Laura Restrepo - Hot Sur

With respect to how María Paz must have lived that unexpected and decisive moment in her life, the sudden instant when they opened the door and said, off you go, Rose says he thinks only one word is apt: awakening. In her manuscript, she repeatedly said that the chapter of her imprisonment wasn’t real, more like a hallucination, an improbable period that would end with a return to normal life. Rose tells me that as far as he can figure that’s why when she was in prison she never called any of her friends, such as her coworkers in the cleaning company, whom she considered her most trusted friends. She didn’t even tell them of her situation, so as not to call attention to the episode that to her was so illusory and unreal. Day after day, hour after hour in Manninpox, María Paz waited for the nightmare to end. If they had so suddenly and without rhyme or reason ripped her away from her home and taken her prisoner, then just as suddenly and without rhyme or reason they told her she was free to go home. Even if the freedom they were offering her was a fragile one, because the new trial was still to come, she must have felt that moment was the end of her nightmare, the longed-for moment of awakening. Rose reminds me that’s how things happened in dreams, arbitrarily, out of nowhere, illogically, without cause or consequence. Just like that.

It was a few months after that day that Mandra X and Las Nolis heard anything about María Paz again. Until now; now they had news again, and it wasn’t good. That’s why they had summoned Pro Bono, and Pro Bono had recruited Ian Rose, or who he had thought was Cleve Rose but then had to settle for Ian. And there they were, with Mandra X telling them through Dummy that there was bad news. Dummy stressed once again that they never told the inmates what illness they were suffering from. They didn’t show them lab reports, if they even performed any tests, or inform them of their diagnoses, and forget about X-ray results or anything like that. So now, they got to the point of the story. A few days ago, they had left an inmate who was paralyzed from the waist down alone and unhandcuffed in the infirmary for a few minutes, long enough that she was able to look at her medical folder, which they had left within her reach. She grabbed the folder and put it under her ass in the wheelchair and snuck it out of the infirmary. In the folder, there were a few medical reports that belonged to other inmates, and the prisoner in the wheelchair sold one of them to Mandra X for twenty dollars because she knew it would be of interest to her. It was María Paz’s medical history, and Dummy now produced it from her breasts and handed it under the table to Pro Bono, who looked at it and passed it on to Rose.

“Wait. How did Dummy hide such a thing in her breasts if security was so tight?” I ask Rose.

“They say that the surface of Neptune is full of diamonds,” he responds. “Have you ever heard that?”

“As far as I know, the only thing on the surface of Neptune is the wind,” I respond.

“Well, now you know there are mountains of diamonds.”

“And?”

“Try and get one of those diamonds. See if you can. It’s the same with Dummy’s breasts, which are like a pair of mountains where you can’t find anything. She can hide whatever she wants between those mountains and no one will ever find it.”

According to the report, the medical procedure performed on the inmate, María Paz, that is, had not been completely successful, María Paz, that is, had not been completely successful, and consequently there had been an infection in the reproductive tract. An endometriosis caused by the unclean conditions under which the scraping was performed. The endometriosis had been so severe that María Paz had gone into septic shock. The decrease in blood flow along with lowered blood pressure had led to disrupted circulation, as a result of which the vital organs began to falter, and it was unlikely that the patient would ever be able to get pregnant again.

“But that’s not the worst part. With the report were the results of an X-ray. A dated X-ray. According to the date, it was taken the last time María Paz was at the hospital, a few days before she left. Look,” Dummy said, gesturing to use the pencil Pro Bono had in his hand and drawing something on the surface of the table. “What do you see?”

Rose tried to make out the drawing but couldn’t. Just a doodle, some kind of inverted vessel, with extensions on each side, which reminded him more than anything of the boa constrictor that swallowed a hat as drawn by Saint-Exupéry in The Little Prince , Cleve’s favorite book as a child.

“What do you see there?” Dummy insisted.

“A butterfly?” Rose took a timid guess.

“No, not a butterfly. You, Mr. Attorney, what do you see?”

“A flower?” Pro Bono ventured.

“It’s a uterus, gentlemen,” Dummy said. “Here are the ovaries and here are the Fallopian tubes.”

“These two wouldn’t know the difference between the Fallopian tubes and the Eustachian tubes,” Mandra X said, laughing and startling Pro Bono and Rose, who jumped back in their chairs at the unexpected interruption that had ruptured the silence of the Sibyl, both of them shocked by the surprise because it hadn’t been much of a joke. According to Rose, it was the only thing Mandra X said throughout their entire visit, her only contribution, which had seemed so funny to her. It was when her mouth opened to laugh that Rose saw the bifurcated tongue fluttering in the depths of its cave.

“Can’t you tell?” Dummy continued. “It’s a uterus.”

“A uterus, of course,” Rose said, embarrassed at his obtuseness.

“If that’s a uterus, my grandmother is a bicycle,” Pro Bono said.

“If your grandmother is a bicycle then so is your mother, but what I’ve drawn here is a fucking uterus. The uterus of María Paz. Now look,” Dummy said, drawing a little mark in the center of the alleged uterus. “Look right here. What do you see now?”

“A fetus,” Pro Bono said.

“Not a fucking fetus.”

“A tumor?” asked Rose.

“Shit no, not a tumor. It’s a clamp. Believe it or not. In the X-ray you can see it perfectly. There, the fucking clamp is clear as the light of day. But we had to destroy the X-ray. The bosses don’t like anybody messing with crap from the infirmary. But right there in her uterus. A perfect silhouette, no room for error, a surgical clamp. One of the small types, a little nothing, like this in the shape of a U, a fucking metallic U, small but treasonous, murderous, hidden up her woohoo, sure to fuck her up. That’s why we got in touch with you, Mr. Attorney, so you can let her know. She can’t go on living with that thing inside because that’s what’s making her bleed.”

“How in the hell did it get in there?” Pro Bono asked.

“How in the hell indeed,” Dummy responded. “That is the question. How do you think? You, sir, you tell me,” she said to Rose, “how did that clamp end up in there? We didn’t get it at first either. It took us a while before we put things together, before Mandra X put the whole sequence together.”

According to the course of events as Dummy saw them, María Paz had a miscarriage when she first arrived, and the savages performed a curettage in the most negligent fashion. Hence, all those months of hemorrhaging, which kept getting worse until she went into a coma. Then they took her to the hospital again and sent her back a week later, not really having done much, apart from bombarding her with antibiotics to control the infection for the moment. Because although they didn’t tell her, they took an X-ray in which they found the clamp that they had left in there because of their own incompetence and carelessness. What would have been the right thing to do? Naturally, go into surgery and remove the thing that was going to kill her, the source of the sickness inside her because of their own stupidity. That would have been the logical and proper thing to do. But nothing is logical or proper in Manninpox, or if there is, it’s only so through some perverted means. María Paz was in such terrible shape that they must have figured she could die if she had surgery. How else can one justify what they did?