Queen of the South

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  It was Patricia O’Farrell who had pointed it out to her after she’d been inside a few weeks. You ought to see yourself, she told Teresa, you’ve already got the prisoner walk. Teresa was convinced that Patricia, who was now lying on her back near her, her hands under her neck, her very short gold hair gleaming in the sun, would never walk that way, even if she spent another twenty years in this place. In her Irish-Jerez blood, she thought, there was too much class, too many good habits, too much intelligence.

  “Gimme a nail,” Patricia said.

  She was lazy or capricious, depending on what day it was. She smoked American-style filter cigarettes, with blond tobacco, but if she didn’t feel like getting up for one of her own she would smoke one of Teresa’s unfiltered, black-tobacco Bisontes, often taken apart and rerolled with a few grains of hashish. Nails, without. Joints or basucos, with.

  Teresa pulled a cigarette out of the pack next to her on the ground, half of them laced with hash, half straight, lit it, and leaning over Patricia’s face, put it between her lips. She saw Patricia smile before she said, “Thanks,” and inhaled without removing her hands from behind her neck, the cigarette dangling from her mouth, her eyes closed in the sun that gave a glow to her hair and the light dusting of golden hairs on her cheeks, around the slight wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. Thirty-four years old, Patricia had said, without anybody’s asking, Teresa’s first day in the cell—the rack, in the jail slang that Teresa now knew so well—that the two women shared. Thirty-four on her National Identity Document, and nine on her sentencing sheet, “of which I’ve served two. With good behavior, work credits, a third off just because . . . I figure I’ve got one or two more, max.”

  Teresa started to tell her who she was—“My name’s Teresa and . . .”—when the other woman cut her off. “I know who you are, sweetheart. Here, we know everything about everybody real fast—sometimes even before they get here. So let me tell you. There are three basic types: bitches, dykes, and pussies. By nationality, aside from the Spaniards we’ve got Moors, Romanians, Portuguese, Nigerians—with AIDS and everything, you want to stay away from them, they’re in bad shape, poor things—a group of Colombian girls that practically run the place—they get any fucking thing they want, and sometimes get away with murder, so watch out—a French girl or two, and a couple of Ukrainians—whores that offed their pimp because he wouldn’t give back their passports. Then there are the Gypsies—don’t mess with them. The young ones with the Lycra pants, long hair, and tattoos deal in pills and chocolate and whatever, and they’re the toughest ones. The older ones, the fat ones with the big tits and the long skirts and their hair in buns, they’ve taken the fall for their men—who’ve got to stay on the street because they’ve got a family to feed, so they come to pick up their Rosarios in a big Mercedes when they get out—and they’re pretty peaceable, but they look out for each other. Except for the Gypsies, among themselves, the inmates look out for number one and only number one, which means that the ones you see in groups are there out of self-interest, or survival—the weak ones looking for a ride on the strong ones.

  “If you want a piece of advice, don’t make friends, don’t mix. Try to get a good gig: laundry, kitchen, commissary—which also takes time off your sentence. And don’t forget to wear flipflops in the shower and never sit your ass down on the toilet in the latrines in the yard—you could catch god knows what. Never say anything against Camarón or Joaquín Sabina or Los Chunguitos or Miguel Bosé, or ask to change the channel when the soaps are on, or take drugs from anybody without knowing what it’s going to cost you in return. Your rap, if you stay out of trouble and do what you’re told to do, will keep you here a year—obsessing about getting out, like all of us, thinking about the family, or remaking your life, or the drink you’re going to have, or the screw, whatever it is. Year and a half max, with the papers and the reports from Corrections and the shrinks and all those other bastards that open the doors or close them on us, depending on their digestion or whether you make a good impression on them or whatever other bug happens to be up their ass that day. So take it easy, keep that nice sweet expression on your face, say Yes sir, Yes ma’am to everybody, don’t pull my chain, and we’ll get along fine, Mexicana. I hope you don’t mind if people call you Mexicana. Everybody’s got some name here. Some girls like them, some don’t. Mine is Lieutenant O’Farrell. And I like it. Maybe one day I’ll let you call me Patty.”

  Patty.”

  “What.”

  “This book is great.”

  “I told you.”

  Patty’s eyes were still closed, the lighted cigarette dangling from her lips, and the sun accentuated little spots, like freckles, on the tip of her nose. She had been attractive once, and in a certain way still was. Or maybe more pleasant-looking than actually attractive, with her blond hair and her five feet eight inches and her bright eyes that made it seem she was always laughing inside. Her mother was a Miss Spain 1950-something, married to the O’Farrell of sherry and thoroughbred-horse fame, a man you saw from time to time in the magazines: an elegant, raisin-wrinkled old man photographed with beautiful horses and barrels of wine in the background, or in a house with tapestries, paintings, and shelves filled with ceramics and books. There were more children; Patricia was the black sheep. Something to do with drugs on the Costa del Sol, with the Russian mafia and a couple of dead men. A boyfriend with three or four noble last names shot dead at point-blank range, and her making it out alive by a miracle, with two gunshots that had kept her in the ICU for a month and a half. Teresa had seen the scars in the showers and when Patricia took off her clothes in the rack: two star-shaped areas of drawn and puckered skin on her back, under her left shoulder blade, about two inches apart. The exit wound from one had left a slightly bigger scar, under her clavicle. The second bullet, smashed flat against a bone, had been removed in the operating room.

  “Full metal jacket,” was Patricia’s comment the first time Teresa stared at the scars. “If it had been a dum-dum or a hollow-point we wouldn’t be talking right now.” And then she closed the matter with a silent, comic grimace. On humid days that second wound bothered her, as Teresa ached from the fresh fracture of her arm.

  “How do you like Edmond Dantès?”

  “Edmond Dantès is me,” Teresa replied, almost seriously, and she saw the wrinkles around Patricia’s eyes deepen, the cigarette quiver as she smiled.

  “Me, too,” Patricia said. “And all of us,” she added, gesturing toward the yard without opening her eyes. “Innocent and virginal and dreaming of a treasure that awaits us all when we get out.”

  “Abbé Faria died,” Teresa said, looking down at the book’s open pages. “Poor old man.”

  “You see? There are times when some people have to buy it so others can live.”

  A group of inmates passed by, walking the two hundred thirty steps toward the wall. They were tough, mean-looking, a half-dozen girls led by Trini Sánchez, also known as Makoki III: a small, masculine, aggressive, tattooed dark-skinned woman, always scrapping with the other inmates, or shivving them—dangerous, and a regular in the Hole. She’d gotten fourteen years for stabbing her girlfriend over half a gram of horse. “Those dykes like fresh bait,” Patricia had warned Teresa the first time they met in the module corridor, when Trini said something that Teresa didn’t catch and the others laughed, sharing the code. “But don’t worry, Mexicanita. They’ll only eat your cunt if you let them.” Teresa hadn’t let them, and after a few tactical advances in the showers, the stalls, and the yard—including one attempt at social interchange via smiles and cigarettes and condensed milk at a table in the dining room—they went on their way. After all, her rackmate was Lieutenant O’Farrell. And with her, the word was, La Mexicanita was taken care of.

  “Hey, Lieutenant.”

  “How’s it goin’, bitches?” Patricia hadn’t even opened her eyes. And her hands were still crossed behind her neck. The others laughed harshly—a couple muttered some good-humored obscenit
y—and continued pacing the yard. Teresa watched them pass and then looked over at her friend. It had not taken her long to see that O’Farrell enjoyed certain privileges among the inmates: she had access to money far above the legal amount of available funds, she received packages from the outside, and with these goods, people on the inside were disposed to help her. Even the guards and prison officers treated her better than the rest.

  But there was also an air of authority about her that had nothing to do with money or packages from the outside. First of all, she was a girl with culture, which made an important difference in a place where very few inmates had gone as far as high school. She expressed herself well, read books, knew people at a certain level of society. It was not unusual for other inmates to come to her for help in filling out forms—requests or official documents that should have been filed by their lawyers—appointed by the court, the motherfuckers disappeared the minute the sentence was handed down, or even before.

  O’Farrell could also get her hands on drugs, from pills of any color to pot or chocolate, which was what they called hash, and she always had rolling paper or aluminum foil for those who needed to light up.

  Plus, she wasn’t one to let anybody get to her. The story was that one day when she was still new, a longtime inmate had raped her, and that O’Farrell had taken it without opening her mouth. But the next morning, when she and the rapist were both naked in the showers, she had come up to the bitch and held a shiv—made from the frame of a fire-extinguisher box—to her throat. Never again, sweetheart, were her words as she looked into the woman’s eyes, the water from the shower running off her, the other inmates standing around like they were watching the TV, although later they all swore on their most recently departed loved ones that they hadn’t seen a thing. And the troublemaker, an alpha bitch everyone called La Valenciana, with a reputation as one mean cunt, was in complete agreement.

  Lieutenant O’Farrell. Teresa saw that Patricia had opened her eyes and was looking at her, and she slowly turned her eyes away so that the other woman wouldn’t read her thoughts. Sometimes the youngest and most defenseless inmates bought the protection of a respected, dangerous alpha bitch—“respected” and “dangerous” meant the same thing—in exchange for favors that in this prison without men included the obvious. Patricia never suggested anything like that to Teresa, but sometimes Teresa caught her watching her in that fixed, slightly reflective way, as though she were looking at her but thinking about something else. She had felt herself looked at that way when she arrived at El Puerto, with the noise of locks and thick bars and heavy doors—clang, clang—and the echo of footsteps and the impersonal voices of the guards and that smell of locked-up women, dirty clothes, musty mattresses, foul-smelling food, sweat, and lye. As Teresa undressed the first night, or went to the toilet—hard at first, until she got used to it, because of the lack of privacy, her jeans and underwear down around her ankles—Patricia would sometimes look at her from her bunk without a word. She’d lay the book she was reading—she had a bookcase full—facedown on her stomach and study Teresa from head to toe. She’d done this for days, weeks, and once in a while she still did. Like now, for example.

  Teresa went back to the book. Edmond Dantès, tied in a sack and with a cannonball attached to his feet to weigh him down, had just been thrown over a cliff—his captors thought it was the body of the dead abbé. The sea is the graveyard of the Château d’If . . . she read avidly. I hope he gets out of this, she thought, quickly turning the page, to the next chapter. Though stunned and almost suffocated, Dantès still had the presence of mind to hold his breath. . . . ¡Híjole! I hope he can get out of that sack and go back to Marseilles and get his boat and take his revenge on those three sons of bitches that sold him out like that.

  Teresa had never imagined that a book could absorb her attention to the point that she could sit down and pick it up right where she’d left off, with a scrap of torn paper for a bookmark so as not to lose her place. Patricia had given her this book after talking about it a lot—Teresa had been marveling to see her sit so quietly for so long, looking at the pages of her books. To think of her getting all those things in her head and preferring that to the telenovelas—she herself loved the ones from Mexico, with their accents of her homeland—and movies and game shows that the other inmates would crowd around the television for.

  “Books are doors that lead out into the street,” Patricia would tell her. “You learn from them, educate yourself, travel, dream, imagine, live other lives, multiply your own life a thousand times. Where can you get more for your money, Mexicanita? And they also keep all sorts of bad things at bay: ghosts, loneliness, shit like that. Sometimes I wonder how you people that don’t read figure out how to live your lives.” But she never said, You ought to read such-and-such, or Look at this, or that; she waited for Teresa to come to it herself, after catching her several times rummaging around among the ever-changing twenty or thirty books that she kept on the shelves in the rack, some from the prison library and others that some relative or friend on the outside would send her, or that she would have other inmates, with third-degree permits, order for her.

  Finally, one day Teresa said, “I’ve never read a whole book before, but I’d like to read one.” She was holding something called Tender Is the Night, or some such title, which had drawn her attention because it sounded so incredibly romantic, plus it had a lovely picture on the cover, a slender, elegant girl in a garden hat, very, very twenties. But Patricia shook her head, took it from her, and said, “Wait, all things in good time—first you ought to read something that you’ll like even better.” And the next day they went to the prison library and asked Marcela Rabbit, the inmate in charge—Rabbit was her nickname, of course; she had put that brand of lye in her mother-in-law’s wine—for the book that Teresa now held in her hands. “It’s about a prisoner like us,” Patricia explained when she saw Teresa worried about having to read such a thick book. “And look—Porrúa Publishers, Mexico City. It came from over there, like you. You were meant for each other.”

  There was a scuffle at the far end of the yard—Moors and young Gypsies cursing each other, some hair-pulling. From there you could see the barred windows of the men’s unit, where the male inmates would often exchange messages—yells and signs—with their “girlfriends” or female buddies. More than one jailhouse idyll had been hatched in that corner—one prisoner doing some cement work had managed to knock up a female inmate in the three minutes the guards took to find them—and the place was frequented by women with male interests on the other side of the wall and the razor wire. Now three or four inmates were arguing, and it had reached the point of slapping and scratching—jealousy, maybe, or a dispute over the best spot in the improvised observatory, while the guard in the guardhouse leaned over the wall to watch.

  Teresa had seen that in prison the women had more balls than some men did. They might wear makeup, have their hair fixed by other inmates who’d been hairdressers on the outside, and like to show off their jewelry, especially when they went to mass on Sunday—Teresa, not thinking about it, stopped going to mass after the death of Santiago Fisterra—or when they were working in the kitchen or areas where some contact with men was possible. That, too, gave rise to jealousy, ripoffs, and settling of scores. She’d seen women beaten to within an inch of their lives over a cigarette or a bite of omelette—eggs weren’t on the official menu and you could get shivved for one—or an insult or even a “What” spoken in the wrong tone of voice. She’d seen women stabbed, or kicked until they bled from their nose and ears. Thefts of food or drugs also caused fights: jars of preserves, cans of meat or other delicacies, heroin or pills stolen from the racks while the inmates were in the dining hall at breakfast and the cells were open. Or breaking the unwritten rules that governed life on the inside. A month earlier, a snitch that cleaned the guardhouses and blew the whistle once in a while on her sister inmates had been beaten to a bloody pulp in the yard latrine when she went to pee. She’
d hardly gotten her skirt up when four inmates rushed inside, while others, who later turned out to be deaf and blind and mute, stood outside to block the door. The bitch was still in the infirmary with several broken ribs and her jaw held together with wires.

  Teresa watched the commotion at the end of the yard. Behind the bars, the guys in the men’s unit were throwing fuel on the fire, and the shift sergeant and two other guards were running across the quadrangle to take charge. After her distracted glance, Teresa returned to Edmond Dantès, with whom she was madly and frankly in love. And as she turned the pages—the fugitive had just been rescued from the sea by fishermen—she could feel Patricia O’Farrell’s eyes fixed on her, looking at her the same way that other woman did, the woman she’d caught so many times stalking her from the shadows and in mirrors.

  She was awakened by rain on the window, and she opened her eyes, terrified in the gray light, because she thought she was out on the ocean again, near the León Rock, in the middle of a black sphere, falling into the void the same way Edmond Dantès had in Abbé Faria’s shroud. After the rock and the impact and the night, the days that followed her awakening in the hospital with one arm immobilized on a splint to the shoulder, her body covered with bruises and scratches, she had gradually—from comments by doctors and nurses, the visit from the police and a social worker, the flash of a photograph, her fingers stained with ink after an official fingerprinting—reconstructed the details of what had happened. Still, whenever somebody pronounced the name Santiago Fisterra, her mind went blank. All that time, the sedatives and her own emotions had kept her in a state of semi-consciousness that prevented any real thought. Not for a moment during those first four or five days did she allow herself to think about Santiago, and when the memory came to her unbidden, she would push it away, sink back into that voluntary stupor. Not yet, her subconscious and her body would say to her. You’d better not face that yet.