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."