump up. “What happened?”
“It’s nothing.”
“Papá!”
“Francisco,” he whispers through bloodied lips, “sit.”
Pilar grabs a washcloth and dabs at a line of blood by his ear. Papá tries to smile, but it doesn’t work. He meets my gaze over Pilar’s head. His eyes hold this dark thing I’ve never seen in my father before.
We’re losing him.
November 3
I watch as Papá helps Pilar get ready for school. He’s rubbing a scrap of cloth against a smudge on her shoe. His eyelids are barely open. The lines that shape his cheeks, the corners of his mouth, the squint of his eyes are all pitched down. Even his skin is tired of holding itself up.
This man is not my papá.
I can’t wait the years it will take legal aid to get us out. There has to be another way. I pull my shoes on and lace them slowly, methodically. I’ve already started sweating along my hairline and beneath my button-down shirt. Yeah, it’s hot. But this is something else.
This is me knowing what I have to do.
When I get to school, I let out a deep breath and open the door to Profesor Perez’s classroom.
“Okay,” I say. “What do I have to do?”
My teacher looks up from the stack of papers he’s grading, his eyes blinking to bring me into focus. “To graduate? Turn in your assignments and prepare for the end-of-year exams in a few weeks. And come to class. Don’t make me go down to the prison to tell your father you’ve been skipping school.”
“No, not that.” If I can’t even say it, how am I ever going to make this work? “How do I get into the University of San Simón?”
Profesor Perez pulls off his reading glasses and motions for me to sit. “This is a surprise. What changed, Francisco?”
“Everything. And nothing. My father wants me to go with my sister up to my grandparents’ home on the Altiplano. But that leaves Papá all alone just so we’re safe. At what price?”
I sag onto the desk behind me. “I think prison is killing my father.”
Profesor Perez leans forward, resting his forearms on the desk and steepling his fingers.
“It will be three years before Papá can get a trial. The people at legal aid said they could work faster if they weren’t so understaffed. I couldn’t help them now if I tried—I don’t know enough. They need more lawyers or law clerks or something. They need educated people to help.”
“So you want to become that person.”
“It’s the only way I can try to make any of this even a little bit okay. I can’t just leave Papá in there without any hope.”
By now the hallways are filling. Class is about to start. Profesor Perez taps his pen against the wooden desk.
“Will you help me?”
He drops his pen and stands. “Certainly.” He leans forward, bracing his weight on his fingertips. “But, Francisco, you need to be prepared to work very hard. You’ll have to graduate, of course. And there are exams two weeks from now that you will have to pass to gain acceptance to San Simón. Your teachers will take care of your referrals, but it costs seventy bolivianos just to sit the exam.”
I drop my head into my hands. We don’t have that kind of money. We need every bit Papá earns to pay for our cell, to pay the council, to pay for protection. If I use our money for this, I’d be risking everything for one test. Taking it and deciding not to go to university after all is not an option. Taking it and failing—impossible.
Profesor Perez walks over to the bookshelf behind his desk and runs a finger along the spines. He pulls out a thin white book and flips through the pages.
“Start with this test prep book. Come back in two days. I’ll quiz you, and we’ll move on to the next one.”
I take the book he hands me.
“This is very ambitious, Francisco.”
Yeah. Tell me something I don’t know.
After school, we stumble across a pickup game in the park. Pilar and Soledad take one look at my face and start laughing.
“Go,” Soledad says as Pilar shoos me toward the dirt field. They lie down in the grass with a blank paper and a half dozen colored pencils between them. I drop my backpack and strip off my white shirt. My pants are going to be filthy after this, but I don’t care.
I jog out to the field. My feet stutter to catch the rhythm and shape of the game, and my legs are slow to stretch into a sprint after all this time. But the hours slide by, and my mind is blissfully, perfectly empty.
I haven’t felt like this—like myself—in weeks.
After the game is over, we walk to the plaza and spread out below the statue of some Spanish guy who died three hundred years ago. I pull out the test prep book and skim through the pages.
Soledad leans back, her chin pointing straight up to the sky. “Why are you even bothering with that?”
I answer in a low voice, not because I’m afraid Pilar will overhear—she hears everything. More, I guess, because I’m not used to saying these kinds of things out loud. “Papá always pushed so hard for me to do well in school. And lately, I’ve been thinking maybe this is the only way I can get him out of San Sebastián. We have to go, Pilar and me. But I can’t just leave him in there when we do.”
Soledad sits up. I can feel her watching me. One side of my face is a normal temperature, and the other is on fire.
“Doesn’t your father ever try to get you to leave the prison?” I ask, just to get her eyes off of me.
It works. She leans back again, chin to the sky. “Drugs messed with Papá’s head. I don’t know if he even knows I’m there most of the time. But if I’m not in the prison, I’m on the street. Girls my age on the streets—sooner or later, they end up selling their bodies so they can eat. I don’t have anywhere else to go, not like you. Screw the diploma. Screw university. If I were you, I’d leave tomorrow and never come back.”
I keep my eyes on the sky, like the two bashful clouds floating up there are the most fascinating things I’ve ever seen.
If it comes to that, you could go with us.
I think it, but I’m not brave enough to say it. Not brave enough by half.
November 4
In the morning, while Papá combs and braids Pilar’s hair, I take the test book out onto the balcony and pick up where I left off studying last night. When Pilar is ready, I follow them down the stairs and across the courtyard.
I take Pilar’s hand; we wave to Papá and walk beyond the walls. Every time I leave the prison, it’s like a weight drops from my shoulders. I don’t know how Papá can stand to never be free of that place.
• • •
At the end of writing class, Profesora Ortiz asks me to stay behind. I watch everyone clamor to find their friends, to spend the few minutes between classes finding something to laugh about.
“Francisco,” she says, “I have read your poems. I see that you are working hard—but I wonder what you’re not putting on the paper. I see your father. I see your mother. I see the world around you, but I see nothing of you. Where are you in your poems?”
I shrug.
“Francisco?”
“Profesora, I’m not a poet.”
“I would beg to differ.”
I kick the tile beneath my feet.
“In your next few poems, I want to see emotion, thought, passion—those things that are uniquely yours. Francisco, I want to see your soul.”
My arms flap at my sides like a skeleton yanked around on a stand. “I’ll try, Profesora. But don’t get your hopes up.”
After school Thursday, Soledad and I walk to a food cart by Pilar’s school where a man is selling escabeche de verduras. We buy three bags, one with extra pepper for Pilar. She loves that spicy shit.
We’re a little early, so we lean against the brick wall and suck on the pickled vegetables one at a time, licking the vinegar that runs down our wrists. My lips burn from the peppers steeping at the bottom—the trick is to remember not to touch your eyes for the rest of the day.
“You look tired,” I say to Soledad. She does. The skin under her eyes is like a permanent shadow.
She doesn’t answer, just flicks her pepper-stained fingers at me.
“I’m serious, Soledad, you look really tired.”
“What, you don’t have enough on your plate, Francisco? Getting your papá out of prison. Watching over Pilar every waking minute, and some of the unwaking ones, too. Finishing school, and applying to university. Taking your sister to the Altiplano. Really, you’re going to start worrying about me, too?”
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