I didn’t say anything and she embraced my knees murmuring Love me Savior, I have only you, don’t leave me, what do you need to love me more? what do you need to know I need you?
She looked at me as I believe one kneels and really looks at the “Savior,” as she called me.
Did I want to know about her past? Like in the song, only if I got her what she needed, “Savior, I depend on you, I don’t want to go out on the street, I’m here with you but you have to give me what I need, please, Savior, help me recover the good and leave the bad behind, first I need relief, then I swear I’ll settle down, I’ll be good, I won’t hurt myself anymore, Savior, Salvador, go out and get me what I need and I swear I’ll reform, understand that I have two I’s like the cartoon El Senor Merengue, and the other I commands more than I do myself, what am I leaving behind? help me recover my soul, Savior, you know I’m good, don’t think I have a taste for what’s bad, don’t think I like what’s ugly, it’s in spite of myself, I want to be good, look, I want to have a baby with you, Savior, make me a baby right now so I’m redeemed…”
She fell asleep. I already knew her sleep was a foretaste of death. I went out to get what she wanted. I came back. I watched over her. I spent the night watching. At six in the morning, Lucha Zapata woke, looked at me in anguish from the bare mat, and I soothed the entreaty in her eyes right away, giving her the injection and the syringe, helping her tie up her arm, watching her travel from hell to heaven and fall back to sleep.
I came back that night. She was sitting in one of those little Mexican chairs with a straw seat and brightly colored back, like a little girl being punished. I smiled at her. She looked up. A venomous sky struggled between her lids. She hugged herself with contained violence.
“You want me to repent just to give you pleasure,” she spat at me. “You’re like everybody else.”
I caressed her head. She moved away contemptuously.
“You think you can control me?” She laughed. “Not even love controls me. Falling in love is submitting. I’m independent.”
“No,” I said without sadness. “You depend on drugs. You’re a poor slave, Lucha, don’t pretend to be independent. Don’t make me laugh. You make me sad.”
She let out an animal shout, the authentic howl of a wounded beast, arbitrary, arbitrary, she began to shout, you think habit can control, nothing controls me, where did you put my aviator helmet? only flying pacifies me, take me to the airport, give me a plane, let me fly like a free bird…
She stood and embraced me.
“Do it for your sweet mamacita.”
“I don’t know her.”
“Then for charity.”
“I don’t have any.”
“What do you have?”
“Love and compassion.”
“Have compassion for yourself, asshole.”
And the demon of consequences, what about him?
MY DISTINGUISHED READERS will say that going from Lucha Zapata’s house to the prison of Miguel Aparecido was like passing from one hell to another. Not at all. Compared to the house on Cerrada de Chimalpopoca, the San Juan de Aragon prison was barely a purgatory.
I had the pass Professor Sangines had given me. I went from grating to grating until I reached Miguel Aparecido’s cell. The prisoner stood when he saw me. He didn’t smile, though in his face I saw an unusual amiability. We exchanged glances before I went into the cell. It was evident we wanted to please each other. What did he want from me? I, from him, wanted only more information for my thesis, though now that Sangines had decided the topic-Machiavelli and the creation of the state-I wondered what the Florentine thinker had to do with the Mexican prisoner.
It didn’t take me long to find out.
Miguel Aparecido had a certain manner that really consisted of a series of digressions, intended perhaps to educate me. His strong, masculine figure, possessed of an aura of fatality together with an appearance of will, stood as he received me, his arms crossed and his sleeves rolled up, revealing arms covered with hair that was almost blond in the uncertain light of the cell, in contrast to the criminal’s Gypsy air, olive skin, and his eyes: blue- black with yellow flecks.
“He doesn’t want to leave prison,” Sangines had told me. “The day he completed his first sentence and left, he immediately committed a crime so he could return.”
“Why?”
“I have no idea! I’m confused.”
“Are you his attorney, Maestro?” I asked with a certain audacity.
“He has given me instructions to save him from freedom.”
“Why?”
“Ask him.”
I did, and Miguel Aparecido gave me an obscure smile.
“So, kid, why do I like prison? I could tell you things like this. Because I’m free of appearances. Here inside I don’t have to pretend I’m what I’m not or that I’m what other people want me to be. Here I can laugh at all the conventions of courtesy, the how are things, how nice, at your disposal, at your service, let’s make a date to get together, how’s everybody at home, where are you going on vacation? how much did that beautiful watch cost? I’m not holding you up, am I?”
I laughed without wanting to and he became serious.
“Because I’m free of belonging to any class but especially the middle class we all aspire to. They want to be free, imagine. I want to be a prisoner.”
“There are many classes in the middle class,” I dared again. “Whom do you wish to be free of?”
He smiled. “Use
He said it in a savage tone. I didn’t let myself be intimidated. I don’t know what I had on my side. The assignment from Professor Sangines. My differences with Jerico. The daily, fortifying trial of tending to Lucha Zapata. Or a recent confidence in my own superiority as a student, a free man, a citizen capable of confronting a recidivist criminal whose stake in the terrain of greatness was the decision to remain in prison. Forever? For how long?
Miguel Aparecido did not take long to return fire even before I could open the first document. He said I was very young but perhaps I hadn’t fully understood something. What? That youth consists of daring. Growing old means losing one’s audacity, he continued.
“What did you dare to do?” I asked, using
“I killed,” he said with simplicity, aplomb, and finality.
I didn’t dare to continue with a “why?” or a “whom?” which from the first had no answer. I concluded then and there that Miguel Aparecido left this question hanging because answering it meant knowing the fatality of the plot and I-who had just moved from
“Do you know what’s fucked up in prison?” he resumed. “Here you’re not anything anymore. First, you’re not anybody. You’re separated from the world. You have to invent another world and then make a new relationship for yourself with a world that matters only if you’ve created it yourself, you know, boy?”
“Licenciado,” I said with dignity.
He laughed. “Fine, Lic. You come here and first you ask yourself, who’s protecting me? After a while, after humiliations, blows, lies, unkept promises, solitudes, tortures, punches, moans and you can’t tell if they’re from taking a shit or jerking off, the arrogance of the guards, the sadism of the other prisoners, you learn to protect yourself. How?”
He took me by the shoulders. I was afraid. He did it only to move me over and stare right into my eyes, not accepting any evasion in my gaze. If my life ended with my being smacked by the undertow on a Guerrero beach, I should add that in this scene with the ill-tempered Miguel Aparecido, I truly began to drown far beyond any previous circumstance in my life.
“Are you imprisoned unjustly?” said the classicist in my heart.
He replied that in a certain way yes, but in the long run, not really.
