Hot Sur

by Laura Restrepo

  A few weeks after you left, Mr. Rose, you were replaced by a lady with a lot of titles. We showed her what we had done in your workshop, not to betray you, but to provide a sense of continuity to the class. Well, she just went off, talking about goals, and motivations, and achievements, and gains. According to her the whole thing was a glorious race toward becoming better. It was more like she was directing graduate students at Harvard or something and not some fucked-up prisoners shit on by fortune, and no more gains than two or three steps in a circle and no more goals than pressing your cheeks to the bars. What a bunch of crap, this fucking self-help self-improvement, they want to make you drunk with that and expect you to believe it. But that doctor they brought to take your place, Mr. Rose, was the reigning queen of it all. And on top of it she gave us a warning: “Write about whatever you want, girls,” she told us, “any topic, you can write about anything that comes into your head, whatever, it’s all fine, everything is welcome, except what happens in this jail. That is strictly prohibited. I will not accept any writing about life in the prison, episodes in the prison, or criticism or complaints about what happens here.”

  “Listen, ma’am,” we asked her. “Where do you think we live? You think we hang in the city and come to Manninpox to hand in our little homework assignments about life outside?”

  What an idiot, that lady. She said there were a bunch of other topics. That we could write about our childhoods, about our lives before prison, our loved ones, our dreams—constructive things and positive memories. We told her that we made suppositories with the positive and the constructive, and we never went back to the workshop. At least I never went, and neither did a few others. For now, Mandra X is my reader. She forces me to think about things seriously, to learn new words, and to call things by their name. Maybe it’s true that every door closed opens a new one, because I have had the best teachers of my life here in Manninpox: you and Mandra X. She doesn’t have family that visits her, just human rights people and defense lawyers for other inmates who come to talk over things with her. I imagine that Mandra X is their contact in here. She works for them, I think, or maybe it’s the other way around.

  Anyway, it was her, Mandra, who hooked me up with my amazing lawyer, my little saint of a lawyer, my talented and intelligent protector, my dear old man, what would I do in this life without him? I tell him that anytime I see him. “You are the man of my life.”

  He laughs. “Get one your own age,” he responds. “One who stands up straight and not a humpbacked old man like me.”

  “But you’re the one I like,” I say. “You and only you, always dancing to your own beat, always true to yourself, different from the others, more dignified and elegant than anyone.”

  “Hi there, baby,” he told me the first time he saw me, right in the middle of that horde that gathers in the lobby of the courthouse. That’s what he told me, before we had even met, “Hi there, baby.” An affectionate greeting, kind, playful. I began to cry like the Magdalene. Because all of a sudden, I felt like a person again and not a criminal on the way to the gallows, just a person with problems who needed help. Since then, the old man has become my defender, my solace, my ally, my powerful lawyer. I’m pinning all my hopes on him. He says he’s going to get me out of here. Every time we see each other he tells me. And I believe him; I cling to his words as if they were the Our Father. In the end, what is the Our Father but a string of words?

  Mandra X is not someone who ever talks about where she was born or where she lived, what kind of life she had, how she was hurt, or what ankle she twisted. When she was still free, did she have a husband or a wife? A mystery. Did she ever have kids? There is a story that was going around that I’d better not repeat. Mandra X. What kind of a name is that? Like a bug, or a robot, or medicine for a migraine. A clownish name for a clownish old lady. That’s what I thought at first, before I knew her. Her tattoos and weirdness alone could have you talking about her for hours, if you dared. Here everybody gets inked. And you see every kind of tattoo, broken hearts or hearts plunged with arrows, names of men and women, Christs, skulls, Baby Jesuses. A tattoo is the only luxury and the only jewelry allowed for inmates. So paint yourselves, eyes on shoulders, spiderwebs in the underarms, tears on the cheeks, butterflies, dragons, birds, pictures of loved ones, Mickey Mouses, Betty Boops, self-portraits. Anything you can think of, even initials on the soles of your feet and drawings on your ass. There are those who even call themselves artists and are expert inkers, setting up businesses with inks and needles. They are never short of customers; here everyone uses their bodies as sketchbooks. Some have poems on their thighs or revolutionary symbols. One named Panterilla had a whole stanza of “Imagine” by John Lennon inked on her back from top to bottom, and Margarita, the Peruvian girl I told you about has that written on her arm, “Mother, I don’t deserve you, but I need you.” The thing is, in Manninpox your body is the only thing that belongs to you and they can’t stop you from doing with it what you want. That’s why many also pierce themselves. There are those who even purposefully mutilate themselves, and Mandra X is the queen of them. That kind of thing makes me shudder, leaves me speechless. I can’t understand why someone would voluntarily amputate a finger, like it happened the other day in the ward where the white inmates are. But Mandra doesn’t disapprove. She thinks they’re gestures of freedom and independence, and that actions that might be wrong or even atrocious when you are free become the complete opposite when you are locked up in prison. That’s what she says, and I listen. She says that in our circumstances, orgies, blood pacts, and even suicide are acts of resistance.

  “Then let me bleed,” I ask of her, when the fatigue of the anemia makes me melodramatic. “Come on, Mandra, it’s an act of resistance.”

  But she forces me to stand up. She finds some medicine and makes me sign letters to the authorities demanding proper medical attention immediately.

  “Let me do it,” I beg her. “I’m fine here. I want to rest.”

  “You’ll be surrendering.” She shakes me. She brings a ball of snow from the courtyard, packs it tight, and puts it on my belly so the bleeding will stop.

  Her gang, or I should say, our gang, is called Noli me tangere: that’s why they call us Las Nolis. It’s a Latin phrase that Jesus uttered to Mary Magdalene after he was resurrected. It means don’t touch me. Don’t get near me, leave me alone, don’t mess with me. See, you learn things. Even in Latin. Now that I’m a Noli, I know the meaning of words like skirmish, independence, liberty, rebellion, rights, resistance. Well, I also learned the meaning of the word clitoris; it embarrasses me to know what it is. Can you imagine? Years and years of tapping and tapping that little button without knowing what it was called. But going back to what we were talking about, I don’t have any tattoos, not even one. I write only on paper. Many sheets of paper because I have a lot to say. Maybe I don’t do it on my own skin because I’m terrified of needles. Sometimes I think I should do it, it would be braver on my part, more daring, more permanent. But what if I regret it later, what if something feels stupid that the day before seemed extraordinary? I imagine you have the same fear, Mr. Rose, when you publish your stuff. There’s an inmate who has “live valorously” tattooed on her shoulder, but both words are written with a b so she’s going to have to libe balorously until the day she dies. And then there’s Greg and Sleepy Joe, who are Slovaks, and who have tattoos on their chests that say, “Lightning over Tatras.” Lightning over Tatras? What the hell is that? Not me, thank you very much, I’ll stick to pencil and paper, at least I can erase it that way, or cross it out, throw it in the garbage, and start anew. Mandra X inspires me. She tells me that Miguel de Cervantes was locked up when he dreamed up Don Quixote. Aside from you, Mr. Rose, she’s the only one who knows that I write, and I ask her about spelling and other such issues. You were a teacher who liked to please us, you put up with anything, congratulated us about everything, but she doesn’t let me get away with anything.
She tells me write down everything I lived and to describe things in detail, even if they burn, even if they sting. But I forget, maybe because of the anemia.

  “I don’t remember, Mandra,” I apologize. “That little bit is not clear. I’m not sure what happened at that moment.”

  “You’re a woman and you act like a girl,” she tells me and leaves.

  Mandra X’s tattoos? They’re different. Imagine blue snakes slithering across her back till they hug her belly, going down her thighs and her calves, and twisting into each other like ropes. They go down to her feet and down her arms to her fingers. Her skin is like one of those laminated figures in anatomy books with veins and arteries, but some who know her say that it is not about veins or arteries, but about rivers. All the rivers of Germany with their respective names, so a map, of her native land. It’s difficult to believe that Mandra X belongs to another place that is not this one. She got here before all of the rest and she’ll be here when they’re all gone. According to these versions, her very white skin is a living map that illustrates the course of the rivers of her country. The Rhine, the Alster, many others that I don’t remember, and the biggest and fattest, the one that goes down on Mandra’s spinal column, the Danube.

  “In Spanish, it is Danubio?”

  “Ah yes, el Danubio. Greg spoke to me about that river, but for him, it is called the Dunaj.”

  “Don’t listen to him. Your husband was a Slovak, that’s why he called it the Dunaj. The river is called the Danube and your husband is dead; they killed him.”

  I change the topic immediately. They’re saying that Greg was killed on the night of his birthday, but I don’t believe it. If they also say that I did it, and I didn’t do it, how am I supposed to believe them?

  Hey, Mandra, that Danubio, or Dunaj, or Danube, that runs down your back and goes all the way down there? Does it go up your asshole? Is that where it empties? And inside, do the waters of that river find beds in your veins? I’d like to ask her, but I don’t dare because if she gets angry she can flatten me with a single blow.

  There I go on a tangent again. What I want to finish telling you, Mr. Rose, is what happened that day in the dining room. The others kept their distance, as if they had decided beforehand that they’d gather in a circle around me.

  I was the reason for this possible melee, that was as clear as day, but I wasn’t sure why. I felt dizzy and things went blurry. Have you ever been about to faint? Well, those were my symptoms. That’s how I felt. I thought I was going to fall. I’m going to fall right here and they’re going to kick the shit out of me. No, don’t fall, goddamn it, I ordered myself, no matter what, don’t fall. As I advanced, the crowd of women opened the way before me. I put away my tray in that silence that precedes any great blow. But the blow didn’t come. As I passed by the bench where I had been sitting, I realized it was empty. My tablemates had disappeared and in the place where I had been there was a pool of blood. Fuck, they stabbed me and I didn’t even notice was the first thing I thought. They must have struck me with something, a makeshift knife, a blade, something so sharp I didn’t even feel it. I passed my hand behind me and realized my uniform was soaked in a warm liquid. I looked at my hand and it was red. The hemorrhaging. No one had stabbed me; the blood was coming out of me on its own.

  Have you ever seen on TV how sharks go into an attack frenzy at the scent of blood? Well, here in prison, it’s the opposite. At the sight of blood, the instinct is to move away and remain as far away as possible. Me, alone with my blood and the others looking at me in disgust. And at that moment, who do you think shows up? The one they called Mandra X. At that time I thought of her as a kind of monster. She appears at my back and begins to walk behind me. And we left the dining room like that, me in front and her behind me, hiding my stained clothes from the others.

  Maybe it’d be good to join her group, if they even accept me, or who knows what kind of favor I have to do in return, I thought when the fright had passed. Strange, my own blood made me a target and protected me. The reason? The horror most prisoners and guards feel at the blood of another. In this place that boils over with violence, where the inhuman rules, there’s nothing that causes so much dread as the sight of human blood. These women have lived through everything. There’s not a horror that’s unknown to them; the streets have initiated them under the worst circumstances, and what they haven’t learned about out there, they learn in here. They tolerate all sorts of filth, the vomit of drunks, the piss of the incontinent, the miserliness of beggars, prostitution inside the jail. Here, any disgusting thing is acceptable; filth is law. And rudeness, bad words, filthy talk, threats, insults, aggressions, lunacy, screams—everything is tolerable except blood. The blood of others is taboo. One single drop of blood is enough to become infected. But blood doesn’t appear drop by drop—it puddles in the middle of the yard or in hallways. Everyone has pints of possibly contaminated blood inside them, and it is the law to carry it protected inside the body. It is up to individuals if they’re consumed by their infections, their problem, nobody else’s business, as long as they don’t go around spreading infection. The plague is in the blood. In Manninpox, that’s what they call AIDS: the plague. They call it by its true name instead of disguising it in an acronym. So I inspire hatred but also fear; my blood is killing me, but it also protects me.

  I realize that Mandra X has begun to sing a song called “Moonlight” with the voice of a man: “I want the moonlight for my sad nights.” Apparently it’s a sort of lesbian anthem, and since Mandra gives it a certain depth, everyone who listens to her sing it suddenly wants to be hugged. Some cry because the song reminds them there is a moon. We never see it here; by the time it comes out, we have long been locked in our cells.

  Now I’m in solitary confinement again, with no way of knowing if it’s rainy or sunny out, if it’s day or night. Time only exists in the round clock that glares at me from the end of the hallway, and which may as well not be there, because nothing changes, everything is repeated, so what good is it to consult it? Better just to let it go around and around, because here time doesn’t exist, it’s no good for anything, time is only waiting for something that never comes. You might say that here time runs backward, toward the past, and that it is not the minutes that pass but memories.

  All the memories pile in my cell, taking over my space, sucking in my air, stealing my peace. I either rid myself of them or get out and leave them there. Here in Manninpox, I have been forced to change, change so much that I have become another person. I’m not sure if better or worse, but certainly different. So what do I do with the hordes of memories of that other María Paz? In what corner of my mind do I keep them? Where do they fit? How should they be classified?

  I’m referring, for example, to the memory of the day that Bolivia finally called for us to come to America. She had in her pocket that magic object we had yearned for, that passport to happiness called the green card, which when it comes down to it is not even green, but which these days is the Holy Grail. Years later, she told me how she had been able to get it, that greencita card of her soul. They gave her a Tuesday appointment and it took her hours to get ready. She bathed with her Heno de Pravia, put on her makeup more carefully than usual, dabbed perfume behind her ears and on the inside of her wrists where the pulse beats. She, who was full-figured and flashy, put on a tight V-neck sweater, letting her cleavage show a bit. Yes sir, my mother was short but voluptuous, something she always put to good use. Bolivia used her body to get ahead in America. She’d never admit that, but I knew it. Knew it and learned it from her, and I can tell you that I was an excellent student. She had a saying, “Necessity has the face of a dog.” I suppose that’s what I am, a dog who does what she can to survive, nothing more than that, or less. Why spin it? The truth is that whoever comes to America has to fight to the death and is good and fucked if she doesn’t use all the tools at her disposal. Bolivia did it. Holly Golightly did it. Why shou
ldn’t I do it? And speaking of, Mr. Rose, I have a question I never got to ask you about Holly. I’d like you to tell me plainly who she was. Sally Tomato’s lover, an escort, or simply a whore? Or maybe all three at once?