She looked at me with eyes so transparent and so clouded at the same time, so ravaged by age, declaring themselves as young as I wished, as old as I desired, that the fragility of the body embracing mine was transformed, by the art of sudden affection, into my own body of a (relatively) vigorous young man of twenty-four. I’m trying to say that whatever her fragilities and my strengths, at that moment in the taxi she got under my skin through the sorcery of her gaze and I got under hers, I confess, through the not very magical temptation of touching her breasts and finding there an immediate responsive promise, as if the nipples I caressed that night in the darkness of the damn dilapidated taxi had been waiting for me a long time and were, from now on, mine alone no matter how many other hands had caressed them before.
How could I find out about Lucha Zapata’s past? Should I even try? Was it forbidden to me? Wasn’t she demanding it: Find out about my past? Or was she affirming, in her extreme helplessness, in the worshipful abandonment of a little street dog, take care of me, you, whatever your name is, I’m exhausted, take me wherever you like, save me today and I promise to save you tomorrow.
I carried her like a rag doll up the stairs. Her head sheathed in the aviator helmet rested on my chest. Her swooning bird’s arm hung inertly around my neck. Her jacketed torso smelled of damp. Her damaged legs hung from my arms. Her shoes were falling off. I did nothing to retrieve them. It was urgent for me to carry her upstairs, lay her down, care for her, protect her.
The shoes would still be there tomorrow. It was Sunday.
MIGUEL APARECIDO LOOKED me up and down, hiding a smile that was not quite contemptuous but not indifferent either. I responded with my own gaze, meant to be bolder than his, among other reasons because I would leave the prison of San Juan de Aragon and lose myself in the tumult of the city and my occupations, while he-Miguel Aparecido-would remain here with his strange blue-black eyes flecked with yellow framing a look of violence tempered by melancholy, as if his life before prison was so turbulent that now he could compensate for it only with a kind of sadness that still shunned compassion. His bushy eyebrows joined in a scowl that would have been diabolical if his eyes had not provided a ray of light. The brightness I detected in him had to do with the way he stood, upright, without a trace of deference or, what is worse, defiance as a disguise for rancor. There were no external signs in this man of dejection or impatience. Only a way of standing that was serene though on the offensive, leaning forward. All this marked by his virile, square-jawed face, shaved too meticulously-I’m not a prisoner, it proclaimed-and with a light olive skin typical, my forgettable overseer Maria Egipciaca would say, of “a decent person.” He was, however, a confirmed criminal. Appearances, my teacher Sangines would add, deceive. Above all if, as in the case of Miguel Aparecido, the resemblance is to the actor Gael Garcia Bernal and the singer Erwin Schrott.
Miguel Aparecido’s nose seemed to sniff at me when I was admitted to his cell. I want to believe that a nose so straight and slender and therefore so immobile had to display some alert, impatient, defiant movement, everything the prisoner’s almost Roman profile, similar to statues in a history textbook, did not betray, I don’t know if in volitional defense or as a simple expression of his own nature. I played, when I met him, with the prisoner’s Roman appearance, accentuated by the barely dissimulated smile of willful lips that wanted, it seemed at the time, to complete the quasi-imperial distinction of graying hair, combed forward but curly in the back.
Professor Sangines had warned me: Miguel Aparecido is a strong man. Don’t underestimate him.
I learned this when he gave me his hand in the Roman style, clasping my forearm and displaying a naked power that ran from his hand to his shoulder, where a kind of red toga hung that moved me to imagine he was a madman who had been locked in the prison for a very long time. In his personal lunatic asylum he was perhaps the Emperor Augustus. I still didn’t know if in our national lunatic asylum he would behave like Caesar or like Caligula.
“Twenty years,” Sangines had told me.
“For what reason, Maestro?”
“Murder.”
“Is it a life sentence?”
“In principle, yes. But Miguel Aparecido has been released twice: for good conduct the first time, in an amnesty the second. On both occasions he refused to leave prison.”
“Why? How did he manage that?”
“The first time he organized a riot. The second, it was by his own wish.”
“I repeat. Why?”
“That’s why he’s an interesting individual. Ask him.”
Ask him. As if it were that easy to oppose my small humanity as a law student, small fornicator in brothels, small companion of boys perhaps smaller than me, small pupil of priests who may have been perverse, small hanger-on in a house of other people’s mysteries I didn’t understand, small slave of a tyrannical government, this small “I” confronting all the concentrated, powerful, iron strength (untouchable body, a gaze of such savage serenity it obliged me to lower my eyes and avoid his touch) of the imprisoned man who was saying to me now:
“How do you know who is guilty?”
I didn’t know how to respond. He looked at me without mercy or irony. He was impenetrable.
“Do the law codes tell you?”
“We live under written law,” I replied with my confused pedantry.
“And we die by the law of habit,” the prisoner added, observing me constantly.
“One thing is true: The fucked-up thing is that they put you here and separate you from the world. Then you have to invent your own world, and the world requires connections to others,” he continued.
“That’s the fucked-up thing,” he said, and smiled for the first time.
He was giving me a small class. He invited me to sit beside him on the cot. I was afraid to lose the effect of his terrible gaze. I observed him out of the corner of my eye. I believe he knew why Sangines had sent me here. He owed the professor something. He didn’t want to defraud him. He didn’t want me to leave with hands as empty as my poor vacant head, scorned from the very beginning by the criminal.
“You have to invent new connections for yourself. That’s fucked up,” he repeated without looking at me.
“Does anybody protect you?” I dared to address him informally, using
His answer surprised me:
“The first thing you learn here is to protect yourself on your own. There are people in prison who wouldn’t know what to do on the outside.”
I told him I didn’t understand. If some convicts didn’t know what to do out of prison, why did he stay here since he undoubtedly knew what to do on the outside?
He smiled. “They’re whining, stupid people, without direction.”
“Who?”
“Think,” he murmured severely.
“Your prison companions,” I insisted on gaining audacity’s ground. “The others.”
He turned to look at me and his eyes told me he had no friends here, no companions. And therefore? His arrogance did not permit him to praise himself. That he was different seemed obvious to me. That he was superior perhaps was his secret. He was open with me, frank. I’m certain his relationship with Sangines included an inviolable pact: If I send you someone, Miguel Aparecido, talk, speak to him, don’t leave him hungry. Remember. You owe me something.
Why did he commit another crime to stay in prison? Why did he refuse amnesty?
He didn’t answer me directly. With a paraphrase that revealed the interior of his vast conspiracy to remain imprisoned, in spite of friendships and good conduct, without allowing me to understand the heart of the matter: Why did Miguel Aparecido want to remain imprisoned? For how long? Was there some reason that kept him from desiring freedom?
He said the first time they imprison you (he did not say, the distracted reader should note, “they imprisoned me”), anger explodes in your chest. You are blinded by a longing to take your revenge on the person who put you here (who put him here, wasn’t it the law, was it an individual?). Then rage gives way to astonishment at finding yourself here, at knowing you are here, knowing (or believing, lying to yourself?) that you are innocent. This is the moment when you give up or begin to grow. You learn to create a scab, to cover the open wound with a mental or physical scab. If you don’t, you go all to hell, you’re defeated, surrounded as you are, you know? by the great wail
