The Hole

by José Revueltas

  A Christological reading of the novel’s Expressionist ending — “lines and more lines, bars and more bars . . . the monstrous blueprint of this gargantuan defeat of liberty, all the fault of geometry” — is inevitable: Revueltas himself uses crucified to describe how the prisoners are ultimately subjugated. An April 5, 1969, journal entry from the author (twenty days after he finished writing the book) suggests, however, a different reading of these mysterious final pages: “An invisible web of fiction surrounds us and we struggle as prisoners inside it like those who struggle to free themselves from a spider’s web from which there is no escape.” This fiction that secures us as in a spider web is the whole political system — and its masters, us, the owners of speech, should be held responsible for the inequality it produces even when our acts are generally well intended and harmless. There is no way out, but there is a thread to follow: imagining a justice system that could do without the spectacle of punishment.

  The publication of The Hole in the United States at this precise moment in time could not be more pertinent: it’s a perfect fable about our complicity — all writers and readers — in the triumph of mass incarceration as the only solution to problems that could be resolved in more rational ways.

  Everybody knows that jail doesn’t help reintegrate those who have renounced the pursuit of society’s norms; it only serves as a spectacle that feeds our leisure hours with the newspaper and television — the panopticon that we contemplate as evidence of our moral superiority. In a country and an era of unparalleled imprisonment we are all, along with the novel’s narrator, an amused audience, a bunch of cold witnesses. We are accomplices and we are all directly compromised.

  —Álvaro Enrigue

  translated by Amanda Hopkinson

  THE HOLE

  They were captive there, the apes, just like the rest, male and female; or rather, male and male, the pair of them in their cage, not quite despairing, not yet totally desperate, pacing from one side to the other, detained but in motion, trapped on the zoological scale as if someone, the others, all humanity, had irreverently washed their hands of the matter, this matter of them being apes, which they to wanted to forget, apes when all’s said and done, who didn’t or refused to get it, captive whichever way you looked at them, penned in that two-story-high barred cage, in their blue uniforms with shining badges on their heads, in their unregimented to- and fro-ing, easy and yet fixed, never managing to take the one step that would allow them to emerge from their interspecies, where they moved, walked, copulated, cruel and lacking all recollection, he-apes and she-apes in Paradise, identical, same hair, same sex, but male and female, imprisoned, fucked. His head carefully and expertly cocked to press his left ear against the horizontal metal sheet that closed the narrow hatch, Polonio squinted down on them from above, his right eye looking along the sharp line of his nose, watching how they paced from one side to the other, the bunch of keys hanging from their blue cloth jackets, jangling against their thighs to the swing of each step. First one then the other, the two apes were sized up, monitored from the second floor by that head with just one eye to observe them, the head on Salome’s platter, poking out of the hatch, the talking fairground head, detached from the torso — like at the fair, the head that tells the future and recites rhymes, John the Baptist’s head, only in this case tilted sideways, resting on its ear — preventing the left eye from seeing anything below, just the surface of the metal sheet that sealed the hatch, while the apes, in the cage, crossed paths as they paced from one end to the other, and that talking head — delivering insults in a long, slow, plangent, cynical drawl, dragging out the vowels on a wave of something like a melody of jarring alternate accents — told them to go fuck their mothers each time either one of them moved into his good eye’s field of vision. “Those fucking ape sons of bitches.” They were captive. More captive than Polonio, more captive than Albino, more captive than the Prick. For a few seconds it was empty, that rectangular cage, the apes disappearing momentarily as they paced back and forth in opposite directions to the far walls of the cage — thirty meters or so, sixty there and back — and that virgin, formless space transformed into inalienable sovereign territory under Polonio’s stubborn right eye, which took in, millimeter by millimeter, each and every detail of that section of the wing. Apes, arch-apes, stupid, vile, and naïve, naïve as a ten-year-old whore. So stupid they didn’t seem to notice that they alone were the captives, they and their mothers and their children and their forefathers. They were born to keep watch and they knew as much, to spy, to constantly look around, making sure no one escaped their clutches in that city with its iron grid of streets, barred corridors, corners multiplying on all sides, and that stupid face they wore was nothing but the manifestation of a certain, hazy longing for other unattainable aptitudes, a certain stutter of the soul in their simian features, underlaid with grief for an irremediable loss of which they remained ignorant, eyes all over them, a mesh of eyes covering their bodies, a river of pupils rushing over their limbs, napes, necks, arms, chests, balls, all to put food on the table at home, or so they told themselves, where their ape families danced and screeched — the little boys and girls and the wife, hairy on the inside — during their twenty-four long hours with the master ape at home, after his twenty-four hour shift in the penitentiary, stretched out on the bed, foul and clammy, the grease-smeared banknotes from petty bribes laying on the bedside table, but never leaving the prison, vile and captive in an endless circulation, ape-notes, which the wife repeatedly smoothed and pressed in the palm of her hand, slowly, terribly, not knowing what she was doing. Life was one long not knowing anything at all: not knowing that there they were in their cage, husband and wife, husband and husband, wife and children, father and father, sons and fathers, terrified, universal apes. The Prick begged to watch them from the hatch, too. Polonio could think of nothing but how vile it was to have the Prick there, just as caged, just as holed. “You know you can’t, man . . . !” He spoke in the same long, rolling cadences he used to abuse the guards in their box, one voice and yet indifferent, used by all like a personal trademark, and which, whether blindly or merely in the dark, didn’t much help to tell them apart, except for the fact that it was the kind of voice that oozed smug complacency and a sense of superiority and hierarchy upheld by a certain class oblivious of what thugs they really were. Of course he couldn’t. Not because of the skill it required to place your head through the hatch and position it there, at an angle, ears catching as it slid across the metal sheet to rest on Salome’s platter, but because the Prick was missing his right eye, and with the left one alone he wouldn’t see a thing apart from the metal surface, close up, coarse, abrasive — and well, that’s why they called him the Prick, for being such a useless prick, blind in one eye, dragging himself around with the shakes and a lame leg, no dignity at all, known throughout the Penitentiary for his habit of carving up his veins each time he was banged up in the hole, his forearms covered in laddered scars like a guitar fretboard, as if he were beyond desperate — but no, he never killed himself — forsaken, sunk, always on edge, not giving a damn about the body that didn’t seem to belong to him, yet a body that he relished, safeguarded, and inside which he hid, appropriating it fiercely with urgent, restless fervor whenever he was able to possess it, climbing inside, all the way down, to lie in its abyss, flooded by a warm, unguent pleasure, climbing inside his own corporeal cage, the drug like a faceless white angel leading him by the hand through rivers of blood, as if he were coursing through an infinite palace with no rooms and no echoes. The goddamn disgrace of a mother who bore him. “I’m telling you, you can’t, man. Get off my fucking back!” Despite everything, the Prick’s mother was due to visit, she existed, however inconceivable her existence. During visiting hours — in a narrow, irregularly shaped room, filled with benches and hordes of people, inmates and relatives, where it was easy to pick out the lawyers and (easier still) the con men, recognizable by their poise and the excessively
cunning airs they assumed as they studied a particular document, affecting a dumb ponderousness as their words slipped into their clients’ ears, and as they shot rapid and deliberately suspicious glances at the door (one of numerous ruses to bolster their clients’ trust and, simultaneously, their sense of bemusement) — during these interviews, the Prick’s mother — amazingly just as ugly as her son, a knife scar running from her eyebrow to the tip of her chin — kept her head down, not looking at him or anything else, only at the floor, her bearing laden with resentment, reproach, and regret, God only knows under what sordid and abject conditions she’d coupled, or with whom, in order to engender him, and perhaps the memory of that distant, grim deed still tormented her each time. Every now and then she’d let out a heavy, rasping sigh. “It’s no-oneses fault, no-oneses but mine for having had you.” The word no-ones had become etched in Polonio’s memory, strange and curious, as if it were the sum of an infinite number of meanings. No-ones, that sad plural. It was no-oneses fault, just fate’s, life’s, damned misfortune’s, no-oneses. For having had you. The rage at having the Prick banged up beside them now in the same cell, right beside Polonio and Albino, and the acute, urgent, craven desire for him to die once and for all, to cease roaming the earth in that debased body of his. His mother desired it too, just as deeply, just as keenly, you could tell. Die die die. He inspired livid, revulsion-fueled compassion. Nothing ever came of his vein cutting, nothing but ranting and raving, despite their hoping, genuinely and devoutly, every time, that he’d finish the job. He would cower by the cell door — any given day, any day he spent banged up in the hole — deliberately against the doorframe, so that the runnel of blood welling up from his vein would flow out as soon as possible into the narrow hallway, on the wing’s upper floor, and from there drip down onto the yard, forming a puddle on the concrete; having worked out how long it would take for all this to happen, the Prick could be sure they would get wise to his suicide and he’d howl like a dog, his breath squeezed through a broken bellow, never dying, just enough to cause a scene so they’d take him from the hole to the infirmary where he’d find a way to wangle more drugs, setting off the cycle all over again, a hundred, a thousand times, never reaching the end before he found himself in the next hole. It was on one such occasion that he and Polonio first met, the Prick dancing a kind of semi-orthopedic jig halfway up a footpath in the infirmary garden, tripping over his tongue as he reeled off verses from the Bible. Around his neck he wore a tie fashioned from a greasy length of cord, and through the rags of his blue jacket, as his dance evolved, you caught flashes of his naked chest and torso, scored with barbaric scars and faded tattoos showing beneath his skin. His good eye and the flower were stomach turning, bloodcurdling: the flower was new, freshly picked, a mutilated gladiola missing some petals, fastened by a piece of rusty wire to the tatters of his jacket, and there, beneath his drooping, half-shut eyelid, which had no lashes at all, his good eye was glazed over with a malicious, calculating, mocking, self-pitying, and tender look. He bent his good leg, the lame one stood to attention, and with his hands on his hips and his feet turned out in that squatting pose of erotic dancers from old illustrated magazines, he attempted a few short jerks forward, during which he lost his balance and fell to the floor, where he tried to get up, writhing and kicking furiously, sending himself spinning on the spot, without it occurring to anyone to come to his aid. At that point his good eye seemed to die on him, as still and artificial as a bird’s. It was with this eye that he kept his mother under observation during visiting hours, not breathing a word. Beyond a doubt she wished him dead, perhaps because of that eye in which she herself was dead, but in the meantime she got him his drug money, twenty, fifty pesos, and she would sit there, having passed it to him — the notes scrunched into a ball like a candy, sticky and sweaty in the hollow of her fist — across the bench in the visitors’ room, her worm-filled belly like a bundle of laundry slumped over her stumpy legs, which didn’t quite touch the floor, hermetic and supernatural in the interminable pain of bearing this son who still clung to her entrails, where he watched her with his miscreant’s eye, refusing to leave the womb, trapped in the amniotic sac, in his cell, surrounded by bars, by apes, of which he was one, propelling himself in circles, always with that one eye of his, powerless to get up from the floor, like a bird with one wing, powerless to leave his mother’s belly, banged up inside his mother’s hole. Since this was more or less the plan, and Polonio was its mastermind, it fell to him to convince her; in the end — without much difficulty — she consented. “You’re a woman of a certain age, mature, respected. The bitches don’t dare try any funny business with you.” The thing was just there, inside her, something maternal. Polonio described it as a cotton plug attached to a thread about twelve inches long, its end dangling loose, a tip to pull the thing out after the event — all the rage these days among women — and it was merely a question of Mecha and La Chata talking her through it, assisting her, so they wouldn’t wind up pregnant only to have to get rid of the child in some horrible manner, one of the latest methods, Meche or La Chata would explain everything and help her put it up there nice and snug. In there everything died, in there spermatozoa became trapped, condemned to death, wild and raging at the barrier, banging on the door just like the guards, apes just like the rest of them — an endless throng of apes banging on locked doors. Polonio hooted with laughter and the two women, Meche and La Chata, did the same, thrilled by how ballsy the old girl had been to accept. But then: of course it hadn’t occurred to anyone that the mother might want to take the chance to use it for any other purpose, to put it like that. The makeshift tampon, tied nice and firmly in a knot, would contain some twenty or thirty grams of drugs, which the other two girls would hand over to the Prick’s mother. “The bitches have never tried it on with you, right? Because you’re a woman in your prime, well respected. Not like us. When they pat us down they always slip the finger in, filthy bitches.” The memory and the idea and the image all made Polonio blind with jealousy, with a strange, absolute jealousy, a kind of incapacity for existing in his own space, for recognizing himself or feeling the limits of his own body, vague, bereft, jealousy in his throat and the pit of his stomach, and a faint and terrible tingling sensation behind his penis, it felt like a premature ejaculation, as opposed to a real one, a kind of contact without semen, which fluttered, vibrated in tiny microscopic, tangible circles, beyond the body, beyond any organism at all, and there before his eyes La Chata would appear, jocund, bestial, and the lines of her thighs, which, when she stood upright, instead of coming together to form the cradle of her sex, left a small gap between the two walls of solid, firm, young, heart-rending flesh. Seen through her dress, backlit — and now Polonio was struck by a vivid rush of nostalgia, from the time when he walked free: of hotel rooms heady with disinfectant, the clean but not-quite-bleached sheets in the two-bit hotels, La Chata and he traveling from one side of the country to the other, or across the border, to San Antonio, Texas, Guatemala, and that time in Tampico, as the sun went down over the Pánuco River, La Chata leaning against the balcony, facing the room, her body naked beneath a flimsy dressing gown and her legs slightly apart, her mound of Venus like a capital of hair atop the two columns of her thighs — it was impossible to resist, and Polonio, overcome by the same sensations as someone possessed by a religious trance, dropped to his knees to kiss it and sink his lips between hers. “They slip their finger in.” Those mother-fuck-ing les-bian bit-ches. The Prick’s mother would carry the little packet of drugs inside her — despite the unforeseen changes to the original plan, what with them now being in the hole, the mother’s task, as it were, remained the same — the little packet to feed her son’s vice, just like before, in her belly, also inside her, she had fed him with life, with the horrible vice of living, of hauling oneself along, of crumbling like the Prick was crumbling, yet still relishing, to an indescribable degree, each and every morsel of life granted to him. Right now the Prick was draped around P
olonio’s neck begging to be allowed to look through the hatch; on his nape, below and behind his ear, Polonio felt the moist kiss of a purulent ulcer upon his skin, one of the Prick’s unhealed wounds, the lips of an oyster kiss wetting him with a thin thread of saliva that ran down to his back, all because he didn’t look after himself, all because of negligence, the hopeless miserable neglect to which he submitted himself. With his left hand, Polonio punched him in the stomach — a clumsy blow on account of his awkward position, his head poking through the hatch — and then kicked him lower down, far more effectively, sending him flying across the cell where he landed against the iron wall with a stunned and muffled cry. “Dickhead,” the Prick grumbled, unperturbed and showing no hostility. “All I wanted was to see when my mami gets here.” He spoke like a child, my mami, when he should have said my mother — my whore of a mother. For that’s what she was. They’d had to come up with a new set of plans and the one in charge of executing them was Meche, Albino’s girl. The women wouldn’t come to visit them, but would instead use the names of other inmates, since their own men no longer had the right to visitors, not now they were in the hole. Albino was the most desperate of them all, maybe because he was the biggest, going so far as to weep from the lack of drugs, but stopping short of slitting his wrists, something all the addicts did when the anguish became too much. He had been a soldier, a sailor, and even a pimp — but not to Meche, she was no one’s whore, she was an honorable woman, a slut for sure, but when she slept with other men it wasn’t for money, no, it was purely for pleasure, behind Albino’s back, of course. That’s why she’d slept with Polonio so often. She was hot, absolutely smoking hot, but she was honorable, and to each her own. During their first days in the hole Albino distracted and entertained them — or rather he entertained Polonio, since the Prick remained hostile, listless, and incapable of understanding a fucking thing going on around him — with Albino’s tremendous, rousing belly dance, renowned throughout the penitentiary, which caused such intense excitement that some, pointlessly trying to conceal their intentions, instead revealed their arousal and the coarse and harried sense of shame that threatened to engulf them, masturbating with furious and flagrant zeal, their hand under their clothes. It was a real privilege for Polonio to have watched him perform here, at his own leisure, in the cell, because elsewhere Albino provoked untold resentment as to who was allowed to join his audience; like any well-respected performer, he ejected all onlookers he considered inconvenient, frivolous, flippant, incapable of appreciating the hard-won attributes of a true virtuoso. Lower down his stomach was a tattoo of a Hindu figure — etched in the brothel of some Hindustani port, or so his story went, by the in-house eunuch, a member of an unpronounceable esoteric sect, while Albino dreamed a deep and almost lethal opium sleep beyond all possible recollection — the tattoo depicted an amusing couple, a young man and woman in the throes of passion, their bodies entwined, enlaced in an incredible foliage of thighs, legs, arms, breasts, and marvelous organs — the Brahmanic tree of Good and Evil — positioned in such a way and with such kinetic wisdom that Albino only had to set it in motion with the right contractions and muscle spasms, its rhythmic oscillations rising at intervals on the surface of his skin, and a subtle, inapprehensible rocking of the hips, for those flailing and capricious-looking body parts — torso and armpits, feet and pubis and hands and wings and stomachs and hair — to assume a mystical unity in which the miracle of the Creation was repeated and human copulation was portrayed in all its magnificent and marvelous splendor. In the cubicle where visitors were inspected before entering the prison, the hands of the female guard felt her through her dress — the finger would follow, the finger of God — but Meche’s mind was elsewhere now: on Albino’s dance to be exact, from the week before, in the visitors’ lobby, just after they’d settled on the final details of the original plan, a plan they then abandoned on account of being sectioned in the hole, the Prick’s mother also there, transfixed by the contortions of the tattoo, apparently confounded, but her lips drawn in a sly smile, and who, despite being well over sixty, was still well capable of making the beast with two backs, the old mule. In a corner of the room, hidden from prying eyes by a barrier of five people — the three women, the Prick, and Polonio — Albino had unfastened his trousers, his t-shirt now raised above his waist like a curtain to set the stage, using his mesmerizing stomach tremors to bring the coitus to life, emerging out of those inky blue lines with every step, with every rift and roll, every ripple and undulation, until all of them — except the Prick and his mother, who were doing their best to mask their reactions — felt a suffocating wave of desire course through their bodies, and, in Meche and La Chata’s case, a brief and ambiguous giggle also danced on the roof of their mouths. Now naked from the waist down, Meche could anticipate the next moves of the guard’s hand, something that had never happened to her before, disturbed by a strange and indecipherable willingness deep within her spirit and a half-hearted resistance, and in that moment Albino appeared in her imagination (in a previously forgotten memory, the first time they’d possessed each other, with intriguing new details now arising in her mind, absolutely fresh as if belonging to someone else), preventing her from assuming the proud indifference and fierce composure that she needed to withstand, patiently, angrily, coldly, the woman groping between her legs. For example, the heavy yet simultaneously repressed breathing, or rather irregular panting, neither steady nor erratic — only now did she realize it had all been air exhaled through his nose; Albino on top of her mound of Venus, for now the thumb and index finger of the female guard were already there, relentless, urgent, that female guard parting her lips, while suddenly, with the middle finger, she began a sweet, delicate, and highly suspicious internal exploration, a slow and deliberate in and out, the eyes utterly fixed as if unto death. The plan was for the women to enter the wing with the rest of the visitors, mingle with other prisoners’ friends and families, and then appear unexpectedly at the door to the hole, willing to do anything to make the apes reconsider their men’s punishment — refusing to move, standing firm for all time, like loyal, rabid she-dogs. The female guard, then, and her wandering hand, were the source of the double, triple, quadruple memories piling up and merging together, Meche at a loss to stop, remedy it, repress a dumb yet absolutely unavoidable attitude of acquiescence, which the bitch savored with a nervous quiver and fitful panting — almost ferocious, breathing only through her nose, actually just like Albino; at which Meche’s own belly seemed to transform, indeed was transformed — by dint of a rebellious transposition — into his belly (Meche, good God, as if letting herself take the man’s role in relation to the bitch) while the image of Albino seeped into her latest sensations, scenes from their first performance, when he straddled her at eye-level, infusing the figures from the Brahmanic tattoo with spine-chilling and prodigious life, and now Meche imagined that it was she who in that moment made her belly dance — identical, albeit secret, invisible undulations — like a seduction technique aimed at the bitch, her eyes closing in, meaning that not only did she not put up any resistance, but, without knowing why, impelled by the mysterious force dictating these new internal relations between Albino, herself, and the guard — which overtook those strangers by chance — she lay down, barely metaphorically speaking (one word would be enough to make her do it for real), in the same position as that other Meche beneath Albino’s body, completely and utterly intoxicated by those Hindustani teenagers. Meche couldn’t formulate in any coherent or logical way, either in words or in thoughts, what was happening to her: what type of rarefied event and new language — secret, with exclusive and singular peculiarities — was now being expressed, although it wasn’t things in general or taken all together, but rather each thing separately, specifically, each thing apart, with their own words, emotions, and subterranean network of communications and significances, which connected them beyond time and space, regardless of the differences between them, so turning them into symbols and co
des that were indecipherable to all those who fell outside of the biographical conspiracy by which things constituted themselves in their own particular hermetic disguise. Archaeology of passion, emotion, and sin, in which the weapons, tools, and abstract organs of desire and the tendency of every imperfect deed to seek out its consanguinity and completion in its own twin — however incestuous this may seem — get closer to their goal by means of a long, dogged, and tireless adventure of superimpositions, which slowly begin to assume the image of that whose form is but an unfulfilled yearning, condemned to be merely the nameless foundation of an eternally grasping proximity, restlessly clamoring signs that wait, febrile, for the moment when they finally unite with their twin meaning, and are decoded by their mere presence. So something — a face, a look, an expression, together constituting the object’s defining feature — is distilled and complemented in another person, another love, and even in other circumstances entirely, like archaeological horizons where details from each period — a frieze, a gargoyle, an apse, a surround — are but the moveable parts of a kind of despairing eternity that time contracts, and where hands, feet, knees, the way in which one looks at another, a kiss, a stone, a landscape, through repetition are perceived by senses which no longer belong to that then, even if the past refers to just a minute ago. When Meche crossed the first barred door into the yard leading onto numerous wings, radiating outward from a corridor, or rather a roundel, in the center of which loomed the watchtower — a raised iron polygon constructed to monitor every inch of the prison from above — her mind was still imprinted with the image of the black and fatally eloquent eyes of the female guard, her motionless, imperturbable, terrible eyes that might have been staring at her forever. Polonio could no longer bear to have his head lodged awkwardly against the metal hatch, so he decided to cede his lookout post to Albino, but, on shooting a sideways glance back inside the cell, he thought he noticed a strange movement, and at just at the same instant he realized that the Prick had stopped moaning for the first time since being punched in the gut. Using great care and attention, slowly and cautiously, Polonio folded the ear poking through the hatch and drew back his head, worrying the whole time that Albino might have finally succeeded in choking the cripple. Truth to tell — he thought — there were more than enough reasons to do so, but Albino must keep his cool, at least for now, they would kill him under more favorable circumstances, as soon as the drugs were safely in their hands, not a moment earlier and not in that cell, since the plan might come crashing to the ground, and, whether they liked it or not, the Prick’s mother was a vital part of the equation. It was a question of carefully planning where and how to kill him in the future (or the not too distant future, if that’s what Albino wanted) — but all in good time. In reality, the Prick hadn’t stopped moaning ever since Polonio had pummeled him in the stomach. His moans were irritating, repetitive, and ingeniously false, revealing quite openly and in perfect detail the monstrous state of his perverse, contemptible, despicable, abject soul. The beating hadn’t even been that bad — his miserable body was used to even more brutal and violent ones — so this phony anguish, affected purely to humiliate himself while pleading for pity had the opposite effect, producing a mounting hatred and disgust, a blind rage that unleashed the most lurid desires, from the very depths of his heart, that he should suffer to ridiculous extremes, that someone should inflict more pain, real pain, capable of leaving him in shreds (and here a childhood memory), just like a malign tarantula, the same sensation that invades the senses when the spider, under the effects of boric acid, goes into a frenzy, shrivels into itself — making a furious but impotent sound — curling up inside its own legs, completely out of its mind, but doesn’t die, it doesn’t die, and you’d like to squash it but you don’t have the energy for that, you don’t dare, and not being able to go through with it is enough to drive you to tears. He whimpered in a hoarse, weak, sticky voice, every now and then feigning a woeful and shameless death rattle, while with his tearful, dirty eye he managed to hold his gaze still, a profoundly imploring gaze pierced with piety, full of self-pity, hypocrisy, falsehood, a distant malevolence. Polonio and Albino had only teamed up with the cripple because his mother was willing to help them, but once their business was done, he could go to hell, could go fuck himself, killing him was the only way out, the only way of recovering any peace or tranquility. “Leave him be!” Polonio barked at Albino, putting all his weight into giving him a hefty shove. Now released from Albino’s clutches, the Prick was slumped like a lifeless sack in the corner. In fact, Albino had very nearly choked him to death, and now he didn’t dare moan or kick up a fuss. Shaking and clumsily raising one hand to his chest, he rubbed his neck and massaged his Adam’s apple between his fingers as if attempting to put it back in place. Now his one eye glinted in silent horror, so stupefied that suddenly he seemed unable to make sense of anything at all. The minute they pulled off the plan and the situation took a new turn, he planned to tell his mother — recounting all his terrible woes, and how nothing mattered to him, nothing apart from the small and fleeting pleasure, the sense of calm the drug provided, and how, minute by minute and second by second, he was locked in battle to find that peace, the only thing he loved in this life, his only respite from the nameless torments he endured and from the way he was forced, literally, to trade his body’s pain, piece by piece of his flesh, in exchange for an indefinite and limitless interval of freedom in which, with each fresh torture, he floundered a little happier. Inserting — or extracting — his head in and out of that iron rectangle, back into the guillotine, moving his skull, with all its parts — nape, forehead, nose, and ears — to the world beyond the cell, placing it there just as you would the head of a man sentenced to death, unreal simply for still being alive, would require careful, meticulous effort, the same way the fetus is extracted from its maternal entrails, a tenacious and deliberate self-birth with forceps that tear out clumps of hair and scrape against skin. With Polonio’s help, Albino was able to tilt his head at an angle and position it on top of the metal sheet. Down below were the apes, in the box, with all the vacant and inexplicable primordial presence of caged apes. Leaning his back against the door, next to Albino’s guillotined body, Polonio lit a cigarette and drew a long, deep drag into his lungs. The sun was falling across half the cell at an oblique, quadrangular angle, a solid, corporeal column inside whose glowing frame dust particles moved and collided with somnambular vagueness, erratic, distracted, confused, tracing the outline of a window of light with its vertical bars on the floor, not far from Polonio. Across from the solar buttress, the mute, resentful figure of the Prick blurred into the shadows. The billowing mountains of smoke exhaled by Polonio invaded the patch of light with an enveloping chaos of rumps, lips, legs, clouds, and the tumult of his personal cavalry, revolving and writhing in the hand-to-hand combat of shifting yet deliberate volumes of smoke, only then, slowly but surely, moving at the whim of the thick air, to settle with an easy and subtle rhythm on a horizontal plane, resembling a military victory parade. Then the movements shape-shifted to the rolling composition of other rhythms, and the slow, slow spirals paused briefly in their transitory state in poses of drunken idols and startled statues. Albino’s voice reached him from beyond the iron door — mild, confiding, tender. “Visiting time.” Visitors. Drugs. The bodies of smoke dissolved, merged into one another, reconstructed reliefs and structures and trails, subject to their own laws — obedient to those of the solar system — now wholly divine, free of all human traits, part of a new and freshly invented natural world, whose demigod was the sun, and where the nebulae, with scarcely a whisper of geometry, before all Creation, occupied the freedom of a space that had been formed in their own image and likeness, like an immense, interminable desire that never permits its own realization, nor does it describe its own limits, refusing to be in any way contained, just like God. But the Prick was still there, a battered, rotten anti-God, who began shaking with the violent convulsions of a hacking, unco
ntrollable cough, which made him pound his body against the wall — in a strange, spasmodic, and idiosyncratic manner, beating out the dull, fleeting beat of a bongo with a flabby drumskin. In the corner where he sat huddled, he looked like a possessed man, with his inflamed vulture’s eye, verging on asphyxiation. The lines, spirals, whorled snails, statues, and gods gone mad were scattered, cracked, and banished by the spasms of that cough. He was missing one lung. Albino might have pressed his knee a little too hard against his chest when, moments earlier, he’d tried to throttle him. He really was a pain in the ass, this cripple. With considerable effort, Albino managed to squeeze his hand through the hatch, right up against his face, over the bridge of his nose, ready to grab the drugs at the moment that the women got up close to the cell. All of a sudden, he was blinded by a terrible rage: at the small moist scab, still not hardened, the pus from the Prick’s open wound that the cripple must have left on Albino’s hand during their scuffle, which Albino had been about to wipe on his lips. He closed his eyes, his head rattling the iron grid with the brute force of clenching his teeth. He was hell-bent on killing him, hell-bent with every atom of his soul. He opened his eyes to take another look. It wouldn’t be long before the relatives started filing in. The padlocks had already been removed from both doors to the box in order to admit them, so the two groups were facing one another, on either side of the iron bars. Their women wouldn’t file in as a group, but one at a time, mingling with the other visitors. Albino speculated as to who would appear first, La Chata, the mother, or Mercedes — Meche — with her beautiful body, shoulders, legs, angelic wings, all so enticing. (It was as if, under present circumstances, the evocation of Meche was distorted by unforeseeable new factors full of contradictions, which lent the memory a different, original, strange quality: Meche had just been through an ordeal, the details of which Albino was none the wiser at that point, yet which, ever since he’d found out, a week before — when they plotted how to get the drugs into the penitentiary and Polonio had thought of using the Prick’s mother — had remained imprinted on his mind, in various forms but always alluding to specific physical images. First of all, the clearly defined female guard, and then the diverse and unnerving meaning assumed by two words, who knows when or where Albino had heard them — exchanged between nurses or doctors as he’d waited someplace to be seen for whatever reason, this was all quite dreamlike, or perhaps it really was a dream — words which, given their convoluted technical character, encompassed a series of extensive and suggestive movements and situations: gynecological position. The female guard, and her method of searching one particular sector of the female visitors, not all of them, but a specific number who came to visit the drug addicts, and among them only the more active pushers inside the penitentiary: Albino and Polonio. Would they inspect the women in that gynecological position? The present situation — and those two absurd words — made this Meche slightly different from the usual Meche: violated and prostituted, not that this was a cause for repulsion, no, quite the opposite, a cause to feel closer to her, as if it lent her a natural, undefined loveliness, or at least one that Albino wasn’t capable of defining; it didn’t matter to him that Meche might have slipped into an unfortunate trance — and he would ask her himself, telling her to spare no details — in the event of a somewhat excessive exploration by the female guard during the inspection: it excited a renewed, previously unfamiliar desire in him, and a meticulous and honest retelling by Meche would give him hope, as they went on, for a new kind of bond to develop between them, more intense and complete, no doubt enjoying a healthy dose of lighthearted, happy depravity in which those two medical words would somehow play a role.) Although the “box” formed part of the wing, separated only by the same bars that acted as a barrier between the two of them, the presence of guards, shut up there inside, made it look like a separate prison, a prison for guards, a prison inside the prison, which visitors were obliged to pass through before entering the yard of the wing itself. This was Albino’s entire field of vision from the hatch — a real torture. Being, as he was, taller than the peephole — chest-high to a man of normal height — Albino was forced to remain bent in a horribly awkward position to keep his head aligned at this angle, and after a couple of minutes he started to feel shooting pains down his neck and back, and his leg began to tremble, giving the ludicrous and mortifying impression that he was scared. As soon as one of the three women were through the first and second barred walls of the box — be it Meche, La Chata, or the mother — it was just a matter of doing something, anything — making a sound, kicking the door — to let them know exactly where the hole was. Naturally, the proper thing to do, he thought, would be to yell insults, hurl abuse at the apes. After all, that’s what they were there for. The important thing was to see them enter, first the box and then the yard, to be sure that everything had gone smoothly during the inspection, with the bitches. Meche and La Chata wouldn’t have had any trouble: the apes would have felt them up and that would’ve been that, nothing to find inside them. The mother was the important one. Please, please let the old hag through with those thirty grams tucked up her crack. For lack of a better word, they called what was about to happen a strike: a women’s strike. But before Meche, La Chata and the mother went up there, to the cell door, so they could shout, scream, and stomp their feet, before the ruckus really kicked off, the mother was meant to hand over the little wrap of drugs to whoever had his head poking through the hatch. In this case Albino, the Baptist, was on duty, leaning his head against the metal plate. Later, loaded up on the drugs, he’d take care of the Prick. It was easy enough to pull off on movie night: deep in the shadows, drive the sharp end of an iron bar through his ribcage, while Polonio covered his mouth to stop him from squealing like a pig. They hadn’t associated the Prick with him — or Polonio, precisely because of his baby face. Albino laughed: all because he had a mother. Having a mother was a big deal for that fucker, the real deal. The visitors formed a line in the central yard, not far away — all the same, beyond Albino’s line of vision — before filing, one by one, onto the respective wings. Mothers, wives, daughters, young men, very few older men, two or three in each group, the air thick with suspicion, eyes down. Curiously enough, their conversations were never about why their relatives had been locked up. Nobody questioned the guilt or innocence of a child, husband, brother: they were there and that was that. The same couldn’t be said for every visitor. Whenever some high-class lady set foot in the place, for the first few times at least, her sole, obsessive, and blatant concern — ultimately lacking all logic or even plain coherence — was to establish a clear social distinction between her inmate — why he was arrested, the temporary and purely incidental nature of his stay there in prison — and the rest of the visitors’ inmates. Hers was merely “accused of,” since no actual crime had been committed — no matter how shady things appeared — some friends in high places had been rallied in his favor, and two or three high-court judges were on the case. Those listening to her invariably nodded, incredulous but indulgent, going along with the gran señora who didn’t pause for breath in her display of piously refined manners, who took their silence as wonder engendered by her ostentatiously luxurious attire. But as her presence in the line of visitors became more frequent, the lady of fine lineage gradually began to change her attitude, she began see things as they really were. Each time she would speak a little less of influential personages, and the innocence or guilt of “her” inmate noticeably dropped out of the conversation, as her outfits became plainer, until in the end she was just another visitor, eventually passing unnoticed, indistinguishable from the rest. La Chata spotted Meche behind her, among the other women in the line. She sighed. Oh, how she envied her. She really had it bad for Meche’s man, Albino, and ever since he’d shown them his belly dance in the visitors’ room, she went weak at the knees at the very thought of him. She would ask Meche if, without jeopardizing their friendship, she could sleep with Albino. Once or twice, that’s all, no
strings, or rather, without Meche getting all strung up about it. Further behind Meche, the Prick’s mother hobbled in, looking suspicious. She’d let Meche and La Chata insert that contraceptive tampon as if it were nothing, with the indifference of a cow letting herself be milked. There were the udders; here was a vagina. Just as they’d predicted, she hadn’t been searched. They’d shown some respect for her age, and the dairy cow passed through, as inoffensive as a virgin. But now they’d reached the apes’ cage, the box. The Prick was pleading with them to let him poke his head through the hatch, because, he said, his mother wasn’t going to hand over the drugs to anyone but him. But his pleas were feeble, despondent. Albino, with his head poking out of the cell, barked back at him. At last, Meche and La Chata appeared down below. “Those fucking bitches, stupid cunts!” The two women’s eyes spun towards the voice: it was their man. But the old mule of a mother wasn’t there — she was late, the wretch. The head in the guillotine flatly refused to give up the lookout post. His mother wasn’t going to be so stupid as to give them the drugs, the Prick whined. Utter bullshit. Just like him to be pining to see his mother right here and now, needing her so desperately. He would tell her everything, not holding back like before. Everything. The interminable nights in the infirmary, strapped into a straightjacket, the ice-cold baths, the vein-cutting: of course he didn’t want to die, but all the same he wanted to die — and the way he let himself go, let his body go like a loose thread, drifting, the boundless impiousness of human beings, his own infinite impiety, the evils of his cursed soul. Everything. He went on whining. “I told you to give it a fucking rest!” Just then the Prick’s mother came through the two barred walls of the box and stepped into the yard in front of the wing. They were saved. Thanks to Albino’s outburst, the women were able to make their way to the holed men’s cell, transported as if by magic, invisible and swift, in a single movement, through the ebb and flow, the searching for one another in the crowd, in such a natural, confident, and self-possessed way that they didn’t stand out or seem to have their own private agenda, so here they were already, just like that, and Meche had thrown herself at Holofernes’s head and was showering it with kisses, on the ears, eyes, nose, smack on the lips. Helpless to escape, Albino merely flapped like the body of a monstrous fish, a fish with a human head, beached by a crashing ocean wave. “M’boy! W’is he?” cried the Prick’s mother in a cavernous and somehow stupid voice; stupid because she seemed to be convinced that she would come face to face with her son right away, and when this didn’t happen she became lost and confused, her expression full of fear and distrust toward the other two women. “W’is he? W’is he?” she repeated, lurching clumsily as if she were drunk, without taking her eyes off the head and hand protruding from the metal hatch. The head separated from the torso — guillotined and alive with its one visible eye rolling crazily, like what happens with cattle when they’re thrown to the ground and know they’re about to die — sent Meche and La Chata into a wild frenzy. Wild but also amused and merry, despite how deranged the whole situation was. They seemed younger than their years — they couldn’t have been more than twenty-five — resembling a couple of teenage girls, sporty, bendy, agile, and as swaggering as they were vulgar. They’d climbed up onto the corridor handrail, and now sat with their legs crossed, feet clamped around the vertical bars, and from that position, skirts hitched high, exposing their thighs, they let out the most extraordinary howls and screeches, wildly flailing their clenched fists in the air, their toned arms like sturdy, steel roots, shaken by short, sharp electric shocks, while their eyes, open unnaturally wide, maddened and inflamed, glinted with unleashed rage. “Let them out, let them out,” three words spliced into one furious emission: leddemaat, leddemaat. The mother didn’t budge from between the two women. She clutched the handrail with both hands, as if on a ship’s bridge, every now and then turning toward the yard and looking out of the corner of her eye in the direction of the hatch, hoping to see her son’s head and not the other guy’s, a man for whom she felt not the least affection or warmth. The head, now directly behind her, was spitting out demands with growing urgency, nearing hysteria. “The drugs, come on, old woman,” sweetly at first, but with a note of aggression rapidly permeating his muted, restrained intonation. “The gear, you old hag! Give us the gear, you cunt!” It was quite possible that the mother really couldn’t hear him. She looked like a stone slab, barely touched by a Neolithic tool — vast, heavy, solemn, and hideous. Her silence had something zoological, even lapidary about it, as if she lacked the organ necessary to make a single sound, to talk or shout, a beast mute from birth. All she did was weep, and even her tears filled you with the same horror as a strange animal seen for the first time, and for whom it is impossible to feel either compassion or love, just as was true of her son. Rather than falling vertically, the thick, slow tears slipped down her cheek along the old knife slash running from her forehead to her jaw, tracing the line of the scar, and then dripping from the tip of her chin — the tears were alien to her eyes, alien to the tears of all humanity. In the yard adjoining the prisoners’ wing, with a subdued air of distraction, in vague need of something beyond themselves, something they found irresistible, the inmates and their relatives slowly gathered beneath the women perched on the rails. Nobody dared to yell or call out, but from the crowd there came a muffled buzzing, a unanimous hum of solidarity and satisfaction, which the apes couldn’t pin on any one person. During visiting hours, the yard was transformed into a bizarre sort of campsite, with blankets spread across the floor and hung wall to wall between the cell doors, making a sort of temporary roof, beneath which each clan gathered, shoulder to shoulder — women, children, and inmates — in a kind of helpless throng of brutish castaways, strangers among strangers, or perhaps people who’d never had a home and today were practicing, entirely by instinct, a kind of warped, primitive cohabitation. Below the three women, the tide rose in small, slow successive waves, people congregating as if out on a stroll, the men never once averting their wide, cynical gaze, simultaneously expectant, amused and unnerved by Meche and La Chata’s black panties. “Go on out then, you stupid Prick!” He didn’t get it. “You, you, get out there!” Albino’s head retreated arduously back into the cell allowing the mother to watch, almost immediately, exactly as if she were looking at herself in the mirror, how she gave birth to her son again, first the tousled, damp hair and then, bone by bone, forehead, cheekbones, jawbone, the flesh of her flesh, blood of her blood — dried up, bitter, and spent. She placed her tough, trembling hand on her son’s forehead as if wanting to protect the blind eye from the intensity of the sun’s rays. “The packet, Mami dearest, the packet you were going to bring,” the man pleaded in a whining, desolate voice. Scared, speechless, sleepwalking in suffering, that hand resting instinctively on her son’s forehead, all of a sudden she took on the hallucinatory and shocking likeness of a crudely-fashioned Our Lady of Sorrows, made of mud and stones and clay, unplaned and unpolished, an ancient, broken idol. Amid the increasingly frequent banging of muffled drums down below, a distinct isolated voice was calling out in chorus with the women. Leddemaat, Leddemaat. On their way from the Governor’s office, a posse of ten guards entered the box. Nobody was prepared to take a risk: a path gradually cleared for those irregular and terrifying strides, apes released from captivity and still not used to running, above all wary of becoming separated from the group, from the tribe, not to end up caught in the middle of the stormy, impersonal crowd, acting with impunity, pretending not to see the apes pass, looking through them as if their bodies were transparent. The struggle against Meche, La Chata, and the old woman seemed to go on forever, a bloodless, painless, and somehow distant affair. Half-naked now, their clothes in shreds, they always found something, anything — a ledge, a crossbar, a fissure — to cling to, while three or four apes per woman made grotesque efforts to drag them toward the stairs. From the crowd’s hoarse voice below erupted all sorts of exclamations, shouts, insults, and guffaws, som
e in protest, some in sympathy, and some savagely gleeful, demanding even more indecency, vulgarity, and shamelessness from the fabulous and once-in-a-lifetime spectacle that was all those bared breasts, asses, and midriffs. The mother, her short arms raised above her head, stood between the women and the apes, without doing a thing, making lumbering and labored jumps, like a fat old fowl who’d forgotten how to fly, a prehistoric link, not quite reptile, not quite bird. In the course of one of these jumps she tripped and went sliding across the iron surface of the walkway, only coming to a halt when her wide-open legs straddled a vertical bar of the handrail, preventing her, for now, from falling off the edge, but which wouldn’t stop the other half of her body, suspended in midair, from plummeting into to the yard at any moment. There followed a roar of collective terror from everyone watching, followed by a suffocating, weird silence, as if there were not a single soul left on the face of the earth. The holed men, struck dumb in their cell and without having seen a thing, sensed that something immense was about to occur. The woman was beating her arms frantically, irrationally, flapping hard. “Don’t move, old lady!” cried one of the apes, breaking the silence and dragging the mother from danger by her armpits. Silence returned, but now it was not only due to the absence of noise and voices, no, it was a silence that reigned over movements too, movements now entirely devoid of sound, wholly inaudible, as if all was a slow and imaginary underwater act performed by hypnotized divers, where everybody, actors and spectators alike, both present and far away, inhabited the diving suits of their own bodies, immobile and displacing their movements little by little, in stages, in autonomous and independent fragments, synchronized in their visible outward unity not by a causal and logical coherence, but precisely, by the icily rigid thread of madness. Something was stirring in this silent movie. Who knows what the Governor said to the apes and the women: an unfamiliar and tense calm descended, two apes bent down over the lock to the cell door and unholed the three recluses, and then the whole group — the three women, their men, and the guards — quietly, despite the crazed faces of Polonio, Albino, and even the Prick, began to head down the stairs. At the door to the box, the Governor let the two guards pass and then turned toward the women. He was quite sure his plan would work. “You can talk to your inmates in here all you like, under a watchful eye,” he said. “Ladies first.” The women obeyed with an air of weary victory. But they’d hardly stepped across the threshold when the first two apes, with lightning speed, pushed them back out of the box, through the other door that led out into the yard, immediately locking the door behind them. Suddenly, without warning, barely realizing what was happening, they’d been left behind on the other side of the wing, the other side of the world. The Governor didn’t have time to laugh at his own ploy. In an unhinged, blind rage, Albino and Polonio, with the Prick between them, sprang forth unleashed, barging blindly and aggressively into the box, unwittingly followed by the Governor and another guard. In one abrupt gesture, Albino locked the door leading onto the wing. Now they were alone with the Governor and the three guards, captive in the same zoo cage. Four against three; no, two against four, given that the Prick was an absolute waste of space. “Let’s see how you level with us now, you fucking ape pieces of shit,” Albino yelled, while removing his cowhide belt to wield in the fight. A blow to the face, across his cheekbone and nose, suddenly caused a blood-red flower to bloom there, as if out of nowhere. Polonio and Albino transformed into two ancient gladiators, homicidal to the roots of their hair. The fight was hushed and precise, and as they prowled around the box not a single voice was raised, not a single groan heard. They were going for it, out to kill or wound their enemies in the most excruciating way possible, using their feet, fists, teeth, and sticks to tear out eyes and break their balls. Every look, expression, and gasp, every movement of an arm or a leg was calibrated, wholly sacrificed to the taut will of one unambiguously implacable goal, all of them oozing death in its fullest, most incredible manifestation. The women, powerless on the other side of the bars, screamed like demons, kicked out at whichever guard happened to be closest, and yanked the hair of anyone who momentarily toppled in their direction, pulling it out in great clumps, bleeding at the roots, often with whitish bits of hairy scalp attached. The mother was on her knees banging her forehead repeatedly against the floor, as if enacting an excessively outlandish prayer, while the Prick curled against the metal bars in a fervent attempt to shrink the volume of his body to an absolute minimum, howling endlessly, doing nothing but howling. More apes showed up from the Governor’s office, at least twenty of them armed with very long metal poles. It was a matter of slotting the poles between the bars, rod by rod, from the grids on one side of the cage through to the other, and with the help of the guards who’d remained on the other side of the wing to hold them there, with two or three men securing each end, raising a line of barricades all the way across and up the rectangle, creating the most random and unpredictable arrangement of elevations and angles, as many as necessary to do battle against the two beasts, and at the same time mindful not to impede or thwart the actions of the Governor and the three apes, all in all a diabolical mutilation of the space, triangles, trapezoids, parallels, oblique or perpendicular divisions, lines and more lines, bars and more bars, until every possible move those gladiators could make was blocked and they were left crucified on the monstrous blueprint of this gargantuan defeat of liberty, all the fault of geometry. The first three of five horizontal bars perpendicular to the vertical ones flanking the box — primarily acting as supports for the poles which would be slotted from one side to the other, but also to sustain the vertical bars and thereby to structure the space — worked in the operation’s favor: the lower bar, at knee height, and the middle and upper bars, which came up to just below the stomach and up to the neck of a man of average height respectively (although Albino’s head towered above the tallest bar) meant that the apes could position the poles in such a way as to restrain that pair of crazed rebels, rendering them absolutely immobile. They, the gladiators, were invincible, higher than God, but this was too much for them. They tried to drive the poles upward, they jumped about and struggled in a thousand ways, but in the end they could do no more. The guards entered the cage to retrieve the Governor and his three helpers, who’d also been reduced to pieces. The women were dragged away, so hoarse their shouts had become inaudible. While all this was going on, the Prick managed to slide himself toward the feet of the officer who’d arrived with the guards. “Her,” he whispered, gesturing toward his mother, with a sideways glance from his misty, teary eye, “it’s her, she’s who’s carrying the drugs inside, up her crack, in her bits. Have her searched, see for yourself.” Only the officer heard. He smiled, a sorry grimace. Hanging from the metal poles, more captive than any captive, Polonio and Albino resembled bloody rags, dismembered apes left out to dry in the sun. All they knew for sure was that the mother hadn’t managed to hand the drugs to her son, not to him, not to no-ones, as she would say. It occurred to them both, in the same moment, that there was no point in killing the cripple now. Why bother.