Norte Page 10
“Because I’m too good to be here,” he said as he tied the laces of his brown suede shoes with the black spots. “They don’t want to give me the raise I deserve, and prefer to fuck me over instead of letting me go to a better university than this piece of shit one. Come morning, the previous night’s trash is always gone.”
“It’s called a garbage truck. Maybe you forgot that you had taken it to the curb for pickup because you took it out so late. I saw you take your trash out at times when you were exhausted and half-asleep.”
“The garbage truck comes around once a week, get it?”
“Got it. And no. Maybe you did something to seriously aggravate the deans?”
“Oh knock it off, you feisty little girl.” I could see the tremble in his lips. “If you doubt me, there’s the door. Unless you’re a spy.”
The lights went out in the house. I walked over to the window. There was a blackout in the whole neighborhood.
“Are you going to blame the deans for this too?”
“Why not? Anything’s possible.”
“Whatever, Fabián. I’m on your side, I just want you to finish your book and . . .”
The lights came back on around the neighborhood. Fabián sighed.
“Oh, all my theories, my big book. You’re truly on my side, huh? If anything gets out, I’ll know who the traitor is. There’s my book. Read it. Tell me what you think.”
There was a manuscript on the desk. I laughed cautiously but was excited.
“Seriously? You’re letting me?”
I picked the manuscript up and held it on my lap. I quickly calculated about five hundred pages. I read the title: “Regarding the Absent Everything.”
The first paragraph was somehow familiar to me, like a paraphrased excerpt from Facundo, which I’d read in Fabián’s class my first semester in Landslide. The second paragraph changed rhythm abruptly, and the prose seemed to want to capture an oral cadence, Fabián’s voice. I remember when we studied the testimonies of nineteenth-century Cuban slaves in his class, how they struck a certain rhythm in the body of the text. The voice was close on the subject, and for that reason, testimony is the narrative discourse par excellence.
I allowed myself to be carried away by the rhythm of the prose. It was like being transported to one of Fabián’s classes. Then it dawned on me. It wasn’t merely a good attempt; it was a literal transcription of one of Fabián’s classes. He always carried a tape recorder with him during his classes, and the first thing he did was turn it on and set it on the desk.
It went on like that until page 83. Two, three, four classes, one after the other. Next came a list of last names. First A, then B . . . I jumped to page 115. 271. 362. 420. It was a copy of the Landslide white pages.
“I don’t understand. I don’t get it.”
“That’s all there is. All the truth I wish to tell.”
“But the book you’ve been writing . . .”
“Utopia: there’s no such place.”
“So much for all the excuses. You never had time for anything else. I had to let the genius work in peace.”
I threw the manuscript on the floor. He walked out onto the balcony. It was one of his favorite places, we used to sit there and talk while he showed me everything he’d planted in the yard. One plant after another until there was no more space—lush vegetation that today I imagined pulled up or withered.
A few minutes passed. Fabián didn’t come back, so I walked over toward the balcony. Fabián stumbled in. He shouted for me to get out of the way, and then he shoved me and started insulting me. I wasn’t in the mood for drama, so I bolted down the stairs, grabbed my bike, and left. Fabián called my cell phone but I didn’t answer. He left apologetic messages.
Things were fine until the calls stopped. I started to think that I might have been too hard on him, too awkward and proud. Should I call him back? Maybe I should go back over to his house.
I tried to write but couldn’t concentrate. I tried to put myself in Fabián’s shoes, comprehend his feelings of despair, imagine myself sitting in front of a laptop for years, incapable of moving forward on my book. I failed. Lying on the sofa, I picked up an anthology by the Hernandez brothers and flipped through the pages as I waited for my cell phone to ring.
My dreams were restless that night.
7
Starke, Florida, 1988–1994
Jesús spent his first night in the Starke, Florida, prison with three other men. Their skin was covered in tattoos; they hadn’t shaved for days and stank to high heaven. They talked among themselves, and when he entered the cell they had looked at him askance but didn’t say a word. Why would he have been put in the same cell as them?
He lay back in his assigned bunk. He felt cold; they had taken his blazer away and told him they’d put it in a bag and give it back when he got out. In exchange, they gave him an orange uniform. He wanted his blazer back.
One of the men approached him and spat at his feet. He smiled at Jesús but kept still. There was no use picking a fight; they were burly men, he was better off avoiding a scuffle. Much of his cunning lay in his ability to discern when to attack and when to get lost in a crowd, avoid drawing attention to himself. Fighting was justified only when he was sure he could win. What about the incident in Miami? That was something different, the woman had surprised him in the bedroom. It was a costly mistake for Jesús. Let it serve as a lesson: never let your guard down.
He looked down at his hands. A twenty-year sentence. Sons of bitches, it was overkill. How the fuck am I going to survive in this place for such a long time? He wanted to keep his spirits up, but it wasn’t easy. He might disappear and nobody would be the wiser. His mother must have given him up for dead by now; María Luisa had gone on with her life without him. Anyone else would have done the same. And Papá? What had become of him? Maybe he’s in a different prison in this country that’s as wide as it is foreign.
A shiver ran through his body. A chilly wave that rolled down from his head to his feet, like an ocean swell of anxiety, of panic. He needed a few lines.
It was a windowless cell. The bars on the door were made of reinforced iron. He was used to coming and going as he pleased, right through houses, through cars. This place was a whole different story.
There was a constant murmur running through the building. Sudden screams from other cells, moaning, shrieking, the loudspeakers barking commands or instructions. He wouldn’t be able to sleep.
That’s what he was thinking when he closed his eyes and fell asleep.
Around two in the morning, a disturbing feeling woke him up. He opened his eyes enough to peek through his eyelid slits. From the darkness he could just barely make out the presence of someone kneeling beside his bed. One of the men was sucking his dick. He tried to sit up and scream, but the other two men covered his mouth and held his hands down. Someone punched him in the eye. His sight clouded and little strings of blood dripped down his face. The pain was intense, as if they had broken a bone. His right eye swelled shut.
A few more punches knocked him to the floor, where he received a barrage of kicks. He tried to protect his face but it was useless. His lips were split and bleeding.
He was still conscious when they pulled his clothes off and turned him over. He felt like screaming when the first cock penetrated him violently, but he knew the guards would never come. He had been put in the cell intentionally. This was how they initiated newcomers.
He lost consciousness when the third man sodomized him.
The majority of Starke’s three thousand prisoners were black. Cubans predominated among the Latino population. In the shower one morning, two of them took turns raping him. Jesús didn’t resist this time; at least he was spared a beating like the one he got that first night.
The guards rarely intervened in rapes or brawls. He used to think he was strong and agile, but not in prison. Nearly everyone lifted weights, and they were tough and muscular. Jesús was easy prey. He was in no condition t
o confront anyone: he was taken to the infirmary after the first night and given three stitches in his right eye. He could hardly open either one.
One morning a guard approached him and told him in Spanish that he could offer “protection.” Jesús asked what that entailed. The guard, named Orlando, took him to a utility room full of cleaning utensils. He told him to drop his pants and sit down on a plastic drum. The guard sucked him off.
Jesús closed his eyes and let him.
His sleep was terrible. The slightest noise would wake him up. When new prisoners arrived, it prompted memories of his own first night and he would start shaking uncontrollably. He was finally transferred to his own cell during his third week in Starke, but he couldn’t relax.
Orlando got him an appointment in the infirmary. There was a photo of President Bush on one of the walls, and posters of Saturday Night Fever and the 49ers on another. Jesús sat on the examination table and waited.
The doctor who attended him knew Spanish, though Jesús made an effort to speak in English. Orlando had told him that everything would be easier if he could speak English. The rapes hadn’t ceased altogether, but at least they had dwindled in frequency.
Jesús pointed at the 49ers poster. “Joe Montana is great,” he said.
“Really? I prefer baseball. I don’t know who put that poster up.”
“Qué?”
“So what’s your problem, son?”
“I not sleep. Everything hurt me.”
“Where does it hurt?”
“Everything.”
“You mean everywhere.”
“Yes.”
Jesús let out a gush of words in a confusing blend of Spanish and English. He told the doctor everything that had happened to him since arriving in Starke that first night. He gestured with his hands to make himself understood and opened his eyes as wide as he could to show how he couldn’t sleep. He pantomimed unzipping his pants to explain the rapes. “Violate,” he shouted over and over again. “I raped!”
The doctor had a hard time understanding him, but the panicked expression on Jesús’s face conveyed everything he needed to know. He took pity on Jesús and gave him pills for the anxiety, and to help him sleep. He told Jesús to hide them carefully and not to abuse them. He removed the stitches from his right eye.
Jesús considered suicide several times. He witnessed brawls between rival gangs that left prisoners toothless and with stab wounds; every night the gangs pulled out all kinds of new weapons, regardless of how often the guards inspected the cells, from rudimentary knives made with wire or pieces of metal to pistols that had been smuggled in during a visit.
He saw a prisoner stab a guard with a screwdriver; the blood spurting from the guard’s chest prompted him to think that skin is just a wrapper holding the red liquid inside. Mesmerized, he watched it gathering in a puddle on the floor. It made him miss having his knife, the thrill of puncturing other bodies, making them burst like tires.
Jesús saw one of the burly, tattooed guys from his first night push a black prisoner from the second floor. His head split open on impact. Jesús was given the task of cleaning up the blood and wiping the floor down with a cloth and alcohol. He couldn’t help stopping when he came across little pieces of brain, and staring at them for a while. How easy it was to break through someone’s skin and spill out everything that’s inside.
Jesús saw people being raped frequently. He was forced to have sex. At least now he didn’t do it for free; he’d learned how to get things in return, like food or protection.
He spent most of his time in his cell. He learned that the 49ers were invincible in their bid for the Super Bowl; they’d only lost two games—against the Falcons and the Rams. Montana and Rice were having an outstanding season. He drew a portrait of María Luisa on a sheet from a paper roll and stuck it to the wall. At night he masturbated thinking of her. Orlando asked who she was, and he said my wife.
“Does she know you’re here?”
“Ain’t talked to her in many years, buey.”
“I could help get a letter to her. Or a message. Whatever. Just tell me where to find her and it’s done.”
Jesús thought about it. “Is OK,” he said, “don’t worry. She no cared about me these years, I no care neither.”
“It’s a big country, man. You’re like a needle in a haystack. Even if she looked, it wouldn’t be easy to find you.”
He had given an alias when they arrested him. Someone in the consulate had asked him for next of kin to communicate his detention. Jesús said he didn’t have any family.
The medicines helped him feel better. He stopped having suicidal thoughts. The dreams came back again: he was the sole survivor in a world where ash rained down and the rivers flowed with blood.
They’d release him for good behavior before he served his full twenty-year sentence. Maybe even before serving ten if he was lucky. Then they’d see who it was they’d been fucking with. They’d be sorry for pissing him off.
He’d make them all pay for humiliating him, and it’d be a bitch.
The 49ers took the Super Bowl that year (they were down 16–13 in the last quarter, but then Montana threw a ten-yard pass to Taylor and clinched it).
A year went by. Two years (the 49ers won the Super Bowl again, 55–10 against the Broncos), and a third (the Giants eliminated the 49ers in the playoffs).
During his fourth year in Starke, Jesús worked his way into the protection of a white supremacist from the Aryan Brotherhood named Randy. By that time the photo of Bush in the infirmary had been replaced by one of Bill Clinton.
Jesús knew that Randy was one of the leaders of the Brotherhood, the most powerful and feared gang in Starke; they controlled the drug smuggling and responded viciously when anyone dared to encroach on their territory. At lunchtime Jesús would line up behind Randy in the cafeteria and do things like offer to pick up anything that fell to the floor. Randy appreciated how naturally Jesús accepted his subservience. He was lanky, with bad teeth and tattoos covering his arms and back. He wore studs in his lips and nose.
Once the prison guards and other prisoners saw Jesús hanging around Randy several times—in the prison yard they were two contrasting figures, a tall blond beside a short, brown-skinned cholo—they didn’t dare mess around with him. In exchange for Randy’s protection, Jesús had sex only with him. The members of the Brotherhood made fun of Jesús: they found out his name was Jesús María José, and so they started calling him María. María the Spic they called him, and he would try to correct them: “I no Puerto Rican.” “María Speedy,” they said, and Jesús accepted the nickname.
One afternoon Randy asked him if he believed in God.
“I not stop believing,” Jesús responded. “But I don’t go to mass for long time.”
“For Christ’s fucking sake, bro, a name like you got, you should be behaving a hell of a lot better! Lemme show you a little bit about fucking God. Follow me, Speedy.”
Randy led him to the chapel beside the infirmary, a tiny room that smelled like jasmine room freshener. A Christ whose legs and arms were just a tad too long hung on a wooden cross above the altar. Prayers written by prisoners begging for intercession were painted along the green walls.
Randy sat down on a pew, Jesús sat beside him.
“This world is the work of a lesser God,” Randy said looking him hard in the eyes. “Ain’t no other explanation for it. And the lesser God—he don’t have a name, see? He’s the Unnamed.”
Randy unzipped his fly.
“You want here? Por favor, no here.”
Randy grabbed Jesús by the nape of his neck and shoved his head into his crotch until Jesús’s lips gave and encased his cock. It was meaty, covered in black spots like a birthmark.
“Repeat after me, Speedy. Our Unnamed Father who art not in heaven.”
“Our Unnamed Father who art not in heaven,” Jesús said. He shut his eyes and let his tongue tickle Randy’s dick cautiously; he knew how Randy liked it.
“Holy be the absence of your name.”
“Holy be . . . the absence of . . . urmph . . . your name.”
“Thy kingdom of blood come.”
“Thy kingdom . . . of blood come.”
“Thy will be done.”
“Thy . . . will be . . . done.”
Randy pressed down hard on Jesús’s neck so that his mouth sucked in the whole cock down to its base. Jesús was blowing him, trying to concentrate on what Randy was saying. It was hard to breathe.
“On earth as it is without heaven.”
“On earth as it is without heaven,” Jesús repeated and got stuck midsentence.
“Give us this day our daily bread!” Randy said in a threatening tone, and Jesús knew he had better not make a mistake with the following sentence. He lifted his head a little and said:
“Give us this day our daily bread.”
“Forgive us not our trespasses.”
He moved up and licked the tip of his penis, stopped.
“Forgive us not our trespasses.”
“As we do not forgive those who trespass against us.”
“As we . . .”
He got stuck again, but then continued: “we do not . . . forgive those who urmph . . . trespass . . . against us.”
“Lead us into temptation.”
“Lead us into temptation.”
“And do not deliver us from evil.”
“And do not deliver us from evil.”
When he finished, Jesús spat Randy’s cum out and wiped the spittle from his inflamed lips with the back of his hand. Randy zipped up his fly and started laughing, his mouth gaping like a black hole that could swallow Jesús whole. He clutched his stomach as if it hurt. He made such a racket that one of the guards approached and tapped the floor with his billy club to alert Randy of his presence.
“If you don’t know how to behave in here,” the guard said, “you’ll have to leave.”
Randy apologized but broke out into hysterical laughter again the second they left the chapel.