I grew to understand that Mandra X had real pull in this place and it would be a good idea to belong to her group. That’s why I’m part of the group, more or less. Don’t think I’m one of the zealots. In any case, she has become my protector and adviser, my sister, my “brotha,” and me, her “sweet kid,” her protectee. When it comes to matters of love, she’s imposing, jealous, randy, unfaithful, Don Juana-ish, fucked in the head, calculating; that is, she has all the defects of a man and more. But with her friends she’s solid as a rock. There is not a more dangerous lover or a sounder buddy. I’m not gonna tell you she’s my friend, she’s friends with no one, she’s up on her high horse, and no one can touch her. How should I put it? Mandra X is a fortress inside the prison, a place of refuge for her protectees, a horror for her enemies, a boyfriend to her mistresses, and a leader for her followers.
One time I told her I felt alone. It was naiveté on my part.
“Alone?” she harangued me. “What the fuck do you mean you feel alone when you just joined the ranks of a huge part of the population of the United States, the ones behind bars, that is? So you’re alone, my depressive little fuck, my sad little cunt, my pillow biter? So snap out of it, bitch, because you are also part of a quarter of all the imprisoned people in the world, who are here in these United States.”
Now I know that you shouldn’t talk nonsense here, or be guided by sentimentalism. I have learned to report my days as bad and not so bad, sometimes more bad than others. Sometimes the hemorrhaging stops, it disappears completely for a week or so, as if a spigot in my veins has been closed. Then I feel as if my life comes back, I recover my energy, my joy, who would’ve have thought it, my joy in spite of everything. On those days, I try to recover, I feed myself well, I write pages and more pages, I even grow calmer thinking that at some point everything will become clear and I’m going to get out of here and go directly to Violeta. I give myself to this vision, dreaming that one day I’ll buy her a house with a garden for her, for Hero, and for me, who knows with what money, but who cares, money doesn’t exist in dreams. And Mandra X, who is Mandra X? Where does she come from? No one knows. She doesn’t utter a peep. She’s white but she speaks Spanish; she’s male but she has tits and a pussy; she’s a justice-seeker and a writer of legal writs and she knows everything there is to know about the law, but she mocks American justice, asserting it is the worst and most corrupt in the world. But she knows it inside out. Imagine decades locked up in here, studying the penal code, looking for a way around it, finding loopholes and resources. But all this knowledge is useless when it comes to her case, because she’s sentenced to life, and from that, no one, not even she, can save herself. She doesn’t allow questions to be asked about her and doesn’t gossip, yet she knows everything. She’s the living memory of this place. According to her, forgetfulness and ignorance are the worst two enemies of a prisoner. Look at my case, the most horrible things that happen to me are the ones I forget about the quickest. Since the night of my husband Greg’s birthday, I have lived through a chain of horrors, but there are blank spaces where the sequence of events should be, like you used to say, on display on its corresponding shelf. But not me, I hide pain and confusion when they’re still fresh in these nebulous zones. Mandra X won’t tolerate that one bit. She forces me to write about what has happened, to go over it, make it worth something, and learn from it. She stores away facts about you that your own memory has forgotten; then she gives them back to you, forcing you to confront them. That’s rare in here. Here, things are set up so that you grow apart from yourself, divide yourself in two, and mop both sides of the hallway at once.
A few weeks after you left, Mr. Rose, you were replaced by a lady with a lot of titles. We showed her what we had done in your workshop, not to betray you, but to provide a sense of continuity to the class. Well, she just went off, talking about goals, and motivations, and achievements, and gains. According to her the whole thing was a glorious race toward becoming better. It was more like she was directing graduate students at Harvard or something and not some fucked-up prisoners shit on by fortune, and no more gains than two or three steps in a circle and no more goals than pressing your cheeks to the bars. What a bunch of crap, this fucking self-help self-improvement, they want to make you drunk with that and expect you to believe it. But that doctor they brought to take your place, Mr. Rose, was the reigning queen of it all. And on top of it she gave us a warning: “Write about whatever you want, girls,” she told us, “any topic, you can write about anything that comes into your head, whatever, it’s all fine, everything is welcome, except what happens in this jail. That is strictly prohibited. I will not accept any writing about life in the prison, episodes in the prison, or criticism or complaints about what happens here.”
“Listen, ma’am,” we asked her. “Where do you think we live? You think we hang in the city and come to Manninpox to hand in our little homework assignments about life outside?”
What an idiot, that lady. She said there were a bunch of other topics. That we could write about our childhoods, about our lives before prison, our loved ones, our dreams — constructive things and positive memories. We told her that we made suppositories with the positive and the constructive, and we never went back to the workshop. At least I never went, and neither did a few others. For now, Mandra X is my reader. She forces me to think about things seriously, to learn new words, and to call things by their name. Maybe it’s true that every door closed opens a new one, because I have had the best teachers of my life here in Manninpox: you and Mandra X. She doesn’t have family that visits her, just human rights people and defense lawyers for other inmates who come to talk over things with her. I imagine that Mandra X is their contact in here. She works for them, I think, or maybe it’s the other way around.