Laura Restrepo - Hot Sur

“I realized I need you to find María Paz.”

“I’ll take you to Manninpox and our partnership ends there.”

They drove on in silence and a couple of hours later got off the main highway and took an old road that wound up the mountains through a forest of trees. Everything seemed wonderful out there at the end of fall. The flock of geese against the deep blue of the sky, the light breeze past the almost bare branches, the fiery colors of the landscape, the smell of wet earth. It’s the same every year, Cleve, exactly the same. And yet you should see it, son, it still startles one as if there had never been such a lustrous season, thought Rose. And since he couldn’t help but feel better, he tried to make peace with the character dozing beside him, painfully shrunken under his hump, yet peaceful, stripped at last of his armor of arrogance, reduced to his true state of an old man that for who knows how many years, eighty at least, had had to make his way in the world with that weight on his back.

“Do you need to lean the chair back a bit?” Rose asked when Pro Bono opened his eyes. “The lever is there on your right. You’ll be more comfortable.”

“I wasn’t made for comfort, my friend,” Pro Bono said, shutting his eyes again. But a bit later, more fully alert now, he asked Rose, “Do you know the great thing about my Lamborghini?”

“Everything,” Rose said, “everything must be great about your Lamborghini.”

“The best thing is the driver’s seat, custom made for my size out of carbon fiber fabric. La Casa del Toro ordered it especially for me. A full-fledged Lamborghini Aventador LP 700-4, a relentless mechanical force, made expressly so that a cripple like me could drive it two hundred miles per hour. What do you think of that?”

“What else can I think? No wonder they suspended your damn license. But listen, I was thinking… Mandra X, or Mandrax. You know? Mandrax, the barbiturate. Those little blue-and-white capsules that were big in nightclubs moons ago. Do you remember them? No? Well, yeah, you’re not much a nightclub person, I take it.”

“Filicide with Mandrax? Could be. Good job, Rose! Maybe you’re brighter than you look.”

“Don’t expect any miracles from me, Señor Attorney. I am a man broken by sorrow, very simple.”

Mandra X, real name Magdalena Krueger, was serving life in Manninpox and was in fact German, as María Paz had guessed. She was born in a place where two rivers come together to form the Danube. As was the case with Jesus Christ, nothing is known about the first thirty years of her life. It was at that point that she made her entrance into the history books when she turned herself in to the Idaho authorities after murdering her three children in cold blood. The lead-up to the trial was a huge controversy and caused quite a scandal in the press. She was convicted by public opinion from the start, but there was a movement led by several human rights groups and pro-euthanasia organizations in her support. In the end, she was sentenced to three consecutive life terms, destined to remain behind bars throughout this lifetime and the next two. Pro Bono was silent about whatever legal intricacies led her from the judgment of an Idaho jury to a prison in upstate New York. All he confirmed was that Mandra X had been taken to Manninpox, and there she would remain forever and ever. She had been spared the death penalty because of a single mitigating detail: according to the record, the victims, the children who happened to be triplets, suffered from a debilitating combination of worsening birth defects that included blindness, deafness, and mental retardation. She had been fully devoted to them until they were thirteen years old, and at that time had decided to do them in with an overdose of narcotics, all three of them at once, making sure to take precautions so they would not suffer or realize what she was doing. “I just put them to sleep, put them to sleep forever,” she declared to the press with a measured calm that one reporter called breathtaking.

Mandra X told the judge that from the moment they were born she had known that there would come a time when life would become unlivable for them. She still had plenty of strength left and had up to that time relied on a family inheritance to be able to remain at home and care for them. But the children could not go to any type of school, and because they could not tell night from day, there was always one of them awake, demanding her attention. Caring for them was a Herculean undertaking. To make matters worse, the money from the inheritance was dwindling fast and they could not live on the welfare check from the state. On the day the children turned twelve, Mandra X had been diagnosed with cancer of the bladder. It had gone into remission, but she became obsessed with the idea that soon it would return. The last thing she wanted was to die and leave them alone.

She made no attempt to cover up her crime or get rid of the bodies. On the contrary, she placed the duly shrouded children in their respective beds, and before turning herself in, made sure that the funeral and burial arrangements were paid. She foresaw any and all issues that could arise and managed to take care of everything beforehand: three coffins in just the right size, the hearse, wreaths and candles for the funeral service, cremation arrangements, and permission for the ashes to be taken to Germany and sprinkled on the Danube from a certain bridge in her hometown.

After she had been sentenced and taken to prison, Mandra X contacted Pro Bono and the organizations that had helped her, and, locked up in her cell, she began a strict exercise regimen and her studies of American penal law.

“Mandra X… Medea X,” Pro Bono told Rose. “The enraged, ferocious, fooled Medea. You know what Euripides has her say? She shouts, ‘Death unto you, my accursed children born of such a deathly mother.’ At first, my knees would tremble every time I had to be in her presence.”

“Like Clarice Starling when she goes to see Hannibal Lecter,” Rose said.

“What?”

“Never mind.”

“Since then we have become partners in crime. We both speak the language of freaks, I suppose.”

“But, wait, there’s still something that I’m not getting, this friend of yours…”

“Hold on there, I didn’t say friend, I said partner,” Pro Bono corrected him. “Mandra X does not have any friends per se.”

“Fine. So this person, your partner, murdered her children because she was afraid that she herself would soon die, and they would be left with no one to care for them…”

“Yet that was twenty years ago and she’s still with us,” Pro Bono completed the thought. “Is that your objection?”

“Not an objection. Who am I to judge? I get her motivation, and I guess that ideally she should have died right after the trial so that the whole sensationalist story would have had an apt ending. But that’s not what happened. The cancer never came back. She misjudged the entire situation. Don’t you think that she should be retried and sentenced to death just for that?”

“Execute her because she didn’t die? Not very prudent.”

Mandra X had helped María Paz, shown her how to survive in prison. María Paz became an entirely new person after Mandra X allowed her into her group.

“Las Nolis,” Pro Bono added. “They were known as Las Nolis, but the real full name of the group, the sect, was in Latin: Noli me tangere. ”

“Sounds a little outlandish, prisoners throwing around Latin,” Rose tells me, “but that was the name. And why not? They were trapped in a medieval castle, so shouldn’t they be using Latin? Anyway, noli me tangere means ‘don’t touch me,’ from somewhere in the Bible. It seems that at first Las Nolis had misjudged María Paz. She came across as a weakling, a stupid, pretty little thing. According to Pro Bono, she had to prove her steeliness.”