over the snare of urban sounds, horns, motors, the squeal of tires, insults, the shouts of vendors, the silences of beggars, offers of sex, sighs of love, childish songs, school choruses, kneeling prayers, all amplified by perverse loudspeakers intent on torturing the prisoners with the memory of freedom.
I armed myself with courage to complete not only the requirements of the university course-“forensic practice”-but also to honor the decision of my respected teacher Sangines. The upper prison of San Juan de Aragon, above the children’s pool, was a large space on one floor. “Here nobody empties chamber pots down on us,” said the unsmiling guard who was my guide now, but on whose shoulders a polished and repolished cleanliness shone with a faint perfume of shit.
Siboney Peralta was a Cuban mulatto about thirty years old with long hair arranged in twisted braids, naked to his navel with the clear intention not only to display his musculature but to frighten or forestall with the power of his biceps, the profound throb of his pectorals, and the menacing hunger of his guts. He wore no shoes and his trousers were rags wrapped around an indistinct sex that could just as easily have been a long hose or a little knob. His crime was not one of passion. It was, according to Siboney, an enigma, a mystery, chico.
“A small mystery?”
“No, very big, chico.”
Siboney didn’t know why he was in prison. He loved music, so much it turned his head, he said, flexing all his muscles, to the point where he couldn’t help doing what the music said.
“I’m a child of the bolero, compay.”
Siboney obeyed the bolero. If the words said “Look at me” and the woman didn’t look at him, Siboney filled with holy rage and strangled her. If the song indicated “Tell me if you love me as I adore you” and the woman didn’t turn around to look at him, the least she received was a Siboneyera beating. If he asked her at a distance if she had a thought for him and if at a distance she remained silent, the mulatto attacked with chairs, windows, plates, flowerpots, what he found at hand in the silent universe of his desire.
“And knowing your trouble, can’t you control it?” I asked uncertainly.
Siboney bellowed with laughter that meant it isn’t my trouble, it’s my joy, my pleasure. What is? I told myself it was nothing less than believing in the words of songs, as I at this moment believe in what I am writing and transmitting to you, curious reader, with all the unpunished fatality of Siboney Peralta strangling the innocent women who did not take his songs literally.
Brillantinas and Gomas were placed in the same cell with the perverse intention of having them argue over the jars of brilliantine and envelopes of gum tragacanth that were the criminal obsession of the pair. Each one, not yet knowing the other, robbed pharmacies and beauty salons to obtain the scarcer brilliantines and ancient envelopes of gum for the hair that was their uncontrolled and uncontrollable fetish. The jailer explained to me that the original intention of the penitentiary’s authorities was to bring together the two rivals to argue about the object of their desires until they annihilated each other over a jar of pomade. This was, he added, the guiding principle of the prison of San Juan de Aragon: to provoke the convicts into killing one another, thereby reducing the prison population.
“Each time one dies, one less mouth to feed, Licenciado,” using the formal title for a lawyer.
“I’m not-”
“Licenciado.”
He looked at me with his sewer eyes.
“Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.”
However, Gomas and Brillantinas agreed not to argue but to coexist peacefully, smearing repulsive unguents on their hair.
“Can you suggest a way to have them kill each other?”
“Shave their heads,” I said in an evil humor.
The jailer had a good laugh. “They’d put brilliantine on their balls and under their armpits, Licen.”
Speaking of licenciados, I was introduced into the cell of the attorney Jenaro Ruvalcaba, whom I knew by name as a penologist of some fame in the Faculty of Law. When he saw me come in he stood and did his best to smooth his prison uniform: gray short-sleeved shirt and trousers far too big for the licenciado’s small stature.
“He says he’s committed no crime,” the jailer remarked with a wink.
“It’s true,” Jenaro said calmly.
“So you say,” the guard replied, mocking him.
Jenaro shrugged. I knew right away that asking him why are you here, what crime are you accused of, meant entering a labyrinth, with no exit, of excuses and injustices. Jenaro himself must have understood this-he was a slim, blond man about forty years old-when he sat down on the cot and patted it gently, inviting me to have a seat.
He said very calmly that the prison was filled with querulous, stupid people who want their freedom but wouldn’t know what to do on the outside. Resignation? No, adaptation, said Jenaro. The punishment of prison, my young friend (that’s me) consists in separating you from the world and then one of two things happens: either you die of despair or you invent new relationships inside what the Gringos call the Big House, which is what it is, after all, a house, a different kind of home but yours as much as the one you left.
“How do you manage?” I asked from behind my mask of a disciplined student.
“I accept what prison gives me.” Ruvalcaba shrugged.
He saw the query in my eyes.
“Once you disregard what you shouldn’t do,” he continued, “in order not to be humiliated.”
He anticipated my question.
“For example: Don’t accept visitors. They come because they have to. They’re always looking at their watch, they want to get away as soon as they can.”
“In Mexico we have conjugal visits.”
His smile was somewhere between cynical and bitter.
“You can be certain your wife has already found a lover-”
“Yes, but in any case she comes to-”
Jenaro raised his voice but grumbled.
“They’ll both betray you so you’ll stay in prison.”
Crazed, he shouted and stood, clutching at his head with both hands, tearing at his ears, closing his eyes.
He came at me, arms flailing. The guard clubbed him on the back of his neck and the licenciado fell, weeping, on the cot.
El Negro Espana and La Perfida Albion were two homosexuals incarcerated in San Juan de Aragon for the crime of solicitation exacerbated by robbery and murder. The institutional powers had not obliged them to reestablish their undesired masculinities. On the contrary, both had at their disposal makeup, tweezers, rouge, false eyelashes, and lipstick, which allowed them to feel comfortable and at the same time serve as a vice-ridden and contemptible example for the guards, who are all…
“Full-fledged hypocrites,” said El Negro Espana, applying a false beauty spot to his cheek and adjusting his expensive comb.
He pointed at it. “I got this when I went to the Feria in Sevilla.”
“Years ago,” murmured La Perfida Albion, an Englishman, I supposed, colorless, with very short hair, whose only mark of identity was the portrait of Queen Elizabeth stuck to his chest.
The flamenco dancer said that at first they had wanted to put them in separate cells in the hope the “normals” would beat them to a pulp. Except that just the opposite occurred. The most macho prisoners succumbed to the charms of La Negra Espana and La Perfida Albion when they shouted “Lover,” and though they called them, when they caressed, “Priscila” or “Encarnacion,” that only excited the men more, for which reason, the Englishman interjected, the authorities were resigned to putting them together again so they’d “do harm” only to each other.
They burst into laughter, caressing each other without shame, La Perfida crooning arias from Madrid operettas in honor of La Negra, and La Negra, to please La Perfida, singing tunes from Gilbert and Sullivan.
“Who protects us?” they sang together.
“We protect ourselves on our own,” they signed off.
Ventanas, whose name came from his predilection for robbing by liberating windows, laughed a great deal
