Prayers for the Stolen (18 page)

I could hear my mother again. Right inside of my head she said, Well, well, well, look who’s here! It’s Miss Onomatopoeia herself!

Miss Onomatopoeia’s name was Luna and she was from Guatemala. She pointed up at the top bunk with the pointer finger of her right hand, her only hand, and told me the top bunk bed was for me. She had long and square fake acrylic fingernails pasted onto her real nails and each nail was painted black and white in a zebra pattern.

One woman from El Salvador was up there, but she left yesterday. I hope it’s clean, Luna said.

I am sure it’s fine.

Nothing in here is fine. All that woman ever said was God. She said God all day long as if the word were her heart beating.

A woman dressed in blue appeared and stood within the door frame. She was so large she blocked out much of the light from the corridor. She had short black hair and long fingernails that were painted yellow. She’d been sentenced. If you wore blue, you had no hope. If you wore beige you had hope.

So you killed the baby, she said. It was you.

I shook my head.

Touch the floor.

I paused for a second and she said it again, Touch the floor!

I crouched and touched the ground with my fingers.

You’re in jail, she said. I tell everyone who comes here to touch the ground as soon as they get here so they know exactly where they are. Now you have to decide if you left your pussy outside or if you brought it in here with you!

The woman moved to one side and the light from behind her body filled my cell. She smelled like blood and ink. She smelled like red and black. I was still crouched, touching the floor when she left.

Violeta, that’s Violeta. She’s killed two, no, three, no, four, no, many men. Bang bang, but with a knife, slice, slice, stab, stab. How many men?

Many. She tattoos everyone and loves jail because there’s so much skin in here.

The sunlight that fell through the narrow slat of the room’s window was cold.

I never knew the sun could be cold.

Luna explained there was no place to keep anything but that I could store my belongings in a space under her bottom bunk bed.

I have no belongings.

You will in time.

No. This is a mistake.

Did you kill her? You did, right?

I looked into Luna’s black eyes.

She was a small, dark brown Mayan Indian from Guatemala with straight black hair. I was a medium-sized, dark brown mix of Spanish and Aztec blood from Guerrero, Mexico, with frizzy, curly hair, which proved I also had some African slave blood. We were just two pages from the continent’s history books. You could tear us out and roll us into a ball and throw us in the trash.

What do you think? I asked.

What?

Think I killed that girl?

Of course not, she answered. They say here that it was an AK-47. You can’t know how to use one of those.

My mother’s voice echoed through me. I heard her say, This Guatemalan Indian is a piece of candy.

Luna said I could borrow any of her things except her toothbrush.

Even though it was only midday, I climbed up into the bed and lay down. The beauty parlor smell of the prison was concentrated up there. It smelled like acetone nail polish remover mixed with lemon hair spray. The unpainted concrete ceiling was a foot away from my face. If I turned over and lay on my side, I could scrape my shoulder and hip against the rough cement.

In jail everyone is missing something, Luna said.

I curled up and tried to forget I was cold. I didn’t have a blanket. If I wanted a blanket or pillow I had to buy it. Everything in jail had to be bought.

There was some graffiti written in black ink on the wall, exactly at my eye level and at the eye level of hundreds of women who had lain in the top bunk bed before me. Most of the graffiti consisted of lovers’ hearts with initials in them. Also, carved into the cement was the word
Tarzan
.

I closed my eyes. I could hear my mother say, So you had to go
to jail and share a room with a one-armed Indian woman from Guatemala!

I also knew that even though we were proud to be the angriest and meanest people in Mexico, my mother could not stop crying because her daughter was in jail. The flies were drinking her tears.

When I thought of my house, I also knew that the drug trafficker’s blue plastic asthma inhaler was still lying in the green grass under the papaya tree. I knew it would lie there for hundreds of years.

I slept for the rest of the day and all through the night. The dawn light awoke me along with the new sound of traffic. It was the first time I had risen without hearing birds. It was raining outside, which made the cement walls and floor seem like walls and floors of ice.

During the night Luna had covered me with a blanket and a couple of towels. Small acts of kindness could turn me inside out. I never would have believed that someone who had shot a child in a break-and-entry robbery, killed twelve old ladies for their wedding rings, or murdered two husbands could loan me a sweater, give me a cookie, or hold my hand.

Luna had also placed my feet inside plastic supermarket bags so they would not get cold in the night.

Julio had said, Life is a crazy place where the drowned can be walking on dry land.

Now I knew he was right. It only took me one day to figure out that being in jail was like wearing a dress inside out, a misbuttoned sweater, or a shoe on the wrong foot. My skin was on the inside and all my veins and bones were on the outside. I thought, I better not bump into anyone.

I was tied to a train
, the migrant train that goes from the south of Mexico to the US border, tied with a blue plastic clothesline, Luna said.

I could see her blood move through her veins and down her left arm and stop at the small stump, which was all that remained of her arm, like a tree limb that has been badly pruned with a dull saw.

I knew what Luna was talking about because Julio had told me that in Mexico there were two borders that cut the country into pieces. The horizontal border is the one between the United States and Mexico. The vertical border leads from Central America, through Mexico, and to the United States. Mostly men take the train from Central America to the border. It’s much cheaper. Women prefer taking the bus because it is safer. Julio, like everyone else, called the train The Beast.

You took The Beast?

We tied ourselves to the train because you fall asleep, Luna explained. You can’t help it. Imagine falling asleep in that speed. I was tied outside to a handrail. I went to sleep
and slipped and fell beside the track and the train tore off my arm and I lost my arm and I almost died.

She said all of this and did not take a breath.

Luna said she liked being in jail because she could urinate whenever she needed to.

You don’t want to get off to urinate when the train stops for a few minutes and the men get off because they’ll watch you, make fun of you as you squat by the tracks, or rape you. All the women, all of us hold it in. It hurts. You don’t want to drink and if you don’t drink, well, you know, you die.

Did you leave Guatemala by yourself?

The train tore off my arm and I almost died and they still wanted to deport me. The migration police didn’t believe me when I said I was Mexican. They told me to sing the Mexican national anthem if I was a Mexican.

Do you know it?

Luna shook her head.

This reminded me of the day I sat under a papaya tree with Paula and Maria going over the words of the national anthem. Paula and I learned it all so easily as if it was senseless sounds, but Maria took the actual words very seriously. What does that mean, exactly? she said. Why are we singing about Mexico going to war? Why does the inside of the world tremble?

I didn’t kill that girl. I could never do that. I was in the car, locked in a car.

Luna unrolled a piece of toilet paper and handed it to me so I could blow my nose.

I’m not crying, I said.

Yes, you are.

No, I’m not.

Luna explained that, even though my mother was supposed to be notified, as I gave the administrators who booked me in her number, they probably would not call her.

They’re slow, slow, slow about everything here if you don’t have money. Money is a car race. Money is speed.

I could feel Mrs. Domingo’s diamond on the inside of my palm, closed in my fist.

You must borrow a person’s telephone, Luna said. You have to call your mother or someone. Is there someone else?

No, there’s no one else.

Are you married? Luna looked at the gold band on my finger.

No.

Georgia will let you make a call. She’s the only one who might lend you her phone without making you pay.

Does everyone know that I’m here because they think I killed that girl?

Yes.

Someone is going to kill me, right?

Luna did not answer. She turned and left the cell.

I thought, If Mike’s alive, he’s dead.

In the small cell the bunk beds took up most of the room. Inside the cave-like space of Luna’s bed, she’d hammered nails into the wall. On these nails she’d hung at least ten sleeves that she’d cut off of sweaters, blouses, and long-sleeved T-shirts. They were all beige and looked like a wall covered in snakes.

After only a few minutes, Luna returned and stood beside me as I looked at the sleeves hooked on the wall.

I did not take my arm into consideration, she said. I didn’t give it a special place in my life. I am saving these sleeves because I am going to make an altar to my arm.

That’s a good idea.

Do you give your arms a special place in your life?

No. No, I have not.

Listen. Stick to me. Don’t go walking around alone.

Do you believe me, Luna?

Yes, maybe, maybe I believe you. Maybe.

There was a knock on the door. A woman was standing there dressed in navy-blue sweatpants. She had a canister on her back and was holding a long, thin metal hose in her hand.

No, no, Luna said. She stood up and held her one hand up in the air.

Do you want bedbugs and fleas? the woman asked in a whisper.

The old, dented tin fumigation canister was corroded at its seams and a dark yellow paste, like mucus, formed around the spout.

Shit, Luna said. Let’s get out of here. She’s going to fumigate. Do what you have to do, Aurora.

Aurora was as pale as one of those centipedes or worms one finds under rocks. They are pale because the creatures have never been in the sun. As a child I used to pry rocks out of the ground or kick them over in search of white or transparent insects. Aurora’s light brown hair was so thin her ears stuck out from her hair.

This is Ladydi, Luna said.

I know, Aurora said in her drafty voice. Get out or stay in. It’s up to you.

She pursed her lips tightly together so that the fumigation fumes would not get in her mouth. The tips of her ten fingers were deep yellow.

Do you have any aspirin? Aurora asked.

Luna didn’t answer and I followed her out of the room. Behind us we heard the whooshing sound of the spray as insecticide filled our cell.

The truth is who wants fleas and bedbugs? Luna said. You look pretty clean, but it’s for the best. We won’t be able to go in there for a while. That stink stays around and gives you a headache you can’t shake off for days. You must be hungry by now. Let’s get some food.

The rain had stopped but the sky was still cloudy.

I followed Luna down the labyrinth of corridors that all seemed the same. The men’s prison could be seen through the long open glassless windows in the concrete walls. The faces of men at the windows looked in our direction. Every now and then one of them cupped his hands around his mouth and screamed something or lifted up a white T-shirt and waved it madly at us. It was as if the women’s prison was a ship passing by and the men’s prison was a deserted island with hundreds of shipwrecked sailors. In one short morning, I learned that the men do this non-stop, all day long, and if a woman waves back, it’s love forever after.

And, unlike the male prison across the patio, this world overflowed with rubbish bins filled with bloodied cotton and rags. In this women’s world blood was exposed in the garbage, in the un-flushed toilet bowl, on sheets and blankets, and on the stained panties soaking in the corner of a sink. I wondered how much blood left this place in a day and coursed through the underground sewage system of Mexico City. I knew I was standing on a lake of blood.

Luna took me to a large room with long tables and benches. Prisoners sat around occupied with different activities. Some were eating, others were knitting, and some women breastfed their babies. Two boys, who were about four or five years old, played on the floor with a train set that was made of small cereal boxes attached with knitting wool. One long table was laid out with dozens of bottles of nail polish and nail polish remover. At least twenty inmates were sitting around painting their fingernails.

Painted on the back wall of the room was a mural framed by a banner that said
The Mural of Hearts
. The content of the work, which I later found out had been painted by the inmates over a span of several years, consisted of portraits of famous Mexican women. I looked at their faces and read the names: Sor Juana,
Emma Godoy, Elena Garro, Frida Kahlo, and Josefa Ortiz de Dominguez.