I run inside, to his house, searching for the key under the cactus pot, and when I go in I topple the chair and don’t have the time or inclination to say anything to whoever’s there, looking at me from behind the partition, still sort of taking a nap, maybe just waking up cuz of the scandal outside, maybe accustomed to it all from so many years of living in El Patio. I search under the mattress, find what I’m looking for, and rush back with my tongue hanging out, praying that what I left seconds ago hasn’t ended badly...
On time. Cuz Humbertico the Piranha has gotten loose and is struggling to retrieve the spoon and its blade. And he’s gonna get it, Yako can’t stop him, he wiggles and wiggles...
Breathless, feeling like an s.o.b., I threw it at him: the horn-handled blade from Albacete province given to him by Gema, that Spanish girl he fucked last year. The one I wanted to fuck and didn’t have the guts to face. The pitch turned out okay: There went that Made in Spain, already open and everything, spinning on the ground, right into his hand. There was no way he couldn’t get it, and the rest was automatic.
We grew up together and he was cut and all the blood on the ground and on his clothes was his and all I’d wanted to do was help him...
That’s what everybody said later, during the runaround and the ambulance and the squad car and the questions. That’s what I told them. Yes, I threw it at him, I wanted him to have a chance cuz he was my pal, but what happened wasn’t all my fault, I told the mustached lieutenant who was taking the report as the paramedics carried the body off, now a knot under the red-stained sheets. Tears started to fall. Without lament, with a tightness in my chest, the way men cry when they have no choice and there’s an overwhelming impotence and there’s nothing more that can be done. The way we cry in El Patio. The way Yako was crying when they took him away.
I cried until the mustached lieutenant, from Santiago like so many of these patrol car guys, but good people unlike most of them, took me aside and put his hand on my shoulder as if I were his son, cuz I was young enough to be his son, and said to me in a low voice that life is fucked and things just happen. He said he wished he had friends like me...
If things were looked at right, it wasn’t Yako’s fault either, since he was a big guy and wasn’t used to fighting with a knife, and he used the spearpoint instead of the blade, the way you do when you think you might lose the weapon if it gets stuck in the wound, and he had such bad luck, or such good aim, that the blade shot right into Humbertico’s eye and into his brain.
Simply put, it was the Piranha’s day, that’s all. Bad luck... If it’s your turn, it’s your turn. If you live by the sword, you die by the sword. Everybody knew it was going to end badly. You don’t mess with knives, that’s what the elders said. And his poor sister... now nothing can save her from whoring.
According to the lieutenant, they weren’t gonna be very hard on Yako. He only had a few little things on his record, mostly peer pressure stuff like stealing jeans from laundry lines. Humbertico was already a jailbird, a bad egg, destined to return. And he’d attacked first, so it would be self-defense anyway, with a bunch of eyewitnesses to boot. It had happened in the heat of battle, Yako had been overtaken by passion...
That’s what the lawyer said at the trial. So did Manolito the Tripod, and Alfredo who went in his marine uniform, and even Babas.
Petra didn’t cry for her dead brother or make a scene during the trial. He brought it on himself, the fool, for trying to come on so tough, for sticking his nose where it didn’t belong, cuz I know how to take care of myself, she was heard to say, and the women in El Patio wrote her off after that, cuz you can be a whore if you want, but blood is blood, even if it’s the guy who took your virginity who spills it.
I also gave testimony, right after a test I had to take, and that also influenced things. As soon as the sentence was declared, Yako, with tears in his eyes, told me that I was his only friend and that he’d never forget it. That he’d get out, that in the end it was only one dead guy. But I knew he was lying, and he did too. There’s a greater distance between zero and one than between one and infinity, and he was now on the other side.
In the last few months, I’ve dreamt now and then of Yako’s face telling me, Brothers forever. And the blade, with its bent horn, zigzagging on the dirt, and later shining like a needle in the air. The cops kept it, of course, as evidence. It’s too bad cuz it was a good knife, with a fine edge, firm and steady.
I still visit Yako now and then, but not as much as during the first few months. Those are the rules, everything’s a waste, so they gave him four years; it’s a lot... Silvia only went with me the first two times, and she never requested a conjugal visit with Yako.
I haven’t seen her since. Well, there was that one time, from afar, in that little hotel at the CUJAE, she was with a French engineer who was attending a conference there. She pretended she didn’t see me, of course, and I didn’t even say hello. I’d fucked her a couple more times while Yako was awaiting his sentence, but she wasn’t interested after that. The feeling’s mutual. I’m not surprised, I knew it from the start. It was all cuz she was his woman and I was his pal. It may have been another way of getting even more of him, of entering his childhood, that little piece of his life which had never been revealed. Yako before he was Yako, before he thought about the red bridge that he feared and desired and ultimately crossed.
On a visit, the second one, he told me that someone had ordered him killed. Maybe it’s not just paranoia. He thinks it was Petra, the Piranha’s sister, and I didn’t say anything one way or the other. Who can understand women anyway — one day lots of kisses, then the next they drive a stake through your heart. It’s not true that they’re all bad; some are worse.
Two guys attacked him in the bathroom: He had to be cool, he was hit by metal tubes, they broke his arm, but he got one of them in the eye, a fat, bald white guy sporting Santa Bárbara tattoos. Now nobody fucks with him, but they gave him two more years for blinding the guy. Between that and what he did to the Piranha, they’ve started to call him The Ophthalmologist. He laughs when he tells the story, then he puts his hand on my shoulder and tells me again how I’m really his pal. And what a blast we’re gonna have, what a fucking blast, once he gets out. For now, he’s pretty much okay: He has things to do, like surviving and watching his back, and climbing the cellblock’s hierarchy. He’s gotten it in his head that he wants to be a cellblock chief.
He’s no longer afraid of losing his life. Maybe there’s value in that: that absolutely nothing matters at all anymore. Now everything’s easy, he doesn’t hafta think much. He doesn’t read anymore. Anvil or hammer. To hit or be hit, to kill or die. He knows the rules now, and he plays accordingly. Living on the other side of the red bridge is not so hard. He told me maybe he’ll get a tattoo, old-school prison style, by hand, with a sewing needle and ink made from burnt shampoo. Maybe he’ll get a Santería emblem, or a kimyankela, a one-eyed spirit with one leg, one arm, to impress the black hordes in the tank. He’s using five necklaces now, never mind that he didn’t believe in any of it.
In his own way, Yako’s happy. I go along with him and tell him how things are on the streets, and we make plans together, even though we both know it won’t be the same. Never again. Maybe that’s real freedom, knowing the limits. The red bridge isn’t so bad. What’s worse is being in the middle, or on the other side, knowing you still hafta cross it, but not knowing when...