Hot Sur

by Laura Restrepo

  Mandra X told the judge that from the moment they were born she had known that there would come a time when life would become unlivable for them. She still had plenty of strength left and had up to that time relied on a family inheritance to be able to remain at home and care for them. But the children could not go to any type of school, and because they could not tell night from day, there was always one of them awake, demanding her attention. Caring for them was a Herculean undertaking. To make matters worse, the money from the inheritance was dwindling fast and they could not live on the welfare check from the state. On the day the children turned twelve, Mandra X had been diagnosed with cancer of the bladder. It had gone into remission, but she became obsessed with the idea that soon it would return. The last thing she wanted was to die and leave them alone.

  She made no attempt to cover up her crime or get rid of the bodies. On the contrary, she placed the duly shrouded children in their respective beds, and before turning herself in, made sure that the funeral and burial arrangements were paid. She foresaw any and all issues that could arise and managed to take care of everything beforehand: three coffins in just the right size, the hearse, wreaths and candles for the funeral service, cremation arrangements, and permission for the ashes to be taken to Germany and sprinkled on the Danube from a certain bridge in her hometown.

  After she had been sentenced and taken to prison, Mandra X contacted Pro Bono and the organizations that had helped her, and, locked up in her cell, she began a strict exercise regimen and her studies of American penal law.

  “Mandra X . . . Medea X,” Pro Bono told Rose. “The enraged, ferocious, fooled Medea. You know what Euripides has her say? She shouts, ‘Death unto you, my accursed children born of such a deathly mother.’ At first, my knees would tremble every time I had to be in her presence.”

  “Like Clarice Starling when she goes to see Hannibal Lecter,” Rose said.

  “What?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Since then we have become partners in crime. We both speak the language of freaks, I suppose.”

  “But, wait, there’s still something that I’m not getting, this friend of yours . . .”

  “Hold on there, I didn’t say friend, I said partner,” Pro Bono corrected him. “Mandra X does not have any friends per se.”

  “Fine. So this person, your partner, murdered her children because she was afraid that she herself would soon die, and they would be left with no one to care for them . . .”

  “Yet that was twenty years ago and she’s still with us,” Pro Bono completed the thought. “Is that your objection?”

  “Not an objection. Who am I to judge? I get her motivation, and I guess that ideally she should have died right after the trial so that the whole sensationalist story would have had an apt ending. But that’s not what happened. The cancer never came back. She misjudged the entire situation. Don’t you think that she should be retried and sentenced to death just for that?”

  “Execute her because she didn’t die? Not very prudent.”

  Mandra X had helped María Paz, shown her how to survive in prison. María Paz became an entirely new person after Mandra X allowed her into her group.

  “Las Nolis,” Pro Bono added. “They were known as Las Nolis, but the real full name of the group, the sect, was in Latin: Noli me tangere.”

  “Sounds a little outlandish, prisoners throwing around Latin,” Rose tells me, “but that was the name. And why not? They were trapped in a medieval castle, so shouldn’t they be using Latin? Anyway, noli me tangere means ‘don’t touch me,’ from somewhere in the Bible. It seems that at first Las Nolis had misjudged María Paz. She came across as a weakling, a stupid, pretty little thing. According to Pro Bono, she had to prove her steeliness.”

  The members of Noli me tangere were unified by the guiding principles of survival and respect. Simple and direct as that. But Mandra X was a wily old fox, and she knew that for the enterprise to work she needed to add touches of mystery and mysticism to it, have it develop its own ceremonies and myths. In prison, as well as in the world outside, but particularly in prison, such a makeup is essential if any enterprise is to have a sense of purpose. Without theatrics, there would be no meaning; without rituals, no loyalty.

  “Was it a kind of political rebellion or a religious cult?” Rose asked Pro Bono.

  “Neither, nothing as complicated as that.”

  Mandra X had come up with a way to bring together women of different ages, social classes, education levels, religions, skin colors, psychological and moral tendencies, and sexual preferences. She did it by focusing on the one thing they had in common: they were all prisoners. They were residents of the worst kind of ghetto. Basically, Mandra X offered them the opportunity to become her property so that they would not have to be treated as less than human in such inhumane conditions. It also helped that they were all Latinas, the other thing that they all had in common. Although she herself had an Aryan background, she had become the head of a Latino gang. Pro Bono wasn’t sure how Mandra X had ended up in such a position, but he knew that she had hacked her way there by force and charisma, and because she had lived many years in Latin America and was fluent in Spanish. On top of that, she was an old-timer. She had been at Manninpox almost longer than anyone had and had become a leader in the fight for prisoners’ human rights. Dark rumors circulated about her legendary crime, and about her philosophy and her methods.

  “María Paz writes about group sacrifices in Manninpox,” Rose said. “About Las Nolis and orgies.”

  “What does the pretty little María Paz know about any of that?” Pro Bono said.

  “Blood sacrifices,” Rose insisted. “She says blood was spilled.”

  According to Pro Bono, the whole situation was difficult to understand unless it was properly placed in the context of the powerlessness, confinement, and extreme deprivation that the women experienced. For them, their wounds were the only things they could call their own. They inflicted these wounds on themselves, and no one could stop them. Their scars were their marks, which they themselves had chosen and crafted, unlike the numbers they had been assigned, the cells in which they were locked up, and the uniforms they had to wear. There were some things, however, that no one could take from them: their blood, their sweat, their shit, their tears, their urine, their saliva, their vaginal fluids.

  “Something’s better than nothing,” Rose quipped.

  “The whole thing reminds me of this Dutch mystic from the fourteenth century, Saint Liduvina de Schiedam,” Pro Bono said.

  “I don’t know who she is,” Rose said, thinking that Cleve would have surely known.

  “A strange woman, half mystic, half insane. She delighted in her own decomposition, applying torments on her body and giving herself over to infections and disease until she had become a mere semblance of the thing she had been, the scraps of a creature. She transformed herself into living waste to discover her true identity. Reading about her has helped me to better understand Mandra X and her Nolis. Listen, Rose, things in there work on another level altogether,” Pro Bono said as Rose watched the low arch of the autumn light gild the landscape. “Look, my friend, if you are going to go in there with me, you’re going to have to change the way you think about things. It’s another world in there, and it forces you to think in different terms.”

  “I’m not sure I’ll go that far with you . . . my friend. Why don’t you tell me a little about María Paz.”

  “María Paz is another story. María Paz is a normal person, to the extent such a thing exists. Her time in Manninpox was an experience that without a doubt made her stronger and allowed her to mature in ways she would have never outside of prison. I personally witnessed the process, yet it did not change her into what I would call prison flesh.”

  “So then María Paz is not like that mystic?” Rose asked.

  “Neither are the others really,
not completely, no need to force the comparison. Mandra X and her girls reclaim their pains, but also their joys. They want to feel alive through suffering and crying but also through singing, masturbating, writing, making love. In the end, Mandra X makes evident that in prison you can live a life that is on a fully human level of dignity if you fight for it stubbornly enough.”

  “María Paz says that they slashed their skins and cut into their veins.”

  “Fine, that too, if it’s done through their own free will.”

  “She writes that they smeared the walls with their own shit.”

  “They graffiti the walls with shit, or with blood. What else are they going to do it with? It’s not like they have spray paint on hand. I’m telling you, don’t judge the situation out of context. What might seem disgusting to you and me is something they experience quite differently. Look at serious artists like Sade and Pasolini; they talk about a circle of shit and a circle of blood.

  “Circles of shit and blood, that’s what made sense to Las Nolis. They eschewed detergent and bleach, which washed away the human stains, turning them into ghosts. You have to begin by understanding that not even the clothes they wore or the sheets they slept on belonged to them. They were washed, disinfected, and handed over arbitrarily to whoever took them next. But Las Nolis were no Goody Two-shoes,” Pro Bono said. “They knew what they wanted and they got it. They could always cover some wall with their shit, smash their plates of food on the floor, or conduct a chilling chorus of screams at lights out. Or turn the prison into an inferno by setting mattresses on fire and destroying any motherfucker who got in their way.

  “Read Jean Genet,” Pro Bono said. “He was a brilliant criminal and wrote about it like no else. He said lice were a ‘sign of our prosperity . . . they were precious. They were both our shame and our glory.’”

  “I think I’m getting it,” Rose said. “So the lice. I’m going to read this Renet.”

  “Genet,” Pro Bono corrected him, and then went on talking as if to himself, like an old man who retreats to the habit of just chattering away no matter who is listening; soon he was off on dozens of tangents, wandering all on his own, citing Sade, Sacher-Masoch, and Roudinesco, recounting anecdotes about Erzsebet Bathory the Bloody Countess, Gilles de Rais and Comte de Lautréamont, Saint Liduvina, Christian martyrs, the murderous cults of the Nizaries, black widows, the geniuses of the dark, the biographies of the auto-flagellants, and the princes of perversity.

  From Cleve’s Notebook

  Researching the history of American prisons, I came upon this little book reprinted in 1954 by Yale University and I read it in one sitting. It’s a biography of Edward Branly, a strange character and the architect who designed Manninpox and overlooked its construction between 1842 and 1847. It was one of the first big jails in the country, along with Sing, Auburn Prison, Cherry Hill Penitentiary in Philadelphia, and New Jersey State Prison, all of which were as impressive and bombastic on the outside as they were reviling on the inside. I read all 156 pages without even getting up for a cup of coffee. I needed to know what kind of cold-blooded person had so meticulously planned the most efficient manner to torture the two thousand women who would one day be imprisoned in Manninpox. I wanted to know more about the man who, with such professional zeal and artistic relish, had come up with every miserable detail of the place: the elongated slots that act as windows and were made to let in just a thread of light; the lack of ventilation, which forces the prisoners to live under the permanent sensation that they are suffocating; the horrible drainage and sewage system that makes the perennial stench of piss and shit accumulate in the air year after year; cells designed for two prisoners that are no bigger than closets; the genius of barred doors, which ensured any movement could be observed from outside and that the prisoners knew they were under constant scrutiny; solitary confinement cells when the behavior of the prisoners left something to be desired, and punishment quarters if they didn’t behave in the isolation cells; the sound of bars slamming shut, expressly designed to reverberate through the hallways as if telling everyone just how fucked they were and that they should forget the outside world because their imprisonment was eternal; or the bathrooms without doors or curtains so that everyone showering or doing their necessities would be completely exposed, to prevent, in the very words of Branly, “sexual assaults, acts of violence, or any other type of immoral behavior.” But the most peculiar aspect of the architect’s mindset, the most surprising one, has to do with the contrast between the outright perversity and gloom of the interior of the structure and the grandiosity of its exterior. Or in his own words, “the manifestation of a sublime aesthetic.” Using the word sublime to refer to a place of abandonment and suffering? What kind of a moron would think of a prison as sublime?

  Although perhaps Edward Branly wasn’t such a moron. For designing Manninpox and overseeing its construction and with other connected commissions, he earned what today would be between twelve and thirteen million dollars; but if he wasn’t a moron, he must have been a sadist. You can imagine him growing up with an abusive father and a decent mother whom the drunk father beat until he knocked her senseless, or something equally horrifying. Or maybe the father forced the mother into prostitution to pay for his drink. Whatever the case, an abused child who as an adolescent enjoyed locking up the cat in a chest and who as an adult would become a torturer of women, but a timid one, incapable of doing so directly, so instead becomes the mind behind a thousand different ways to torture these women by locking them up, degrading them, reducing them to rags. It seems to me that only such a type of degenerate could conceive such a moral monstrosity as Manninpox. However, the little gray book proved me wrong. Edward Branly had been just the opposite, nothing short of a great man, respected and admired in his time and an exemplary citizen. One of those of whom it was said had impeccable manners, Branly was a champion of progress and reform in keeping with the just and liberal model. His prison was seen in his time as an outstanding accomplishment and a critical contribution to “upholding the dignity, worth, and empowerment of a society,” to quote the hagiographer of the book. That is, in that time, Manninpox was not seen as some monstrosity. On the contrary, although it was a penal institution, it was imagined it would play a reformist, even redemptive, role, a pillar in a society that metes out just punishment to those who deserve it. And in that sense, Manninpox was not unique, just one in a series of many monumental castles of horror, unforgettable and omnipresent in the conscience of the inhabitants of a country who should know what awaits them if they should veer down the wrong road. “This is progress, this is civilization. We have arrived!” so proclaimed the official who opened Manninpox, with Branly himself standing there, who took a bottle of champagne and smashed it against the foundation stone.

  From the time I first went into Manninpox, and as I return to it weekly, I cannot stop thinking of that world of confinement that coexists in the shadow of ours, in which doors are open and the air is plenty, where the rest of us exist without truly knowing what it’s worth. Ever since meeting María Paz, I can’t help but wonder what twists of fate would have led a person like her to reside on that side of the bars, while a person like me resided on this side. It all seems so painfully arbitrary. For a moment, just for a moment, I can imagine that the separation and the walls vanish. The other day, she came to me with two pieces of paper torn from a legal pad in which she had completed an exercise I had assigned. When she handed them to me, our hands grazed, and an electrical charge coursed through my body. It seemed that the contact had been prolonged longer than strictly necessary, that the moment was paused in time and we were one, touching, feeling, and communicating with each other. Becoming aroused as well, I must admit, or at least I was. But the significant thing was that during the time that graze lasted, she and I were on the same side of the bars. Or maybe just together in a world in which bars did not exist. Just for a moment. I don’t know if she felt the same thing. Perha
ps she didn’t even notice. But no, she did notice, of course she noticed. The little wily one must have caught my astonishment and made me into the laughingstock of the group when she talked about it.

  “Oh, Mr. Rose, your lightning rod is blushing,” she said about the scar on my forehead but emphasizing the double entendre, in that flirty little voice that all the prisoners use, half giggling like schoolgirls if you say nail because they interpret it as fuck, or if you say blow because it means to suck dick, on and on in this way, till it becomes exhausting.

  “Yes, it blushes,” I said, trying to make a quick exit, “and careful, because it burns, just like Harry Potter’s.”

  Interview with Ian Rose

  “You seem to have read everything. Have you heard of this?” Rose asked Pro Bono, taking out of the glove compartment a little book with a gray cover and handing it to him. “I found it among my son’s books. It’s a biography of Edward Branly, the man who—”