Jennifer Clement - Prayers for the Stolen

To one side of the yard, twenty or so women were playing football. The other prisoners sat around on benches. When I looked up I could see a colony of faces. Dozens of women peered out from the windows. When I looked up to the opposite side, I could see the men’s jail and their faces were also looking out of windows. Looking out of windows here was an activity. It was a way to live.

Those men, Luna said, pointing in the direction of the men’s prison, they’re looking for wives. Do you have a husband?

No.

If you get married he can come and visit you. They give you a room with a bed and everything.

No. I’m not married.

None of those men over there at the jail want to marry me, Luna said. Because of my arm. I really don’t want a man, I want a baby. I want someone to love.

Even if they take the child away from you?

In jail a woman could only keep her child until the age of six.

It’s six years of love at least, Luna said. And then you can have another. Do you want a baby?

Yes.

That’s Georgia, Luna said, pointing to one of the women playing football.

Georgia was a tall, slim woman who looked thirty years old. She had blond hair and blue eyes. In the prison yard, she stood out among all the dark skin and hair. She looked like a stick of butter on a table.

She’s from England, Luna explained. A woman from the British Embassy comes and visits her and gives her money, and her family sends money too.

Why is she here? What did she do?

She was coming to Mexico for a fashion show, Luna said. She worked in fashion. She had shoes.

Shoes?

Yes, two suitcases filled with them, the platform shoes, you know, the shoes with the big platforms?

Yes.

Those platform shoes were filled with heroin.

Heroin! Heroin! You’ve got to be kidding! What idiot brings heroin into Mexico?

That’s what everyone says.

I thought of the hills and valleys around my house planted with red and white poppies. I thought of the towns on our mountain like Kilometer Thirty, or Eden. These were the towns along the old road to Acapulco and not the new highway that tore our lives in two pieces. These were the towns that you could only enter by invitation. If you accidently went there no one would ask you your name or ask you what time it was, they’d just kill you. Mike once told me that there were huge mansions in those towns and incredible laboratories that were built underground to turn the poppies into heroin. He said that a miracle occurred at Kilometer Thirty a few years ago. The Virgin Mary appeared in a piece of marble.

Passenger buses always went on this road in convoy. They were scared that they’d be stopped and robbed. This was the highway where decapitated bodies were hung from bridges. This was the highway where the bus drivers swore that at night they’d seen the ghosts. They had seen the ghost face of a clown or the vaporous image of two little girls holding hands as they walked down the side of the road.

No one on this highway stopped to buy tamarind candy or live turtles or starfish with five rays wriggling and squirming in the dry air.

There is an American girl living in the town of Eden. Now that is a backward story, Mike told me. Who comes here?

He said that one of Mexico’s most important drug lords brought her back and she’s only about fourteen years old. She’s the man’s third wife and she likes to take care of everyone’s babies. She keeps to herself, Mike said. She likes to bake cakes.

The young American girl became a legend inside of me. I imagined her walking along our roads, drinking our water, and standing under our sun.

Mike told me that at Christmas the drug lord brought in fake snow and covered the town with mountains of the white powder to make the American girl happy. He also ordered the building of a huge Christmas tree, which was made out of dozens of pine trees that were delivered from a pine-tree nursery near Mexico City. The drug trafficker placed the tall tree in the middle of the main square and had it covered with Christmas decorations.

But that was not the best thing he did, Mike said. The best thing he did was to bring reindeer to the town. He flew them in on one of his private airplanes from a ranch in Tamaulipas.

Have you seen this? I asked.

Yes. Imagine, he turns a piece of Guerrero into the North Pole.

Surrounded by cement, far from the ocean and seabirds and my mother, I thought, How the hell did Mike know all of this?

My hand ached to slap him across the face.

I listened to his stories and never really listened. Now I knew why he had all this information and why I was in jail accused of killing a drug lord, the drug lord’s daughter, and having a package of heroin, worth a million and a half dollars, in my possession.

Where are you, Mike?

I thought, I am going to pray for you, Mike. I’m going to pray you remember me. I’m that deep line, from pinkie to thumb, in the palm of your right hand, Mike. The lifeline that gets full of dirt when you forget to wash.

In my mind I was talking to Mike, but in my eyes I was watching two dozen women playing football. One had Chicharito tattooed on her arm. Another woman had the full body image of the Virgin of Guadalupe on the outside of her right thigh.

They play football every day, Luna said. Even if it’s raining they have tournaments. The three teams are Rainbow, Liberty, and Barcelona.

The women ran and called out to each other. From here I could see Violeta who played with a lit cigarette in her mouth. She ran back and forth and never stopped puffing. The smoking butt sat in her mouth as she moved. When she approached a scuffle for the ball, she would throw her head backward, in a gesture that reminded me of a bird drinking water. She did this so that she would not burn anyone with the fiery tip of her cigarette. Her extremely long fingernails that were painted yellow yesterday now were green. From where I sat, only a few feet away, her fingernails looked like long parrot feathers coming out of the tips of her fingers.

Violeta is the captain, Luna said.

As we watched the game Aurora, who had finished fumigating our room, slunk toward us. She was still carrying the canister on her back. She sat down beside us.

You can go to your room now, Aurora said.

I squirmed a little from her odor. I had noticed her yellow fingertips but, outside in the daylight, I realized her skin and the whites of her eyes were also jaundiced.

No, we’re not going in for a while, Luna said.

Do you have any aspirin? Aurora asked.

Don’t tell me you’ve finished all yours again? You’ll get a hole in your stomach!

My head hurts.

Aurora lay down. She curled up on her side on the ground on the cold and damp cement. It seemed like the coldest piece of the planet on that cloudy morning. I wanted to touch her and caress her head as if she were a stray dog in the street. But, as with a stray dog, I was afraid to touch her because she might give me a disease. As she lay beside me, I even thought I could see mange on the side of her head, under her stringy hair.

If my mother were there she would have said, She deserves to be run over by a car!

The football game ended and Luna called out to Georgia to come over. Georgia walked slowly while Violeta followed behind, still puffing on a cigarette. When they reached us Violeta squatted down on her heels in front of me so that we were eye-to-eye. She rested her hands on her knees so that her nails were stretched out before her. Close up her nails no longer made me think of feathers. Instead, they were like the talons of hawks and vultures that swarmed above my house back in the jungle. Violeta’s nails looked like they could pick up a rabbit or a mouse and carry it off. The nails could tear at flesh. They could scratch someone’s face to pieces.