“Edward Branly, that sounds familiar,” Pro Bono interrupted him. “The inventor of the wireless telegraph?”
“Another Edward Branly, an inventor of new ways to torture women.”
“Why does this seem strange to you?” Pro Bono asked after perusing the book. “That’s the mentality that the America of that time was built on, the same mentality that holds together the America of today.”
“And it doesn’t repulse you?” Rose asked.
“Me? Yes it does. That’s why I’m a defense attorney and not a prosecutor.”
Manninpox was a very old prison, darker than the new ones, but also more difficult to run. That gave the inmates more room to protest and to come together around certain concepts. For example, whatever is filthy is human and belongs to us, whatever is clean is inhuman and the tool of our jailers. This was an old belief that rebels like those in Sinn Féin were able to reanimate, making their filthy hunger strikes into weapons. Pro Bono was the author of a good number of theories on the subject that he had published in various essays. According to him, so-called good people are terrified of filth, blood, and death. The “decent” folk play up the type of civilization that offers immortality as a utopia, and from this comes their obsession with security, both personal and national. From there also came their devotion to youth, dieting, keeping fit and active, plastic surgery, good health, extreme cleanliness, antibiotics, disinfectants, and antiseptics. They are convinced that America can make them immortal, and they conceal sickness, filthiness, old age, and death to deny their existence. But the American utopia according to Pro Bono would do nothing less than banish immortality. What kind of people have we become, he asked himself in his essays, that we pretend to live by ignoring death? It was common enough to hear the American dream described as living to possess. Wrong, according to Pro Bono. The equation needs to be inverted: possessing to live. Possessing in order not to die. Immortality was the true American utopia. Las Nolis, refusing to play along, incorporated death into all their rituals. That was their clarity, what gave them an advantage over others.
“So María Paz didn’t take part in that? The blood things?” Rose asked.
“María Paz was herself a living sacrifice. In an environment where self-mutilation is valued and even exalted, what better symbol than María Paz, innocence personified and submitted to a bloodletting?”
“That road goes to my house.” Rose gestured to the left when they came to an intersection in a narrow, steep road, darkened by thick plant growth. “That way, some fifteen minutes up the mountain, you come to a little lake called Silver Coin Pond. On the side of the road, there is a large boulder, and beside it a maple that is taller than the others are. Not long ago, the face of a man named John Eagles appeared on it. They had ripped it off him and nailed it to the trunk. That death has stuck to this mountain. It weighs on the people still. It will not be lifted.”
“Who did such a thing?” Pro Bono asked.
“Unsolved. The authorities claim it was outsiders in a drug frenzy, but the locals blamed escaped prisoners. Residents here think prisoners escape from Manninpox and roam in the woods committing atrocities. Every time something bad happens, the locals blame it on them. A missing chicken, a fire in a stable, a noise in the darkness, a stolen bicycle. You can try to reason with these people, explain to them that no one can escape from that windowless fortress. But they don’t buy it. They believe the prisoners escape and they are frightened.”
“When did that happen? The guy’s face ripped off?”
“A few days before the death of my son.”
Soon, the hulking mass of Manninpox appeared on the horizon, a place as undesirable as any, the nightmare of its good neighbors, the dark cloud of sunny days, a stain in the amazing scenery. Rose, who up to that point had not yet decided whether he would go in, realized that there would be no escaping it. If there were any answers to his questions about Cleve’s death, they were locked in that place. Pro Bono, who was a regular there and knew the procedures, got him a badge as a legal professional, his assistant, but told him he would not lie to Mandra X. He would let her know he was the father of Cleve Rose. This was not going to be a regular visit.
Mandra X enjoyed certain privileges. She could receive visitors during the week, including members of the press, in private and without the presence of guards, according to provisions made by the state assembly for prisoners with recognized leadership records on human rights issues. They were put in Conference Hall, a room with absurdly tall ceilings and five metallic tables with four chairs each, placed far enough from each other so that conversations would not be overheard. They were the only ones there, and Rose thought that there could not be a more desolate place. To ease his anxiety, he tried to figure out in what direction his house would be. But there were no windows in the room, making it impossible for him to orient himself. They must have been underground. At least Rose had the sense that they had been descending as they traversed an access ramp. He shivered and regretted having left his coat in the car. So he lifted the collar of his jacket and buttoned it up. It felt strange to feel a breeze in the air, which somehow snuck into that sealed place, making the solitude in there even more unbearable. The drafts made it in but not daylight, not a single ray of sunlight. The place was lit by fluorescent tubes on the ceiling, which emitted a grainy light that broke up the space into a million vibrating points. Rose tried to make out any human sound, a cough, steps, some sign of life in the distance, but heard nothing. On the other hand, he heard bells trilling like the voice of God and metallic noises that reached his ears from various angles repeatedly, dry, deafening noises of gates slamming shut—or was that just the echo of older noises? Good God, he thought, and stuck his frozen hands in his pockets to warm them up.
“I don’t know what got into me in that place,” Rose tells me. “Maybe claustrophobia. I felt my chest tightening. A horrible pain, and on my left side, so I thought it could be my heart. I just wanted to get out of there. Like I said, it was a huge room, but I felt as if all that empty and cold space was closing in on me. No one came; no one opened the door, no one. We remained there alone, under lock and key for what seemed like an eternity, although in truth it must have been no more than fifteen or twenty minutes. I felt they had forgotten about us. Till finally Mandra X appeared with a guard on each side, although there was no physical contact.”
From what he had been told, Rose expected Mandra X to come in breathing fire and smashing things, an enraged bull trotting into the arena. But there was none of that. Mandra X walked in as patiently, coldly, and majestically as an ice queen, balancing her muscular bulk, scoping out the place, her mouth pursed and her arms bent slightly and separated from her body. Although Pro Bono had advised him to be cool and not stare with his mouth agape as people often did, Rose could not help but keep his eyes on her from the moment she walked in. She was a totemic figure, a being above the confines of nature, or below them. Hard to tell if she was goddess or demon, man or woman, a temple devoid of statues or a statue with no temple. That’s what she had been able to turn into after so many years of being locked up in a cell, with no other option but to metamorphose, cutting and painting and perforating herself with metal spikes and needles, becoming a contemporary version of Saint Liduvina. She had transformed herself in all the physical means possible. Tattoos covered every inch of her skin, not leaving a single spot blank, as if some child armed with a blue crayon had gone to war on her. Her elongated earlobes seemed detached from her head. The lack of eyelashes and eyebrows gave her an otherworldly appearance. Her hair was buzzed short and lined with razor cuts, so that her head seemed like a miniature ancient geoglyph. On top of this, her nose and upper lip were pierced and her tongue bifurcated, and her neck and arms adorned with scars. That’s just what you could see, what her uniform wasn’t concealing. Rose didn’t even want to imagine, but he couldn’t help remembering that according to María Paz, Mandra X had her ni
pples injected with ink and added a crown of rays around each, two dark suns in the middle of her chest. And the smell that came off her . . . Not exactly smelling like a saint, Rose thought, more so like homeless folk who pass by you pushing their clanging carts. She carried her theatrical bearing well, like a Delphic Sibyl, but a savage one, not lovely or green-eyed like Michelangelo portrays her in the Sistine Chapel, but a snake-like Sibyl, grotesque and somehow sublime as well, as the Sibyls must truly have been.
“Suffice it to say that she has had tattooed the phrase ‘I have a dream,’” Rose tells me. “Believe it or not. There in those dungeons lives a creature who dares to dream. To be truthful, I don’t know. It was creepy. In the outside world, people wear shirts that say, ‘Single and at your service,’ ‘I love NYC,’ ‘Fuck y’all,’ and ‘Ban nuclear now.’ But that monster tattooed ‘I have a dream’ across her forehead. It was no wonder Pro Bono had said that Manninpox seemed to exist simply to hold her in, Mandra X, the minotaur in that labyrinth of stone. And she wasn’t by herself. She came with another inmate of the same size, or maybe even bigger. But I swear I didn’t even notice. My eyes were glued to that . . . species of bull inked in blue. I didn’t even notice the other one until they were right beside us. In silence.
“Pro Bono had neglected to tell me that Mandra X does not talk directly to anyone from outside, only through an intermediary. Perhaps not to incriminate herself, I never knew the exact reason. I was never able to hear her speak but for a single phrase. At times, she would whisper something in the ear of the other inmate, who was the one who spoke with us. Afterward, Pro Bono told me the other inmate was known as Dummy. Maybe because that’s her role, she’s like a ventriloquist’s dummy. But out of Mandra X’s mouth, not a word. Not one. The minotaur was content just to look at us.
“She didn’t join us at the table, but sat a few feet away from it. And she looked at us. To start off, Dummy asked about me. ‘Can we trust this guy?’ Do you know what Pro Bono told them? He said he didn’t know me that well. Unbelievable, but that’s exactly what he said. There you have it, my new BFF, betraying in me in the company of this monster without a moment’s thought to the consequences. ‘If you like, I can go,’ I said absurdly, as if I could just walk out that huge, solid-steel door, and I started to get up, but then Pro Bono explained that I was Cleve Rose’s father, and with a whisper from Mandra X, Dummy gestured for me to sit.”
Rose imagined it had been some kind of test: Mandra X wanted to take a fresh look at him and he had to accept that. It was impossible not to anyway. It was clear that she was the alpha among the four of them, the dominant macho who said when and how and for how long things would transpire. Dummy began to talk about María Paz right away. About how when the other inmates first saw her, the first thing they said was, “That one ain’t gonna make it.” Two kinds of people ended up in Manninpox. The first group consisted of those who take responsibility for their actions, and they admit that they committed a crime and it has proven costly, and they throw it right back in your face: “I did it, so what?—and I’m paying for it now, and when I finish paying I’m outta here and you’ll never see my ass again.” The other type says, “I did nothing, this is an injustice and the fuckers who did it are going to pay.” This latter group remained active and alive out of pure indignation and the need for vengeance. But Dummy explained that María Paz belonged to a third category, those who condemned themselves, who did no wrong but still felt guilty. She was fucked before she could defend herself because she killed the defense attorney within her, a horrible handicap.
“You can always tell the victim type, something about them, as if they were marked or something,” Dummy said beside the watchful eyes of Mandra X, who observed the proceedings as if from a pedestal, making Rose’s blood cold with her utter silence.
“The more victim traits a person possesses, the more likely she will attract a bolt of lightning. But that’s not mine,” Pro Bono said. “I’m paraphrasing René Girard.”
Rose paid close attention to everything but said nothing. He didn’t dare look Mandra X in the eyes, but he could not stop looking at the blue lines that ran up and down her arms, and he wondered what they meant. Are they veins? he wondered. Veins tattooed over the real veins? But then he noticed that each of the blue veins was labeled with a name in minuscule letters running parallel to it, and although he wasn’t able to read them, he would have had to put on his glasses, he remembered that María Paz had recounted how the net of veins on Mandra X were a mapping of all the bodies of water of Germany.
“The theory about getting hit by lightning is correct. There are those with a lightning bolt on their foreheads,” Rose tells me. And while he doesn’t recount the story of his son’s scar yet, he tells me about Luigi, a boy from his neighborhood when he was growing up.
This Luigi, skinny and younger than him, was by all signs an evident victim, a poor shit, a sad little runt, whose mother screamed at him and beat him. And Rose did too, of course he did. All he had to do was hear Luigi cry and a committed cruelty arose in him like he had never experienced before—an exacerbation, an arousal even, that took over his person every time he heard Luigi wail. And Rose had never been a bully, the opposite in fact: the tough kids at school had abused and ridiculed him to no end. Rose could have said what Obama had said about the same type of experience: “I didn’t emerge unscathed.” Yet an almost sexual urge had led him to beat Luigi, make him howl, help fuck him up some more because he himself had been fucked up, and simply because Luigi’s mother, by beating Luigi, had passed him on and put him at the mercy of all his superiors. Luigi was a loser, and veritable sufferer, and Rose thought that abusing him was not only okay but also inevitable: his little whimpers were an invitation to mistreat him.
The other prisoners thought that María Paz attracted misery because of her tendency to lower her guard, to hide behind her favorite phrases: “I don’t know,” “I don’t remember,” “I don’t understand,” and with the modest habit she had of pulling down her shirt all the time, as if it were too short on her. The older inmates told themselves that María was a martyr for anyone to overtake, a value judgment about which they were almost never wrong. Manninpox exposed the weak, confused, and defeated ones, and chewed them up. It gulped down their blood. In María Paz’s case, all this wasn’t meant figuratively; her blood dripped warmly on the cold stones. At first, she appeared to live in the clouds, incapable of telling her story even to herself, incompetent when it came to putting together the pieces of the puzzle to make a whole. During her first weeks, she couldn’t even figure out what her downfall had been. She talked about things that had happened to her as if they had happened to someone else. The first time Mandra X talked with her in private, María Paz complained that they hadn’t given her panties. When she had arrived at the prison and traded her clothes for the uniform, they hadn’t given her panties. They left her without underwear and that upset her horribly. She complained about that as if it were her one and only problem, having to go without panties and feeling exposed and violated. Maybe if we get her panties this rag doll could become a person again, Mandra X had thought, and found two pairs, so she could wash one while wearing the other. That seemed to calm down the novice a bit. She had already been through a lot. After a confrontation, she had spent a few days in solitary, no one knew how many. She herself didn’t know, had lost count. It was understandable that she would be a little discombobulated after what had happened, but she was going to hit bottom if she didn’t react somehow.
“They didn’t even tell her about her husband’s murder, and if they had, it hadn’t registered,” Rose tells me. “Pro Bono had to tell her, more than a month after it had happened.”
“Sir, did you know María Paz was pregnant?” Dummy asked Pro Bono. “You didn’t know? Really? Pregnant, you know? Bun in the oven, little one inside. Does that shock you? Well, yes, she was fucking pregnant.”
“I had no idea,” Pro Bono s
aid after a few seconds of silence, and Rose sensed that not having known about this truly upset him. “She never told me.”
Of course she didn’t tell him. María Paz never told anyone anything, especially if it was about her pain. But that’s how it was; she was pregnant. Although she hardly mentioned it, because she was incapable of admitting it, even to herself. According to the perception they had about her inside the prison, María Paz was a bramble of confusion, a goddamned bundle of nerves. Day by day less so, admittedly, and little by little she had been waking up, getting the hang of things, because whoever didn’t wake the fuck up wasn’t going to survive long at Manninpox, washed away by the current. But at first she was a babe in the woods, in utter denial of things and trembling all day.
“I take it you also don’t know that she lost the child after the beating that she took from the feds,” Dummy asked Pro Bono. “Not a clue, right? Or that this was the reason for hemorrhaging? No, you couldn’t know. The little princess never talked about those things because they hurt. Better just to remain quiet. Better not to say that the guards even refused to give her sanitary napkins, throwing it in her face that she had used up her tampon quota and the quota for the whole prison. But María Paz was one of those people who believed that if she didn’t talk about things it was as if they didn’t happen.”
“Foolish me for not having suspected it,” Rose says. “María Paz could have very well been pregnant, of course, with such a busy amorous life. And yes, of course, the beating they gave her when they arrested her must have caused her to miscarry. It must have really hurt her to lose the child in such a manner, who knows in what basement of what station at the hands of those sadists. And she was incapable of reasoning that the fault was theirs, those who beat her; I know the scene well, have lived through it myself. She created a completely new set of reasons to punish herself over that lost child, the same old beating on the chest with guilt: It’s my fault my child could not be born, my fault I was a bad mother, my fault the child wasn’t Greg’s but Joe’s, or the other way, my stupid fault it wasn’t Joe’s but Greg’s.”
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