by Josh Barkan
“I can’t let you tell me what to do,” I said. “It’s characteristic of a lot of prisoners that they tell me a bunch of lies, and if I let you edit my article then it might end up with a bunch of your fantasies.” It was, perhaps, bold of me to tell him this, but this was the truth. Prisoners loved to make up stories. I had almost never met a prisoner on death row who didn’t claim he was innocent.
“You think you’re smarter than me. You think you’re better than me. How much do you really understand of the other prisoners you have worked with?”
This simple question was not really new to me. It was a question I had asked myself, before, but the question had never come to me directly from a prisoner, and the force of the question, the immediacy of it, within only minutes of meeting Martinez, made me stand up and come out of my pose of knowingness. He was right in his question, I could see. He had figured me out in only a matter of minutes. I did feel I knew more than most of the prisoners I investigated. I even felt I knew more than most of the people I interacted with. Arrogance had always been my Achilles’ heel. I did not mean to look arrogant, but the way I lifted my chin when I spoke, the way I often paused between my sentences, listening to myself speak, as if I had words that were particularly important to say, made me look arrogant. It was not the image I intended to give off, but it was true about me. My head, which was bald, made me look, in some ways, like a mirror image of Martinez across from me. My head was bald from older age and an effort to keep my skull from looking like that of an old man; it was a way of me trying to remain appearing like someone who was cool. It gave me a suave, debonair look that I liked to use to my advantage at parties, to pick up younger women, sometimes feigning interest in what they told me, even if I wasn’t interested, to woo them into a bedroom. I had always thought of myself as fair and righteous and just, even though I often doubted that about myself, and here was Martinez who had called me out on my worst inner feelings and habits in a matter of minutes. It was unnerving to see him across from me, reflecting me back to myself so powerfully and so easily.
“If you want me to leave,” I said, “I will go now. I’m sorry if I have disturbed you today.”
“That’s better,” he wrote. “I can see you are speaking to me sincerely now. No, go ahead, now that you have made the effort to come all the way to this prison, we can talk.”
“How did you end up here?” I asked him, even though my friend in the agency had given me the basic blow-by-blow.
He stood up from the chair and began to mime what had happened to him. He showed me a party, where he was with his friends, laughing, as he blew out a birthday cake. He drew the candles on the cake in the air in front of me. He showed me a clock with the hands at three o’clock at the party, as he ate a piece of cake. Then he drew a line and shifted his arms back and forth, on a flat plane, to show me he was going to another scene. In that other scene there was a thief asking for money at a window with bars. He pulled out his pockets to show that the person was asking for money. He frowned and pouted, to let me know this wasn’t him. He pretended to be a nice old lady. He pretended to be another man holding on to this nice old lady, twisting back and forth to do the face of the man with a gun and the face of the old lady. Then he pointed a gun with his fingers at the temple of the old lady and pulled the trigger and she fell to the ground. He lay on the ground, taking in the full pain of the lady, not moving for a good long while to let me know she was really dead. When he finally got up from the ground he mimed tears coming from his eyes, to let me know the whole story was very, very sad.
I was mesmerized by the story he told with his body, by the way he swayed to and fro, arching his back to make me feel the story he was telling; and by the way he made his face extra expressive.
“You’re an impressive mime,” I told him when he came back to sit in front of me.
“Thank you,” he wrote. “But I want you to understand I’m not being melodramatic. And I’m not doing this to entertain you or to impress you. I mime because that is how I express my feelings and because you are deaf impaired.”
“Deaf impaired?” I said.
“Yes, you not only can’t sign but you have no idea what it is like to be in my world. So by miming maybe I can hint at some of the things you miss in usual body language.”
“Are you saying all deaf people can mime, or that they feel like mimes?”
“No, of course not,” he wrote. “I am just saying that there are many things you might think you know that you might miss. If you come again, I will teach you some more.”
He was, according to my friend, no older than thirty-three, but he knew he had things to teach me, someone nineteen years his senior. It was the first of five meetings over the next two months. I came as often as the warden of the prison would let me. They told me I could visit no more frequently than once every two weeks. The reason they gave was so as not to disturb the prisoners, but I sensed it was because every time I saw Martinez they would have to clear the others out of his cell, and Martinez wrote me as much on his paper the next time I saw him.
On the last visit, two weeks ago, he stopped writing on the paper and he looked me straight in the eyes, and he mouthed at me, insisting I watch his lips and try to read them as he always watched mine. There was something he clearly did not want to write on the paper, which I kept after each interview but that he must have believed the guards could see. “I want you to help me escape from here,” he mouthed to me. “I do not belong here. You know this now, completely. You know every part of my story.”
He had told me, by then, how he had grown up, who the members of his family were, what the hardscrabble ways of his growing up had been. He had poured out every part of his youth, all mimed in front of me as I sat transfixed, watching him act. He had given me all his story, and now what he was asking for was something in return.
I stopped and told him, “That is something I can’t do. If I did that, then I would instantly end up in prison myself, and I wouldn’t be able to help any of you on the inside.” It was a perfectly logical answer. He wasn’t the first prisoner to ask me to help him try to find a way to escape. Other prisoners had found enough confidence in me to ask the same question. But he was the first prisoner to make me think twice about my reply.
Going home, as I drove from the prison through the endless concrete small houses of Mexico City, and then as I paced in my small apartment back in the neighborhood of La Roma, I thought about a flame thrower I had seen the night before in the central plaza of Tlalpan in the south of the city. There, the evening before, I had seen a street performer light on fire a large circle with multiple torch endings and throw the circle around and around, larger than a hula hoop around his body, then on the ground in front of him, moving his body in and out of the flames. The risk of what the performer did, only to make a few pesos, trying to wow the crowd, had entranced me. The performer put his life on the line every night, and like many performers in the city, he probably performed at streetlights as well, doing his show, risking burning his hair, all to make a dime.
Did I have the same guts, not to make a dime, but to help a man who had been condemned to prison for life on completely phony charges? By now, I was more than convinced Martinez had never committed his crime. I had, in between prison visits, interviewed all the other people at his birthday party and the few people I could find who had been at the actual bank crime. It was clear he had never been at the scene of the crime. It was also clear the particular judge who had sentenced him had a particularly bad reputation for sending innocent people to prison.
How much was I willing to get inside the hoop of flame? I thought about my life in Mexico, how comfortable I felt in the country, how every day that I woke up I felt like there was a new surprise with something to teach me and to fill me with curiosity and awe. I thought about the risk I might lose all of that, the sense of place I had become attached to. I thought about the feeling that in this country, I was always alive. It was not that this country was co
mpletely better than mine. I wasn’t interested, after a number of years, in comparing one country to the other. But what I felt was that here, people cared about me, and I cared about them. There was time to care. We were not separated by all of the barriers of private spaces and private homes, which carved out so much personal space in the United States that it often felt like we had bubbles keeping us from one another. In Mexico, those bubbles felt smaller, and often nonexistent. This had become my home. I had become a permanent resident of the place. To risk all of that, my right to live in the country, in order to bring some means of escape to Martinez, was risking it all. There was the very real risk that if caught, I could be brought in front of the same kind of despicable judge that had thrown Martinez in prison for life.
But for the first time in my life I knew I had to let more than my rational mind make decisions for me. I had to step into the ring of fire twirling around and around above my head and around my body. I had to risk it all, to take the action to see if I could make one big wrong right. I packed a metal file in the bottom of my briefcase on the next visit. I opened the stuffing of my briefcase carefully, and made a little sleeve on the bottom, and brought the briefcase to a shoe-repair man to have the bag sewn up properly so it would look right. I could slide the metal file in and out easily. It was a small gesture. It was much less than bringing in a gun, something that seemed far beyond my capacity and that might get Martinez caught, as well as me. It was the most efficient act of rebellion I could think of, and I brought the metal file in to Martinez on my visit in the morning.
For two months, Martinez took that file which I had brought to him and he scraped and pulled and concentrated the edge of the metal blade against the bars of his cell. On the night of his breakout, he waited until the guards came by on their final round of the evening, before the prisoners were supposed to go to sleep, when the guards made their final roll call. The guards called out the names of each prisoner in each cell. They tapped their batons against the metal bars of each cell, echoing the names of the prisoners, and then it was lights out. A guard came and said Martinez’s name, specifically. Martinez made the loudest sound he could, a squeal that was high-pitched, approximating a “yes.” He knew when to say his name when he felt the vibration of the other prisoners in his cell calling out their names.
The night was unusual because it was September 15, the night everyone in the prison had just completed celebrating the independence day of the country, the equivalent of the U.S.’s July 4. On this night, all the prisoners were brought into the main courtyard at the same time to watch a concert. It was one of the few times the prisoners were brought out all together, and one of the few times they were entertained together. The daily life of the interior of the prison was run by the warden, in outward appearance. But a high-level narco, from the north of the country in Monterrey, who ran a large cartel on the outside of the prison, was the real head of the day-to-day life. He had been convicted, but his links to the outside world were still strong. He brought in information and got out his plans for his cartel, and he told the prison warden who he wanted for the Día de la Independencia music. He chose Los Tigres del Norte, a popular band that toured the country. The inmates had all hooted and hollered listening to Los Tigres. The Tigres knew better than to bring in any women with the band, or a riot might ensue. Hundreds and hundreds of tacos and cans of Coca-Cola were downed. The garbage piled up in bag after bag, loaded into extra trash cans in the corner of the central courtyard.
When the last of the guards went by, and Martinez had called out his name, and the other prisoners in his cell went to bed, he pulled at the two cuts he had filed on a single bar, pulled out the bar, and shimmied himself through.
I had discussed the breakout plan with him. Martinez had initially thought he could dress up like a member of Los Tigres and waltz out of the concert with the rest of the band in the heat of the mayhem of the prison-mate fans. He was good at acting, and a perfect mime, but the chance he could fool the other band members and the guards as they went out was far too risky, I had told him, so he had scrapped that idea. Instead we had agreed the large quantity of garbage from the get-together was the key to his escape.
From his place of freedom outside of his cell, he ran in the dark, unchecked in his small space for the first time in five years. He ran like a cat freed from his enclosure. His body moved with energy, with the training of a professional mime, keeping to the edges of the shadows and out of any few splotches of light. He ran and felt the ground, listening with his hands for the vibrations of any of the guards as they made their rounds. I knew nothing about the layout of the prison, other than what I had seen on my five previous visits, but Martinez was able to tell me where the garbage was gathered and thrown out every night from the high-walled building. He ran to the garbage containers, which were more than usual, from the party, as he had expected, lifted the lid of one of the large containers, climbed inside the gray plastic container, took one last big breath of unfetid air, smelled the residues of sauces and of soda cans, the sticky sweet residue of Coca-Cola mixing with the warm decomposing smell of corn and chilies, and he buried his whole body beneath the mess, breathing through a plastic bottle that he had cut the bottom off of.
It was similar to the trick the famous narco El Chapo Guzmán had used, making it out of prison in a laundry basket. Martinez had thought of that possibility, too, but after Guzmán had used the method, all laundry baskets were inspected entering and leaving prison. But the garbage wasn’t suspected. Martinez had figured that out. It was considered too disgusting. He sat in the container for four hours, until four in the morning, when the garbage was always brought outside, each container wheeled out and left for the garbage trucks to come an hour or two later, in the early dawn.
Along the north edge of the prison, when the garbage canisters were wheeled out and left by a single man whose job it was to do so, I waited thirty-five yards across the street, in the shadows, with a motorcycle, watching with binoculars. When the last of the large plastic canisters was wheeled out, and the man whose duty it was to remove the garbage had gone, I watched intently to see if Martinez had made his break. I saw one of the lids of the canisters push up. I saw Martinez leap out. I flashed a flashlight, twice, at the man covered with garbage. We had agreed his chances would be almost zero if someone didn’t come pick him up. The most dangerous moment for a prison breakout was just after the prisoner had found a way outside the prison walls. That was when they stood out, looked unusual in prison clothes, and were so dazed from the adrenaline rush of their escape that other people ran into them, saw something suspicious, and reported them. Or the prisoner went off, running cockeyed.
This was the moment when Martinez had asked me to come get him in a motorcycle. A car was too big. A car might be spotted by one of the watchtowers.
And this was the moment that I had hesitated, for a moment, in the planning. Was I really willing to risk my whole life in Mexico and to fully commit myself to this man? Yet here I was, fully committed, fully taking action for the first time in my life. I wore a black ski mask, like the crooks who had genuinely committed the crime Martinez was accused of. The mask hid the white baldness of my head. I had given Martinez the one signal with the two quick flashes, and he came to me, where the motorcycle was hidden in the long underbrush on the far side of the road. Martinez jumped on the back of the motorbike. I barely looked back at him in the rush of the moment. I focused on balancing him on the back and rushing away as quietly as I could, then racing down the big hill from the prison toward the north of the city. I felt his arms grip my waist. I smelled his body, the residue of the garbage, and the smell of his fright. There was a smell in the night unlike any I had ever smelled before, the smell of a man rushing with all of his fright and elation to freedom. We rode the back roads at first, and then hit the main eje boulevards that break through the city. The red lights blinked, from stop to green, and I cut north through the night like a man bringing a slave in the United
States north on the Underground Railroad. And like the people who took a risk bringing those slaves north, I brought him into my home first, briefly, to wash and change his clothes, so he wouldn’t stand out as he made his journey to freedom. He stuffed his clothes into the kitchen garbage container in my apartment in La Roma. He scrubbed his body in my shower. He cleansed the last of the residue of the garbage, and of the prison, off his body. He put on some clothes, which I had bought for him. It was too risky to give him my own clothes, or anything that might give me away as helping him if he were caught, and too risky to ask for any clothes from his family. His family would be kept in the dark about his escape until he was settled in a new city, months down the line.
He washed, and he ate the food I gave him, he wrote down on a piece of paper explaining exactly how the escape had gone, and accentuated the words on the paper by miming some of the scarier moments. Then he jumped on the back of the motorcycle, not waiting longer than an hour, since the prison would find out in the dawn he was gone and they might signal a search to begin. But by then, as the first light of the morning came out strong, as the chickens cockled in the morning, as they do in the streets of Mexico City even in the biggest, most densely inhabited neighborhoods, I had brought him to the bus station and placed him on a bus bound for Oaxaca. The price of his freedom would be exile from his home city, where he had grown up. It was too dangerous, even in a city of twenty million, for him to pretend to melt into the fabric of Mexico City. Someone would eventually see him. Someone would eventually recognize his face. He would have to leave the city, where he had spent almost every day of his life for thirty-three years.
Standing by the bus, after I had bought him his ticket, I gave Martinez a hug. He clasped me like a wiry feline. He rubbed the back of my bald head in appreciation, leaned back, looked into my eyes, and I could see him hold back tears. I couldn’t hold back my own. I wept as he took one last look at me and then as he turned with only a small bag, with some peanuts and one extra pair of clothes I had left for him and a few hundred dollars in pesos. He would need every peso to start his new life. I had no idea, exactly, where he would go in Oaxaca. We had agreed it was best for me to know nothing about his final destination. Someday, far in the future, when he was safe, he would write to me, but we had agreed there would be no specific day when.