evictions, estates, seizures, bankruptcies, mergers, land boundaries, jurisdictions, appraisals, all of this the professor enumerated without referring to the internationalist subject of his class and, eventually, anchoring in prison law.
Did he sigh? Did he command?
The fact is that, motivated by Don Antonio Sangines, I requested and secured permission to do my class in forensic practice in prison.
And not in any prison but in the most feared, most famous, but most unknown, visible in its strange name but invisible in its even gloomier (I supposed) interior. The grave of the living. The house of the dead, yes. The Mexican Siberia, a wasteland within a wasteland, a cave within another cave, a labyrinth with many entrances and no exit, an altar of consecrated blasphemies and profanations. The black hole. The metaphor of our life imprisoned in the womb at first, in a shroud at the last, in the deepest secrets of the domestic prison between tango and tomb. The prison built with the stones of the law. Hope, the prison of Zechariah. Liberation, the hope of Isaiah.
And so, with these thoughts, I commenced the conclusion of my law studies at the Palacio Negro de San Juan de Aragon, built underground in the bed of the old Rio del Consulado, beneath the footsteps of the urban crowd which, I never suspected, could be heard as one more torture in the depths of this prison of prisons.
LA CHUCHITA APPROACHED and, with tears in her eyes, gave me her hand. In the other she carried a small mirror into which she looked from time to time with a mixture of serenity and alarm. Dress me, she said. I replied that she was already dressed. The girl cried out and began to pull off her clothing, I mean the long nightshirt of coarse homespun worn by all the girls imprisoned in the depths of San Juan de Aragon. I hate it, she screamed, tearing at her tangled hair flattened by grime, I hate seeing myself naked. You’re dressed, I said innocently. She leaped at me, trying to scratch me. They have to dress me, she screamed, they have to dress me. Then she bowed her head and withdrew while a blue boy, at her side, bent over the cement floor picking up something invisible, and a little farther on, another adolescent scratched incessantly at his back and complained of the pimples that itched, that burned, that never healed no matter how his bloodied nails scratched at dark skin.
The girl Isaura had a fixed idea: the volcano Popocatepetl. I sat beside her for a while. She spoke of nothing else. She repeated the name of the mountain over and over again, smiling, savoring the syllables. Po-po-ca-te-pel. I corrected her. Po-po-ca-te-petl. The word was Nahua-I corrected myself, wanting her to understand me: Aztec. She repeated: Po-po-ca-te-pel. I insisted: te-petl. She looked at me with sustained, inexplicable fury, as if I had violated a secret chamber, a sacred corner of her existence. I would have preferred the girl to attack me physically. She merely observed me with a distance that wanted to wound me and the entire world, the world that had sent her here, the empty swimming pool of children imprisoned in San Juan de Aragon. What would I say to her? There was no open pathway between my presence and her release. When she walked away repeating Po- po-ca-te-pel, she no longer was looking at me.
I wasn’t told the name of the next creature I approached. Its sex was indecipherable. It couldn’t have been more than six or seven years old, but something had been engraved on its face. Indeterminacy, or rather, a gentle, undefined astonishment. Who was it? Alberto. A boy. No. Albertina. A girl. It looked at me with tears in its eyes.
Another boy of about fifteen showed off a scar at his waist. I say “showed off” because he displayed it with a self-satisfied mixture of misfortune and valor, pointing at it with his index finger, look at me, touch me, just try…
I was distracted by a boy with a very sad face. I didn’t dare ask him his name. He couldn’t have been more than eleven, but in his gaze an ancient guilt was revealed in small lines between his eyebrows, a grimacing mouth, the defiance suggested by very white teeth in a filthy mouth from which the remains of a tortilla and scrambled eggs were dangling. Like a flash of lightning, sadness transformed into aggression when he realized I was observing him.
“Felix,” he shouted. “Felicity.”
He threw himself at me. Only the intervention of a guard stopped the charge.
Others were more eloquent. Ceferino told me he wasn’t guilty of anything. The crime lay in being abandoned. He was abandoned in a wretched neighborhood where not even the dogs could find anything to eat in the garbage dump. He wanted to eat a dog to see what it tasted like. It would have been better if he had eaten the parents who abandoned him in the neighborhood of the garbage dump. He looked for them. No way. Where did they go? The city is enormous. What did they leave behind? The tag on his overalls. The name of the store where they bought him overalls. There they told him where his papa and mama had gone. He walked an entire day from neighborhood to neighborhood, searching until he found them at a little stand on the Xalostoc road, there on the highway to Pachuca, that is, right on the fucking road. Papa, mama, I was going to say to them. It’s me, your son, Perez. He realized as soon as he looked at them that they had abandoned him because the child was a burden, another mouth to feed, a hindrance, and now, in their small business, his papa and mama had forgotten him completely. They believed-he believed-that if they had prospered just a little it was because they didn’t have to feed a boy named Perez. He looked at them, if not smiling then satisfied, self-satisfied. Not free of guilt. Just forgetful of everything that happened before they emigrated from the neighborhood and found a suitable way to survive. They were unaware of his existence. They didn’t know he was there, at the age of eleven, ready to attack them with an ice pick, stab out their eyes, leave them there screaming and bleeding, and end up in the prison for minors at San Juan de Aragon.
Did they survive?
I wish they had, so they would never see the world again and have to find another way to live, feeling themselves scorned, fucked, gone all to hell, assholes, sons of bitches.
Merlin was a mentally deficient boy. Not completely, but sufficiently so. Shaved head, the mischievous gaze of a happy imbecile, his mouth hanging open, snot dripping; the jailer who accompanied me explained that this boy was part of the bands of idiots criminal gangs used to commit offenses. They placed bombs in cars. They were a distraction during criminal acts. They served as decoys. They acted as false abductees. The smartest ones were spies. Almost all of them were given to the gangs by their families in exchange for money, and sometimes just to get rid of the runty little bastards.
Others, the amiable guard helping me to complete the course in forensic practice pointed out, had more talent but were born into the most absolute marginality, with lives close to those of dogs or pigs. Their only way out-he traced a wide arc with his arm and open hand-was crime or prostitution. He implied, to my amazement, that this black lake was in a way a place of seduction. Instead of a deadly fate, the kids who swarmed here, like phantoms, alone or arm in arm, all dressed in their sad caftans of coarse cloth, barefoot, scratching their shaved heads as if nits were their only consolation, picking at their companion’s navel, scratching their balls and their armpits, blowing their nose with their hand, shitting and pissing at will, all together in the great underground cement pool in the obscene guts of the Federal District, all possessed a jailhouse destiny.
That was implied in the jailer’s gaze, at once indifferent and obscure. Albertina said she had been kidnapped in a restaurant in Las Lomas, no less, when she went to the bathroom and disappeared while her parents looked for her and she, drugged, left the place in the arms of her kidnappers, except dressed as a boy, her curls cut off, her hair dyed black, and a pallor that did not leave her in the stupor of never knowing again who she was or who she had been, trained only to steal, to slip between security bars and end up behind prison bars, completely disoriented forever.
What do you want us to do?
I don’t know how to get dressed by myself! screamed La Chuchita.
The boy with the scar on his back had been kidnapped in order to remove his kidney and sell it to the Gringos who require replacement organs. Thank your saints they didn’t take both of them, asshole. He dedicated himself to finding who kidnapped him, drugged him, and operated on him. Since he didn’t find them, he decided to cross the border and go from hospital to hospital destroying with a colorful cane from Apizaco the jars where other people’s kidneys were resting. Broken glass, spilled fluids, kidneys that the boy picked up, cooked, and ate, wrapped in tortillas, like great Gringo tacos devoured by a vengeful Mexican. He was expelled from California, contrary to the United States policy of detaining Mexicans, especially those suspected of not speaking English. Catarino-that was his name-turned out to be too dangerous, even behind the bars of Alcatraz: He was capable of eating them all, like Hannibal Lecter.
Justice triumphed.
