It was a few months after that day that Mandra X and Las Nolis heard anything about María Paz again. Until now; now they had news again, and it wasn’t good. That’s why they had summoned Pro Bono, and Pro Bono had recruited Ian Rose, or who he had thought was Cleve Rose but then had to settle for Ian. And there they were, with Mandra X telling them through Dummy that there was bad news. Dummy stressed once again that they never told the inmates what illness they were suffering from. They didn’t show them lab reports, if they even performed any tests, or inform them of their diagnoses, and forget about X-ray results or anything like that. So now, they got to the point of the story. A few days ago, they had left an inmate who was paralyzed from the waist down alone and unhandcuffed in the infirmary for a few minutes, long enough that she was able to look at her medical folder, which they had left within her reach. She grabbed the folder and put it under her ass in the wheelchair and snuck it out of the infirmary. In the folder, there were a few medical reports that belonged to other inmates, and the prisoner in the wheelchair sold one of them to Mandra X for twenty dollars because she knew it would be of interest to her. It was María Paz’s medical history, and Dummy now produced it from her breasts and handed it under the table to Pro Bono, who looked at it and passed it on to Rose.
“Wait. How did Dummy hide such a thing in her breasts if security was so tight?” I ask Rose.
“They say that the surface of Neptune is full of diamonds,” he responds. “Have you ever heard that?”
“As far as I know, the only thing on the surface of Neptune is the wind,” I respond.
“Well, now you know there are mountains of diamonds.”
“And?”
“Try and get one of those diamonds. See if you can. It’s the same with Dummy’s breasts, which are like a pair of mountains where you can’t find anything. She can hide whatever she wants between those mountains and no one will ever find it.”
According to the report, the medical procedure performed on the inmate, María Paz, that is, had not been completely successful, María Paz, that is, had not been completely successful, and consequently there had been an infection in the reproductive tract. An endometriosis caused by the unclean conditions under which the scraping was performed. The endometriosis had been so severe that María Paz had gone into septic shock. The decrease in blood flow along with lowered blood pressure had led to disrupted circulation, as a result of which the vital organs began to falter, and it was unlikely that the patient would ever be able to get pregnant again.
“But that’s not the worst part. With the report were the results of an X-ray. A dated X-ray. According to the date, it was taken the last time María Paz was at the hospital, a few days before she left. Look,” Dummy said, gesturing to use the pencil Pro Bono had in his hand and drawing something on the surface of the table. “What do you see?”
Rose tried to make out the drawing but couldn’t. Just a doodle, some kind of inverted vessel, with extensions on each side, which reminded him more than anything of the boa constrictor that swallowed a hat as drawn by Saint-Exupéry in The Little Prince, Cleve’s favorite book as a child.
“What do you see there?” Dummy insisted.
“A butterfly?” Rose took a timid guess.
“No, not a butterfly. You, Mr. Attorney, what do you see?”
“A flower?” Pro Bono ventured.
“It’s a uterus, gentlemen,” Dummy said. “Here are the ovaries and here are the Fallopian tubes.”
“These two wouldn’t know the difference between the Fallopian tubes and the Eustachian tubes,” Mandra X said, laughing and startling Pro Bono and Rose, who jumped back in their chairs at the unexpected interruption that had ruptured the silence of the Sibyl, both of them shocked by the surprise because it hadn’t been much of a joke. According to Rose, it was the only thing Mandra X said throughout their entire visit, her only contribution, which had seemed so funny to her. It was when her mouth opened to laugh that Rose saw the bifurcated tongue fluttering in the depths of its cave.
“Can’t you tell?” Dummy continued. “It’s a uterus.”
“A uterus, of course,” Rose said, embarrassed at his obtuseness.
“If that’s a uterus, my grandmother is a bicycle,” Pro Bono said.
“If your grandmother is a bicycle then so is your mother, but what I’ve drawn here is a fucking uterus. The uterus of María Paz. Now look,” Dummy said, drawing a little mark in the center of the alleged uterus. “Look right here. What do you see now?”
“A fetus,” Pro Bono said.
“Not a fucking fetus.”
“A tumor?” asked Rose.
“Shit no, not a tumor. It’s a clamp. Believe it or not. In the X-ray you can see it perfectly. There, the fucking clamp is clear as the light of day. But we had to destroy the X-ray. The bosses don’t like anybody messing with crap from the infirmary. But right there in her uterus. A perfect silhouette, no room for error, a surgical clamp. One of the small types, a little nothing, like this in the shape of a U, a fucking metallic U, small but treasonous, murderous, hidden up her woohoo, sure to fuck her up. That’s why we got in touch with you, Mr. Attorney, so you can let her know. She can’t go on living with that thing inside because that’s what’s making her bleed.”
“How in the hell did it get in there?” Pro Bono asked.
“How in the hell indeed,” Dummy responded. “That is the question. How do you think? You, sir, you tell me,” she said to Rose, “how did that clamp end up in there? We didn’t get it at first either. It took us a while before we put things together, before Mandra X put the whole sequence together.”
According to the course of events as Dummy saw them, María Paz had a miscarriage when she first arrived, and the savages performed a curettage in the most negligent fashion. Hence, all those months of hemorrhaging, which kept getting worse until she went into a coma. Then they took her to the hospital again and sent her back a week later, not really having done much, apart from bombarding her with antibiotics to control the infection for the moment. Because although they didn’t tell her, they took an X-ray in which they found the clamp that they had left in there because of their own incompetence and carelessness. What would have been the right thing to do? Naturally, go into surgery and remove the thing that was going to kill her, the source of the sickness inside her because of their own stupidity. That would have been the logical and proper thing to do. But nothing is logical or proper in Manninpox, or if there is, it’s only so through some perverted means. María Paz was in such terrible shape that they must have figured she could die if she had surgery. How else can one justify what they did?
When they arrested her, they had beat her up so bad, she miscarried. Then they had botched the curettage and left a clamp inside, and then they figured she was going to die on the operating table. They didn’t want to risk such controversy. So what do they do? They fix it so she can go. She was given her freedom. That was their solution to the jam they were in. If she’s going to die, let it be outside where the guilt won’t fall on them.
“That’s why María Paz was set free,” Dummy said. “That’s why these sons of bitches let her go.”
“And here I was thinking it was a miracle from Ismaela’s cross,” Pro Bono said. But no one laughed.
“The miracle was performed by the cross, sir,” Dummy corrected.
“Clearly,” Pro Bono responded. “There’s no other explanation.”
“You have to find her,” Dummy said. “She has to know and get it taken care of right away.”
“That might be difficult.” Pro Bono sighed.
“You have to, sir. There’s not much we can do from in here. Her life is basically in your hands.”
With María Paz’s life in his hands, as Dummy had asserted, that’s the state in which Pro Bone and Rose left Manninpox on that day.
“It’s practically impossible,” P
ro Bono said.
But impossible or not, they had no other choice but to get working on it right away, or at least think of how to begin, start discussing possible contacts, places to look. They had to get in touch somehow. But neither of them could think of anything better than contacting Socorro in Staten Island.
“We have no other option, even if the old woman is a pathological liar,” Rose said. “Maybe María Paz went to see her.” His hand still hurt from the crushing handshake with Dummy, and he brought it to his nose, that old habit of his that Edith had hated, smelling his hand after shaking it with someone. There had been no handshake with Mandra X, not even a cordial good-bye from her. Just as she hadn’t spoken but once, she made sure there was no physical contact at any time. When she realized the meeting was over, she got up and walked out of the room in the same fashion she had come in, unapproachable and stinking, like the Queen of Saba.
Rose was suddenly overcome with exhaustion and asked Pro Bono if they could stop by his house for a while to rest and eat something before returning to New York, and so he could check in on his dogs. Pro Bono preferred to have a coffee at Mis Errores.
“We don’t have time,” he said.
“What if we put an ad in the paper?” Rose suggested.
“An ad?” Pro Bono said somewhat mockingly. “Like what, ‘Girl, you have a clamp inside,’ in the New York Times classifieds.”
That’s the point when Rose decided he had had enough. If Pro Bono wanted his help, he was going to have to come clean about some things. What the devil had happened with María Paz? Why didn’t Pro Bono know where she was? Rose said he was not going to lift a finger until he was caught up. There was something strange going on here, something very weird and confusing, and he was not just going to play along anymore. He was going to be told everything or he was out.
“Of course, I’ll explain, of course,” Pro Bono assured him, tapping him on the shoulder. “You are absolutely correct. If you’re going to be involved in this, you have a right to know everything about it. I am going to make things clear to you. Well, at least to the extent that they are clear to me, which may not be saying much. Please, calm down, I’ll lay things out, but it has to be little by little. Let’s do it section by section, like a butcher. Don’t expect me to summarize in three sentences what is a deviously complicated situation. Clarification number one: if we are going to go looking for María Paz, it has to be done in an absolutely discreet fashion. If not, we may cause more problems than we prevent. Nothing public, no fanfare. We have to figure out a way so that she is the only one who receives the message.”
“That sounds more like a warning than a clarification,” Rose protested.
“Let’s try again. But let’s get our heads in place. Let’s remember what we’re dealing with. Let’s see, it’s only eleven. We still have time tonight. Do me a favor, Rose; can you take me somewhere? It’s near here,” Pro Bono asked, paying for the coffees.
“Right there, to the left,” Pro Bono said as they neared the place. “That hotel right there. Let’s see. I think that’s it. Yes, this has to be it. The Blue Oasis. I should have remembered a name like that. Blue Oasis, okay, that’s it.”
“Do you need to use the bathroom? Grab a bite? I don’t understand what’s going on.”
“I’m letting you in on everything. Isn’t that what you wanted? María Paz and I stopped at that hotel when she was released. I was the one who was waiting for her at the gate. By myself. No one else.”
It had been raining on the afternoon María Paz was released, and Pro Bono had been waiting in his car for a while. They had told him she would be released at five, and he had completed all the paperwork, but it was already dark with no sign of her. The guards at the gate wore black raincoats and ponchos and moved like ghosts between the beams of light that cast white figures on the wet pavement. Ensconced in his Lamborghini with a portable reading light, Pro Bono tried without success to read the latest novel by Paul Auster. He had never before been at Manninpox after three or four in the afternoon and was unaware of the otherworldly dimension the prison acquired after dark. The hooded figures became friars and the bulk of stone a macabre monastery. It was almost eight when he noticed a side door open, and then he saw her exit in that darkness whitened by the spotlights.
“It was an indelible moment,” he told Rose. “I saw her approach among the thousand drops of rain made visible by the watch lights as if silver confetti were falling on her.”
Inside the car, Pro Bono asked her if she wanted to go eat somewhere to celebrate her freedom. She didn’t hear him or look at him, as if all her senses were sealed off, except for touch, because she passed her fingers over the surface of things as if remembering the texture of the tender, lovely, warm world that she had erased from her memory. Pro Bono repeated the invitation and she nodded. But not like this. She didn’t want to get to New York all wet and smelling like prison. So he proposed stopping at a hotel on the way so she could bathe and fix herself up. It shouldn’t take long, and they could have a late dinner in the city. What she really wanted was to get under a long hot shower and wash away the nightmare, baptize herself anew, and rid herself of all the prison grime, so that there wasn’t one particle of Manninpox left on her, not even under her nails. And as if she had suddenly found her voice again, she soon started blabbing, giggling at herself for talking so much, “jabbering on like one just set free,” she said, remembering a saying from her country. She confessed to the lawyer that she could lock herself up in a bathroom for hours, that she had spent months showering in groups, and that she wanted nothing more than to lock herself up in a clean bathroom and stand under the hot water without feeling the eyes of the guards checking her out, and forget forever about that little drip of water that came out of those showers that she only had access to twice a week, with her back pressed to the cold wall. What joy, never again having to shower like some spider pressed to the cold wall. She wanted a hot shower, great clouds of steam, and then to dry herself with plush towels and be allowed to toss them on the floor when she was done—thick, dry, soft white towels with no holes, not damp, for she was not sure if such a thing as dry towels existed anymore. She also loved those little shampoos and conditioners in hotel rooms.
“So I stopped at one, the first one along the way.”
“The Blue Oasis . . .” Rose said. “It was important for you to remember the name, no?”
“Precisely. Illicit things happen in hotel rooms, my friend. Nabokov had Humbert take Lolita to one that is called Enchanted Hunters. Room number? 342. Memorable. And where does Tennessee Williams’s Night of the Iguana take place? In the Costa Verde hotel.”
“What’s the hotel in that song by the Eagles?” Rose asked. “‘Hotel California’—‘this could be heaven or this could be hell.’ And in Leaving Las Vegas, Nicholas Cage locks himself up in a hotel room to drink himself to death. The Desert Song Motel. And this one is a softball for you, Mr. Attorney, in the bathroom of a certain hotel, a secretary is stabbed to death in Alfred Hitchcock’s—”
“The Bates Motel!”
“Exactly, the Bates Motel. Memory is funny that way; it remembers the Bates Motel but forgets the Blue Oasis . . .”
“I’m a married man, my friend.”
“I understand.”
“Although nothing worth concealing happened that night.”
“Except that you were in a motel room with a girl, a girl who was your client on top of everything.”
“I was with her and I wasn’t. I was with her, but not the way you’re thinking. I watched TV while she locked herself up in the bathroom. That’s it.”
“Where did you watch the TV from?”
“From the bed. It was a motel room.”
“Did she watch from the bed too?”
“Yeah, maybe, I don’t remember, maybe.”
“So you were both lying down on the bed at the same time?�
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“Have you taken a good look at me? I could never really be lying down lying down. But maybe we were in the bed, maybe even under the blankets, and maybe I even held her.”
But still, Pro Bono kept his clothes on. He never takes them off in front of anyone, not even Gunnora, with whom he has been for forty-seven years. Truth be told, he never even sees himself naked anymore. As an old man, he avoids mirrors to avoid the disgust.
“So you want me to believe that you got into bed with your suit on, and your watch, and your fancy shoes.”
María Paz needed to talk, needed to be loved, needed to be listened to, to be told everything would be alright. She was delighted with the quality of the mattress. She opened and closed the curtains with the remote control, went barefoot on the plush carpet, stretched out on the king-size bed, kissed the clean sheets, hugged tight the fresh-smelling pillows. She told Pro Bono that in Manninpox she had to sleep with her arms as a pillow because, for months, they had failed to give her a pillow, and when she finally got one, it was so disgustingly greasy she preferred not to use it. Pro Bono wanted to take her for a good meal in the city, to celebrate those first hours of freedom with a fine bottle of champagne. But she said she was happy there, didn’t want to leave. Why should they go anywhere else with the rain outside, and it was so nice in there. “Please, sir, let’s just stay here.”
“I would wager that at just that moment you let her place her head on your shoulder,” Rose said.
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