“They didn’t even tell her about her husband’s murder, and if they had, it hadn’t registered,” Rose tells me. “Pro Bono had to tell her, more than a month after it had happened.”
“Sir, did you know María Paz was pregnant?” Dummy asked Pro Bono. “You didn’t know? Really? Pregnant, you know? Bun in the oven, little one inside. Does that shock you? Well, yes, she was fucking pregnant.”
“I had no idea,” Pro Bono said after a few seconds of silence, and Rose sensed that not having known about this truly upset him. “She never told me.”
Of course she didn’t tell him. María Paz never told anyone anything, especially if it was about her pain. But that’s how it was; she was pregnant. Although she hardly mentioned it, because she was incapable of admitting it, even to herself. According to the perception they had about her inside the prison, María Paz was a bramble of confusion, a goddamned bundle of nerves. Day by day less so, admittedly, and little by little she had been waking up, getting the hang of things, because whoever didn’t wake the fuck up wasn’t going to survive long at Manninpox, washed away by the current. But at first she was a babe in the woods, in utter denial of things and trembling all day.
“I take it you also don’t know that she lost the child after the beating that she took from the feds,” Dummy asked Pro Bono. “Not a clue, right? Or that this was the reason for hemorrhaging? No, you couldn’t know. The little princess never talked about those things because they hurt. Better just to remain quiet. Better not to say that the guards even refused to give her sanitary napkins, throwing it in her face that she had used up her tampon quota and the quota for the whole prison. But María Paz was one of those people who believed that if she didn’t talk about things it was as if they didn’t happen.”
“Foolish me for not having suspected it,” Rose says. “María Paz could have very well been pregnant, of course, with such a busy amorous life. And yes, of course, the beating they gave her when they arrested her must have caused her to miscarry. It must have really hurt her to lose the child in such a manner, who knows in what basement of what station at the hands of those sadists. And she was incapable of reasoning that the fault was theirs, those who beat her; I know the scene well, have lived through it myself. She created a completely new set of reasons to punish herself over that lost child, the same old beating on the chest with guilt: It’s my fault my child could not be born, my fault I was a bad mother, my fault the child wasn’t Greg’s but Joe’s, or the other way, my stupid fault it wasn’t Joe’s but Greg’s.”
Rose says he noticed something that was consistent throughout María Paz’s manuscript: she lingers in the present or dwells in the past, but leaves the reader hanging on the issues that are most pressing, that call most for resolution. But, of course, it could be that María Paz did talk about her pregnancy and that those passages are among the missing pages.
“Did you know, sir, that María Paz was sent to a hospital near Manninpox because the hemorrhaging wouldn’t stop?” Dummy continued to ask questions. “They scraped her insides. A curettage they called it, sir. No, you didn’t know. She didn’t tell you. She wasn’t capable of painting the whole picture. The way she sees her own life, it is full of holes, like a piece of fucking Swiss cheese. People think of things. People come up with ideas. Initiatives, as they say. The son of this man here, Professor Rose. He thought it would be a good idea for María Paz to write things down. So she would be more aware, as they say. Brilliant, your son, sir. A good person, but naive.”
“My son was an excellent teacher and he did what he could here,” Rose jumped in, leaving inhibitions aside when faced with the insulting of his boy.
María Paz’s problems hadn’t ended with that. According to Dummy, or according to Mandra X as related by Dummy, the medical care offered to the inmates at Manninpox, especially gynecological care, was shameful. The sick inmates were transferred to a special ward of a nearby public hospital, where, according to certain security regulations, they were kept in a separate wing and cuffed to their beds. They were forced to wait hours, sometimes days, then they were summarily attended, given a haphazard diagnosis, and treated accordingly. Nobody explained anything to them. What was wrong? What medication had they been given? The inmates remained ignorant of all details; they were simply acted upon as if objects. María Paz had not been an exception to this. They scraped her and she apparently recovered. The bleeding stopped, so they sent her back to her cell. But a couple of weeks later, the hemorrhaging started again, although not as bad as before. Every day little maroon spots appeared in her panties as a reminder that her insides were still damaged. Mandra X forced her to focus on the trial that she was waiting for, to prepare herself, to review the arguments in her defense, to make sure the chronology of events was clear in her head so that she wouldn’t contradict herself, wouldn’t lose hope. But María Paz wouldn’t come down from the clouds. She pretended to be out of it and got lost in dreams that had nothing to do with the facts, fantasies about that house with the garden she said she was going to buy.
Rose tells me he didn’t fully buy the picture of María Paz they painted of her in prison. He thought those women didn’t really understand her character. From what he had read, he knew the type of person she was. But, of course, when he was in Manninpox he didn’t say any of this. You don’t tease a pair of dragons when they’re sitting right in front of you. María Paz wasn’t one to be interpreted through ideologies, Rose thought, she need not be judged because she wasn’t aggressive, or proud, or forward like the rest of Mandra X’s militants. María Paz wasn’t of that brand; her style was more discreet, according to Rose, which didn’t mean it was any less effective. “Necessity has the face of a dog,” as she wrote in her manuscript, and Rose was beginning to understand that her personal code of conduct must have been guided by just such a maxim. He knew dogs well, their peculiar manner of slowly filling in the gaps with countless acts of humility and patience, and yet at the same time, with such guile and conviction that it made them by far the smartest of animals. That’s how María Paz went through life. She didn’t disgust anyone, and she didn’t bark or bite. No fuss or declarations, more or less going forward diagonally. Like a dog swimming. Rose had seen his dogs swimming. It wasn’t a crawl or a butterfly or a backstroke, but a freestyle paddling that was just enough to keep their heads above the water, yet so effective and persevering it would have allowed them to cross the English Channel if they had wanted.