“Suffice it to say that she has had tattooed the phrase ‘I have a dream,’” Rose tells me. “Believe it or not. There in those dungeons lives a creature who dares to dream. To be truthful, I don’t know. It was creepy. In the outside world, people wear shirts that say, ‘Single and at your service,’ ‘I love NYC,’ ‘Fuck y’all,’ and ‘Ban nuclear now.’ But that monster tattooed ‘I have a dream’ across her forehead. It was no wonder Pro Bono had said that Manninpox seemed to exist simply to hold her in, Mandra X, the minotaur in that labyrinth of stone. And she wasn’t by herself. She came with another inmate of the same size, or maybe even bigger. But I swear I didn’t even notice. My eyes were glued to that… species of bull inked in blue. I didn’t even notice the other one until they were right beside us. In silence.
“Pro Bono had neglected to tell me that Mandra X does not talk directly to anyone from outside, only through an intermediary. Perhaps not to incriminate herself, I never knew the exact reason. I was never able to hear her speak but for a single phrase. At times, she would whisper something in the ear of the other inmate, who was the one who spoke with us. Afterward, Pro Bono told me the other inmate was known as Dummy. Maybe because that’s her role, she’s like a ventriloquist’s dummy. But out of Mandra X’s mouth, not a word. Not one. The minotaur was content just to look at us.
“She didn’t join us at the table, but sat a few feet away from it. And she looked at us. To start off, Dummy asked about me. ‘Can we trust this guy?’ Do you know what Pro Bono told them? He said he didn’t know me that well. Unbelievable, but that’s exactly what he said. There you have it, my new BFF, betraying in me in the company of this monster without a moment’s thought to the consequences. ‘If you like, I can go,’ I said absurdly, as if I could just walk out that huge, solid-steel door, and I started to get up, but then Pro Bono explained that I was Cleve Rose’s father, and with a whisper from Mandra X, Dummy gestured for me to sit.”
Rose imagined it had been some kind of test: Mandra X wanted to take a fresh look at him and he had to accept that. It was impossible not to anyway. It was clear that she was the alpha among the four of them, the dominant macho who said when and how and for how long things would transpire. Dummy began to talk about María Paz right away. About how when the other inmates first saw her, the first thing they said was, “That one ain’t gonna make it.” Two kinds of people ended up in Manninpox. The first group consisted of those who take responsibility for their actions, and they admit that they committed a crime and it has proven costly, and they throw it right back in your face: “I did it, so what? — and I’m paying for it now, and when I finish paying I’m outta here and you’ll never see my ass again.” The other type says, “I did nothing, this is an injustice and the fuckers who did it are going to pay.” This latter group remained active and alive out of pure indignation and the need for vengeance. But Dummy explained that María Paz belonged to a third category, those who condemned themselves, who did no wrong but still felt guilty. She was fucked before she could defend herself because she killed the defense attorney within her, a horrible handicap.
“You can always tell the victim type, something about them, as if they were marked or something,” Dummy said beside the watchful eyes of Mandra X, who observed the proceedings as if from a pedestal, making Rose’s blood cold with her utter silence.
“The more victim traits a person possesses, the more likely she will attract a bolt of lightning. But that’s not mine,” Pro Bono said. “I’m paraphrasing René Girard.”
Rose paid close attention to everything but said nothing. He didn’t dare look Mandra X in the eyes, but he could not stop looking at the blue lines that ran up and down her arms, and he wondered what they meant. Are they veins? he wondered. Veins tattooed over the real veins? But then he noticed that each of the blue veins was labeled with a name in minuscule letters running parallel to it, and although he wasn’t able to read them, he would have had to put on his glasses, he remembered that María Paz had recounted how the net of veins on Mandra X were a mapping of all the bodies of water of Germany.
“The theory about getting hit by lightning is correct. There are those with a lightning bolt on their foreheads,” Rose tells me. And while he doesn’t recount the story of his son’s scar yet, he tells me about Luigi, a boy from his neighborhood when he was growing up.
This Luigi, skinny and younger than him, was by all signs an evident victim, a poor shit, a sad little runt, whose mother screamed at him and beat him. And Rose did too, of course he did. All he had to do was hear Luigi cry and a committed cruelty arose in him like he had never experienced before — an exacerbation, an arousal even, that took over his person every time he heard Luigi wail. And Rose had never been a bully, the opposite in fact: the tough kids at school had abused and ridiculed him to no end. Rose could have said what Obama had said about the same type of experience: “I didn’t emerge unscathed.” Yet an almost sexual urge had led him to beat Luigi, make him howl, help fuck him up some more because he himself had been fucked up, and simply because Luigi’s mother, by beating Luigi, had passed him on and put him at the mercy of all his superiors. Luigi was a loser, and veritable sufferer, and Rose thought that abusing him was not only okay but also inevitable: his little whimpers were an invitation to mistreat him.
The other prisoners thought that María Paz attracted misery because of her tendency to lower her guard, to hide behind her favorite phrases: “I don’t know,” “I don’t remember,” “I don’t understand,” and with the modest habit she had of pulling down her shirt all the time, as if it were too short on her. The older inmates told themselves that María was a martyr for anyone to overtake, a value judgment about which they were almost never wrong. Manninpox exposed the weak, confused, and defeated ones, and chewed them up. It gulped down their blood. In María Paz’s case, all this wasn’t meant figuratively; her blood dripped warmly on the cold stones. At first, she appeared to live in the clouds, incapable of telling her story even to herself, incompetent when it came to putting together the pieces of the puzzle to make a whole. During her first weeks, she couldn’t even figure out what her downfall had been. She talked about things that had happened to her as if they had happened to someone else. The first time Mandra X talked with her in private, María Paz complained that they hadn’t given her panties. When she had arrived at the prison and traded her clothes for the uniform, they hadn’t given her panties. They left her without underwear and that upset her horribly. She complained about that as if it were her one and only problem, having to go without panties and feeling exposed and violated. Maybe if we get her panties this rag doll could become a person again, Mandra X had thought, and found two pairs, so she could wash one while wearing the other. That seemed to calm down the novice a bit. She had already been through a lot. After a confrontation, she had spent a few days in solitary, no one knew how many. She herself didn’t know, had lost count. It was understandable that she would be a little discombobulated after what had happened, but she was going to hit bottom if she didn’t react somehow.