Laura Restrepo - Hot Sur

“Listen, ma’am,” we asked her. “Where do you think we live? You think we hang in the city and come to Manninpox to hand in our little homework assignments about life outside?”

What an idiot, that lady. She said there were a bunch of other topics. That we could write about our childhoods, about our lives before prison, our loved ones, our dreams — constructive things and positive memories. We told her that we made suppositories with the positive and the constructive, and we never went back to the workshop. At least I never went, and neither did a few others. For now, Mandra X is my reader. She forces me to think about things seriously, to learn new words, and to call things by their name. Maybe it’s true that every door closed opens a new one, because I have had the best teachers of my life here in Manninpox: you and Mandra X. She doesn’t have family that visits her, just human rights people and defense lawyers for other inmates who come to talk over things with her. I imagine that Mandra X is their contact in here. She works for them, I think, or maybe it’s the other way around.

Anyway, it was her, Mandra, who hooked me up with my amazing lawyer, my little saint of a lawyer, my talented and intelligent protector, my dear old man, what would I do in this life without him? I tell him that anytime I see him. “You are the man of my life.”

He laughs. “Get one your own age,” he responds. “One who stands up straight and not a humpbacked old man like me.”

“But you’re the one I like,” I say. “You and only you, always dancing to your own beat, always true to yourself, different from the others, more dignified and elegant than anyone.”

“Hi there, baby,” he told me the first time he saw me, right in the middle of that horde that gathers in the lobby of the courthouse. That’s what he told me, before we had even met, “Hi there, baby.” An affectionate greeting, kind, playful. I began to cry like the Magdalene. Because all of a sudden, I felt like a person again and not a criminal on the way to the gallows, just a person with problems who needed help. Since then, the old man has become my defender, my solace, my ally, my powerful lawyer. I’m pinning all my hopes on him. He says he’s going to get me out of here. Every time we see each other he tells me. And I believe him; I cling to his words as if they were the Our Father. In the end, what is the Our Father but a string of words?

Mandra X is not someone who ever talks about where she was born or where she lived, what kind of life she had, how she was hurt, or what ankle she twisted. When she was still free, did she have a husband or a wife? A mystery. Did she ever have kids? There is a story that was going around that I’d better not repeat. Mandra X. What kind of a name is that? Like a bug, or a robot, or medicine for a migraine. A clownish name for a clownish old lady. That’s what I thought at first, before I knew her. Her tattoos and weirdness alone could have you talking about her for hours, if you dared. Here everybody gets inked. And you see every kind of tattoo, broken hearts or hearts plunged with arrows, names of men and women, Christs, skulls, Baby Jesuses. A tattoo is the only luxury and the only jewelry allowed for inmates. So paint yourselves, eyes on shoulders, spiderwebs in the underarms, tears on the cheeks, butterflies, dragons, birds, pictures of loved ones, Mickey Mouses, Betty Boops, self-portraits. Anything you can think of, even initials on the soles of your feet and drawings on your ass. There are those who even call themselves artists and are expert inkers, setting up businesses with inks and needles. They are never short of customers; here everyone uses their bodies as sketchbooks. Some have poems on their thighs or revolutionary symbols. One named Panterilla had a whole stanza of “Imagine” by John Lennon inked on her back from top to bottom, and Margarita, the Peruvian girl I told you about has that written on her arm, “Mother, I don’t deserve you, but I need you.” The thing is, in Manninpox your body is the only thing that belongs to you and they can’t stop you from doing with it what you want. That’s why many also pierce themselves. There are those who even purposefully mutilate themselves, and Mandra X is the queen of them. That kind of thing makes me shudder, leaves me speechless. I can’t understand why someone would voluntarily amputate a finger, like it happened the other day in the ward where the white inmates are. But Mandra doesn’t disapprove. She thinks they’re gestures of freedom and independence, and that actions that might be wrong or even atrocious when you are free become the complete opposite when you are locked up in prison. That’s what she says, and I listen. She says that in our circumstances, orgies, blood pacts, and even suicide are acts of resistance.

“Then let me bleed,” I ask of her, when the fatigue of the anemia makes me melodramatic. “Come on, Mandra, it’s an act of resistance.”

But she forces me to stand up. She finds some medicine and makes me sign letters to the authorities demanding proper medical attention immediately.

“Let me do it,” I beg her. “I’m fine here. I want to rest.”

“You’ll be surrendering.” She shakes me. She brings a ball of snow from the courtyard, packs it tight, and puts it on my belly so the bleeding will stop.

Her gang, or I should say, our gang, is called Noli me tangere : that’s why they call us Las Nolis. It’s a Latin phrase that Jesus uttered to Mary Magdalene after he was resurrected. It means don’t touch me. Don’t get near me, leave me alone, don’t mess with me. See, you learn things. Even in Latin. Now that I’m a Noli, I know the meaning of words like skirmish, independence, liberty, rebellion, rights, resistance. Well, I also learned the meaning of the word clitoris; it embarrasses me to know what it is. Can you imagine? Years and years of tapping and tapping that little button without knowing what it was called. But going back to what we were talking about, I don’t have any tattoos, not even one. I write only on paper. Many sheets of paper because I have a lot to say. Maybe I don’t do it on my own skin because I’m terrified of needles. Sometimes I think I should do it, it would be braver on my part, more daring, more permanent. But what if I regret it later, what if something feels stupid that the day before seemed extraordinary? I imagine you have the same fear, Mr. Rose, when you publish your stuff. There’s an inmate who has “live valorously” tattooed on her shoulder, but both words are written with a b so she’s going to have to libe balorously until the day she dies. And then there’s Greg and Sleepy Joe, who are Slovaks, and who have tattoos on their chests that say, “Lightning over Tatras.” Lightning over Tatras? What the hell is that? Not me, thank you very much, I’ll stick to pencil and paper, at least I can erase it that way, or cross it out, throw it in the garbage, and start anew. Mandra X inspires me. She tells me that Miguel de Cervantes was locked up when he dreamed up Don Quixote. Aside from you, Mr. Rose, she’s the only one who knows that I write, and I ask her about spelling and other such issues. You were a teacher who liked to please us, you put up with anything, congratulated us about everything, but she doesn’t let me get away with anything. She tells me write down everything I lived and to describe things in detail, even if they burn, even if they sting. But I forget, maybe because of the anemia.

“I don’t remember, Mandra,” I apologize. “That little bit is not clear. I’m not sure what happened at that moment.”

“You’re a woman and you act like a girl,” she tells me and leaves.

Mandra X’s tattoos? They’re different. Imagine blue snakes slithering across her back till they hug her belly, going down her thighs and her calves, and twisting into each other like ropes. They go down to her feet and down her arms to her fingers. Her skin is like one of those laminated figures in anatomy books with veins and arteries, but some who know her say that it is not about veins or arteries, but about rivers. All the rivers of Germany with their respective names, so a map, of her native land. It’s difficult to believe that Mandra X belongs to another place that is not this one. She got here before all of the rest and she’ll be here when they’re all gone. According to these versions, her very white skin is a living map that illustrates the course of the rivers of her country. The Rhine, the Alster, many others that I don’t remember, and the biggest and fattest, the one that goes down on Mandra’s spinal column, the Danube.