Laura Restrepo - Hot Sur

I didn’t know that yet, and I hadn’t made friends who would defend me. I hadn’t formed alliances or joined any of the gangs, and my sisterhood with Mandra X had not yet begun, meaning I was alone and left to my own devices.

They had already warned me about her, Mandra X. “She’s the leader of those who spill milk,” they told me. I imagined a million things. Spill milk? It sounded sexual, but something a man would say. Later, I was able to see it with my own eyes. Fucking around, they’d spill cartons of milk on the floor of the dining room. Las Nolis: that’s what Mandra’s girls are called. They’re her clan, her buddies — the sect of the chosen. You would go get some food and there were puddles of milk everywhere, the tables, the benches, the trays. At first, I thought they did it just to fuck with people, but later I found out it was their way of demanding from those in charge that they replace the regular milk with lactose-free milk. Because of the farts, you know? Here, it’s two, three, or even four to a cell. Many of the inmates are lactose intolerant, and if they drink it, their stomach swells, and then come the torpedoes. Can you imagine what it’s like to spend a night locked up in a room eight by nine feet with three old broads farting away? A gas chamber, sorry, bad joke. They also said that Mandra X was a dyke, and that if she liked someone, she got her by hook or by crook. That’s what they said. I wasn’t sure. I had seen her, and she was a huge woman; in Manninpox, whoever commits to working out and is disciplined about it can become a bull without leaving her cell, with a daily routine of push-ups, pull-ups, sit-ups, and crunches. That was Mandra X, so muscular you would swear she had a pair of hanging balls. And she was weird, very weird. Weirder than a checkered dog. They also told me that she was the leader of the resistance inside. That she was a warrior, or what they call warrior in here, an inmate who’s not afraid of skirmishes. The one who goes to the authorities with demands when the prisoners get worked up about something. I had heard all this, but until that moment I had only run into her in the hallway when she had jumped on me for asking too many questions. They also said that her gang, Las Nolis, made blood pacts, that they had their own mythology and rituals, and even engaged in sacrificial practices. That’s what they said about her and her group, and I didn’t like it, although it seemed to have its benefits, given that I was vulnerable here, and I needed to associate with someone. Because here, if you’re alone you pay for it, and you can be forced to do some pretty ugly things, such as become somebody’s woman. Or a maid. “From now on you are mine,” one of the butch women would tell you, and if you don’t respond by pulling her eyes out you become her sexual slave. Or some cacique comes and says, “You, just so you know, from now on you are my servant.” Either you smash her teeth in, or you’ll be doing her laundry, making her bed, giving her money, finding her cigarettes, cleaning her cell, writing letters for her sons and boyfriends. They even make you cut their toenails and give them manicures. Or also to go down on them, which here they call cunni. That’s almost always the fate of the unaffiliated. But I still avoided Mandra X and her Nolis, so they wouldn’t rape me or force me to participate in their satanic rituals. As if there were other options to consider, such as the Children of Christ, who take a drug called angel dust and walk around having visions of Christ. Anyway, they were a black sisterhood and would never accept me. There were also the Netas, all Puerto Rican, the Sisters of Jarimat UI for the Muslims, and the Wontan Clan, the least likely to take me because they were white extremists.

I grew to understand that Mandra X had real pull in this place and it would be a good idea to belong to her group. That’s why I’m part of the group, more or less. Don’t think I’m one of the zealots. In any case, she has become my protector and adviser, my sister, my “brotha,” and me, her “sweet kid,” her protectee. When it comes to matters of love, she’s imposing, jealous, randy, unfaithful, Don Juana-ish, fucked in the head, calculating; that is, she has all the defects of a man and more. But with her friends she’s solid as a rock. There is not a more dangerous lover or a sounder buddy. I’m not gonna tell you she’s my friend, she’s friends with no one, she’s up on her high horse, and no one can touch her. How should I put it? Mandra X is a fortress inside the prison, a place of refuge for her protectees, a horror for her enemies, a boyfriend to her mistresses, and a leader for her followers.

One time I told her I felt alone. It was naiveté on my part.

“Alone?” she harangued me. “What the fuck do you mean you feel alone when you just joined the ranks of a huge part of the population of the United States, the ones behind bars, that is? So you’re alone, my depressive little fuck, my sad little cunt, my pillow biter? So snap out of it, bitch, because you are also part of a quarter of all the imprisoned people in the world, who are here in these United States.”

Now I know that you shouldn’t talk nonsense here, or be guided by sentimentalism. I have learned to report my days as bad and not so bad, sometimes more bad than others. Sometimes the hemorrhaging stops, it disappears completely for a week or so, as if a spigot in my veins has been closed. Then I feel as if my life comes back, I recover my energy, my joy, who would’ve have thought it, my joy in spite of everything. On those days, I try to recover, I feed myself well, I write pages and more pages, I even grow calmer thinking that at some point everything will become clear and I’m going to get out of here and go directly to Violeta. I give myself to this vision, dreaming that one day I’ll buy her a house with a garden for her, for Hero, and for me, who knows with what money, but who cares, money doesn’t exist in dreams. And Mandra X, who is Mandra X? Where does she come from? No one knows. She doesn’t utter a peep. She’s white but she speaks Spanish; she’s male but she has tits and a pussy; she’s a justice-seeker and a writer of legal writs and she knows everything there is to know about the law, but she mocks American justice, asserting it is the worst and most corrupt in the world. But she knows it inside out. Imagine decades locked up in here, studying the penal code, looking for a way around it, finding loopholes and resources. But all this knowledge is useless when it comes to her case, because she’s sentenced to life, and from that, no one, not even she, can save herself. She doesn’t allow questions to be asked about her and doesn’t gossip, yet she knows everything. She’s the living memory of this place. According to her, forgetfulness and ignorance are the worst two enemies of a prisoner. Look at my case, the most horrible things that happen to me are the ones I forget about the quickest. Since the night of my husband Greg’s birthday, I have lived through a chain of horrors, but there are blank spaces where the sequence of events should be, like you used to say, on display on its corresponding shelf. But not me, I hide pain and confusion when they’re still fresh in these nebulous zones. Mandra X won’t tolerate that one bit. She forces me to write about what has happened, to go over it, make it worth something, and learn from it. She stores away facts about you that your own memory has forgotten; then she gives them back to you, forcing you to confront them. That’s rare in here. Here, things are set up so that you grow apart from yourself, divide yourself in two, and mop both sides of the hallway at once.

A few weeks after you left, Mr. Rose, you were replaced by a lady with a lot of titles. We showed her what we had done in your workshop, not to betray you, but to provide a sense of continuity to the class. Well, she just went off, talking about goals, and motivations, and achievements, and gains. According to her the whole thing was a glorious race toward becoming better. It was more like she was directing graduate students at Harvard or something and not some fucked-up prisoners shit on by fortune, and no more gains than two or three steps in a circle and no more goals than pressing your cheeks to the bars. What a bunch of crap, this fucking self-help self-improvement, they want to make you drunk with that and expect you to believe it. But that doctor they brought to take your place, Mr. Rose, was the reigning queen of it all. And on top of it she gave us a warning: “Write about whatever you want, girls,” she told us, “any topic, you can write about anything that comes into your head, whatever, it’s all fine, everything is welcome, except what happens in this jail. That is strictly prohibited. I will not accept any writing about life in the prison, episodes in the prison, or criticism or complaints about what happens here.”