Jennifer Clement - Prayers for the Stolen

I looked toward the Pacific Ocean to the place where I knew the Virgin Mary was drowning under the waves.

Mrs. Domingo’s diamond ring was still on my hand. I turned the diamond inward, toward my palm, so that it looked as if I were only wearing a gold wedding band.

I knew an army helicopter would take me to Mexico City. My crime was too important to be handled by the state of Guerrero. Thanks to television, I had done all this before. I knew exactly what was going to happen.

I knew I was going to go straight to the women’s jail because I was a witness and an accomplice to the murder of a girl who was the daughter of one of Mexico’s most important drug traffickers. This was the crime that had captured the nation.

If I had not stopped watching television at the marble house, I would have known that the brutal killing of a girl shocked the world. I would have known that a teacher from a rural community claimed it was vultures that led him to the shack. He told one reporter that there were over twenty vultures above and they looked like a cloud of black feathers swimming in the air.

In the helicopter I sat with my back to the pilot. Only one policeman got in and sat straight in front of me. I had to lean forward on my seat since my hands were still handcuffed behind my back.

As we lifted off and rose above the port of Acapulco, the helicopter turned and headed toward Mexico City. I looked out the window and down on the jungle below. My feet began to feel cold in the plastic flip-flops as we reached a higher altitude.

There were two canisters stored between the two seats in front of me. They were labeled with the skull and crossbones symbol for poison. In large black letters I read the word Paraquat .

I didn’t bother to look out the window when the helicopter flew over Mexico City. I’d always thought I’d visit the city’s parks, museums, and the famous Chapultepec zoo and castle, but now I knew it would never happen.

The guard sitting across from me was still wearing the wool ski mask. The sweat from his scalp dripped down his neck and the front of his shirt. He was so sweaty that even his hand resting on the machine gun glistened. His eyes peered through the holes in the wool and looked into my eyes.

You’re all a bunch of stupid girls, he said.

I looked away from him and out the window at the Popocatepetl volcano with the long plume of smoke blowing from its crater.

He shook his head back and forth.

All you stupid bitches care about is money.

My hands were handcuffed behind my back and I felt the diamond in my palm.

Long ago, my mother taught me how to protect myself against a man. She said to take my index finger and poke out the man’s eyes, to just scoop them out like clams out of their shells. She did not teach me what to do if I were in handcuffs.

I never want to have a daughter, he said.

He took out a piece of gum and pushed it through the hole in the mask and into his mouth. His mouth moved under the wool, under the small round opening, as he chewed.

If I had a daughter, he said, I’d spit.

In Mexico City , before I was formally booked and taken to jail, I was paraded for the press in a room at the airport.

I was made to stand behind a long table that was covered with several dozen rifles, pistols, and ammunition. This was the cache of weapons that had been found at the house in Acapulco. The reporters screamed out questions at me and television cameras filmed my face.

Who killed her, you or Mike?

Why did you have to shoot her in the face like that?

Why? Why did you kill an innocent little girl?

What happened at that ranch?

Are you Mike’s girlfriend?

As the reporters called out questions, I bowed my head, pressed my chin to my chest, and looked down toward my heart so they could not photograph my face. But then I remembered something. I looked up.

If I looked up, and let myself be filmed, my eyes would pierce right through the camera. In two seconds the image of my face would be beamed down into the bowl of the white satellite dish antenna my father had bought. In two seconds the image of my face would be beamed down straight into the television screen and right into my two-room home on our mountain. I knew that if I looked up into the camera, I would see my mother as she sat in front of the TV with a beer in her hand and a yellow plastic flyswatter across her knee. I looked into the camera and deep into my mother’s eyes and she looked back.

The Santa Marta Jail in the south of Mexico City was the biggest beauty parlor in the world. The bitter and citric scent of hair dyes, hair sprays, and nail polish permeated the rooms and passageways of the building.

The odors took me back to the day that Maria had her harelip fixed. It was the day a kettle of vultures circled above our home. And it was also the day my mother was angry with the Acapulco fortune-teller because the woman never predicted that my mother would have to bury someone.

Did that fortune-teller tell my mother that her daughter was going to go to jail?

In the prison office where I was booked there was a blackboard on the wall. A scrawl of white chalk kept track of the foreign inmates and children. In the jail there were seventy-seven children who were all under the age of six. There were three inmates from Colombia; three from Holland; six from Venezuela; three from France; one from Guatemala, one from the United Kingdom, two from Costa Rica, one from Argentina, and one from the United States.

After I was booked in and my photograph and fingerprints were taken, I was given a pair of clean beige sweatpants and a beige sweatshirt and told to change. The clothes were worn so thin I could see my skin beneath the weave. How many women had placed their arms in these sleeves before me?

The jail was a chessboard of beige and navy-blue squares. The women in beige were awaiting trial and the women in blue had been sentenced. In jail I learned that everyone would get hungry for yellow or green, as if colors had turned into food.

No one gave me a pair of shoes or sneakers.

I walked through the jail in my red plastic flip-flops with traces of Acapulco beach sand between my toes.

A female prison guard pushed me through the octagonal maze of corridors toward my cell. Instead of windows, long rectangular openings in the cement walls, like slashes from a knife, looked out on the main yard where a few women in navy blue kicked a ball around.

On the other side of the building, across the yard, was the men’s prison. It was close enough to hear shrieks and cries coming from over the wall. The men and women prisoners could wave to each other from certain points.

My cell contained a bunk bed. When you are charged with killing the daughter of one of the country’s most important drug traffickers you get special treatment. You get to share a cell with only one other prisoner. Most of the inmates had to share rooms with at least four people, two to a bed. I was placed in a cell with a foreigner because this makes it harder to be killed by orders from outside. I knew this. The person who killed that little girl had no chance of living, not for long.