Every morning at seven, unless it’s raining or we’re in isolation, they take us out to an interior yard they call the OSRU, for open space recreation unit. I’m not sure you ever saw it. You have the sky above, cement floor under your feet, and it is forty-two by fifteen steps. A space a little fucking tight for the one hundred thirty to one hundred fifty prisoners that share it. But it doesn’t matter, because you can see the sky, a glorious rectangle of blue, and there’s fresh air that fills your lungs so you can breathe again. In the winter, the yard is covered in snow and it is like a miracle to walk on that intact blanket, so soft and white, so resplendent and fallen from the sky, and that I first came to know here in America. I have told you, Colombia is tropical and there is no winter there. Every time Bolivia called me when I was staying with the Navas, I asked her, “Tell me, Mami, what’s snow like?” “Like lemon ice cream,” she responded. But among other things, the first thing that caught my attention when I saw that yard were the inmates walking around in a circle. Walking fast and faster in a circle, hugging those walls that kept them locked up. You know how this is here, a ridiculous Dracula’s castle with walls of reinforced concrete, without even a little crack to foster dreams of escape. They’d all be there, one hundred thirty to one hundred fifty women going around in circles, one behind the other, two deep, three deep, counterclockwise, like sleepwalkers trapped in their own dreams. This didn’t look like a jail but an insane asylum. And yet, after a week, I was doing it too, possessed of that urge to go around in circles without even asking myself what I was doing. It’s as if you need to break the bonds of confinement, and what drives you to walk in circles is the need to get out of here. Observe a caged tiger. Or any animal in a zoo, have you seen them? They go around and around, staying close to the bars, circling the space of their entrapment. We will never be able to go over the walls of that yard unless they crumble by the grace of God and the trumpets of Jericho. Searchlights and sirens await the spider woman who manages to climb to the top, and rolls of barbed wire, a swarm of blades, and electrified fences that will cut her to pieces, slice her, electrocute her, and mash her until she’s pulp. That’s why we go around in circles, I think. Maybe we are looking to close in that which encloses us, confine what confines us. They say that she who arrives on an island, sooner or later begins to go around it in circles. It’s called “rock fever.” We suffer from it here in Manninpox, and so every day we do the same thing.
Maybe it’s time to tell you why they put me in here. Although it won’t really be possible to explain it because I don’t really understand it myself. All I can tell you is that my chain of missteps in America began when I fell in love with a cop. Or when I didn’t fall in love with him enough, because I’m not going to lie to you, Mr. Rose, I can’t say I fell in love, not that kind of love you’d die for, that didn’t happen. I wonder if you are madly in love with that girl who teaches the deaf. I imagine you are from the way you talked about her. But with Americans you never know. You have this habit of saying things as if you were on camera, so it doesn’t matter what you say, as long as you say it with a smile and “have a nice day.” How I hate that “have a nice day.” They may not even know you or give a shit about your life, or you can drop dead in front of them, and they’ll still blurt out “have a nice day” with that fake smile.
Let’s put it like this, so when you write about it in your novel things are clear: my ruin was marrying Greg, the American ex-cop too many years older than me. He worked for the same company as me as a daytime security guard. Or maybe my mistake was loving him, because I shouldn’t have loved Greg, but I did. In his glory days he must have been a son of a bitch, one of those assholes that stomps on blacks and Latinos with their boots. Or maybe not, I was never quite sure. Anyhow, he had mellowed out by the time fate set him on my path, grown old and crusty, with a half-smile that was his white flag, making it clear he had surrendered long before. And besides, he was a widower, that type of widower with the air of an orphan begging for a good woman to take care of him.
He had the stuff of a bull, but came around the corner seeming like a tired steer. A nice fellow, believe me, with a beer belly and shiny black shoes. But what really attracted me to him, I’ll tell you, although it sounds bad, was that he was tall, white, blond, and English speaking. Well, blond at some point, but by the time I met him he was bald. I was attracted to the fact that he wore his blue-and-white Colorado Rockies T-shirt when he sat down to eat, that he put half a bottle of ketchup on everything, and that he thought if you were Colombian, you surely must know a friend of his who lived in Buenos Aires. Someone like that was a dream come true, just what I had been looking for since the time I ate Milky Ways dreaming about America. I’d had various US Latino boyfriends, one Honduran and another Peruvian. But this would be the first time in all those years that a gringo-gringo expressed serious interest in me, as Bolivia would say, or interests other than sucky-fucky ones. Think about it, Mr. Rose, what it meant for a poor Latina to finally be part of life, not on the side of the violent minorities and the superpredators, but on the side of law and order and the special victims unit.
One Tuesday, I was on my way to the office with thirty-eight completed surveys when I needed forty. I was short two and that was a big drama, because they only paid us for completed jobs, a check for the paperwork for the entire job. Before going in, I was able to get in touch with a contact by phone, something that was prohibited because interviews had to be done in person and at the place of residence. But this time it was a real emergency; in general, I was very diligent about my work, none of these routine proceedings like the rest of the girls. Not me, I got into it in depth, pursuing the task with an investigative reporter’s brio, and asking more questions than I had to, for gossip’s sake, I think, because I got excited about the stories people told. I confess that sin, I like to stick my nose in other people’s business, find out what’s happening in the dormitories and kitchens, and well, now by necessity, inside the cells. Ever since I was a girl, I’ve always liked to butt into private conversations. I try to understand people’s dreams and miseries, and I am fascinated by real-life love stories and follow them as if they were telenovelas. The thing was that on that day I was able to get a survey done, but I still needed one more after that to get to forty. I went into a café to have breakfast, diagonally across from our office, very worried because for the first time I was going to turn in incomplete work. I ordered coffee and toast, and who do I see there but Greg, the security guard. The old man was standing there holding his coffee, feeding pieces of a ham-and-cheese sandwich to his dog Hero, a crippled little pet that was like a mascot for everyone in the company. Greg is my man, I told myself; he had been heaven sent. So I went up to him very demurely, questionnaire in hand. We had never talked before, that is, except for the “have a nice day” or to exchange a few words about how Hero was doing.
“I’ll buy another sandwich for Hero if you answer a few questions for me,” I proposed.
“About what?”