hole, his forearms covered in laddered scars like a guitar fretboard, as if he were beyond desperate — but no, he never killed himself — forsaken, sunk, always on edge, not giving a damn about the body that didn’t seem to belong to him, yet a body that he relished, safeguarded, and inside which he hid, appropriating it fiercely with urgent, restless fervor whenever he was able to possess it, climbing inside, all the way down, to lie in its abyss, flooded by a warm, unguent pleasure, climbing inside his own corporeal cage, the drug like a faceless white angel leading him by the hand through rivers of blood, as if he were coursing through an infinite palace with no rooms and no echoes. The goddamn disgrace of a mother who bore him. “I’m telling you, you can’t, man. Get off my fucking back!” Despite everything, the Prick’s mother was due to visit, she existed, however inconceivable her existence. During visiting hours — in a narrow, irregularly shaped room, filled with benches and hordes of people, inmates and relatives, where it was easy to pick out the lawyers and (easier still) the con men, recognizable by their poise and the excessively cunning airs they assumed as they studied a particular document, affecting a dumb ponderousness as their words slipped into their clients’ ears, and as they shot rapid and deliberately suspicious glances at the door (one of numerous ruses to bolster their clients’ trust and, simultaneously, their sense of bemusement) — during these interviews, the Prick’s mother — amazingly just as ugly as her son, a knife scar running from her eyebrow to the tip of her chin — kept her head down, not looking at him or anything else, only at the floor, her bearing laden with resentment, reproach, and regret, God only knows under what sordid and abject conditions she’d coupled, or with whom, in order to engender him, and perhaps the memory of that distant, grim deed still tormented her each time. Every now and then she’d let out a heavy, rasping sigh. “It’s no-oneses fault, no-oneses but mine for having had you.” The word no-ones had become etched in Polonio’s memory, strange and curious, as if it were the sum of an infinite number of meanings. No-ones, that sad plural. It was no-oneses fault, just fate’s, life’s, damned misfortune’s, no-oneses. For having had you. The rage at having the Prick banged up beside them now in the same cell, right beside Polonio and Albino, and the acute, urgent, craven desire for him to die once and for all, to cease roaming the earth in that debased body of his. His mother desired it too, just as deeply, just as keenly, you could tell. Die die die. He inspired livid, revulsion-fueled compassion. Nothing ever came of his vein cutting, nothing but ranting and raving, despite their hoping, genuinely and devoutly, every time, that he’d finish the job. He would cower by the cell door — any given day, any day he spent banged up in the hole — deliberately against the doorframe, so that the runnel of blood welling up from his vein would flow out as soon as possible into the narrow hallway, on the wing’s upper floor, and from there drip down onto the yard, forming a puddle on the concrete; having worked out how long it would take for all this to happen, the Prick could be sure they would get wise to his suicide and he’d howl like a dog, his breath squeezed through a broken bellow, never dying, just enough to cause a scene so they’d take him from the hole to the infirmary where he’d find a way to wangle more drugs, setting off the cycle all over again, a hundred, a thousand times, never reaching the end before he found himself in the next hole. It was on one such occasion that he and Polonio first met, the Prick dancing a kind of semi-orthopedic jig halfway up a footpath in the infirmary garden, tripping over his tongue as he reeled off verses from the Bible. Around his neck he wore a tie fashioned from a greasy length of cord, and through the rags of his blue jacket, as his dance evolved, you caught flashes of his naked chest and torso, scored with barbaric scars and faded tattoos showing beneath his skin. His good eye and the flower were stomach turning, bloodcurdling: the flower was new, freshly picked, a mutilated gladiola missing some petals, fastened by a piece of rusty wire to the tatters of his jacket, and there, beneath his drooping, half-shut eyelid, which had no lashes at all, his good eye was glazed over with a malicious, calculating, mocking, self-pitying, and tender look. He bent his good leg, the lame one stood to attention, and with his hands on his hips and his feet turned out in that squatting pose of erotic dancers from old illustrated magazines, he attempted a few short jerks forward, during which he lost his balance and fell to the floor, where he tried to get up, writhing and kicking furiously, sending himself spinning on the spot, without it occurring to anyone to come to his aid. At that point his good eye seemed to die on him, as still and artificial as a bird’s. It was with this eye that he kept his mother under observation during visiting hours, not breathing a word. Beyond a doubt she wished him dead, perhaps because of that eye in which she herself was dead, but in the meantime she got him his drug money, twenty, fifty pesos, and she would sit there, having passed it to him — the notes scrunched into a ball like a candy, sticky and sweaty in the hollow of her fist — across the bench in the visitors’ room, her worm-filled belly like a bundle of laundry slumped over her stumpy legs, which didn’t quite touch the floor, hermetic and supernatural in the interminable pain of bearing this son who still clung to her entrails, where he watched her with his miscreant’s eye, refusing to leave the womb, trapped in the amniotic sac, in his cell, surrounded by bars, by apes, of which he was one, propelling himself in circles, always with that one eye of his, powerless to get up from the floor, like a bird with one wing, powerless to leave his mother’s belly, banged up inside his mother’s hole. Since this was more or less the plan, and Polonio was its mastermind, it fell to him to convince her; in the end — without much difficulty — she consented. “You’re a woman of a certain age, mature, respected. The bitches don’t dare try any funny business with you.” The thing was just there, inside her, something maternal. Polonio described it as a cotton plug attached to a thread about twelve inches long, its end dangling loose, a tip to pull the thing out after the event — all the rage these days among women — and it was merely a question of Mecha and La Chata talking her through it, assisting her, so they wouldn’t wind up pregnant only to have to get rid of the child in some horrible manner, one of the latest methods, Meche or La Chata would explain everything and help her put it up there nice and snug. In there everything died, in there spermatozoa became trapped, condemned to death, wild and raging at the barrier, banging on the door just like the guards, apes just like the rest of them — an endless throng of apes banging on locked doors. Polonio hooted with laughter and the two women, Meche and La Chata, did the same, thrilled by how ballsy the old girl had been to accept. But then: of course it hadn’t occurred to anyone that the mother might want to take the chance to use it for any other purpose, to put it like that. The makeshift tampon, tied nice and firmly in a knot, would contain some twenty or thirty grams of drugs, which the other two girls would hand over to the Prick’s mother. “The