It’s as if I unplugged something and I’ve begun to empty. As if because I could not escape past the walls, I’ve begun to escape from myself. But don’t think I’m attracted to the idea of dying. I’ve tried to stop the hemorrhaging with compresses, drugs, spells, yoga, prayers, and even cotton balls coated in arnica and ginger. All for nothing. I started with this whole drama right after I arrived in Manninpox, in the dining room during lunch. They had assigned me a permanent spot at one of the tables, which are long, for eight or ten prisoners with adjoining benches. That day I finished eating, picked up my tray, and headed for one of the corners, where we have to turn them in before the bell rings, and as I was doing this I noticed that the others opened a path before me. They had already warned me that one of the most dangerous moments in here is when you are walking with both of your hands busy carrying the tray, which is when they can jump you. If somebody wants to fuck you, that’s when they can do it, stab you in the side and disappear into the mayhem that ensues. I don’t know if they ever told you, but Piporro (do you remember Piporro, who came to your workshop a couple of times?), she was carrying her tray, and they pierced her with the long sharpened handle of a plastic spoon. Nothing like that was happening to me. I panicked because of the opposite, when I noticed that everyone was moving aside to let me pass. I felt as if they were watching me with disgust and thought they were going to hit me. That’s the sensation I had. In jail, intuitions like that come all of a sudden, like getting sucker-punched. The certainty of danger is physical, the warning from the body, not the mind. I was always aware of the eyes of the others, terrified to be looked upon with hatred or to be looked at too much. I needed to know how they were looking at me to know what to expect. But the longer you’re here, the more you come to understand that the eyes are less important than the hands. What you must never grow careless about are the hands of others, because that’s how aggression is expressed. Keep a close eye on anyone with her hands behind her or in her pockets. The real danger is always in the hands.
I didn’t know that yet, and I hadn’t made friends who would defend me. I hadn’t formed alliances or joined any of the gangs, and my sisterhood with Mandra X had not yet begun, meaning I was alone and left to my own devices.
They had already warned me about her, Mandra X. “She’s the leader of those who spill milk,” they told me. I imagined a million things. Spill milk? It sounded sexual, but something a man would say. Later, I was able to see it with my own eyes. Fucking around, they’d spill cartons of milk on the floor of the dining room. Las Nolis: that’s what Mandra’s girls are called. They’re her clan, her buddies — the sect of the chosen. You would go get some food and there were puddles of milk everywhere, the tables, the benches, the trays. At first, I thought they did it just to fuck with people, but later I found out it was their way of demanding from those in charge that they replace the regular milk with lactose-free milk. Because of the farts, you know? Here, it’s two, three, or even four to a cell. Many of the inmates are lactose intolerant, and if they drink it, their stomach swells, and then come the torpedoes. Can you imagine what it’s like to spend a night locked up in a room eight by nine feet with three old broads farting away? A gas chamber, sorry, bad joke. They also said that Mandra X was a dyke, and that if she liked someone, she got her by hook or by crook. That’s what they said. I wasn’t sure. I had seen her, and she was a huge woman; in Manninpox, whoever commits to working out and is disciplined about it can become a bull without leaving her cell, with a daily routine of push-ups, pull-ups, sit-ups, and crunches. That was Mandra X, so muscular you would swear she had a pair of hanging balls. And she was weird, very weird. Weirder than a checkered dog. They also told me that she was the leader of the resistance inside. That she was a warrior, or what they call warrior in here, an inmate who’s not afraid of skirmishes. The one who goes to the authorities with demands when the prisoners get worked up about something. I had heard all this, but until that moment I had only run into her in the hallway when she had jumped on me for asking too many questions. They also said that her gang, Las Nolis, made blood pacts, that they had their own mythology and rituals, and even engaged in sacrificial practices. That’s what they said about her and her group, and I didn’t like it, although it seemed to have its benefits, given that I was vulnerable here, and I needed to associate with someone. Because here, if you’re alone you pay for it, and you can be forced to do some pretty ugly things, such as become somebody’s woman. Or a maid. “From now on you are mine,” one of the butch women would tell you, and if you don’t respond by pulling her eyes out you become her sexual slave. Or some cacique comes and says, “You, just so you know, from now on you are my servant.” Either you smash her teeth in, or you’ll be doing her laundry, making her bed, giving her money, finding her cigarettes, cleaning her cell, writing letters for her sons and boyfriends. They even make you cut their toenails and give them manicures. Or also to go down on them, which here they call cunni. That’s almost always the fate of the unaffiliated. But I still avoided Mandra X and her Nolis, so they wouldn’t rape me or force me to participate in their satanic rituals. As if there were other options to consider, such as the Children of Christ, who take a drug called angel dust and walk around having visions of Christ. Anyway, they were a black sisterhood and would never accept me. There were also the Netas, all Puerto Rican, the Sisters of Jarimat UI for the Muslims, and the Wontan Clan, the least likely to take me because they were white extremists.