“I won’t forget what you’re saying… Be sure to call my secretary… I hope we see each other again… Let’s see when…”
“I don’t know,” Jerico said to me, “why each of those anodyne phrases sounded like a threat.”
Especially when the president said goodbye to Jerico, asking him to be discreet, not to make a false move, and not to make himself noticeable.
“Be discreet, don’t make any false moves, don’t make yourself noticeable.”
And Jerico simply thought,
I’M A LOYAL man, Miguel Aparecido told me on the day I returned to the San Juan de Aragon prison, impelled by circumstances.
“I’m here because I want to be,” he added, and I agreed because I already knew that.
His expression did not change. If he repeated this psalm, it was because he considered it necessary. Perhaps it was only a preamble.
“I’m here to serve a sentence imposed on me by life, not the law.”
I made it clear I was listening attentively.
“I’m still here because of loyalty, I want you to understand this, Josue my friend. I’m still here by my own wish. Because if I were to leave here, I’d kill the person I should love the most.”
“Should?” I dared to say.
He said no one obliged him to be here except himself. He said if he left here he would commit an unforgivable act. He spoke as if the penitentiary were his salvation. I believed him. Miguel Aparecido was a sincere man. A caged tiger with sleeves perpetually rolled up, stubbornly kneading his forearms covered with almost blond hair, as if they were the weapons of a solitary warrior afraid to be victorious in battle.
“I tell you this, Josue, so you can understand my dilemma. I’m here because I want to be. I like prison because prison protects me from myself. I like prison because here I have a world I understand and that understands me.”
He gave me a capo’s smile but didn’t frighten me (if that was his intention) because I wasn’t a prisoner or subject to any mafia. Because I, ladies and gentlemen, was free-or thought I was.
He only laughed. “Ask any prisoner. Talk to Negro Espana or Perfida Albion. Consult with Siboney Peralta. You haven’t done that, old friend? They’re like a tomb. Don’t go to any trouble. But if you talk to them on my behalf, they’ll tell you the same thing I’m telling you. In the prison of San Juan de Aragon there’s an interior empire and I’m its head. Nothing happens here, boy, that I don’t know about, nothing I don’t want or can’t control. You should know: Even occasional riots are the work of my will alone.”
He rubbed his hands over his face. It sounded like sandpaper. He was lying to me.
He said he could smell the air and when it became very heavy, a huge fight was needed to clear the atmosphere. When they’re needed, he said, there are serious riots here, a chaos of broken chairs smashing against the walls, dining room tables in smithereens, scratches on metal doors, injured police, some even dead. Violations, abuses, sexual pleasures disguised as punishments, understand? Here we bite locks open.
Why was he lying to me?
“And then the smoke clears. A few ashes remain. But we are at peace again. Peace is necessary in a prison. Many innocents pass through here.” He looked at me with a kind of religious passion that disturbed me. “They have to be respected. You’ve seen the children in the pool. Do you think they should have a life sentence? Well, I’ll tell you that if this prison were like almost all the rest, I mean, concentration camps where jailers are the worst criminals, where police traffic in drugs and sex and are guiltier than the worst criminal, then I’d commit suicide, kid, because if there were chaos here it would be because I was powerless to establish the necessary order. Necessary, Josue, just that, no more and no less; the order that’s indispensable so the San Juan de Aragon prison isn’t heaven or hell, no, but just, and it’s a lot, a fucking purgatory.”
He was out of breath, which surprised me. In my opinion, Miguel Aparecido was a man of steel. Perhaps because in reality I didn’t know who he was. Was he lying to me?
He took me by the shoulders and looked at me as a tiger must look at its dying prey.
“When something happens here that slips out of my hands, it makes me furious.”
He repeated it syllable by syllable.
“Fu-ri-ous.”
He took a breath and told me that an individual turned up here, and at first Miguel did not attribute the slightest importance to him. Instead he laughed at him a little. He was a mariachi who then became a cop or vice versa, it doesn’t matter, but he was a born crook. It seems this mariachi or cop or whatever he was took part in a neighborhood disturbance a few years ago when the police themselves, charged with maintaining order, created disorder where there had been none, because the people in the district governed themselves and dealt with their own crimes without harming anyone. They gave a phenomenal beating to the cop or mariachi when neighbors and the “guardians of law and order” faced one another one tragic night when the police were sacrificed by the crowd, burned, stripped, hung by the feet as a warning: Don’t come back to the neighborhood, we govern ourselves here. Well, it seems the mariachi or cop or complete ass, his name was Maximiliano Batalla, pretended to be mute and paralyzed just so his mama, a very clever but sentimental old woman named Medea Batalla, would take care of him, feed him, and take him in his wheelchair to pray to the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception.
“Go on, Maxi, sing, don’t you see that Our Lady is asking you to?”
“And Maxi sang,” Miguel Aparecido continued. “He sang rancheras so well he deceived his poor mama, passing himself off as mute and crippled while his comrades-in-arts-mariachis and police and potheads and thugs-visited him, and Maxi organized them for a series of urban crimes ranging from the innocence of stealing mail from the United States because workers are sometimes so ignorant they send dollars in a letter, to attacking pregnant women to rob them at intersections when there’s a confusion of streetlights, traffic police, and racing engines.”
The Mariachi’s Gang-as it came to be known-invaded commercial centers for the sheer pleasure of sowing panic, without stealing anything. It permeated the city with an army of beggars simply to put two things to the test: that nothing happens to a criminal disguised as a beggar but everyone believes beggars are criminals.
“It’s a gamble,” Miguel Aparecido said very seriously. “A risk,” he added almost as if he were saying a prayer. “The plain truth is that the Mariachi’s Gang alternated its serious crimes with sheer fooling around, spreading confusion in the city, which was its intention.”
Maxi’s gang was organized to swindle migrants beyond the simple stealing of dollar bills in letters. They were very perverse. They organized residents of the neighborhoods where the workers came from to stone those who returned, because without them the districts no longer received dollars and in Mexico-I looked at Miguel when Miguel wasn’t looking at me-the poor die without dollars from the migrants, the poor produce nothing…
“Except workers,” I said.
“And grief,” Miguel added.
“So then”-I wanted to speed up the story-“what did Maximiliano Batalla do that you couldn’t forgive?”
“He killed,” Miguel Aparecido said very serenely.
“Whom?”
“Senora Estrella Rosales de Esparza. Errol Esparza’s mother. Nazario Esparza’s wife.”
Then Miguel Aparecido, as if it had no importance, moved on to other subjects or returned to earlier ones. I was stunned. I remembered Dona Estrellita’s body laid out in the Pedregal house on the day of the wake. I remembered the sinister Don Nazario and knew him capable of anything. I evoked the new lady of the house and did not know what she was capable of. My truest, most tender memory was of Errol, our old buddy from secondary school, with his head like an egg. I repressed my feelings. I wanted to listen to the prisoner of San Juan de Aragon.
“Do you know what hope means?” he asked.
I said I didn’t.
“You’re right. Hope brings nothing but sorrow, trouble, and disappointment.”
I thought I was going to see him being sentimental for the first time. I shouldn’t have had false hopes.
“What would happen if you were to escape?” I dared to ask him.
“Here, chaos. Outside, who knows. Here, people wither. But if I weren’t here, the streets would be filled with corpses.”
“More? I don’t follow.”
