Rose guessed María Paz’s character was the antithesis of a challenging and belligerent individual like Mandra X. He saw María Paz as pragmatic, measured, used to not asking for more than her share, to not exposing herself more than necessary, to moving efficiently below the surface, taking care of one thing at a time, without wasting her energies on causes or pointless issues. Mandra X was an agitator, a leader, a rebel with a cause. Not so María Paz. A survivor, as she herself had said about Bolivia, her mother, which suited her as well, Rose thought; she had become an expert at keeping her head above water without much ado, just like the dogs.
One day, the guards came to get María Paz in her cell to take her to court. The decisive moment of her trial had arrived. Mandra X had visited a few moments earlier and had seen her praying and pleading with all the saints to grant her freedom so she could find her sister, Violeta.
“To hell with the saints,” Mandra X told her, “and forget about Violeta for now. Worry about your own skin. Go fuck the asses of those sons of bitches who are keeping you locked up. The saints have nothing to do with this. You have to count on yourself.” And as María Paz walked down the hall heading for the bus that would take her to court, chained up like Houdini, Mandra X was able to yell one last thing: “You’re gonna get out of here because you’re innocent, Do you hear me? You’re innocent and you’re going to be free.” But that’s not how it turned out. María Paz had returned to her cell with a fifteen-year sentence.
A few weeks later, the shock of the tragedy lifted a bit when Pro Bono requested a mistrial from the supreme court because María had not been provided with a proper defense. In Pro Bono’s words, “the trial was shit, a sick joke, a series of fuckups.” And what happened? Pro Bono was successful with his petition, and the court ordered a retrial. A do-over. Back to the drawing board. Pro Bono petitioned that the defendant be freed in the meanwhile, but he was denied. She was considered a flight risk and remained in Manninpox.
It was during that time that María began to change. The other inmates noticed how some other person seemed to be emerging from the inside. They noted how she matured, getting stronger and distancing herself from the lost and defeated María Paz who had been at the first trial under those pitiable conditions and without any real defense. Pro Bono’s support and the solidarity with Mandra X, in combination with the hope of a new trial, animated and energized her in a way that she even developed a sense of humor. She went to bed at night with the hope that she would be found innocent and with the feeling that her freedom was just around the corner. She began to read everything she could and was excited about Cleve’s writing workshop. It was only sometime later that she got hit low again with what the Latina interns call the reckoning, especially after her sister, Violeta, refused to talk to her on the phone. Otherwise, María Paz remained active and in a good mood, consulting the dictionary to learn conjugations and grammatical rules, committed to improving her written English to leave behind some record of what she had lived through. But not everything was going as planned. The supreme court, which needed to set a date for the new trial, postponed it time and again. Why? Rose didn’t quite understand. Pro Bono explained it to him, but he was incapable of capturing the minutiae of it. Legal intricacies, asshole moves by the prosecutor, insufficient evidence, the give-and-take of Pro Bono’s negotiations with the prosecution. Months passed and the new trial started to become a mirage. And although María Paz’s mind apparently withstood the uncertainty and the accompanying stress, the same was not true of her body, and it began to falter again. María Paz internalized the issue and the hemorrhaging returned worse than ever, draining her of vital energy.
Mandra X and Las Nolis tried whatever they could to prevent this final breakdown, home remedies that were crude and insufficient to address chronic anemia, things like contraband fresh foods and supplements, eight to ten glasses of water daily, no coffee.
“A lot of the inmates thought this was bull,” Dummy told them. “They preferred other methods. I mean like spells, superstitions, and all that crap.”
Some leaned toward white magic, some toward the other kind. There was everything in there. Candomblé, voodoo, spells, palo mayombe, masses, and even exorcisms — a whole panoply of approaches, according to Dummy. Mandra X put up a fight against it because she despised the irrational, no prayers for her, or incense, or candles lit to virgins, she was at war against all that. But it was still everywhere. The prisoners had learned to appreciate María Paz. There was something about the girl that won people over, a natural seductive quality, and rumors spread that Mandra X was letting her die. According to Dummy herself, even Mandra X realized that this was true to an extent, for all she could do was apply hot compresses to deal with the sickness. Things were definitely not going well.
Among the Latinas, there was an old woman named Ismaela Ayé who considered herself the queen mother of sorcery in the place. She was the only one who had been at Manninpox longer than Mandra X, so the two were rivals for that title, and for every other title as well, sworn enemies from day one. Ismaela Ayé had been retired for years. According to her, her decline had started when the guard confiscated a pot of holy soil; it was dirt from Golgotha, she claimed, which had been her source of power.
“Bullshit,” Dummy said, “Ismaela Ayé had slowly been cornered by Mandra X, that’s what had happened, her and her trashy, third-world hucksterism, all that caveman Catholicism and crappy devotions — what jar? what dirt from Golgotha? — as if we all just fell off the truck. Mandra X had pushed Ismaela aside, convincing the others to become a little more aware, to act rationally, not to be fucked by authority or by their own ignorance.”
With María Paz’s health crisis, Ismaela experienced a renaissance in power, gaining power by spreading rumors about Mandra X, using her evil tongue to spread curses from her cell, like a murderer of her own children who does not understand the sacred value of blood. Ismaela Ayé started reciting passages from the books of Exodus and Hebrews to cast guilt on Mandra X, and took advantage of the situation to promote the glory of living blood, the blood of Cavalry that falls on the celestial chalice, and other such hyperboles that in the end caught the attention of the other prisoners and reverberated throughout Manninpox.
At the same time, Mandra X knew that she was in trouble, that María Paz’s health crisis made her limitations all too evident. The other inmates were judging her, doubting her methods, waiting for a breakup. Perhaps Mandra X could assume her previous position again only if she got rid of Ismaela Ayé. It wouldn’t have been hard; all it would have taken was one good whack. The old woman was nothing but a dry-skinned bag of bones. But such a thing would come back to bite Mandra X in the ass, so she opted for more conciliatory measures and tried to make peace with Ismaela: “Please understand, this María Paz is no Jesus Christ incarnate; she’s just a sick girl.” But the old woman didn’t let up; she knew she had Mandra X in hot water. Nothing else to do, Mandra X’s theories and the practices of Las Nolis regarding pain as redemption and wounds as badges sounded horrible in light of the reality that María Paz was dying. Mandra X was between Scylla and Charybdis, between the negligence of those who ran the prison and the fanaticism unleashed among the inmates. She had to soften to the point of prescribing herb teas, yoga exercises, and cold sitz baths, and this began to undermine her image and influence. On the other hand, the popularity of old woman Ayé continued to skyrocket, and the Latina inmates opened their ears to her sermons, which asserted that we all are Christ figures and that all blood is sacred, that Moses sprinkled the book with such blood, that Yemaya’s blood comes from these shadows, that the lamb so sealed the covenant, that such sacrifices to this or to that were beneficial. “A vulgar jambalaya,” Dummy told Pro Bono and Rose. Ismaela’s brain was sotted and she couldn’t remember anything in detail, so she just jumbled everything up, and what she couldn’t remember she made up. What she couldn’t make up, she dreamt up. And yet, overnight she was able to win over many inmates with her stories, dragging the women into a drunkenness of superstition and supernatural thinking.