“Eight to ten years in prison is a lot of years, Mabelita,” said Captain Silva, changing his voice again; now he seemed sad and compassionate. “Especially if you’re in the women’s prison at Sullana. A hell, I can tell you, I know it like the back of my hand. There’s no water or electricity most of the time. The inmates sleep in piles, two or three in each cot along with their kids, a lot of them on the floor, stinking of shit and piss because the bathrooms are almost always out of order, and they take care of their needs in buckets or plastic bags that are emptied only once a day. A body can’t put up with that system for very long. Least of all a nice little woman like you, accustomed to a different kind of life.”
Even though she wanted to shout and insult him, Mabel remained silent. She’d never been inside the women’s prison at Sullana, but she’d seen it from the outside, passing by. She sensed that the captain wasn’t exaggerating at all in his description.
“After a year or a year and a half of that kind of life, surrounded by prostitutes, murderers, thieves, drug traffickers, many of them driven crazy in prison, a young, beautiful woman like you gets old, ugly, and half nuts. I don’t want that for you, Mabelita.”
The captain sighed, filled with pity over the possible fate of the lady of the house.
“You might say that it’s perverse to tell you these things and paint this kind of picture for you,” the implacable chief continued. “You’d be wrong. The sergeant and I aren’t sadists. We don’t want to frighten you. What do you say, Lituma?”
“Of course not, just the opposite,” the sergeant declared, shifting again in the armchair. “We’ve come with good intentions, señora.”
“We want to spare you those horrors.” Captain Silva grimaced, contorting his face, as if he’d had an awful hallucination, and raised his hands in alarm. “The scandal, the trial, the interrogations, the prison bars. Can you imagine it, Mabel? Instead of paying the penalty for complicity with those thugs, we want you to be free, no strings attached, living the good life you’ve been living for years. Do you see why I told you our visit was for your own good? It is, Mabelita, believe me.”
Now she could sense what this was about. From panic she’d moved on to rage and from rage to profound dejection. Her eyelids were heavy, and again she felt a weariness that made her close her eyes for a few moments. How marvelous it would be to sleep, to lose consciousness and memory, to doze off right here, curled up in the chair. To forget, to feel that none of this had happened, that life was what it had always been.
Mabel brought her face close to the windowpane and after a little while saw Miguel go out and disappear a few meters farther on, swallowed up by the dark. She looked over the area carefully. She couldn’t see anyone. But that didn’t reassure her. The cop could be standing in the doorway of a nearby house and could have seen him from there. He’d report to his bosses and the police would inform Don Felícito Yanaqué: “Your son and employee, Miguel Yanaqué, visits your mistress’s house at night.” The scandal would explode. What would happen to her? As she bathed, changed the sheets, and then lay down, the lamp on the night table lit, trying to sleep, she asked herself again, as she had so often in the past two and a half years since she’d begun to see Miguel in secret, how Felícito would react if he ever found out. He wasn’t the kind of man who pulled a knife or a revolver in defense of his honor, the kind who thinks that sexual affronts are washed away with blood. But he’d leave her. She’d be on the street. Her savings would last barely a few months, and only if she cut expenses drastically. At this point it wouldn’t be so easy for her to establish another relationship as comfortable as the one she had with the owner of Narihualá Transport. She’d been stupid. An idiot. It was her own fault. She always knew that sooner or later she’d have to pay the price. She was so depressed that sleep eluded her. This would be another night of insomnia and nightmares.
She dozed off from time to time and had intermittent attacks of panic. She was a practical woman and never wasted time feeling sorry for herself or crying over her mistakes. What she regretted most in life was giving in to the insistent young man who had pursued her, caught up with her, courted her, and with whom she’d flirted without suspecting he was Felícito’s son. It had begun two and a half years earlier, when in the streets, stores, restaurants, and cafeterias in the center of Piura, she realized she was often running into a white, athletic, good-looking, well-dressed boy who gave her suggestive looks and flirtatious smiles. She learned who he was when, after making him beg more than a little, and accepting fruit juice from him in a pastry shop, going out to eat with him, going dancing a couple of times in a discotheque along the river, she agreed to go to bed with him in a motel in Atarjea. She was never in love with Miguel. Well, Mabel hadn’t been in love with anybody since she was a kid, maybe because that was who she was or maybe because of what happened with her stepfather when she was thirteen. She’d been so disappointed with her first loves as a girl that from then on she’d had affairs, some longer than others, some very brief, but they had never involved her heart, only her body and her reason. She thought that’s how her affair with Miguel would be, that after two or three encounters it would dissolve on her own terms. But this time it didn’t happen that way. The boy had fallen in love. He stuck to her like a leech. Mabel realized the relationship had become a problem and tried to break it off. She couldn’t. The only time she hadn’t been able to get rid of a lover. A lover? Not really, since because he was either very poor or a tightwad, he rarely gave her presents, didn’t take her to nice places, and even warned her they’d never have a formal relationship because he wasn’t one of those men who wants to be a father and have a family. In other words, his only interest in her was sex.
When she tried to force the break, he threatened to tell his father everything. From that moment on she knew the story would end badly, and that of the three, she’d suffer the most.
“Effective cooperation with the justice system,” Captain Silva explained, smiling enthusiastically. “That’s what it’s called in legal jargon, Mabelita. The key word isn’t ‘cooperation,’ it’s ‘effective.’ It means that the cooperation has to be useful and productive. If you cooperate honestly and help us to put the crooks who got you involved in this mess behind bars, you’re exempt from prison, even from being tried. And with good reason, because you’re a victim too. No strings attached, Mabelita! Imagine what that means!”
The captain took a couple of drags on his cigarette, and she saw the little clouds of smoke thicken the rarefied atmosphere of the living room and then gradually disperse.
“You must be asking yourself what kind of cooperation we want from you. Why don’t you explain, Lituma.”
The sergeant agreed.
“For now, we want you to continue pretending, señora,” he said, very respectfully. “Just like you’ve pretended all this time with Señor Yanaqué and with us. Exactly the same. Miguel doesn’t know we know everything, and you, instead of telling him, will keep acting as if this conversation never took place.”
“That’s exactly what we want from you,” Captain Silva agreed. “I’ll be frank, give you more proof of our confidence. Your cooperation can be very useful to us. Not to nab Miguel Yanaqué. He’s already fucked and can’t make a move without our knowing about it. But we’re not sure about his accomplices. We don’t know who they are. With your help, we’ll set a trap and send them to prison, where gangsters should be, instead of on the street, making life hard for decent people. You’d be doing us a great service. And we’ll return it, pay you back with another great favor. I’m speaking for the National Police and the justice system. This deal has the prosecutor’s approval. You heard right, Mabelita. The prosecutor himself, Dr. Hermando Símula! You won the lottery with me, girl.”