Jennifer Clement - Prayers for the Stolen

Do you have any aspirin? Aurora asked.

In that cluttered jail cell filled with poisonous fumes, I learned that Aurora met Paula at McClane’s ranch.

The day Paula arrived it was McClane’s daughter’s fifteenth birthday party, Aurora said. I was in a tent with the other stolen women. Most of them had been taken when they tried to cross the border into the USA. All these men kept coming in and looking us over. I was already older. This was the third time I had been sold. Paula said she was from outside Acapulco. She was so beautiful.

I nodded. Yes, she was.

I thought of our angry piece of land that once held a real community, but was ruined by the criminal world of drug traffickers and the immigration to the United States. Our angry piece of land was a broken constellation and each little home was ash.

Aurora struggled to breathe. She sat up on her elbows but stayed under the blankets. I perched on the edge of the bed, as there were so many bags and things around her. There was no room. Aurora’s bed was a garbage dump.

A man who was the son of a huge drug lord in Tijuana took me, Aurora explained. Because of this, I did not live on McClane’s ranch, but we would visit often and there were parties. Sometimes I would go to Matamoros or they would come to Tijuana. So, I didn’t see Paula that often, but I saw her. I remember once I went to McClane’s ranch for a birthday party and she had a tattoo that said Cannibal’s Baby on her arm. I’d never seen that before. Of course one of McClane’s nicknames was Cannibal. They called him that because he was always making jokes about eating people, especially women.

Did he really eat people?

He’d say things like, You’re so pretty, I want to eat your arm. I’ll shake some salt on you and roll you up in a tortilla. Things like that. We all knew that when we gave ourselves to these men it was like washing dishes or taking out the garbage.

What do you mean?

It was like being a urinal.

Aurora coughed and reached for a plastic bottle filled with water and took a long drink. When she finished, she offered the bottle to me. I didn’t want to, because she seemed so sick, but I took a sip. I knew I was drinking her spit.

Paula’s tattoo was something new, Aurora continued. I was surprised she had that done, but maybe she just had no choice.

Yes, she had that tattoo, I said. And the cigarette burns.

Those men loved tattoo parlors and they always went to one in Tijuana. McClane had Saint Death tattooed on his back and the Virgin of Guadalupe on his chest. I never saw Paula again and we never said goodbye.

She made it home. It was not expected.

The rumor was that she’d managed to run away. They said one night she just walked out of the ranch and walked and walked and never came back. We thought he might have killed her. You never knew. We hoped she had not tried to cross to the United States because she would have been stolen again for sure.

What happened to you? I asked as Aurora lay back on her bed. She had no pillow so she had to lie flat.

I took the rat poison out from under the kitchen sink and mixed it in with the coffee.

Aurora’s eyes were so pale they made me think of the light blue color of dead jellyfish on the beach in Acapulco.

Where are you from? I asked.

Aurora was from Baja California. She grew up in the village of San Ignacio. Her father worked as a tour guide taking tourists out in his boat to see the California gray whales.

Look at this, Aurora said.

She pulled out a piece of cardboard from under her pile of plastic bags. It was a collage of a beach with a whale on the surface of the water and several starfish and shells cut out from magazines and glued to the brown sheet.

I cut the starfish from black paper, she said. No magazine in this jail had a photograph of a starfish!

I like it, I said. It’s pretty. It reminds me of beaches on the outside of Acapulco. I’ve never seen a whale though.

You have to understand, the first time I was stolen I was only twelve, Aurora continued. I was only a small fish, the kind you always throw back into the ocean because it is too small to eat. They should not have done that! I was the only girl in the village with light eyes.

Her eyes were like the glass in a glass-bottom boat.

No one could believe it at the ranch. Who would ever have thought that Aurora, the sweetest and most obedient of all, could have done it, but I did.

I could see into Aurora’s eyes and down into her body of light brown sand and shells.

I killed five men. Isn’t that so special! They were gathered at the ranch for a meeting. It took them two days to die in a hospital in Tijuana. The police came and arrested me when the doctors proved that the men had been poisoned. The police tested the coffee cups and they tested positive for poison. And I’d even washed them over and over with Ajax! Everyone knew I made the coffee for the rats’ meetings. Everyone knew there was a bottle of rat poison in the rats’ kitchen under the sink. Rats need to be poisoned, right?

Aurora rummaged through one of her plastic supermarket bags. She unknotted a bag filled with buttons and a stack of nail files that were held together with a rubber band. From here she also pulled out a small pile of old newspaper clippings.

Here. Read this, if you don’t believe me. It was even in the newspapers!

I read the newspaper article and then handed the clipping back to her and she placed it back into the pile.

She was proud of killing those men. It was her act of justice.

I boiled the water. I added the coffee. I let it sit.

Yes.

I placed the cups on a tray with a bowl of sugar. I could hear the men talking in the dining room. I stirred the coffee grounds in the pot.

Yes.

Aurora paused and tried to take a breath. She only seemed able to breathe out. She tried to breathe in not only with her lungs but also with her whole body, in heaves, but failed.

How did you do it?

It just took one minute. It was easy. I took out the bottle of rat poison from under the sink. I poured it into the coffee. It was so easy. It was like adding sugar or Coffee-mate.

I reached over and took her arm. The surface of her skin felt coarse as if it were still covered in beach sand. I looked into the sea landscape of her eyes and saw the whales and dolphins.

Please tell me more about Paula and McClane, I said.

Aurora told me that McClane not only had ranches all over the north, he also had businesses and properties in the state of Guerrero.

Near you, Aurora said. I never saw this, but other women told me that he had a mansion outside of Acapulco where one Christmas he built the North Pole and even brought in real reindeer on an airplane.

Yes, I answered, I’ve heard about that.

Did you know that McClane loved his horse so much that he buried it in a coffin in a cemetery as if it were a person?

No, I did not know that.

They say he wants to be buried in his car.

The cemeteries are full of men buried in their cars. I have heard about this.

I watched Aurora take another sip from the water bottle. How did Paula make it back? Aurora asked. Did you see her?

Aurora rested her head back down on the mattress.

Did she tell you about McClane’s ranch? Aurora asked.

Paula’s mother fed her from a bottle, a baby bottle, and even fed her baby food, Gerber, from a jar, I said.

Aurora listened and yawned. Her eyes closed and opened a few times. Then she turned on her side and fell asleep.

I looked at her. With her face quiet, in repose, without struggling to breathe, I could see she had been beautiful. She had been worth stealing. Today she was like a malnourished dog lost on the highway.

I curled up at the bottom of her bed among the plastic bags and fumigation canisters and fell asleep too.