of prison-he looked directly at me, with an infernal vision of desire in his eyes-the wails of the fistfighters, the shouts of the pitiless, the silence of the tortured. And the debilitating sound of the city, out there.
“There was a reporter here. A real bastard, very rebellious. He threatened: ‘When I get out of here I’ll denounce you all, you bunch of assholes. You’ll see. As soon as I get out.’ They broke his hands. ‘Let’s see what you write now, you son of a bitch.’ It didn’t occur to them that when he got out he could dictate with broken hands. The jailers are in jail, you know? It doesn’t occur to them that there’s life outside these walls. They really think the world ends here. And it’s true. They don’t read what an ex-con may write. It doesn’t matter to them. They go on with their routine. The prison warden perhaps reads or receives complaints. I’ll bet you, your name’s Josue? (my name’s Josue) that if he doesn’t file them away, even when he acknowledges their receipt, he does nothing, what’s called absolutely nothing, you understand me, asshole? Nothing.”
He gave a sudden guffaw, as if freed of a commitment to himself not to express extreme emotions. If not a statue he was a stoic, I thought then, when I still didn’t know the mystery of Miguel Aparecido’s crimes.
It was his opinion that, as a young attorney, I ought to understand the rule of justice: Everybody’s for sale, everybody can be bought. Sell the torturer, sell the pickpocket. No matter how clean he is when he arrives, the next one will also steal, also torture.
“Remind the prof of that, let’s see what he tells you.”
He took a deep breath, as if he were concluding. But that wasn’t the case. He inhaled in order to go on. He was paying, I was convinced, a debt he owed the professor. It would take me some time to find out what Sangines had done for this prisoner, strange in his serenity, vigorous in his determination to continue here and not obtain his freedom. Why?
“A man was tortured here and the idiot threatened to inform on the torturer when he got out of prison.”
He paused so I would look at him and perhaps (I was beginning to observe) so I would admire him. He seemed to forget that I already knew what he was telling me. (What does prison do to one’s memory?)
“The torturer simply told him: You’ll never get out, asshole.”
He looked at me with those eyes I’ve mentioned, blue-black with flashes of the plumage of a canary imprisoned in a liquid cage.
“He never got out.”
I left and don’t know if I really heard or imagined, along the eternal corridor that led away from Miguel Aparecido, the horrible chorus of curses, anathemas, and fulminations that descended from the forbidden heaven of San Juan de Aragon down to the pool of the cursed children. In my bones I felt something I didn’t want to feel: the fury of failure, resentment like a sickness, anger like a probable salvation, and the final words Miguel Aparecido said to me.
“How do you know who is guilty? Above all, how do you know if you’re innocent?”
I LEFT THE question unresolved. Had Miguel Aparecido performed a play for only one spectator: myself? If that was true, did he do it with the complicity of Antonio Sangines? What united the prisoner and the professor beyond the relationship of accused-defender? Was my visit to the cells of the prison merely a part of my course in forensic practice, prepared by my professor with a dramatic, almost operatic example of perverse criminality? Because, after all, what keeps Miguel Aparecido imprisoned? Only his desire to remain behind bars? Or a secret maneuver, part of a web of interests I wouldn’t dare to imagine because I lacked both data and experience?
I could not permit these circumstances to distance me from an immediate obligation, which was to look after the woman who had fallen so accidentally into my arms at the airport.
I tended to her the best I could. She was a doll without will, dependent on me. The incident on the airfield had wiped her out, as if in the decision to take control of a small plane and compete for a runway with the Air France jet she had abandoned that portion of will we all accumulate and portion out in installments until we die. Lucha Zapata was exhausted because she had left on the runway all the energy her spirit had possessed until then. Now on account of simply passing by, I was obliged to undress her, bathe her, lay her down in Jerico’s bed, offer her a meal she barely tasted and vomited up before the food reached her stomach.
How to describe her?
She was a bird. A wounded bird who happened to nest in my garret. Which bird? We live in a country of birds. Two hundred sixty species in the Yucatec lagoons of Rio Lagartos. Almost seven hundred species embalmed in the Saltillo museum. They are part of the great tropical coasts of the country and ascend like eagles to the highest peaks. They survive, who knows how, the deadly smoke of the city. That is to say, I had plenty to choose from when I determined a resemblance between them and Lucha Zapata. She was like a pink (tending to red) flamingo in a fishing village in Yucatan, a bird withdrawn into itself and its sacred, almost sepulchral silence. Noise must be avoided: A motor, for example, is a resonant catastrophe that obliges the bird to fly away. Silence is required to see it. And if I kept a single bird, it was in spite of the physical appearance of the woman who lay in Jerico’s bed.
Lucha Zapata was a flamingo. Which is a bird, the dictionary says, with “very long bill, neck, and legs, white plumage on neck, chest, and abdomen, and intense red on head, tail, feet, back, and bill.” But this woman was small, withdrawn, lying in a fetal position in bed, and her arms were injured, pecked at as if other birds, raptors, had constantly assaulted her throughout her life. There was, in spite of everything, something vibrant in the small body I had seen in extreme action, struggling with the police after an audacious, frustrated attempt to fly. Did she even know how to pilot a plane? Had she managed only to climb into the machine and drive it down the runway as if it were an automobile? Did she even get it out of the hangar?
I didn’t dare ask her anything because between us loomed an invisible barrier that was in no way perverse. It was an untroubled boundary where, in implicit fashion, I offered her protection and she was grateful for it. Her nakedness was pathetic and at the same time natural and devout. What I mean is that Lucha Zapata was not embarrassed at her nakedness because she was without sin that needed to be forgiven. She lay in Jerico’s bed like a newborn, needing care and affection, completely removed from a lust she did not offer or expect from me, as I did not expect it from her.
Why do I compare her to a flamingo? She was not pink. Her extremities were not long. Her tints, however, were reddish, for the hair on her head and her pubis shone like a bird’s plumage. And if the body is our carnal plumage, hers was as pale as an early dawn, as wounded as a precipitate night. Lucha Zapata’s pale skin was pecked from head to toe. Red wounds glistened on her arms and legs, especially on her wrists and ankles.
She opened her eyes and looked at me looking at her.
I knew, and she told me without words, that her wounds were caused by no one but herself.
Why, in spite of everything, do I compare her to what she was not: a flamingo lost in a distant Mayan lagoon? Because of the fright in her. Not a common, ordinary fear but a vocation for solitude that withdraws from contact, including the visual contact of another person’s gaze, too often guilty of unhealthy curiosity and offensive prejudice.
Lucha Zapata looked at me and did not see evil in my eyes.
She simply extended her hand to take mine and said Dress me, Savior, pick me up and take me back to my house. My things are there. My medicines. Hurry. It’s urgent.
What was I to do, compassionate readers, except satisfy the desires of this helpless woman who from now on-my head and heart told me so, even my respiration, the involuntary panting with which I picked up the defeated body wrapped in a sarape-would be my responsibility? I carried her down to Calle de Praga, hailed a taxi, and repeated the address she had just given to me with a sigh: “Cerrada de Chimalpopoca beside the Metro in Colonia de los Doctores.”
I became accustomed to having two addresses. One on Calle de Praga, where punctually every month I received the check that allowed me to live without determining who sent it to me or asking at the bank for the name of a person who undoubtedly did not wish to be known or have the bank reveal his or her identity. The other on Cerrada de Chimalpopoca: the modest, bare little house of my friend Lucha Zapata. An old entrance, a courtyard with dead flowers, in the rear an unfurnished retreat with mats on the floor, a Japanese eating table, a pillow or two, and a rod where half a dozen skirts and trousers were hanging. Behind the improvised closet a tiny bathroom with a tub and shower. A variety of pharmaceutical products. I recognized some names but didn’t know most of them. The towels were very old.
“Stay. Don’t leave me.”
How could I abandon her, I who longed to be responsible for someone since I couldn’t be responsible for unknown relatives (who had been, in my opinion, humiliatingly, generously, shamefully responsible for me), or
