The shoes would still be there tomorrow. It was Sunday.
MIGUEL APARECIDO LOOKED me up and down, hiding a smile that was not quite contemptuous but not indifferent either. I responded with my own gaze, meant to be bolder than his, among other reasons because I would leave the prison of San Juan de Aragón and lose myself in the tumult of the city and my occupations, while he—Miguel Aparecido—would remain here with his strange blue-black eyes flecked with yellow framing a look of violence tempered by melancholy, as if his life before prison was so turbulent that now he could compensate for it only with a kind of sadness that still shunned compassion. His bushy eyebrows joined in a scowl that would have been diabolical if his eyes had not provided a ray of light. The brightness I detected in him had to do with the way he stood, upright, without a trace of deference or, what is worse, defiance as a disguise for rancor. There were no external signs in this man of dejection or impatience. Only a way of standing that was serene though on the offensive, leaning forward. All this marked by his virile, square-jawed face, shaved too meticulously—I’m not a prisoner, it proclaimed—and with a light olive skin typical, my forgettable overseer María Egipciaca would say, of “a decent person.” He was, however, a confirmed criminal. Appearances, my teacher Sanginés would add, deceive. Above all if, as in the case of Miguel Aparecido, the resemblance is to the actor Gael García Bernal and the singer Erwin Schrott.
Miguel Aparecido’s nose seemed to sniff at me when I was admitted to his cell. I want to believe that a nose so straight and slender and therefore so immobile had to display some alert, impatient, defiant movement, everything the prisoner’s almost Roman profile, similar to statues in a history textbook, did not betray, I don’t know if in volitional defense or as a simple expression of his own nature. I played, when I met him, with the prisoner’s Roman appearance, accentuated by the barely dissimulated smile of willful lips that wanted, it seemed at the time, to complete the quasi-imperial distinction of graying hair, combed forward but curly in the back.
Professor Sanginés had warned me: Miguel Aparecido is a strong man. Don’t underestimate him.
I learned this when he gave me his hand in the Roman style, clasping my forearm and displaying a naked power that ran from his hand to his shoulder, where a kind of red toga hung that moved me to imagine he was a madman who had been locked in the prison for a very long time. In his personal lunatic asylum he was perhaps the Emperor Augustus. I still didn’t know if in our national lunatic asylum he would behave like Caesar or like Caligula.
“Twenty years,” Sanginés had told me.
“For what reason, Maestro?”
“Murder.”
“Is it a life sentence?”
“In principle, yes. But Miguel Aparecido has been released twice: for good conduct the first time, in an amnesty the second. On both occasions he refused to leave prison.”
“Why? How did he manage that?”
“The first time he organized a riot. The second, it was by his own wish.”
“I repeat. Why?”
“That’s why he’s an interesting individual. Ask him.”
Ask him. As if it were that easy to oppose my small humanity as a law student, small fornicator in brothels, small companion of boys perhaps smaller than me, small pupil of priests who may have been perverse, small hanger-on in a house of other people’s mysteries I didn’t understand, small slave of a tyrannical government, this small “I” confronting all the concentrated, powerful, iron strength (untouchable body, a gaze of such savage serenity it obliged me to lower my eyes and avoid his touch) of the imprisoned man who was saying to me now:
“How do you know who is guilty?”
I didn’t know how to respond. He looked at me without mercy or irony. He was impenetrable.
“Do the law codes tell you?”
“We live under written law,” I replied with my confused pedantry.
“And we die by the law of habit,” the prisoner added, observing me constantly.
“One thing is true: The fucked-up thing is that they put you here and separate you from the world. Then you have to invent your own world, and the world requires connections to others,” he continued.
“That’s the fucked-up thing,” he said, and smiled for the first time.
He was giving me a small class. He invited me to sit beside him on the cot. I was afraid to lose the effect of his terrible gaze. I observed him out of the corner of my eye. I believe he knew why Sanginés had sent me here. He owed the professor something. He didn’t want to defraud him. He didn’t want me to leave with hands as empty as my poor vacant head, scorned from the very beginning by the criminal.
“You have to invent new connections for yourself. That’s fucked up,” he repeated without looking at me.
“Does anybody protect you?” I dared to address him informally, using tú and taking advantage of our not looking in each other’s eyes.
His answer surprised me:
“The first thing you learn here is to protect yourself on your own. There are people in prison who wouldn’t know what to do on the outside.”
I told him I didn’t understand. If some convicts didn’t know what to do out of prison, why did he stay here since he undoubtedly knew what to do on the outside?
He smiled. “They’re whining, stupid people, without direction.”
“Who?”
“Think,” he murmured severely.
“Your prison companions,” I insisted on gaining audacity’s ground. “The others.”
He turned to look at me and his eyes told me he had no friends here, no companions. And therefore? His arrogance did not permit him to praise himself. That he was different seemed obvious to me. That he was superior perhaps was his secret. He was open with me, frank. I’m certain his relationship with Sanginés included an inviolable pact: If I send you someone, Miguel Aparecido, talk, speak to him, don’t leave him hungry. Remember. You owe me something.
Why did he commit another crime to stay in prison? Why did he refuse amnesty?
He didn’t answer me directly. With a paraphrase that revealed the interior of his vast conspiracy to remain imprisoned, in spite of friendships and good conduct, without allowing me to understand the heart of the matter: Why did Miguel Aparecido want to remain imprisoned? For how long? Was there some reason that kept him from desiring freedom?
He said the first time they imprison you (he did not say, the distracted reader should note, “they imprisoned me”), anger explodes in your chest. You are blinded by a longing to take your revenge on the person who put you here (who put him here, wasn’t it the law, was it an individual?). Then rage gives way to astonishment at finding yourself here, at knowing you are here, knowing (or believing, lying to yourself?) that you are innocent. This is the moment when you give up or begin to grow. You learn to create a scab, to cover the open wound with a mental or physical scab. If you don’t, you go all to hell, you’re defeated, surrounded as you are, you know? by the great wail of prison—he looked directly at me, with an infernal vision of desire in his eyes—the wails of the fistfighters, the shouts of the pitiless, the silence of the tortured. And the debilitating sound of the city, out there.
“There was a reporter here. A real bastard, very rebellious. He threatened: ‘When I get out of here I’ll denounce you all, you bunch of assholes. You’ll see. As soon as I get out.’ They broke his hands. ‘Let’s see what you write now, you son of a bitch.’ It didn’t occur to them that when he got out he could dictate with broken hands. The jailers are in jail, you know? It doesn’t occur to them that there’s life outside these walls. They really think the world ends here. And it’s true. They don’t read what an ex-con may write. It doesn’t matter to them. They go on with their routine. The prison warden perhaps reads or receives complaints. I’ll bet you, your name’s Josué? (my name’s Josué) that if he doesn’t file them away, even when he acknowledges their receipt, he does nothing, what’s called absolutely nothing, you understand me, asshole? N
othing.”
He gave a sudden guffaw, as if freed of a commitment to himself not to express extreme emotions. If not a statue he was a stoic, I thought then, when I still didn’t know the mystery of Miguel Aparecido’s crimes.
It was his opinion that, as a young attorney, I ought to understand the rule of justice: Everybody’s for sale, everybody can be bought. Sell the torturer, sell the pickpocket. No matter how clean he is when he arrives, the next one will also steal, also torture.
“Remind the prof of that, let’s see what he tells you.”
He took a deep breath, as if he were concluding. But that wasn’t the case. He inhaled in order to go on. He was paying, I was convinced, a debt he owed the professor. It would take me some time to find out what Sanginés had done for this prisoner, strange in his serenity, vigorous in his determination to continue here and not obtain his freedom. Why?
“A man was tortured here and the idiot threatened to inform on the torturer when he got out of prison.”
He paused so I would look at him and perhaps (I was beginning to observe) so I would admire him. He seemed to forget that I already knew what he was telling me. (What does prison do to one’s memory?)
“The torturer simply told him: You’ll never get out, asshole.”
He looked at me with those eyes I’ve mentioned, blue-black with flashes of the plumage of a canary imprisoned in a liquid cage.
“He never got out.”
I left and don’t know if I really heard or imagined, along the eternal corridor that led away from Miguel Aparecido, the horrible chorus of curses, anathemas, and fulminations that descended from the forbidden heaven of San Juan de Aragón down to the pool of the cursed children. In my bones I felt something I didn’t want to feel: the fury of failure, resentment like a sickness, anger like a probable salvation, and the final words Miguel Aparecido said to me.
“How do you know who is guilty? Above all, how do you know if you’re innocent?”
I LEFT THE question unresolved. Had Miguel Aparecido performed a play for only one spectator: myself? If that was true, did he do it with the complicity of Antonio Sanginés? What united the prisoner and the professor beyond the relationship of accused-defender? Was my visit to the cells of the prison merely a part of my course in forensic practice, prepared by my professor with a dramatic, almost operatic example of perverse criminality? Because, after all, what keeps Miguel Aparecido imprisoned? Only his desire to remain behind bars? Or a secret maneuver, part of a web of interests I wouldn’t dare to imagine because I lacked both data and experience?
I could not permit these circumstances to distance me from an immediate obligation, which was to look after the woman who had fallen so accidentally into my arms at the airport.
I tended to her the best I could. She was a doll without will, dependent on me. The incident on the airfield had wiped her out, as if in the decision to take control of a small plane and compete for a runway with the Air France jet she had abandoned that portion of will we all accumulate and portion out in installments until we die. Lucha Zapata was exhausted because she had left on the runway all the energy her spirit had possessed until then. Now on account of simply passing by, I was obliged to undress her, bathe her, lay her down in Jericó’s bed, offer her a meal she barely tasted and vomited up before the food reached her stomach.
How to describe her?
She was a bird. A wounded bird who happened to nest in my garret. Which bird? We live in a country of birds. Two hundred sixty species in the Yucatec lagoons of Río Lagartos. Almost seven hundred species embalmed in the Saltillo museum. They are part of the great tropical coasts of the country and ascend like eagles to the highest peaks. They survive, who knows how, the deadly smoke of the city. That is to say, I had plenty to choose from when I determined a resemblance between them and Lucha Zapata. She was like a pink (tending to red) flamingo in a fishing village in Yucatán, a bird withdrawn into itself and its sacred, almost sepulchral silence. Noise must be avoided: A motor, for example, is a resonant catastrophe that obliges the bird to fly away. Silence is required to see it. And if I kept a single bird, it was in spite of the physical appearance of the woman who lay in Jericó’s bed.
Lucha Zapata was a flamingo. Which is a bird, the dictionary says, with “very long bill, neck, and legs, white plumage on neck, chest, and abdomen, and intense red on head, tail, feet, back, and bill.” But this woman was small, withdrawn, lying in a fetal position in bed, and her arms were injured, pecked at as if other birds, raptors, had constantly assaulted her throughout her life. There was, in spite of everything, something vibrant in the small body I had seen in extreme action, struggling with the police after an audacious, frustrated attempt to fly. Did she even know how to pilot a plane? Had she managed only to climb into the machine and drive it down the runway as if it were an automobile? Did she even get it out of the hangar?
I didn’t dare ask her anything because between us loomed an invisible barrier that was in no way perverse. It was an untroubled boundary where, in implicit fashion, I offered her protection and she was grateful for it. Her nakedness was pathetic and at the same time natural and devout. What I mean is that Lucha Zapata was not embarrassed at her nakedness because she was without sin that needed to be forgiven. She lay in Jericó’s bed like a newborn, needing care and affection, completely removed from a lust she did not offer or expect from me, as I did not expect it from her.
Why do I compare her to a flamingo? She was not pink. Her extremities were not long. Her tints, however, were reddish, for the hair on her head and her pubis shone like a bird’s plumage. And if the body is our carnal plumage, hers was as pale as an early dawn, as wounded as a precipitate night. Lucha Zapata’s pale skin was pecked from head to toe. Red wounds glistened on her arms and legs, especially on her wrists and ankles.
She opened her eyes and looked at me looking at her.
I knew, and she told me without words, that her wounds were caused by no one but herself.
Why, in spite of everything, do I compare her to what she was not: a flamingo lost in a distant Mayan lagoon? Because of the fright in her. Not a common, ordinary fear but a vocation for solitude that withdraws from contact, including the visual contact of another person’s gaze, too often guilty of unhealthy curiosity and offensive prejudice.
Lucha Zapata looked at me and did not see evil in my eyes.
She simply extended her hand to take mine and said Dress me, Savior, pick me up and take me back to my house. My things are there. My medicines. Hurry. It’s urgent.
What was I to do, compassionate readers, except satisfy the desires of this helpless woman who from now on—my head and heart told me so, even my respiration, the involuntary panting with which I picked up the defeated body wrapped in a sarape—would be my responsibility? I carried her down to Calle de Praga, hailed a taxi, and repeated the address she had just given to me with a sigh: “Cerrada de Chimalpopoca beside the Metro in Colonia de los Doctores.”
I became accustomed to having two addresses. One on Calle de Praga, where punctually every month I received the check that allowed me to live without determining who sent it to me or asking at the bank for the name of a person who undoubtedly did not wish to be known or have the bank reveal his or her identity. The other on Cerrada de Chimalpopoca: the modest, bare little house of my friend Lucha Zapata. An old entrance, a courtyard with dead flowers, in the rear an unfurnished retreat with mats on the floor, a Japanese eating table, a pillow or two, and a rod where half a dozen skirts and trousers were hanging. Behind the improvised closet a tiny bathroom with a tub and shower. A variety of pharmaceutical products. I recognized some names but didn’t know most of them. The towels were very old.
“Stay. Don’t leave me.”
How could I abandon her, I who longed to be responsible for someone since I couldn’t be responsible for unknown relatives (who had been, in my opinion, humiliatingly, generously, shamefully responsible for me), or occasional though respected teachers (Filopá
ter, Sanginés), or transitory friends (Errol Esparza), or healers who were both generous and aloof (Elvira Ríos), much less jailers as odious as María Egipciaca? What remained? Jericó’s friendship, firm and constant since the days of secondary school. But Jericó wasn’t here.
And now this fragile woman, inert in bed one day and the next as vibrant as an unattached electrical cable. At first in the little house in Colonia de los Doctores (symbol of a lost city, generous and ordered in the name of medical science, with one-story buildings and discreet façades, and an occasional gray residence built of stone) Lucha Zapata lived with me regaining her strength. I was afraid that when she recovered her stamina she would undertake adventures like the battle in the airport, for which I did not feel qualified. But for the moment, delicate and sweet, sometimes shaping unassuming movements, lying on the mat with a blue pillow under her head, Lucha Zapata told me, recalling our encounter, that if she went to the airport, exposing herself to danger, it was because aviation teaches us to be fatalistic, which gives me a reason for living in spite of the fatality all around us.
I talked to her, sharing the gourd of yerba maté Lucha always had in her hand and expounding on the openings or bases she constantly supplied, ideas about the fated as opposed to the voluntary, the free, and the virtuous, a distinction that pleased her a great deal, and she would ask me to explain: What I want can be good or bad, I told her, but it expresses my will. Does that mean that whether it’s good or evil, what I do is free? How do I make my freedom not only free but virtuous? Freedom for evil? Or is evil not free precisely because it is evil?
“Don’t get all excited,” Lucha said with a laugh. “Whatever you do, things are going to happen with or without you.”