my mind as signs of another world.
“But my dear son!” she whispered almost effortlessly. “Are you my dead son that I myself saw in the casket? Yes! It’s you! I believe in God! Come to my arms! But, what? … Can’t you see that I’m your mother? Look at me! Look at me! Touch me, my son! What, don’t you think it’s me?”
I beheld her again, touched her adorable salt-and-pepper head, but nothing. I didn’t believe her one bit.
“Yes, I see you,” I replied. “I’m touching you, but I don’t believe it. Such impossibilities just can’t happen.”
And I laughed with all my strength!
[JM]
________________
THE RELEASE
Yesterday I was at the Panopticon print shops to correct a set of page proofs.
The shop manager is a convict, a good guy, like all the criminals of the world. Young, smart, very polite, Solís, that’s his name, he’s whipped together excellent intelligence and told me his story, revealed his complaints, unveiled his pain.
“Out of the five hundred prisoners here,” he says, “only as many as a third deserve to be punished like this. The others don’t; the others are as or more moral than the judges who sentenced them.”
His eyes scope out58 the trim of who knows what invisible bitter plate. Eternal injustice! One of the workers comes up to me. Tall, broad-shouldered, he walks up jubilantly.
“Good afternoon,” he says. “How are you?” And he shakes my hand with lively effusion.
I don’t recognize him, so I ask him his name.
“You don’t remember me? I’m Lozano. We did time together in the Trujillo penitentiary. I was so glad to hear that the court acquitted you.”
Just like that. I remember him. Poor guy. He was sentenced to nine years in prison for conspiring in a murder.
The thoughtful man walks away.
“What!” Solís inquires with surprise. “You were in prison too?”
“I was,” I reply. “Indeed I was, my friend.”
And I in turn explain the circumstances of my imprisonment in Trujillo, charged with frustrated arson, robbery, and sedition …
“If you’ve done time in Trujillo,” he says smilingly, “then you ought to have met Jesús Palomino, who’s from that department. He drained away twelve years in this prison.”
I remember.
“There you go,” he adds. “That man was an innocent victim of the poor organization of the justice system.” He falls silent for a few moments and, after looking me in the face with a piercing gaze, decisively breaks out, “I’m going to tell you off the cuff what happened to Palomino here.”
The afternoon is gray and rainy. Metallic machinery and linotypes painfully hang clanging in the damp, dark air. I turn my eyes and in the distance notice the chubby face of a prisoner who smiles kindly among the black steel bits in movement. He’s my worker, the one who’s paginating my book. This bastard won’t stop smiling. It’s as though he’s lost the true feeling of his misfortune or has become an idiot.
Solís coughs and, with a toilsome inflection, begins his tale: “Palomino was a good man. It turns out that he was swindled in a cynical, insulting way by a hardened criminal never convicted by the courts, since he was from an upper-class family. Verging on misery, as Palomino was, and as a result of a violent altercation between these two, the unforeseeable occurred: a gunshot, a dead body, the Panopticon. After being locked up in here, the poor man endured sinister nightmares. It was horrendous. Even those of us who used to watch him were forced to suffer his hellish contagion! It was awful! Death would’ve been better. Yes, indeed. Death would’ve been better! …”
The tranquil narrator wants to weep. He noticeably relives his past with clarity, since his eyes moisten and he has to pause in silence for a moment, so as not to show in his voice that he’s started to sob in his soul.
“When I think about it,” he adds, “I don’t know how Palomino resisted so much. His was a torment beyond words. I don’t know through which channels he was informed that someone was plotting to poison him inside the prison and had been doing so even prior to his incarceration. The family of the man he killed prosecuted him far beyond his misfortune. They weren’t satisfied with his fifteen-year sentence or with the way it dragged his family into clamorous ruin: they carried their thirst for revenge even lower. And then they would hide behind the cellar doorjambs and between one spore and the next of the lichens that grow on incarcerated fingers, in search of the most secret passageways of the prison; and so they would move around here, with more freedom than before in the light of day for this unjust sentence, and they would flutter their infamous ambushy eyelashes in the air that the prisoner had no choice but to breathe. Being notified of that, Palomino, as you’ll imagine, suffered a terrible shock; he knew it and could do nothing from then on to make it disappear. A man of good stature, like him, feared such a death, not for himself, of course, but for her and for them, the innocent offspring skewered with stigma and orphanhood. Hence, the minute-by-minute anxiety and fright in the everyday fight for his life. Ten years had passed like this when I saw him for the first time. In his soul there awoke that tormented, not pity and compassion, but religious and almost inexplicable beatific transformation. He didn’t evoke pity. His heart was filled with something perhaps milder and calmer and nearly sweet. When I looked at him, I no longer felt compelled to unlock his shackles or dress the blackish-green wounds that were open at the end of all his ends. I wouldn’t have done any of that. In the face of such a plea, such a superhuman attitude of dread, I always wanted to leave him as he was, to march out step-by-step, startled, with pauses, line-by-line, toward the fatal crossroads, toward death under oath, so much has time revealed. Back then Palomino no longer sought help. He only filled his heart with something more vague and ideal, more serene and sweet; and it was pleasant, a merciful pleasure, to let him climb his hill, to let him walk through the hallways in the dark, entering and exiting the cold cells, in his horrendous game of shaky trapezes, agonizingly flying toward fate, with no fixed point for him to catch. With his fleecy red beard and eyes polar algae green, tattered uniform, skittish, abashed, he always seemed to see everything. An obstinate gesture of disbelief bounced off his dreadful just man lips, his vermilion hair, his mended pants and even his handicapped fingers that sought, in the full extent of his prisoner chapel, a safe place to lean and rest, without ever being able to find one. How many times I saw him at death’s door! During work one day, he came to the print shop. Silent, pensive, taciturn, Palomino was cleaning some black rubber belts in a corner of the shop, and from time to time, he’d shoot a most watchful glance at his surroundings, making his eyeballs furtively roll, with the visionary air of a nocturnal bird that catches sight of dreadful ghosts. He suddenly jerked back. On repeated occasions I had caught one of his coworkers casting, from one landmark to the next, noticeable expressions and uttering strange words of subtle aversion, perhaps without a reason, on the other side of the shop. Since their intention couldn’t have been pleasing to my friend, given the background story I’ve already mentioned, such behavior caused him to experience an awkward jolt and a sharp stinging sensation that frayed his every nerve. The gratuitous hater, in turn, was surprised when he noticed this and, serenity now lost, poured out a few drops from a glass carafe with rather meaningful clumsiness and alarm; the color and density of the liquid was almost completely enveloped and veiled by a winged spiral of smoke coming from over by the motors. I don’t know how to describe where those long mysterious tears
