She made no attempt to cover up her crime or get rid of the bodies. On the contrary, she placed the duly shrouded children in their respective beds, and before turning herself in, made sure that the funeral and burial arrangements were paid. She foresaw any and all issues that could arise and managed to take care of everything beforehand: three coffins in just the right size, the hearse, wreaths and candles for the funeral service, cremation arrangements, and permission for the ashes to be taken to Germany and sprinkled on the Danube from a certain bridge in her hometown.
After she had been sentenced and taken to prison, Mandra X contacted Pro Bono and the organizations that had helped her, and, locked up in her cell, she began a strict exercise regimen and her studies of American penal law.
“Mandra X… Medea X,” Pro Bono told Rose. “The enraged, ferocious, fooled Medea. You know what Euripides has her say? She shouts, ‘Death unto you, my accursed children born of such a deathly mother.’ At first, my knees would tremble every time I had to be in her presence.”
“Like Clarice Starling when she goes to see Hannibal Lecter,” Rose said.
“What?”
“Never mind.”
“Since then we have become partners in crime. We both speak the language of freaks, I suppose.”
“But, wait, there’s still something that I’m not getting, this friend of yours…”
“Hold on there, I didn’t say friend, I said partner,” Pro Bono corrected him. “Mandra X does not have any friends per se.”
“Fine. So this person, your partner, murdered her children because she was afraid that she herself would soon die, and they would be left with no one to care for them…”
“Yet that was twenty years ago and she’s still with us,” Pro Bono completed the thought. “Is that your objection?”
“Not an objection. Who am I to judge? I get her motivation, and I guess that ideally she should have died right after the trial so that the whole sensationalist story would have had an apt ending. But that’s not what happened. The cancer never came back. She misjudged the entire situation. Don’t you think that she should be retried and sentenced to death just for that?”
“Execute her because she didn’t die? Not very prudent.”
Mandra X had helped María Paz, shown her how to survive in prison. María Paz became an entirely new person after Mandra X allowed her into her group.
“Las Nolis,” Pro Bono added. “They were known as Las Nolis, but the real full name of the group, the sect, was in Latin: Noli me tangere.”
“Sounds a little outlandish, prisoners throwing around Latin,” Rose tells me, “but that was the name. And why not? They were trapped in a medieval castle, so shouldn’t they be using Latin? Anyway, noli me tangere means ‘don’t touch me,’ from somewhere in the Bible. It seems that at first Las Nolis had misjudged María Paz. She came across as a weakling, a stupid, pretty little thing. According to Pro Bono, she had to prove her steeliness.”
The members of Noli me tangere were unified by the guiding principles of survival and respect. Simple and direct as that. But Mandra X was a wily old fox, and she knew that for the enterprise to work she needed to add touches of mystery and mysticism to it, have it develop its own ceremonies and myths. In prison, as well as in the world outside, but particularly in prison, such a makeup is essential if any enterprise is to have a sense of purpose. Without theatrics, there would be no meaning; without rituals, no loyalty.
“Was it a kind of political rebellion or a religious cult?” Rose asked Pro Bono.
“Neither, nothing as complicated as that.”
Mandra X had come up with a way to bring together women of different ages, social classes, education levels, religions, skin colors, psychological and moral tendencies, and sexual preferences. She did it by focusing on the one thing they had in common: they were all prisoners. They were residents of the worst kind of ghetto. Basically, Mandra X offered them the opportunity to become her property so that they would not have to be treated as less than human in such inhumane conditions. It also helped that they were all Latinas, the other thing that they all had in common. Although she herself had an Aryan background, she had become the head of a Latino gang. Pro Bono wasn’t sure how Mandra X had ended up in such a position, but he knew that she had hacked her way there by force and charisma, and because she had lived many years in Latin America and was fluent in Spanish. On top of that, she was an old-timer. She had been at Manninpox almost longer than anyone had and had become a leader in the fight for prisoners’ human rights. Dark rumors circulated about her legendary crime, and about her philosophy and her methods.
“María Paz writes about group sacrifices in Manninpox,” Rose said. “About Las Nolis and orgies.”
“What does the pretty little María Paz know about any of that?” Pro Bono said.
“Blood sacrifices,” Rose insisted. “She says blood was spilled.”
According to Pro Bono, the whole situation was difficult to understand unless it was properly placed in the context of the powerlessness, confinement, and extreme deprivation that the women experienced. For them, their wounds were the only things they could call their own. They inflicted these wounds on themselves, and no one could stop them. Their scars were their marks, which they themselves had chosen and crafted, unlike the numbers they had been assigned, the cells in which they were locked up, and the uniforms they had to wear. There were some things, however, that no one could take from them: their blood, their sweat, their shit, their tears, their urine, their saliva, their vaginal fluids.
“Something’s better than nothing,” Rose quipped.
“The whole thing reminds me of this Dutch mystic from the fourteenth century, Saint Liduvina de Schiedam,” Pro Bono said.
“I don’t know who she is,” Rose said, thinking that Cleve would have surely known.
“A strange woman, half mystic, half insane. She delighted in her own decomposition, applying torments on her body and giving herself over to infections and disease until she had become a mere semblance of the thing she had been, the scraps of a creature. She transformed herself into living waste to discover her true identity. Reading about her has helped me to better understand Mandra X and her Nolis. Listen, Rose, things in there work on another level altogether,” Pro Bono said as Rose watched the low arch of the autumn light gild the landscape. “Look, my friend, if you are going to go in there with me, you’re going to have to change the way you think about things. It’s another world in there, and it forces you to think in different terms.”
“I’m not sure I’ll go that far with you… my friend. Why don’t you tell me a little about María Paz.”
“María Paz is another story. María Paz is a normal person, to the extent such a thing exists. Her time in Manninpox was an experience that without a doubt made her stronger and allowed her to mature in ways she would have never outside of prison. I personally witnessed the process, yet it did not change her into what I would call prison flesh.”
“So then María Paz is not like that mystic?” Rose asked.
“Neither are the others really, not completely, no need to force the comparison. Mandra X and her girls reclaim their pains, but also their joys. They want to feel alive through suffering and crying but also through singing, masturbating, writing, making love. In the end, Mandra X makes evident that in prison you can live a life that is on a fully human level of dignity if you fight for it stubbornly enough.”
“María Paz says that they slashed their skins and cut into their veins.”