bitches have never tried it on with you, right? Because you’re a woman in your prime, well respected. Not like us. When they pat us down they always slip the finger in, filthy bitches.” The memory and the idea and the image all made Polonio blind with jealousy, with a strange, absolute jealousy, a kind of incapacity for existing in his own space, for recognizing himself or feeling the limits of his own body, vague, bereft, jealousy in his throat and the pit of his stomach, and a faint and terrible tingling sensation behind his penis, it felt like a premature ejaculation, as opposed to a real one, a kind of contact without semen, which fluttered, vibrated in tiny microscopic, tangible circles, beyond the body, beyond any organism at all, and there before his eyes La Chata would appear, jocund, bestial, and the lines of her thighs, which, when she stood upright, instead of coming together to form the cradle of her sex, left a small gap between the two walls of solid, firm, young, heart-rending flesh. Seen through her dress, backlit — and now Polonio was struck by a vivid rush of nostalgia, from the time when he walked free: of hotel rooms heady with disinfectant, the clean but not-quite-bleached sheets in the two-bit hotels, La Chata and he traveling from one side of the country to the other, or across the border, to San Antonio, Texas, Guatemala, and that time in Tampico, as the sun went down over the Pánuco River, La Chata leaning against the balcony, facing the room, her body naked beneath a flimsy dressing gown and her legs slightly apart, her mound of Venus like a capital of hair atop the two columns of her thighs — it was impossible to resist, and Polonio, overcome by the same sensations as someone possessed by a religious trance, dropped to his knees to kiss it and sink his lips between hers. “They slip their finger in.” Those mother-fuck-ing les-bian bit-ches. The Prick’s mother would carry the little packet of drugs inside her — despite the unforeseen changes to the original plan, what with them now being in the hole, the mother’s task, as it were, remained the same — the little packet to feed her son’s vice, just like before, in her belly, also inside her, she had fed him with life, with the horrible vice of living, of hauling oneself along, of crumbling like the Prick was crumbling, yet still relishing, to an indescribable degree, each and every morsel of life granted to him. Right now the Prick was draped around Polonio’s neck begging to be allowed to look through the hatch; on his nape, below and behind his ear, Polonio felt the moist kiss of a purulent ulcer upon his skin, one of the Prick’s unhealed wounds, the lips of an oyster kiss wetting him with a thin thread of saliva that ran down to his back, all because he didn’t look after himself, all because of negligence, the hopeless miserable neglect to which he submitted himself. With his left hand, Polonio punched him in the stomach — a clumsy blow on account of his awkward position, his head poking through the hatch — and then kicked him lower down, far more effectively, sending him flying across the cell where he landed against the iron wall with a stunned and muffled cry. “Dickhead,” the Prick grumbled, unperturbed and showing no hostility. “All I wanted was to see when my mami gets here.” He spoke like a child, my mami, when he should have said my mother — my whore of a mother. For that’s what she was. They’d had to come up with a new set of plans and the one in charge of executing them was Meche, Albino’s girl. The women wouldn’t come to visit them, but would instead use the names of other inmates, since their own men no longer had the right to visitors, not now they were in the hole. Albino was the most desperate of them all, maybe because he was the biggest, going so far as to weep from the lack of drugs, but stopping short of slitting his wrists, something all the addicts did when the anguish became too much. He had been a soldier, a sailor, and even a pimp — but not to Meche, she was no one’s whore, she was an honorable woman, a slut for sure, but when she slept with other men it wasn’t for money, no, it was purely for pleasure, behind Albino’s back, of course. That’s why she’d slept with Polonio so often. She was hot, absolutely smoking hot, but she was honorable, and to each her own. During their first days in the hole Albino distracted and entertained them — or rather he entertained Polonio, since the Prick remained hostile, listless, and incapable of understanding a fucking thing going on around him — with Albino’s tremendous, rousing belly dance, renowned throughout the penitentiary, which caused such intense excitement that some, pointlessly trying to conceal their intentions, instead revealed their arousal and the coarse and harried sense of shame that threatened to engulf them, masturbating with furious and flagrant zeal, their hand under their clothes. It was a real privilege for Polonio to have watched him perform here, at his own leisure, in the cell, because elsewhere Albino provoked untold resentment as to who was allowed to join his audience; like any well-respected performer, he ejected all onlookers he considered inconvenient, frivolous, flippant, incapable of appreciating the hard-won attributes of a true virtuoso. Lower down his stomach was a tattoo of a Hindu figure — etched in the brothel of some Hindustani port, or so his story went, by the in-house eunuch, a member of an unpronounceable esoteric sect, while Albino dreamed a deep and almost lethal opium sleep beyond all possible recollection — the tattoo depicted an amusing couple, a young man and woman in the throes of passion, their bodies entwined, enlaced in an incredible foliage of thighs, legs, arms, breasts, and marvelous organs — the Brahmanic tree of Good and Evil — positioned in such a way and with such kinetic wisdom that Albino only had to set it in motion with the right contractions and muscle spasms, its rhythmic oscillations rising at intervals on the surface of his skin, and a subtle, inapprehensible rocking of the hips, for those flailing and capricious-looking body parts — torso and armpits, feet and pubis and hands and wings and stomachs and hair — to assume a mystical unity in which the miracle of the Creation was repeated and human copulation was portrayed in all its magnificent and marvelous splendor. In the cubicle where visitors were inspected before entering the prison, the hands of the female guard felt her through her dress — the finger would follow, the finger of God — but Meche’s mind was elsewhere now: on Albino’s dance to be exact, from the week before, in the visitors’ lobby, just after they’d settled on the final details of the original plan, a plan they then abandoned on account of being sectioned in the hole, the Prick’s mother also there, transfixed by the contortions of the tattoo, apparently confounded, but her lips drawn in a sly smile, and who, despite being well over sixty, was still well capable of making the beast with two backs, the old mule. In a corner of the room, hidden from prying eyes by a barrier of five people — the three women, the Prick, and Polonio — Albino had unfastened his trousers, his t-shirt now raised above his waist like a curtain to set the stage, using his mesmerizing stomach tremors to bring the coitus to life, emerging out of those inky blue lines with every step, with every rift and roll, every ripple and undulation, until all of them — except the Prick and his mother, who were doing their best to mask their reactions — felt a suffocating wave of desire course through their bodies, and, in Meche and La Chata’s case, a brief and ambiguous giggle also danced on the roof of their mouths. Now naked from the waist down, Meche could anticipate the next moves of the guard’s hand, something that had never happened to her before, disturbed by a strange and indecipherable willingness deep within her spirit and a half-hearted resistance, and in that moment Albino appeared in her imagination (in a previously forgotten memory, the first time they’d possessed each other, with intriguing new details now arising in her mind, absolutely fresh as if belonging to someone else), preventing her from assuming the proud indifference and fierce composure that she needed to withstand, patiently, angrily, coldly, the woman groping between her legs. For example, the heavy yet simultaneously repressed breathing, or rather irregular panting, neither steady nor erratic — only now did she realize it had all been air exhaled through his nose; Albino on top of her mound of Venus, for now the thumb and index finger of the female guard were already there, relentless, urgent, that female guard parting her lips, while suddenly, with the middle finger, she began a sweet, delicate, and highly suspicious internal exploration, a slow and deliberate in and out, the eyes utterly fixed as if unto death. The plan was for the women to enter the wing with the rest of the visitors, mingle with other prisoners’ friends and families, and then appear unexpectedly at the door to the