Laura Restrepo - Hot Sur

Although perhaps Edward Branly wasn’t such a moron. For designing Manninpox and overseeing its construction and with other connected commissions, he earned what today would be between twelve and thirteen million dollars; but if he wasn’t a moron, he must have been a sadist. You can imagine him growing up with an abusive father and a decent mother whom the drunk father beat until he knocked her senseless, or something equally horrifying. Or maybe the father forced the mother into prostitution to pay for his drink. Whatever the case, an abused child who as an adolescent enjoyed locking up the cat in a chest and who as an adult would become a torturer of women, but a timid one, incapable of doing so directly, so instead becomes the mind behind a thousand different ways to torture these women by locking them up, degrading them, reducing them to rags. It seems to me that only such a type of degenerate could conceive such a moral monstrosity as Manninpox. However, the little gray book proved me wrong. Edward Branly had been just the opposite, nothing short of a great man, respected and admired in his time and an exemplary citizen. One of those of whom it was said had impeccable manners, Branly was a champion of progress and reform in keeping with the just and liberal model. His prison was seen in his time as an outstanding accomplishment and a critical contribution to “upholding the dignity, worth, and empowerment of a society,” to quote the hagiographer of the book. That is, in that time, Manninpox was not seen as some monstrosity. On the contrary, although it was a penal institution, it was imagined it would play a reformist, even redemptive, role, a pillar in a society that metes out just punishment to those who deserve it. And in that sense, Manninpox was not unique, just one in a series of many monumental castles of horror, unforgettable and omnipresent in the conscience of the inhabitants of a country who should know what awaits them if they should veer down the wrong road. “This is progress, this is civilization. We have arrived!” so proclaimed the official who opened Manninpox, with Branly himself standing there, who took a bottle of champagne and smashed it against the foundation stone.

From the time I first went into Manninpox, and as I return to it weekly, I cannot stop thinking of that world of confinement that coexists in the shadow of ours, in which doors are open and the air is plenty, where the rest of us exist without truly knowing what it’s worth. Ever since meeting María Paz, I can’t help but wonder what twists of fate would have led a person like her to reside on that side of the bars, while a person like me resided on this side. It all seems so painfully arbitrary. For a moment, just for a moment, I can imagine that the separation and the walls vanish. The other day, she came to me with two pieces of paper torn from a legal pad in which she had completed an exercise I had assigned. When she handed them to me, our hands grazed, and an electrical charge coursed through my body. It seemed that the contact had been prolonged longer than strictly necessary, that the moment was paused in time and we were one, touching, feeling, and communicating with each other. Becoming aroused as well, I must admit, or at least I was. But the significant thing was that during the time that graze lasted, she and I were on the same side of the bars. Or maybe just together in a world in which bars did not exist. Just for a moment. I don’t know if she felt the same thing. Perhaps she didn’t even notice. But no, she did notice, of course she noticed. The little wily one must have caught my astonishment and made me into the laughingstock of the group when she talked about it.

“Oh, Mr. Rose, your lightning rod is blushing,” she said about the scar on my forehead but emphasizing the double entendre, in that flirty little voice that all the prisoners use, half giggling like schoolgirls if you say nail because they interpret it as fuck, or if you say blow because it means to suck dick, on and on in this way, till it becomes exhausting.

“Yes, it blushes,” I said, trying to make a quick exit, “and careful, because it burns, just like Harry Potter’s.”

Interview with Ian Rose

“You seem to have read everything. Have you heard of this?” Rose asked Pro Bono, taking out of the glove compartment a little book with a gray cover and handing it to him. “I found it among my son’s books. It’s a biography of Edward Branly, the man who—”

“Edward Branly, that sounds familiar,” Pro Bono interrupted him. “The inventor of the wireless telegraph?”

“Another Edward Branly, an inventor of new ways to torture women.”

“Why does this seem strange to you?” Pro Bono asked after perusing the book. “That’s the mentality that the America of that time was built on, the same mentality that holds together the America of today.”

“And it doesn’t repulse you?” Rose asked.

“Me? Yes it does. That’s why I’m a defense attorney and not a prosecutor.”

Manninpox was a very old prison, darker than the new ones, but also more difficult to run. That gave the inmates more room to protest and to come together around certain concepts. For example, whatever is filthy is human and belongs to us, whatever is clean is inhuman and the tool of our jailers. This was an old belief that rebels like those in Sinn Féin were able to reanimate, making their filthy hunger strikes into weapons. Pro Bono was the author of a good number of theories on the subject that he had published in various essays. According to him, so-called good people are terrified of filth, blood, and death. The “decent” folk play up the type of civilization that offers immortality as a utopia, and from this comes their obsession with security, both personal and national. From there also came their devotion to youth, dieting, keeping fit and active, plastic surgery, good health, extreme cleanliness, antibiotics, disinfectants, and antiseptics. They are convinced that America can make them immortal, and they conceal sickness, filthiness, old age, and death to deny their existence. But the American utopia according to Pro Bono would do nothing less than banish immortality. What kind of people have we become, he asked himself in his essays, that we pretend to live by ignoring death? It was common enough to hear the American dream described as living to possess. Wrong, according to Pro Bono. The equation needs to be inverted: possessing to live. Possessing in order not to die. Immortality was the true American utopia. Las Nolis, refusing to play along, incorporated death into all their rituals. That was their clarity, what gave them an advantage over others.

“So María Paz didn’t take part in that? The blood things?” Rose asked.

“María Paz was herself a living sacrifice. In an environment where self-mutilation is valued and even exalted, what better symbol than María Paz, innocence personified and submitted to a bloodletting?”

“That road goes to my house.” Rose gestured to the left when they came to an intersection in a narrow, steep road, darkened by thick plant growth. “That way, some fifteen minutes up the mountain, you come to a little lake called Silver Coin Pond. On the side of the road, there is a large boulder, and beside it a maple that is taller than the others are. Not long ago, the face of a man named John Eagles appeared on it. They had ripped it off him and nailed it to the trunk. That death has stuck to this mountain. It weighs on the people still. It will not be lifted.”

“Who did such a thing?” Pro Bono asked.

“Unsolved. The authorities claim it was outsiders in a drug frenzy, but the locals blamed escaped prisoners. Residents here think prisoners escape from Manninpox and roam in the woods committing atrocities. Every time something bad happens, the locals blame it on them. A missing chicken, a fire in a stable, a noise in the darkness, a stolen bicycle. You can try to reason with these people, explain to them that no one can escape from that windowless fortress. But they don’t buy it. They believe the prisoners escape and they are frightened.”