Hot Sur

by Laura Restrepo

  In the middle of this mayhem, Mr. Rose, it so happened that because your workshop was in English, to attend became an act of betrayal in the eyes of our Latina sisters who accused us of selling out, and they began to block the hallways to the classroom. The six of us tried hard to explain things to them. The little gringo was teaching us to write, the language it was done in didn’t matter. We are not siding with anyone, but they thought it was all bullshit.

  “Well, from now on, I will conduct half the class in English and half the class in Spanish,” you announced when you heard what was happening.

  “What do you mean in Spanish?” the students who only spoke English, who were the majority, piped up. “You don’t speak Spanish and neither do we.”

  “But I do speak it.” You stood your ground defiantly and let out an impeccable Spanish that left us Latinas flabbergasted. Where the hell did this gringuito learn Cervantes’s language? And from that moment on, you conducted the rest of the class in our language, while the white girls stewed.

  After the hour was done, you said good-bye and left, so you didn’t see how the Latinas all gathered on one side of the class with our backs to the wall, our hairs standing on end like fighting cocks: the vengeance of the North was about to come down upon us. We had been waiting for it since before you left, and who knows what would have happened there if not for the intervention of an inmate known as Lady Gugu, a radical white activist who led a gang that preached it was a waste of time for the races to be pulling each other’s hair. And because she’s quite charming and knows when to play the clown, Lady Gugu announced that she too was going to conduct half the class in Spanish and began a demented and nonsensical monologue that broke the tension and made both sides break out in laughter. Who knows what that madwoman was saying in a Spanish with the worst American accent, that your ass is a great hat, and good morning, enchiladas, Antonio Banderas eats my cunt, and anything she could come up with, my little señorita whore, good mosquito tacos, anything at all, I’m very Mexicana, I’m a pretty little coco. And the rest of us were disarmed, safe on first, because it was impossible to figure out who Lady Gugu was insulting, the white folks and the way they speak Spanish, or the Latinas by mocking our language.

  The bad thing was that after that we never saw you again. That happened on a Thursday and the following Tuesday they told us that the course had been canceled. That’s all they said, canceled, that’s how they tell us things around here, just like that, without saying why or who, canceled, by God or a ghost, canceled, that’s it. That’s the way things are around here, they like to make us think that misfortunes occur on their own, and they can then wash their hands. But there was no need for them to say anything else, for us the reason you were fired was very clear.

  Ever since they started fucking with us about the Spanish, the Latina inmates have been going around like lionesses, ready to scratch anyone’s face off, our halls always on the verge of exploding. They’re going to have to stitch our lips together if they want us not to speak our own language, which, as you yourself said, is the only thing they can’t take away from us. And so the game continues, sometimes they’re stricter and sometimes they relax the rules because they just give up, but they keep fucking with us, and if on Saturday they turn off someone’s microphone during visiting hours, the blood rises again and rage builds up. And what could not be reversed, Mr. Rose, was the thing with your class. They just canceled it, but I’ll never forget that Thursday when Lady Gugu decided to speak Spanish, talking about asses and hats and other nonsense. It was a euphoric moment, Mr. Rose. You should have been there, a kind of small victory, a few minutes of fun and games between the Latinas and the white girls, something very rare around here. It was as if the prisoners of all colors got together and decided to smack the faces of all those who hated us.

  By night, that feeling had vanished. When you’re a prisoner you have to be skeptical about those moments of hope because they turn quickly, and the higher you jump the harder you fall. You go around with moods like a yo-yo, up and down, up and down, one moment you think you are saved and in the next you realize you are damned. That’s what happened to me that night, after that class that would be your last, although we didn’t know it yet. Alone in my cot I was struck by the reckoning, the name we have for the kind of depression that drains the blood, and what had seemed marvelous a few hours before now seemed tomfoolery, what hat or not hat, what enchiladas, I had never eaten enchiladas in my life, didn’t even know how they were made, probably something gross and spicy as hell. And Banderas was a bad actor. So much pride in his Spanish, which he didn’t even speak well because he was forgetting it. And me, so proud of being a Latina, and months before I’d have given anything to be married to an American? I’m telling you, everything seemed very forced. Which got me to thinking: while I was free, my goal was to wipe the Latina off me as if it were a stain, and in prison I’m becoming a fundamentalist of Latinohood. But what I’m going to do, on the one hand it’s something that’s spontaneous, it’s the face of my rage, on the other hand, I need it to survive, that simple. Here, you have to take sides not to get sandwiched in the eternal war between the races.

  I mentioned that the Latina prisoners had a name for that blood-draining depression, that plummeting of the spirit; we called it the reckoning. The reckoning comes upon you like a bucket of cold water, soaking your bones and drowning you in despair. “The reckoning hit me,” we say around here, or “I have the reckoning in the brain,” or “Don’t talk to me, I have the reckoning.” The reckoning is the worst, you want to die, nothing interests you; you just want to be still, to isolate, as if locked up in yourself, a dead woman living. The reckoning is introversion, despondency, pessimism—all mixed into a deadly cocktail. In the second section I was in, 12-GPU, there was a black Cuban woman, under the full weight of the reckoning, always huddled up on her cot. An enormous woman abandoned in the narrow cot in which she hardly fit, like a mountain that had crumbled. Her name was Tere Sosa, but because she never moved, we called her Pere Sosa, which means the lazy one. The reckoning comes and goes for the rest of us, but it had swallowed her whole. She didn’t even get up to go eat, and after a while not even to go to the bathroom. She soiled herself and gave off a smell that wasn’t even human, as if she had decided to transform herself into a pile of shit, a heap of garbage. The guards couldn’t make her get up, not even by force, because there is no force as powerful as the reckoning. So they hosed her down with water and left her there, soaked and trembling from the cold. But even then, soaked and soiled and starving, the woman couldn’t care less. Recently arrived in that section, still inexperienced and ignorant of its laws, I passed by Pere Sosa and asked what she had done to be in such a state, why they had arrested her. Why did I open my mouth? I felt a shove behind me right away; someone was throwing me up against the wall with all her strength. Later, I was to discover that it was no other than Mandra X, one of the capos of the prison, a lesbian thug who was one of the leaders of a powerful gang, according to what I was told then.

  “Listen to me good,” Mandra X told me that time, flattening my nose against her chest. “We don’t know what Pere Sosa might have done. And you know why we don’t know? Because we don’t ask. We don’t ask those things here, princess. So the next time I hear you asking them, I’ll break your face.”

  The cure for the reckoning is work. Nonstop work, in handicraft, in whatever you can get, leather embossing, crocheting, knitting, making wooden objects, whatever, so you can rock to the whir of the routine of your hands and let them think for you, so that there is no other thought in you besides that trivial thought free of anguish that the hands think. It’s the best antidote. But it’s hard to get work in the prison. It they don’t trust you, you can’t have access to tools that can be turned into weapons, you know, so they only give them to you, if they give them to you at all, for a couple of hours and under surveillance. Only a small percentage of prisoners enjoys the privilege o
f manual labor, and most of them are white, because the black and Latino prisoners are always under suspicion. They let me make knapsacks from polyester fiber, tying the yarn by hand. That soothes my mind, and it is easy to get permission for because no tools are necessary. Making knots hour after hour is a compulsion that may save you if the reckoning has befallen you; at least it works for me, and I have become almost addicted to it, I could tie polyester yarn from here to eternity, thinking about nothing. The other recourse against the reckoning is to sign up to mop floors. They always need volunteers because never in my life have I seen such shiny floors. At all hours, there’s someone mopping the concrete, somebody cleaning what cannot be cleaned. No matter how much bleach they use the smell still lingers there, floating in the darkness, the stink of the urine and sweat and shit of the thousands of prisoners that for more than a century have inhabited this place, the miasma of the great sewer that runs under these floors that each day they mop and mop until they’re dazzling.

  I at least remained in high spirits with the polyester knapsacks and the mopping, but the hemorrhaging has dwindled my strength and each day brings me down even further. There I go off on a tangent again. I begin to tell you something, but I’m dragged by a gust that blows and end up who knows where. I was asking you, Mr. Rose, how you would describe me physically in the novel, because in class it didn’t seem that you looked at us or were interested in me or any of the others, not in that way; you didn’t even seem to flinch when we sat in the front row and crossed our legs provocatively. We were about to give you up as a homosexual when you spoke to us about a girlfriend who was a teacher of deaf children. After you left, we gossiped about such a little saintly pair, her dealing with the deaf and you with prisoners. I think you never properly inspected us visually, undressed us with your eyes, as they say, out of good manners, and perhaps because you knew how persnickety the gringos are about harassment. So I’ll have to tell you what I look like myself, describe what I look like, in case you don’t remember.

  I’m sorry if this seems conceited, but I consider myself a rather pretty woman. Not beautiful or gorgeous, but definitely pretty. My hair is coffee-colored, long and thick. A thick head of hair, a crown of hair I should say. My hair is my best feature. The only thing that hasn’t deteriorated with the hemorrhaging and with this life in jail. As for the rest, I have acceptable features, a seductive smile although not perfect because I never wore braces, tanned skin, cinnamon they call it, and a pleasing little body. That’s what a boyfriend told me once the first time he saw me naked; he told me that I had a pleasing little body. I found the comment a little off-putting, especially in the middle of what was supposed to be a torrid sex scene. But maybe the man didn’t want to offend and was only making “an objective description with restrictive use of adjectives” as you would have advised in your creative-writing class. Anyways, I’m no babe, but I’m also not lacking in female graces. Well, I have a pleasing body when I’m thin, although not as thin as now, now I’m thin as a rake, and besides I’ll confess that for a long time I was fat, chubby fat with a big ass, especially after I got married, married life accumulated in my thighs and in my butt. Now I’m very skinny, and that makes me look anorexic, with the prominent cheekbones and the eyes grown so large I look like a nocturnal bug. Because of the anemia, my hands are transparent. If I put them against the light I imagine I can see the bones, like in an X-ray. And although my current appearance shocks me, I think Kate Moss would be envious.

  One time, after I had arrived in America, I had to fill out an application for a job. I was with my friend Jessica Ojeda, who was born in New Jersey and spoke English better than I did. Although just because she was born here was no guarantee she spoke better English. I learned it as a girl in Colombia, at the Colegio Bilingue Corazon de María of the Mothers Clarisas, which I attended with the Navas and in which Mother Milagros provided intensive lessons on grammar, pronunciation, and English literature five days a week. Then I got to America and from the time I was twelve to the time I was eighteen I hung out in Latino neighborhoods in which English was hardly heard. My first great disappointment upon arriving in America was that Bolivia had no car, the second that it was so hot, and the third was that in America everyone spoke only Spanish. You want to know what the business signs were of my first neighborhood in America? La Lechonería, Pasteles Nelly, Rincón Musical, Pollos a la Brasa, Tejidos el Porvernir, Pandi y Panda Ropa a Mano para Bebe, Papasito Restaurante, Cuchifrito, Sabor de Patria, Fútbol en Directo, Cigarrillos Pielroja, Consultorio Pediatrico para Niños y Niñas. And so on. But back to the job application that I filled out with Jessica Ojeda. She noticed that where they asked for the color of your eyes and hair, I wrote coffee. Hair color: coffee. Eyes: coffee. Skin: coffee with milk. That’s what I wrote because that’s what we call that color, coffee—or rather it is one of three terms: wheat, cinnamon, or coffee.

  “Those are names of food,” Jessica reprimanded me. “Don’t say that here, because people get offended. Here you say Latino when they ask you for your ethnic group and dark brown when they ask you about your hair and eyes.”

  “You don’t understand,” I explained. “Those of us born in the coffee zone have coffee eyes, and hair that is the same color as brilliant dark coffee in a cup, of coffee when it is magnificently coffee-colored. And our skin is the color of coffee with milk and sugar when you drink it really hot.”

  “Alright then,” she said, offering a compromise, “put dark brown.”

  “Not dark brown.” I held my ground. “Coffee. I’m proud of that, end of story.”

  Let’s see, Mr. Rose, what else can I tell you about me? Do you want to know if I have any special features? A few scars, which here in prison they call embroidery. One on my cheek from a scratch from Violeta that I told you about. Another one from an appendix operation, one on the eyebrow from a bicycle fall, a mole an inch from the corner of my mouth on the right side. Normal all in all, so far, but I have a few other things that are somewhat embarrassing. For example, stretch marks on my thighs from all the weight I gained and lost, too much hair on my legs, and a coffee-colored bramble of pubic hair; one of my nostrils is a bit higher than the other, and although I’d like to tell you that my breasts are full, like in the novels, the truth is I barely fill an A cup. Aside from that, I’m five feet five inches tall, wear size seven and a half shoes, have transparent hands from anemia, which I told you already, and have a pair of ears that are “full,” but which I can fortunately hide under my long hair.

  I’d like it if in your book you recounted Bolivia’s departure for America as sad but also joyful, because before she left we took a hot shower together, something we had never done. She washed my hair with an herb shampoo that she herself made in the kitchen, and since my body was small and dark, hers seemed a wonder, so round and full, so white and generous, which always made me uneasy. I was a little girl, Mr. Rose, and didn’t know much about life. But I did know one thing, that my mother did things with her body. Though I wouldn’t be able to tell you exactly what. I felt as if her body wasn’t guarded, wasn’t private, but rather exhibited outside the house; there was something about Bolivia’s body that fascinated me and frightened me at the same time. That afternoon she had ironed my halter top and favorite dress, a yellow jumper, my favorite color then. Bolivia knew how to iron with starch beautifully, by which I mean that the clothes came out fragrant and fresh, as if new. It seems it was a family thing, because her mother also ironed, my poor wretched grandmother Africa María, may she rest in peace. And my mother had shown me; I think it was one of the few things she got to show me before she left. Although come to think of it, I must have made that up. No one shows a seven-year-old girl how to iron; that would be an atrocity. A girl would burn herself with an iron. Anyway, I’d have liked for such a memory to be real, and maybe it is and it is good to think that Bolivia taught me something, that she left me something before leaving for America, something besides the coscoja, the brok
en-off coin piece that hangs from the chain around my neck, well, that used to hang around my neck before they confiscated it when I was brought to Manninpox.