He stared down at his feet. She took the machete from him and tossed it on the bed. But she did not leave.
She stood back and undid her skirt and slowly tossed it aside. He looked up at her. Her blouse came down over her creamy thighs, but she unbuttoned it slowly. She looked at him, stared at him a long moment. Then took her blouse off. She was now naked except for a small pair of black panties. His mouth opened and his eyes blinked. He began to breathe heavier, and his eyes watered. So, giving a sigh, she took her panties off.
“Oh my good god, you are absolutely gorgeous,” he said.
“See,” she said, quite matter of fact, as she stared at him. “You’ve just proven it, haven’t you! You have all the equipment to be a man—and I can see it reacts just like a man’s should—so please understand you don’t have to try to prove it anymore.”
“You are my cousin,” he said, softly.
“At this moment—and this is the only moment—that does not matter.”
And then she picked up her blouse, skirt and panties, and left the room naked.
4.
GIRLS AND WOMEN IN OTHER CELLS RELIED UPON MARY CYR TO hand them things—to ask for things, to get them beer, and Mary would dole out—chocolate bars, toothpaste, Tampax—and once or twice a week she sent out for McDonald’s for the whole block, even the guards if they wanted. And Principia would collect the money, and write the orders down, saying:
“A Big a Mac—two a Macs—fren fries—” and run to do this for her new friend Mary Cyr.
The cells were above the dirt floor that ran between them. Cinder blocks were placed along the fringe of this floor every few feet. There were two or three chairs, some plants that grew. Now and then a lizard crawled into the cell window and sunned itself between the bars. Mary quite liked them.
Once in a while the other prisoners would take a walk along that dirt corridor, and all of them would end up standing at her cell, talking to her, smoking cigarettes and asking questions.
“Did you do it?”
“No—I have done nada.”
“Do you like to have—sex?”
“Not as much as people believe, and not with children.”
“Sabemos quién lo hizo,” one young woman said one day. That is, she said she knew who had done it. She said everyone knew.
She was in jail for three months for shoplifting. It was on the tip of her tongue to tell Mary that certain people said it was the wife of Carlos DeRolfo—a woman no one liked at all.
“Who?” Mary asked. She felt sick, became dizzy, began to shake.
But the woman knew better. She shrugged and moved her lips, in an aloof pout, and looked away. She watched other women, to see if they would say anything, and then moved to the back of the crowd. She was only eighteen years old and was just learning to keep her mouth shut.
She didn’t look at Mary Cyr for the rest of the day, didn’t eat her Big Mac with them but took it back to her cell.
“Ah,” Mary said. “Dinero es dinero—and truth is truth.”
“Es peligroso hablar,” one of the other women told her. “Señorita, por favor.”
It is dangerous to talk. Please, miss—
Mary knew nothing would be said about this, to anyone at all.
So she said nothing either.
* * *
—
She once wrote in her diary about Le Select—yes, she was with some French colleagues. Very nice people—they decided that they would finally call each other the intimate tu instead of the formal vous—yes, how symbolic, how kind. Until they got in an argument over who should pay for the extra bottle of wine. Soon they were back to the more formal vous, and Mary Cyr paid for the wine.
“Le Select is exactly as it should be—full of rather select arses—” she wrote. Now that she thought of it, she liked many of the women here better.
5.
UNFORTUNATELY FOR LUCRETIA RAPONE, SHE POKED HER NOSE into everything in Oathoa. And she did not know that within twenty-four days her life would be irrevocably changed.
Her life was a constant inquiry—it was as if she was a source of persistent curiosity. As if it was her right to find out everything that was going on. She had dozens of theories and suppositions on why the water was turned off on Santa Anna Street, or why a public washroom was shut down. Or why there was a gas leak, or why Bruno’s Tea Room was sold. She laughed loudly, talked loudly, and said what she should not. In fact the most distinct feature on her was her rather large mouth that turned upward at both ends as if she was constantly grinning. There was another character trait she had—mean-spiritedness. She always laughed when others were hurt, or when youngsters were teased. She would sway from side to side as she walked, so men called her the pendulum. But no man was able to insult her more than she could insult him. There was a darker side of her too—a side that brought her into contact with people like Hulk Hernández in 1998. And she knew certain things that put her own life in danger.
So over a month before she had walked down the street to see about the new social assistance cheque—having received a tip from Hulk Hernández that she could get two different cheques a month if she saw a certain person who was a friend of theirs, and filled out another form. So then that was the only thing on her mind that day. But just when she started to go to the office—just at that moment, she turned and saw a beautiful lady in chains—and just at that moment as she stepped forward, the young woman she had known of for a long while, Sharon DeRolfo, began to snap pictures. So she followed along at a distance, and heard what this beautiful woman had done. She had murdered a boy, and his younger brother was missing.
It was terrible. So she followed the others to the jail. Then seeing no one else brave enough to inquire what was happening, she put her makeup on, made sure her hair was combed, adjusted the little bracelet on her wrist and went into the office, asking.
“Oh,” Erappo Pole said. “We have a murder—you knew them—that boy Victor.”
“Victor?” she said. “Of course—sí.”
So she went back home. Victor—wasn’t that the boy she teased, who had the little brother Florin—one dead one missing, well, she couldn’t do much about that.
But that evening they said everyone was going up to the church to pray. Then one of her friends phoned and said the women were going to go, to show support for the Sonora family.
So she put on a black kerchief and went along.
There were seven women, all preparing to go to the church, and she simply barged through to the front to see what was happening. Then the women followed her up the steps, and that was the first time she was fortunate enough to have her picture taken. She, at the front, with a large hat, and a veil over her face.
“Who organized the prayer group?” the reporter asked.
“I did,” she said, and she looked around quickly and nodded. “Sí—it was I.”
And so therefore it was.
Four days passed where she became the head of the prayer group at the church. She organized marches to the jail—she taunted the prisoner. She had laminated little pictures of Victor that she wore. One night, after Lucretia was interviewed by that husband and wife on TV, her friend Bianca came to her, nervously, and said:
“Did you tell the TV you were the mother? Well, the reporter from El Mundo wants to talk to the mother—he thinks one of us is the mother—so, Lucretia, you go tell him she is dead, that you made a mistake.”
Lucretia looked at her and frowned deeply. Then she looked at the other women.
“Those children need a mother,” she said. She wiped tears from her eyes. “I will do my duty and be the mother. I already said I was, so I will be.”
The other women looked at her. Then they nodded as she pushed through them. And she went out to meet the reporter, with the women following her. But since Bianca and those other women pretended once that Lucretia Rapone was the mother, now it was paramount that they continue to pretend. So now all of them said she was the mother. And all of them
began to believe it.
And so Lucretia, who admitted she hated children—often in fact was disgusted by Principia’s affection for her children, and had two abortions, and was making a secret deal to help Hernández smuggle certain children north—was now a mother as well.
It was all very strange how it happened, but in this world, nothing in fact was more natural. It seemed all very devious, but in this world, nothing was devious. It seemed very unbecoming, but in this world what was unbecoming? One knows that in this world, from the Peloponnesian Wars on, no deviousness was left unused.
And every time you saw Lucretia she was at church blessing herself, wearing a laminated picture of Victor on her breast.
She, however, knew nothing of the tape recorder, or of the TINK TINK TINK that had once emanated from the bowels of the earth.
Gabriella would not dare tell her that.
6.
IT WAS NOW SEVEN WEEKS SINCE THE OWNER AND CEO OF THE mine, in a panic, declared the search over and closed off the opening.
For four or five days after that the men three-hundred metres down banded together. They shared what they had—a few even formed a prayer group.
But then slowly the fact became clear that all was soundless, and the search for them was over. They were buried alive in a five- by eight-metre grave. They could not believe it—and tried to remain calm. But little by little they became aware that their families might still be above them praying, but that the rescuers themselves had left and gone away.
Pedro had a carrot in his pocket for his donkey and he attempted to cut it up.
But something happened, as he was doing this. Seeing one by one the lamps on the top of the men’s hats fade and die, seeing the carrot, three of the men started to go mad.
He had shared what he had for his donkey, the carrot and the corn he had in his big front pocket that went halfway down his leg. And then he went back to work. Suddenly it would grow dimmer, and he would look over his shoulder and see that another lamp was about to go out.
Then a man whose lamp had just gone out on his head would say that he had been marked for death, and begin to laugh.
“Someone will hear me,” he told them. “I know someone must hear me sooner or later.”
Now there were only three lamps left, dimmer and dimmer as the hours passed.
Exhausted, his legs aching, he sat back for one moment. Then once more:
TINK TINK TINK, he sounded.
And those TINKs were the very sounds on his son’s tape.
The tape was now in Gabriella’s possession along with Maxwell the truck.
* * *
—
But all of this—all of this affected Principia as well. She had not seen or heard from her husband in eighteen months, and yet she continued on, needing to believe that everything was fine with him, because people like Mr. Hernández, inspector of the mine, told her he was fine, and poohed any concern. But then once or twice when he saw her along the street, he looked the other way as he drove by.
So she too had hidden much of the truth from herself.
The idea Principia had was if she prayed enough to the Virgin of Guadalupe, the truth would go away—or at least she would look at it differently—or barring that she would be able to forget all about it. But the pressing need to go to the jail every day and to look outraged, to pray again in the afternoon in front of the cell window where that little girl (strangely, this is how Principia thought of Mary Cyr) was—made her realize her lie more and more. Of course she knew Mary Cyr had nothing to do with the murder—nada—and she knew also who did, or who must have. But this too, if she believed it, would implicate those she had trusted, and perhaps even implicate her own sister, Lucretia, and could she do so? Then there was the other stranger part of all of this that she wrestled with: even though she knew all, was she self-deceiving enough to pretend not to know? That was the question. And so she tried not to think about it.
Mr. and Mrs. DeRolfo were helping her, helping her son and putting her daughter through school. So as DeRolfo said, Gabriella was like his daughter—he loved her, and the university in Mexico City was waiting for her.
For Principia all she had to do was be quiet, and their lives would be fine. In fact, the very resort Mary had stayed at would hire her in the summer if she could get a good recommendation from Señora DeRolfo. And Señora DeRolfo had told her she would write her the best recommendation in all of Mexico. So what was there to worry about, or concern herself over?
Still, the truth was always present, and the praying did not take it away but exposed it—with each decade of the beads, said in a monotone with the priest who was the most pious of them all, parading his sincere sorrow.
Principia was not at all dumb. What played into all of this outrage was the fate of the thirteen. The thirteen from the town of Oathoa who died in the coal mine—which was supposedly, all of a sudden, the Cyrs’ responsibility. It was so much believed to be the Cyrs’ fault that even if a survivor came back to life and said they were in error, no one would believe him. Why was this? Because believing it was the fault of a foreigner relieved everyone in town of the burden of the truth. And Principia knew this in her heart.
“El destino de los trece” was written on the coal bins’ battered walls.
“El destino de los trece es la muerte” was held up on placards and signs when they burned the effigy.
Was inside the church foyer.
Was put up in the window of houses.
Was on the walls of two restaurants.
She walked behind those signs, the smell of diesel in the hot afternoons, shouting with the others. She did this because the blame had now been shifted to the little girl in the cell, the puta, and because Lucretia demanded she go along with her.
“You have to show support in my grief.”
Of course she did not know that of the fourteen million given to implement safety upgrades by Tarsco, thirteen and a half million went into the pockets of the Mexican owners.
Hernández—or “the Hulk,” as he was called—saw to it. The upgrades would only go so deep—the great water leaks, the lack of supports, all of it would be rendered unimportant because they were unseen.
When they worried about a mine inspector investigating, Hernández arrived at the mine two days later with a sign that read Inspector de operaciones mineras on his front window. He got out with a clipboard and looked very officious.
But though everyone concerned believed this would never be discovered, all of it was in the hands of the young prosecutor Alfonso Bara from Mexico City.
* * *
—
“What do you want to become?” Principia had asked Lucretia one night, in the little apartment they shared with her daughter, Gabriella, and son, Ángel. It was the very night Lucretia was given the designer glasses, which she wouldn’t take off even when they sat at home.
“I want to become as famous as Mary Cyr,” Lucretia had laughed. Her picture she had heard—that is, Lucretia’s picture—was published in the New York Post—she had been mistaken for Victor’s mother. “Not mistaken,” she said. “No mistake—it is who I am.”
Then Principia asked who would feed the sorry, mean old donkey.
“I will feed it,” Gabriella said. “Okay, Ángel?” she asked, as if that would take care of everything for good.
“I don’t care,” Ángel said. And he got up and left.
7.
THE NEXT DAY WHEN CONSTABLE FEY SAW HER, PRINCIPIA WAS ON her way to meet Ms. Tallagonga. Why, she did not know. She was called so she went, scared and worried. Mrs. DeRolfo had told her she was wanted, when she was in the living room dusting.
Señora DeRolfo had looked at her, when she was at the house—and said:
“Go home and change and be your best. Be very good—be very wise,” and put her hands on either shoulder and looked into her eyes.
And so she walked down the roadway, passed the open beach, passed the umbrellas in the sun, passed the jail
and the old, blind donkey.
“Somos hermanas en esto juntos.”
We are sisters in this together.
The prosecutor said this holding out her hand.
The world of law never wants to be uncertain. It is dramatic and shifting, but it is reactionary in its stance against perceived delinquency—diligent in upholding what it takes to be an affront against the sovereignty of the nation. Or that is what is supposed by many people, even by Principia and Tallagonga at this meeting on the second floor of the law building in the main square of Oathoa, just across the street from where Delano was having coffee. But in reality it can also be unprincipled and self-serving—hidden in its vales are enough measures of conceit to stop battleships. Tallagonga could no more wrestle her way away from this case than she could fly. She’d taken it up with grave enthusiasm a month ago and was now caught in its hidden files, caught in the media, caught in the international interest and international interests, surrounding it. She was caught in the lie, which for the honour of Oathoa she must believe. So everything that came against her, she would deflect, and then plow onward.
In the glare of international attention she could not now say that it was all a horrible mistake, a lie, and then be certain of her future advancing toward Mexico City. Not if people in Mexico City viewed this as a pivotal case. Still, in her private moments she had asked herself: Should the case go forward?
Little by little she felt Mary Cyr was innocent—there were too many small things that pointed to it. First of all there was evidence that Victor had not been poisoned, he had been beaten and choked by a larger person. It was very strange that Señor DeRolfo said he was poisoned, a doctor who had tried to save them from a flu epidemic years before. So poisoned he was.
Now that Mary was in jail she was constitutionally considered guilty. Besides, if Tallagonga let it go, her main adversary who used to be her friend at one time, Alfonso Bara, would gain the position both of them were seeking, an under attorney general of Mexico dealing in the criminal division. (That is also why Mary Cyr was kept in the jail here, and not in some safer place. Tallagonga needed her to stay here.)
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