Rose says he noticed something that was consistent throughout María Paz’s manuscript: she lingers in the present or dwells in the past, but leaves the reader hanging on the issues that are most pressing, that call most for resolution. But, of course, it could be that María Paz did talk about her pregnancy and that those passages are among the missing pages.
“Did you know, sir, that María Paz was sent to a hospital near Manninpox because the hemorrhaging wouldn’t stop?” Dummy continued to ask questions. “They scraped her insides. A curettage they called it, sir. No, you didn’t know. She didn’t tell you. She wasn’t capable of painting the whole picture. The way she sees her own life, it is full of holes, like a piece of fucking Swiss cheese. People think of things. People come up with ideas. Initiatives, as they say. The son of this man here, Professor Rose. He thought it would be a good idea for María Paz to write things down. So she would be more aware, as they say. Brilliant, your son, sir. A good person, but naive.”
“My son was an excellent teacher and he did what he could here,” Rose jumped in, leaving inhibitions aside when faced with the insulting of his boy.
María Paz’s problems hadn’t ended with that. According to Dummy, or according to Mandra X as related by Dummy, the medical care offered to the inmates at Manninpox, especially gynecological care, was shameful. The sick inmates were transferred to a special ward of a nearby public hospital, where, according to certain security regulations, they were kept in a separate wing and cuffed to their beds. They were forced to wait hours, sometimes days, then they were summarily attended, given a haphazard diagnosis, and treated accordingly. Nobody explained anything to them. What was wrong? What medication had they been given? The inmates remained ignorant of all details; they were simply acted upon as if objects. María Paz had not been an exception to this. They scraped her and she apparently recovered. The bleeding stopped, so they sent her back to her cell. But a couple of weeks later, the hemorrhaging started again, although not as bad as before. Every day little maroon spots appeared in her panties as a reminder that her insides were still damaged. Mandra X forced her to focus on the trial that she was waiting for, to prepare herself, to review the arguments in her defense, to make sure the chronology of events was clear in her head so that she wouldn’t contradict herself, wouldn’t lose hope. But María Paz wouldn’t come down from the clouds. She pretended to be out of it and got lost in dreams that had nothing to do with the facts, fantasies about that house with the garden she said she was going to buy.
Rose tells me he didn’t fully buy the picture of María Paz they painted of her in prison. He thought those women didn’t really understand her character. From what he had read, he knew the type of person she was. But, of course, when he was in Manninpox he didn’t say any of this. You don’t tease a pair of dragons when they’re sitting right in front of you. María Paz wasn’t one to be interpreted through ideologies, Rose thought, she need not be judged because she wasn’t aggressive, or proud, or forward like the rest of Mandra X’s militants. María Paz wasn’t of that brand; her style was more discreet, according to Rose, which didn’t mean it was any less effective. “Necessity has the face of a dog,” as she wrote in her manuscript, and Rose was beginning to understand that her personal code of conduct must have been guided by just such a maxim. He knew dogs well, their peculiar manner of slowly filling in the gaps with countless acts of humility and patience, and yet at the same time, with such guile and conviction that it made them by far the smartest of animals. That’s how María Paz went through life. She didn’t disgust anyone, and she didn’t bark or bite. No fuss or declarations, more or less going forward diagonally. Like a dog swimming. Rose had seen his dogs swimming. It wasn’t a crawl or a butterfly or a backstroke, but a freestyle paddling that was just enough to keep their heads above the water, yet so effective and persevering it would have allowed them to cross the English Channel if they had wanted.
Rose guessed María Paz’s character was the antithesis of a challenging and belligerent individual like Mandra X. He saw María Paz as pragmatic, measured, used to not asking for more than her share, to not exposing herself more than necessary, to moving efficiently below the surface, taking care of one thing at a time, without wasting her energies on causes or pointless issues. Mandra X was an agitator, a leader, a rebel with a cause. Not so María Paz. A survivor, as she herself had said about Bolivia, her mother, which suited her as well, Rose thought; she had become an expert at keeping her head above water without much ado, just like the dogs.
One day, the guards came to get María Paz in her cell to take her to court. The decisive moment of her trial had arrived. Mandra X had visited a few moments earlier and had seen her praying and pleading with all the saints to grant her freedom so she could find her sister, Violeta.
“To hell with the saints,” Mandra X told her, “and forget about Violeta for now. Worry about your own skin. Go fuck the asses of those sons of bitches who are keeping you locked up. The saints have nothing to do with this. You have to count on yourself.” And as María Paz walked down the hall heading for the bus that would take her to court, chained up like Houdini, Mandra X was able to yell one last thing: “You’re gonna get out of here because you’re innocent, Do you hear me? You’re innocent and you’re going to be free.” But that’s not how it turned out. María Paz had returned to her cell with a fifteen-year sentence.
A few weeks later, the shock of the tragedy lifted a bit when Pro Bono requested a mistrial from the supreme court because María had not been provided with a proper defense. In Pro Bono’s words, “the trial was shit, a sick joke, a series of fuckups.” And what happened? Pro Bono was successful with his petition, and the court ordered a retrial. A do-over. Back to the drawing board. Pro Bono petitioned that the defendant be freed in the meanwhile, but he was denied. She was considered a flight risk and remained in Manninpox.
It was during that time that María began to change. The other inmates noticed how some other person seemed to be emerging from the inside. They noted how she matured, getting stronger and distancing herself from the lost and defeated María Paz who had been at the first trial under those pitiable conditions and without any real defense. Pro Bono’s support and the solidarity with Mandra X, in combination with the hope of a new trial, animated and energized her in a way that she even developed a sense of humor. She went to bed at night with the hope that she would be found innocent and with the feeling that her freedom was just around the corner. She began to read everything she could and was excited about Cleve’s writing workshop. It was only sometime later that she got hit low again with what the Latina interns call the reckoning, especially after her sister, Violeta, refused to talk to her on the phone. Otherwise, María Paz remained active and in a good mood, consulting the dictionary to learn conjugations and grammatical rules, committed to improving her written English to leave behind some record of what she had lived through. But not everything was going as planned. The supreme court, which needed to set a date for the new trial, postponed it time and again. Why? Rose didn’t quite understand. Pro Bono explained it to him, but he was incapable of capturing the minutiae of it. Legal intricacies, asshole moves by the prosecutor, insufficient evidence, the give-and-take of Pro Bono’s negotiations with the prosecution. Months passed and the new trial started to become a mirage. And although María Paz’s mind apparently withstood the uncertainty and the accompanying stress, the same was not true of her body, and it began to falter again. María Paz internalized the issue and the hemorrhaging returned worse than ever, draining her of vital energy.
Mandra X and Las Nolis tried whatever they could to prevent this final breakdown, home remedies that were crude and insufficient to address chronic anemia, things like contraband fresh foods and supplements, eight to ten glasses of water daily, no coffee.
“A lot of the inmates thought this was bull,” Dummy told them. “They preferred other methods. I mean like spells, superstitions, and all th
at crap.”
Some leaned toward white magic, some toward the other kind. There was everything in there. Candomblé, voodoo, spells, palo mayombe, masses, and even exorcisms—a whole panoply of approaches, according to Dummy. Mandra X put up a fight against it because she despised the irrational, no prayers for her, or incense, or candles lit to virgins, she was at war against all that. But it was still everywhere. The prisoners had learned to appreciate María Paz. There was something about the girl that won people over, a natural seductive quality, and rumors spread that Mandra X was letting her die. According to Dummy herself, even Mandra X realized that this was true to an extent, for all she could do was apply hot compresses to deal with the sickness. Things were definitely not going well.
Among the Latinas, there was an old woman named Ismaela Ayé who considered herself the queen mother of sorcery in the place. She was the only one who had been at Manninpox longer than Mandra X, so the two were rivals for that title, and for every other title as well, sworn enemies from day one. Ismaela Ayé had been retired for years. According to her, her decline had started when the guard confiscated a pot of holy soil; it was dirt from Golgotha, she claimed, which had been her source of power.
“Bullshit,” Dummy said, “Ismaela Ayé had slowly been cornered by Mandra X, that’s what had happened, her and her trashy, third-world hucksterism, all that caveman Catholicism and crappy devotions—what jar? what dirt from Golgotha?—as if we all just fell off the truck. Mandra X had pushed Ismaela aside, convincing the others to become a little more aware, to act rationally, not to be fucked by authority or by their own ignorance.”
With María Paz’s health crisis, Ismaela experienced a renaissance in power, gaining power by spreading rumors about Mandra X, using her evil tongue to spread curses from her cell, like a murderer of her own children who does not understand the sacred value of blood. Ismaela Ayé started reciting passages from the books of Exodus and Hebrews to cast guilt on Mandra X, and took advantage of the situation to promote the glory of living blood, the blood of Cavalry that falls on the celestial chalice, and other such hyperboles that in the end caught the attention of the other prisoners and reverberated throughout Manninpox.
At the same time, Mandra X knew that she was in trouble, that María Paz’s health crisis made her limitations all too evident. The other inmates were judging her, doubting her methods, waiting for a breakup. Perhaps Mandra X could assume her previous position again only if she got rid of Ismaela Ayé. It wouldn’t have been hard; all it would have taken was one good whack. The old woman was nothing but a dry-skinned bag of bones. But such a thing would come back to bite Mandra X in the ass, so she opted for more conciliatory measures and tried to make peace with Ismaela: “Please understand, this María Paz is no Jesus Christ incarnate; she’s just a sick girl.” But the old woman didn’t let up; she knew she had Mandra X in hot water. Nothing else to do, Mandra X’s theories and the practices of Las Nolis regarding pain as redemption and wounds as badges sounded horrible in light of the reality that María Paz was dying. Mandra X was between Scylla and Charybdis, between the negligence of those who ran the prison and the fanaticism unleashed among the inmates. She had to soften to the point of prescribing herb teas, yoga exercises, and cold sitz baths, and this began to undermine her image and influence. On the other hand, the popularity of old woman Ayé continued to skyrocket, and the Latina inmates opened their ears to her sermons, which asserted that we all are Christ figures and that all blood is sacred, that Moses sprinkled the book with such blood, that Yemaya’s blood comes from these shadows, that the lamb so sealed the covenant, that such sacrifices to this or to that were beneficial. “A vulgar jambalaya,” Dummy told Pro Bono and Rose. Ismaela’s brain was sotted and she couldn’t remember anything in detail, so she just jumbled everything up, and what she couldn’t remember she made up. What she couldn’t make up, she dreamt up. And yet, overnight she was able to win over many inmates with her stories, dragging the women into a drunkenness of superstition and supernatural thinking.
“It set everything back decades around here,” Dummy said, “a return to the fucking Middle Ages, that’s what happened here. María Paz, half-conscious amid it, and Mandra X powerless, looking on as the girl was dying in her arms and not able to do a thing about it, because all her recourses had been exhausted, and each day María Paz was getting worse, physically and spiritually. Mandra X saw her as resigned, babbling without end about her sister, Violeta, with a drooly smile, as if she herself was the first to understand that it didn’t really matter, because at that stage not even the damned divinity could save her. At last the pressure forced Mandra X to give in, and she allowed Ismaela Ayé to take charge of the patient and work her sorcery.
“She let the old woman do her thing, you know,” Dummy said. “There was no other choice.” The first thing Ismaela ordered was for María Paz to be lowered from her cot to the floor, face up, her body stiff and extended, the arms perpendicular to the torso. A crucifixion is what the old woman pulled out of her sleeve, because according to her the cross is a passageway, a door, a crossing of paths, and before the power of the cross, bad luck takes a hike, goes the other way, and stops assaulting the victim. And did it work?
“Oh yeah, it worked, worked like a fucking charm,” Dummy said. “Half an hour after lying there, crucified on the floor, María Paz has a seizure and she passes out. She goes comatose, practically dead. Responding to nothing. And the old woman? Is she feeling bad about it? Admitting her ignorance? Her guilt?”
Not at all. Ismaela Ayé remained very calm, proud, proclaiming up and down that her method had begun to take effect, that the bad luck had been cut at the legs, and that from that moment María Paz would begin to improve.
Mandra X confronted her: “You just killed her, you rotted old woman!” But it had no effect on Ismaela, who insisted that this was how it had to be, first the patient had to hit bottom before arising and coming of the depths. She had to go down into the darkness before embracing the light of the Almighty. This is what she was blabbering, with María Paz good as dead.
As things happened, the management of the prison finally did something. They had no choice but to transfer her to the hospital again, this time in a coma. Five days later, María Paz came back to the prison on her own two feet. She had come out of the coma, and although she looked weary, she was alive, even cheerful, and she told the others they had pumped her with antibiotics and anti-inflammatories enough for a horse. And forty-eight hours after returning from the hospital, she was informed that the supreme court had granted her temporary freedom until the new trial. She could go home.
This privilege was something rarely granted except under very extraordinary circumstances, such as with a reputable prisoner with deep roots in the community or an individual with an impeccable record, above all one who is prepared to put up a considerable bond. María Paz did not meet any of these conditions. Her profile, in fact, was quite the opposite. Yet, she was free to go. To go. Go home. She could walk out of Manninpox, just like that? Just like that. She was offered conditional freedom and would be under close watch until her new trial. But she could go wherever she damned well felt like it. María Paz couldn’t believe what she was hearing. How was it possible that all of a sudden they came with such news? “Get your things together,” they ordered. It was seven at night, everyone in their cell already, when the guards came to hurry her out. She couldn’t do as she was told. She sat on her cot, her bare feet on the stone floor, and she couldn’t move, her eyes fixed on nothing, wrapping herself up in her blanket as if it were a shield.
“Get the fuck outta here,” Mandra X screamed from the cell across the way. “Are you deaf? You can go.”
“But how?” María Paz didn’t quite get it. She felt nothing. Or she did feel one thing: panic. She didn’t dare move, as if it were some kind of ruse so they could say she was fleeing when they shot her in the back.
“Don’t ask questions,”
Mandra X told her. “Just go. Get out.”
María Paz dressed herself, put some things in the box they had given her, although she didn’t quite get everything in. She left behind the pictures she’d put up on the wall, and they didn’t really give her a chance to get things she had lent others, or say good-bye to anyone, hugs or such. They led her out through the hallway. She was stunned and kept on her feet by the ton of medications they had given her. She looked back as if to ask something, plead to someone, as if instead of leading her to freedom, they were taking her to some horrible punishment. On seeing her, her fellow prisoners came up to the bars of their respective cells and began to applaud as she passed. At first timidly, just a few of them. Soon, all of them—a standing ovation. “You made it!” they shouted. “You did it! You fucked them! You made it, kid!”
With respect to how María Paz must have lived that unexpected and decisive moment in her life, the sudden instant when they opened the door and said, off you go, Rose says he thinks only one word is apt: awakening. In her manuscript, she repeatedly said that the chapter of her imprisonment wasn’t real, more like a hallucination, an improbable period that would end with a return to normal life. Rose tells me that as far as he can figure that’s why when she was in prison she never called any of her friends, such as her coworkers in the cleaning company, whom she considered her most trusted friends. She didn’t even tell them of her situation, so as not to call attention to the episode that to her was so illusory and unreal. Day after day, hour after hour in Manninpox, María Paz waited for the nightmare to end. If they had so suddenly and without rhyme or reason ripped her away from her home and taken her prisoner, then just as suddenly and without rhyme or reason they told her she was free to go home. Even if the freedom they were offering her was a fragile one, because the new trial was still to come, she must have felt that moment was the end of her nightmare, the longed-for moment of awakening. Rose reminds me that’s how things happened in dreams, arbitrarily, out of nowhere, illogically, without cause or consequence. Just like that.
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