Poison

CHAPTER 13

They told her they had informed the American Consulate in Monterrey of her arrest. She did not believe them. In Mexico back then—and for all she knew, it was the same now—a narcotics violation was a felony and any felony suspect could be held and interrogated for a maximum of seventy-two hours without access to a lawyer. Within six days, if a magistrate found that a trial was indicated by the evidence, and if the offense was punishable by a term of more than two years (which Marilyn's alleged offense was) the prisoner could be held for as long as a year before his case was brought to trial. Mexican law was—and is—premised on the Napoleonic Code. In simple terms, you were guilty until you proved yourself innocent. When Marilyn demanded that she be allowed to make a personal telephone call, the local police officer told her this was something to be discussed with the District Attorney; he would either allow it or he would not.

Eight days after she'd been arrested, a consular officer came to see her at the Comisaría. He told her she was being charged with possession of marijuana. He told her that if she was convicted, she could expect a prison sentence of from five years and three months to twelve years. He promised he would call the people she listed for him on a sheet of American Embassy stationery: her mother, Joseph Seward, and the beach bum she used to live with in Los Angeles. The consul later told her he'd been unable to contact any of these people. She did not know who else she could ask him to call.

On the twelfth day of September, she stood trial in Saltillo, represented by a Mexican lawyer whose name had been supplied by the consular officer. She was sentenced to six years' imprisonment for possession of what turned out to be eight ounces of marijuana, all that was left of the kilo she had bought in Iguala. The consul told her an American Embassy official would report the arrest, trial, and sentence in detail to the State Department, which would in turn notify relatives or friends in the States. But she did not know where her mother was, and most of her friends were transient hookers.

On the morning of September fifteenth, she was transported by van to La Fortaleza, a centuries-old prison in the state of Tamaulipas, some two hundred miles southwest of Brownsville, Texas. In the van with her were a woman she later learned had killed her husband with a grubbing hoe, and a man who had stolen a typewriter from the offices of an air-conditioning firm in Monterrey. Marilyn was still wearing the white cotton caftan and thonged sandals she'd had on when they arrested her. Her tote bag had been requisitioned in Ramos Arizpe, presumably because it contained evidence of a crime. Her makeup, her diaphragm, her passport, and her underwear were in that bag, together with several pieces of silver jewelry she could have used to good advantage at La Fortaleza.

She learned there on the day she arrived, and only through deductive reasoning, that the only thing you could get in that place was what you paid for. She discovered this after the internal search, when she and a dozen female prisoners from towns all over Coahuila, Nuevo León and Tamaulipas were standing in a line that led to a long table upon which were piled blankets and clothing and woven straw mats and thin mattresses covered with striped ticking. The grubbing-hoe murderess—a short, hefty dark woman with curly black hair, solemn brown eyes, pendulous breasts and wide buttocks—took from a black leather purse on a chain around her thick neck a wad of pesos which she handed to the matron, a stern-faced woman with hair dyed a flaming red. The matron then passed over the table a mattress, a blanket, two pairs of cotton panties, and several tentlike faded grey smocks.

When the woman protested in voluble Spanish, the matron generously added another pair of panties to the pile she now held on her extended arms. She protested again. The matron shook her head and waved her on. Marilyn's money had disappeared somewhere between the Ramos Arizpe roadblock and the local jail; she had nothing with which to engage in prison commerce. She had only the caftan folded over her arm, the long flowing cotton robe somewhat less than pristine after almost three unwashed weeks in Ramos Arizpe. The matron said something to her in Spanish. Marilyn did not understand. She repeated it. Marilyn shook her head. The matron waved her on, naked.

La Fortaleza had been built by the Spaniards back in the sixteenth century as a second-line coastal defense. Some two thousand feet above sea level, it dominated the countryside and afforded a distant view of the Gulf of Mexico, some twenty-five miles to the east. The prisoners never saw anything but the walls. In the late 1820's, when the new Mexican government took over the fortress and turned it into a prison, only a hundred and ten convicts were transferred there. Now there were four hundred and eighty of them, sixty-seven in the women's compound alone. Because this area had once been used for the solitary confinement of male prisoners—at a time when female murderers, armed robbers, extortionists and kidnapers were virtually unheard of in Mexico—it was in effect a prison within a prison, a square within a square, its walls twenty feet high, the higher walls of the prison proper visible beyond them. The thickness of the compound walls was dictated by the width of the cells into which the women were locked each night at ten and released into the courtyard each morning at six, when the cells were hosed down. Marilyn visualized the whole as a sort of labyrinth in the puzzle books she used to buy when she was a little girl.

The walls surrounding the entire prison were eight feet thick, a conglomerate of boulders, bricks and concrete. The only gate into the prison was at the front, where the bars were four inches in diameter, and this opened onto a cobbled, arched passageway—a holdover from when the prison was a fortress—to a second gate beyond that opened onto the warden's office on the left and the search room on the right, where the monied prisoners had purchased the clothing and other articles they needed for survival here. Immediately beyond these two rooms, and opening onto the courtyard lined with the men's cells and the various prison workshops, was a third barred gate. Marilyn and the other women were marched through this gate and past the watchful eyes of the male guards and prisoners idling in the courtyard—some of them squatting in the dirt playing cards, others smoking or talking, some playing guitars—to the smaller inner prison where first there was a barred gate and then a massive wooden door that shielded the women from the further prying eyes of the male population, but not from the eyes of the machine-gun guards in the four watchtowers, who could look down from their vantage points directly into the enclosure.

There were seven women, including herself, in Marilyn's cell.

The cell was six feet wide by eight feet long.

On either side of the cell, there was a double-decker wooden bunk. There was a three-foot space between the bunks. Immediately inside the bars, there was a space of perhaps two feet between them and the footboards of the bunks. In this space, in one corner of the cell, was the toilet hole over which the women squatted to relieve themselves in full view of the guards in the towers. For the first three days of her confinement, Marilyn did not move her bowels. Neither did she eat the foul-smelling food prepared in the prison kitchen and distributed twice daily, at eight in the morning and at six p.m. She learned later that the male prisoners operated a small cocina in the outside compound and that edible food could be purchased there—but in the beginning, she had no money, anyway.

The four bunks were occupied by prisoners who'd been there when the others arrived. Marilyn and one of the other newcomers slept as best they could on the stone floor of the cell. Teresa Delarosa, the grubbing-hoe murderess, slept on the floor, too, on the mattress she had purchased, but only for the first two weeks of her confinement. After that, and after it was learned that she had viciously struck her husband twenty-six times on the face, head and neck with the hoe—almost decapitating the poor man before finally severing his jugular with one powerful swipe—Teresa was afforded the respect to which she was entitled, and the woman occupying the bottom bunk on the lefthand side of the cell moved to a deferential sleeping spot on the floor. Marilyn slept sitting up, her back to the wall, in the two feet of space just inside the cell bars, opposite the toilet hole where all night long the women pissed.

There was a shower in the courtyard, and the women would use it once a week; here in prison, cleanliness was neither next to godliness nor next to necessary. The guards in the watchtowers would study the single shower stall through binoculars, the sunlight glinting off the lenses. For the first two weeks of her incarceration, Marilyn did not shower. She never took off the caftan. It was perhaps this that called her to the closer personal attention of the warden. She did not know that the prison guards had already nicknamed her—because of the flowing white garment and her long blonde hair—"La Arabe Dorada": The Golden Arab.

The first time she ate prison food, she vomited it all back into the shit-reeking toilet hole in the corner of the cell. Panchita, one of the other women, apparently incensed by Marilyn's breach of dining etiquette, began kicking her violently while she was crouched over the hole retching up her guts. Teresa said something about it, and Panchita whirled on her and shoved her back against the far wall of the cell and both women began screaming at each other while a bright green lizard examined the food Marilyn had just thrown up. Teresa, it turned out, had purchased from one of the male prisoners who ran the cocina outside, a spoon honed to razor-blade sharpness, and she brandished this now, and—whispering in Spanish that was incomprehensible to Marilyn but nonetheless hair-raising—said something to Panchita that caused her to retreat muttering to the top bunk she occupied on the righthand side of the cell. The lizard scampered away into the sunlight.

She learned the names of the other women only because she heard them repeated so often, but she could not speak the language and therefore said nothing to any of them. She received no visitors. She could buy neither writing paper nor postage stamps because she had no money, and so she wrote no letters. She was lonelier inside that prison than any of the other inmates, lonelier than she'd ever been in her life. And then, all at once, the language came to her. One moment it was unfathomable, the next it was crystal clear.

"I can remember," Panchita said, "in Veracruz where I was born, the fiesta for Our Lady of the Rosary. In the second week of October."

"I have never been to Veracruz," Beatriz said.

"It is a beautiful town," Teresa said. "My husband took me there once."

"They would march in costumes…"

"To the church in the Plaza Zamora," Engracia said, and sighed wistfully.

"And later, there would be dancing in the town."

"There is no dancing here at the Fortress," Beatriz said.

"But in Veracruz, ah," Panchita said. "En Veracruz, todos los dias eran dorados, y todas las noches violetas." In Veracruz, all the days were golden, and all the nights were purple.

Panchita was serving a lifetime sentence for drowning both her children in the Rio de la Babia. Belita and Engracia were lesbians. They shared the bottom bunk below Panchita's. Wrapped in each others' arms each night, they would whisper themselves to discreet orgasm. Another of the women had been in prison for close to twenty years. She never said a word. She stood against the wall at the far end of the cell, staring out past the bars and into the sunlit inner courtyard. The other women called her "La Sordo-muda." Beatriz, who was here because she had attempted armed robbery at the Hertz rental office in Matehuala, suffered from asthma. She paid for the medication supplied to her on a weekly basis by the prison's hospital staff, a single nurse who was herself a prisoner working in a bare stone room called "La Enfermería." More often than not, Beatriz would gasp for breath in the middle of the night, her mouth open, lying on the stone floor, moaning, "Quiero morir, quiero morir," occasionally calling to the matron at the end of the corridor, "Qué hora es?," to which the matron invariably replied, "Es tarde, cállate!"

Whenever anyone was wanted in the warden's office, a messenger from the outer prison would be let in through the barred inner gate, and then would knock on the wooden door beyond to shout the prisoner's name, and the dreaded word "Alcaide!" which meant "Warden!" El carcelero, the turnkey, would then unlock the inner door, and the prisoner would be led through the courtyard with its watchful male prisoners, and through the innermost of the prison's front gates to wait on a wooden bench outside the warden's office till he was ready to grant an audience.

On the tenth day of October, Marilyn heard her name called, and then the word "Alcaide!" and the door was unlocked, and she walked through the courtyard behind the messenger, sunlight streaming through the caftan as the men watched her long legs in silhouette.

She sat on the wooden bench and waited.

Lizards scampered about the open area before the office and the search room across the way. The warden called from behind his closed door, and the messenger—a trustee named Luis, who also brought food from the cocina to those women prisoners who could afford it—opened the door, ushered Marilyn inside, and then left, closing the door behind him.

The warden's name was on his desk, on a small wooden plaque made in the prison's woodworking shop: HERIBERTO DOMINGUEZ. He was a short, dark-skinned man with a pencil-line mustache under his nose. He was wearing the olive-green uniform all of the prison guards wore, but on the collar of his tunic were several red and green stripes, obviously the markings of his rank. A riding crop was on his desktop, close to his right hand. A framed picture of a woman and two children was on the other end of the desk.

"Sit down," he said in Spanish.

She sat.

"I have some valuables that belong to you," he said.

She did not answer.

"Your passport—that is valuable, eh?"

"Yes," she answered in Spanish. "My passport is valuable."

"And some jewelry as well. We do not steal from the prisoners here at the Fortress. It is different elsewhere in Mexico. The prison at Saltillo is the worst. Not here. I have been keeping these safe for you."

"Mil gracias," Marilyn said.

"Tu hablas Español muy bien," he said.

"Solo un poco," she replied.

"No, no, you speak it very well," he said. "This jewelry," he said. "It could help you here in the Fortress. I understand you sleep on the floor and possess only the single garment on your back."

"Es verdad," she said. "That is true."

"Would you like the jewelry?" he asked.

"Yes, I would like it."

"I will let you have it then," he said, and smiled. "But for another jewel."

She did not understand him at first.

"Tu mejor tesoro," he said. "Your greatest treasure."

"Thank you, no," she said, and rose, and started for the door.

"Un momenta," he said. "I did not yet give you permission to leave."

"I wish to go back to my cell," she said.

"You will go back when I allow you to go back."

"I wish to telephone the American consul."

"Ah, yes, we once allowed prisoners to telephone outside. But the privilege was abused, an escape was arranged via telephone." He shrugged. "We do not permit it any longer."

"When the consul comes to visit…"

"Yes, he is supposed to come once a month. But Monterrey is so very far away, eh? Has he been here yet?"

"When he comes…"

"We had another American here once, a man. The consul came to see him three, four times a year."

"When he comes, I'll tell him you have my passport."

"Ah, but he already knows this. A prisoner's personal belongings are always turned over to the authorities for safekeeping. I am keeping your passport safe for you, quenda. I could burn it, you know, and then it would be very difficult for you to obtain another one when finally you are released from here. But, in any event, that is a long time in the future. For now, I will keep the passport safe for you. And I will give you your jewelry, if you want it. The jewelry can make things easier for you here. It is not such a terrible life here if one has the wherewithal. The jewelry can make things easier. I can make things easier."

He picked up the riding crop, and rose, and came around the desk. He was at least six inches shorter than she was, a squat little man wearing jodhpurs and high, brown leather boots. Smiling, he walked to where she was standing.

"Raise your gown for me," he said.

"No." she answered, and turned, and walked swiftly to the door.

It was locked from the outside.

He came up behind her and struck her without warning, bringing the short whip down hard on her shoulder. She was turning toward him, her hands instinctively curled in defense, when he struck her again with the crop, just above the collar bone, and then once more across the breasts. She punched out at him, and then dodged away from him and around him, running from the door to the small shuttered window, and throwing the shutters open—the window was barred.

She ran back to the door again, twisting the unresponsive knob again, the riding crop striking her back, shouting "Help!" in English and then "Socorro!" in Spanish, and then whirling on him and flailing helplessly at the hissing whip, feeling its sting on the palms of her hands, backing away from it, wincing with each rhythmic slash, covering her face at last, and crumbling beneath the blows he rained on her withering shoulders, finally collapsing on her knees before him, her face still covered.

He would not stop hitting her.

He whipped her till she was whimpering, her hands streaked with blood, blood seeping through the shoulders of the white caftan, "Help me, someone, please," she moaned, and still he hit her, his grunts accompanying the swishing of the crop, whipped her flat to the floor, whipped her prone at his feet, her bleeding hands clasped behind her neck. He rolled her over then, and lifted the hem of the caftan with the tip of the riding crop.

"You have splendid legs," he said. "Tienes hermosas piernas."

With both hands he yanked the blood-spattered caftan above her waist and then brought back the whip as if to strike her across her exposed crotch. She cowered in terror, but he did not hit her again. He began laughing instead and then slowly unbuttoned the flap of his trousers.

He paid for her services later.

With a gold bracelet she had bought in Los Angeles.

She sold the bracelet for sixteen hundred pesos, the equivalent back then of two hundred U.S. dollars. She had paid four hundred dollars for it in L.A. With the money, Marilyn bought clothing, blankets, and a mattress, and was able to keester the remainder for the purchase of food. It was Belita who taught her to put the money inside a condom (which Marilyn purchased from Luis) and slide it up into her rectum; Belita had been in and out of prisons and jails from the time she was fourteen. The Spanish words for asshole keestering were "metertelo en el culo."

With part of the money, she bought writing paper, envelopes and postage stamps, and paid Luis two hundred pesos besides to mail a dozen letters to people she had known in Los Angeles and Houston. She learned later that all correspondence passed through Dominguez's office, and when she received no answers, she realized he had not permitted her letters to leave the prison, for fear of spoiling the very good arrangement he had with her. "Nuestro pacto secreto," he called it.

Every day at three o'clock, Luis would knock on the door leading to the cell block, and he would call out her name, and then shout "Alcaide!" and she would be led again to the warden's office where the entire prison population knew Dominguez would take his pleasure with "La Arabe Dorada," the nickname sticking because Dominguez insisted she wear to their daily meetings not the grey smock she now wore in the cell block, but instead what he called her "vestido de novia"—her wedding dress. He no longer used the riding crop on her, except to raise the hem of the caftan as she stood before him, the tented cotton hanging on the tip of the whip as he examined her blonde pubic hair in seemingly amazed discovery each time.

He took to calling her Mariucha, the Spanish diminutive for Mary. Tenderly, he would caress her burnished mound, hoping for a response from her. She stood before him glacially; he might have been her gynecologist. He would ask her then to hold the robe above her waist while he unbuttoned his fly as he had done the first time, slowly and deliberately, lingeringly, as if threatening an awesomely massive exposure that would cause her to gasp in wonder. The mountain labored and brought forth a mouse. In minuscule erection, he would lead her to the battered leather sofa against the wall, there to achieve within minutes the climax he had been hungering for since breakfast.

Afterward he would shout vituperation, blaming her for the corruption of his religious beliefs and his moral values, heaping upon her obscenities he dredged from the reeking swamp of his mind. He would then angrily knock on the door and bellow to Luis to unlock it. He told her once that he did not trust a key anywhere within her reach. "You are a treacherous cunt, Mariucha," he said to her, the Spanish word "concha"—despite its literal translation as "shell"—just as stinging as its English counterpart.

She still feared the whip.

He had stopped beating her, yes, but the whip was always in his untrusting hand, even as he mounted her. She suffered his weight upon her, suffered the worm of his manhood inside her, suffered his daily ejaculations because she dreaded the whip and was afraid he might use it again if she provoked his displeasure. Better the words of scorn and anger following his pitiful spasms. Better the endearment "Mariucha." And then, quite suddenly, it occurred to her that she might become pregnant by him, spawning an evil little monster in his own image, and this frightened her more than the whip did.

When one day at the beginning of November he generously offered her another piece of her own jewelry as recompense for her imagined ardor, she asked if she might have her diaphragm instead. He had never seen such a contraption before, and did not know what it was. He suspected it was more valuable than the jewelry, perhaps, but he could not fathom how. He examined it closely, turning it over and over in his hands, searching for the hidden clue to its worth. Shrugging, he gave it to her at last, together with the mysterious tube of jelly.

Late in November, his interest seemed to dissipate. Prison rumor had it that his wife, a formidable battle-ax named Margarita, had learned of his post-meridiem activities and had called an abrupt halt to them by threatening to have her brother teach him the meaning of honor. Margarita's brother, or so the prison grapevine maintained, was a prize fighter who had recently won a huge purse in Mexico City, or Acapulco, or perhaps Tampico—the grapevine was often vague. But whatever the reason, the daily summonings ceased, and by the end of the month, Marilyn was convinced she had heard the last of Dominguez.

And then one day, the knock came on the thick wooden door, and she heard Luis calling for the Golden Arab, heard the word "Alcaide!" and exchanged a frightened glance with Teresa.

The weather had turned uncommonly cold and damp. There was no heat in the cell block, and only the matrons enjoyed the comfort of a coal brazier set up in the stone corridor open to the wind that raged in off the hills. "Ponte el vestido de novia," Luis told her, and she took the caftan from where it was folded under the mattress, and removed first the threadbare overcoat she had purchased with the last of her keestered money, and then her grey smock and cotton panties, and quickly slipped the caftan over her head, and put on the coat again. Squatting, she inserted the diaphragm while Luis watched from the corridor outside. "Puerco de mierda!" she yelled at him, and he laughed. Before she left the cell, Teresa took her hands between both her own, and whispered, "Coraje"—Courage.

The men called to her as she crossed the windy courtyard.

"Hola, Arabe!"

"Quieras acostarti con migo, Arabe?"

"Mira, Arabe! Mira mi pijal"

This time, there was a stranger in the office with Dominguez.

He was perhaps forty years old, a horse-faced man wearing the uniform of a prison guard. He was smiling somewhat foolishly, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, occasionally stroking the sparse mustache under his bulbous nose.

"Mariucha," Dominguez said, smiling, "I would like you to meet Senor Perez. He has expressed an interest in you."

She said nothing. She stood just inside the door Luis had again locked from the outside. The barred window across the room was shuttered. She waited.

"Senor Perez and I have made an arrangement," Dominguez said.

"What arrangement?" she asked at once.

"A satisfactory arrangement, do not worry."

"What arrangement?" she asked again. She was beginning to tremble. She thrust her hands into the pockets of the coat, hoping they would not see that she was trembling.

"Take off your coat," Dominguez said. "Raise your gown."

"No," she said. "Ask Luis to unlock the door, please." Her voice was shaking. "I wish to go back to the cell."

"Your wishes are of no concern to me," Dominguez said. "Senor Perez is willing to pay for your company, now let the man see what he is buying! Do as I tell you!"

"No," she said, and took her hands from her pockets, the fists clenched.

Dominguez was already coming around the desk, slapping the riding crop against the open palm of his hand.

"Keep away from me, you son of a bitch," she said in English. "I'll kill you," she said, "Te maturé!" she said, hurling the threat in Spanish, her eyes searching the room for something she could use to smash his face.

He lashed out at her with the whip, and when she tried to grab it from his hands, he pulled it back and struck her again, and then kept striking her while the grinning guard looked on, battered her to her knees, and then to the floor, and forced her kicking onto her back. She fought him as he tried to unbutton the coat, clutched his hand by the wrist and bit the fleshy part of his palm near the pinky, fought the whip and then the punches he threw at her breasts and her face.

Her nose began bleeding, she was certain he had broken her nose, but she fought him still, fought him till there was no strength left in her, and even then she tried to roll away from him as he clawed at her buttons, straddling her. She spit into his face, and then shrieked as he slapped her with his open hand, continued slapping her, back and forth, the square hard hand incessant, blood spattering in a fine red mist as he hit her backhanded, forehanded, slapped her into near insensibility, and still she struggled. And finally he ripped the buttons off the coat, and forced the coat open, and pulled the caftan above her waist, her back arched, kicking, twisting, still trying to free herself from him. In a frenzy, swearing, he whipped her across her naked thighs until they were bleeding, and then he moved away from where she lay sobbing and trembling and broken on the stone floor, and said to Perez, "Lleva la puta!"—Take the whore!

The next time he sent for her, Marilyn was carrying in her coat pocket the razor-honed spoon Teresa had purchased from the kitchen entrepreneur. There was a new man in Dominguez's office this time, a squat and burly brute, also wearing the uniform of a prison guard. A knife scar ran across one of his bushy eyebrows. He studied her appraisingly as she came into the office. In the righthand pocket of the coat, her hand was curled around the sharpened spoon.

"Show him," Dominguez said.

She shook her head.

Smiling, Dominguez came around the desk, the riding crop in his hand.

"Another taste, yes?" he said, and raised the crop and saw the glittering metal clutched in her fist an instant before she stabbed at him.

He turned sideways to avoid the blow aimed at his heart, caught the blade on the flesh of his biceps instead, and backed away from her in terror as she came at him once again, her blue eyes slitted, her lips skinned back over her teeth. The other man sidestepped gingerly around her and behind her. With both hands clenched together, he swung them at the back of her neck. She stumbled forward with the force of the blow, and then turned on him with the spoon still clenched in her fist. He swung his interlocked hands as though wielding an imaginary baseball bat, and this time the blow caught her on the temple, and she staggered, she, the room, the spoon fell clattering to the stone floor, she dropped dizzily to her knees, and the whip lashed at her back, Dominguez shouting invective and striking her again and again until the guard took gentle hold of his arm and whispered that the Arab was unconscious.

She regained consciousness hours later in what the prisoners called "El Pozo," a dark dungeon set into the stone floor and covered with a barred grate, a three-foot cubicle in which it was impossible to stretch full-length, impossible to sit upright, impossible even to curl into a fetal position on one's side. She crouched there naked, her lips swollen and crusted with blood, shivering in the cold evening air, crying out in rage to whoever might hear, shouting for the American consul, screaming for justice. She was continent for as long as she could bear it, and then she soiled the narrow space, and became ill on the stench of her own filth, and vomited up the food she had eaten the day before. No one came to feed her. No one brought her water. She crouched on the cold stone floor, her back aching, her limbs beginning to stiffen, her mouth throbbing with pain.

She called to the matrons, who did not answer.

She shouted for Teresa until she was hoarse, but though Teresa could hear her from the cell block, they would not allow her to go to the sunken cage.

Sobbing, she called upon the President of the United States to please intercede on her behalf.

She beseeched the Pope, remembering all the prayers she had learned at St. Ignatius, reciting them aloud and then begging His Holiness to come here to the prison to see for himself the injustice being done.

She called her mother's name again and again, weeping, choking, "Mama, please help me, Mama, tell them I'm a good girl."

On the fifth day, she became feverish, and in her delirium she imagined that she was standing on an elevated train platform in a nameless city, waiting for the train to come in, holding only an umbrella in her hand and watching a horde of rats swarm up out of the ghetto gutters to climb the steel supporting pillars and scurry across the tracks.

Hundreds of them.

Thousands of them.

Swarming across the tracks.

She was standing on the platform, it was broad daylight there on the platform, and there were millions of rats coming at her. The rats were grey and brown and black, they had long tails that switched in the sunlight, they had long teeth that glinted in the sunlight, they seemed to glide in the sunlight. She tried to tell them who she was. She held up the umbrella. It wasn't raining, there was bright sunlight, but she held up the umbrella.

They were nibbling at her feet now, they were climbing up her legs, she tried to hit them with the umbrella. They chewed the umbrella, they chewed the black silk, they chewed the ribs, they ate the wooden handle. They were climbing up her chest, her chest burned, her chest was on fire, Stop, please, she said, where's my umbrella, what did you do with my umbrella? They were all over her now, they were attacking her face. She couldn't breathe. She clawed at them. They were chewing her face. They were ripping open her face, blood was gushing from her mouth. Stop, she yelled, stop! and awakened to discover the nightmare was reality, the dungeon was swarming with rats the size of alley cats, nibbling at her dried feces, crawling over her naked body, licking at the blood caked on her lips.

She screamed.

She screamed.

She screamed.

On the morning of the sixth day, Dominguez sent a matron to uncage her. The matron unlocked the grate and slid it back, and then grimaced and pinched her nostrils against the stench from below. She held out her hand to Marilyn and helped her to climb out of the hole. Marilyn tried to stand, and collapsed to her knees. She tried again, and again fell. "Wow," she said, and blinked at the courtyard sun.

Impatiently, the matron began walking toward the shower stall, Marilyn staggering along behind her. The temperature that morning was in the low fifties. There was only cold water in the shower, but Marilyn stood beneath the icy spray, washing from her body the blood and the filth, cleansing herself and feeling oddly victorious. Her lips were still swollen, her right eye had been blackened and was closed to a narrow slit, every bone in her body ached—but she had won.

When Luis came to her with the white caftan folded over his arm, she refused to put it on. She insisted instead that she wear the grey smock, like all the other women. Luis shrugged. On the way to Dominguez's office, he tried to put his hand on her behind, and she knocked it away, and the men in the courtyard hooted and laughed. Before he rapped on Dominguez's door, he tried to touch her breast, but she backed away from him and crouched as if ready to spring for his throat, and his face went white. Timidly, he knocked on the door.

"Yes, come in!" Dominguez called.

There were a dozen prison guards in the office.

She fainted before the fifth man was finished with her.

He would have to kill her next time.

She would force him to kill her. She would force him to beat her to death with the crop or with his hands. She had been a whore in Houston, but this was not being a whore. This was being owned, and she would not be owned by him or any other man.

He did not summon her to his office again until shortly before Christmas. Again, she would not wear the caftan even though Luis told her it was the warden's specific desire that she look particularly beautiful today. She said in English, "Fuck the warden," and then followed Luis across the courtyard, wearing the blue overcoat over the faded grey smock, the buttons gone from the coat, clutching the coat closed against the wind, her arms folded across her waist. The courtyard was silent. The men knew what had happened to her, and there was no more sport in taunting her with sexual jibes or innuendo.

A man was sitting in the wooden chair beside Dominguez's desk. The man was wearing a dark blue business suit, a grey tie on a striped silk shirt, highly polished black shoes. A grey hat was perched on his lap. He seemed to be in his late sixties, a dapper little man with a neat mustache under his nose, glittering brown eyes surveying her as she came into the room and stood before the desk.

"This is the woman," Dominguez said.

"Does she speak Spanish?" the man asked.

His voice was very low. Marilyn suspected he had never had to raise it in his life. He was watching her steadily. He had directed his words to Dominguez, but he kept staring at her. She thought If he tries to lay a finger on me, I'll rip the eyes from his head. She thought This time, they'll have to kill me.

"You heard the question, Mariucha," Dominguez said. She still said nothing. Dominguez shrugged. "She speaks Spanish, yes," he said.

"Will you not speak then, Miss?" the man said.

"Who are you?" she asked him in Spanish.

"Ah, very good," he said. "I am Alberto Hidalgo."

"Don Alberto," Dominguez corrected.

"You do me great honor," Hidalgo said, "but no, I am not what you say. No, no," he said, shaking his head and smiling.

"What do you think of her?" Dominguez asked.

"She appears thin."

"The closer the bone," Dominguez said, and chuckled. "Don Alberto is here from South America," he said. "We are trying to arrange your release from the Fortress."

"Sure," she said in English.

"Cómo?" Hidalgo asked.

"How are you going to manage that?" she asked in Spanish.

"Don Alberto has many friends here in Mexico," Dominguez said. "It may be possible for you to be released in his custody. To serve out the remainder of your sentence in his custody. The authorities may permit that."

"We are not certain, of course," Hidalgo said. "We are talking now about Argentina. There may be difficulties."

"Not for a man with your friends," Dominguez said.

"Well, perhaps. We shall see."

"But if it can be arranged…"

"Yes, I am interested," Hidalgo said. "But, of course, the young lady may prefer staying here."

"I do not think she would prefer staying here," Dominguez said, and smiled.

"Señorita?"

"What are you, a pimp?" she asked in Spanish.

"No, no, no, no, no," he said, smiling. "No, no, a pimp, what gives you that idea?"

"Just came to me out of the blue," she said in English.

"Cómo?"

"What are you then?"

"A businessman," he said, and shrugged. "A humanitarian perhaps. I would not like to see someone as beautiful as you languishing in prison." The words were particularly sonorous in Spanish, they rolled off his tongue mellifluously, "languideciendo en la cárcel." He smiled again. "Does she have a passport?" he asked Dominguez.

"Yes, I've been keeping it safe for her," Dominguez said.

"Well, that should make things easier," Hidalgo said. He turned to her again. "So," he said, "it's up to you, after all. If it can be arranged, would you be interested?"

She weighed her decision for only an instant. She did not for a moment believe he was anything but what she'd labeled him; he was a pimp and he was buying her. But if he could take her out of here, if she could accompany him out of this place into broad daylight and open streets, then there was a chance for eventual escape.

"Yes, fine," she said. "Muy bien."

"Si es asi, estáhecho," Hidalgo said. "In that case, it is done."

"She will give you no trouble," Dominguez said, and then added something Marilyn didn't fully understand. "Ya está domesticada."

He had told Hidalgo she was already housebroken.