apart from the small and fleeting pleasure, the sense of calm the drug provided, and how, minute by minute and second by second, he was locked in battle to find that peace, the only thing he loved in this life, his only respite from the nameless torments he endured and from the way he was forced, literally, to trade his body’s pain, piece by piece of his flesh, in exchange for an indefinite and limitless interval of freedom in which, with each fresh torture, he floundered a little happier. Inserting — or extracting — his head in and out of that iron rectangle, back into the guillotine, moving his skull, with all its parts — nape, forehead, nose, and ears — to the world beyond the cell, placing it there just as you would the head of a man sentenced to death, unreal simply for still being alive, would require careful, meticulous effort, the same way the fetus is extracted from its maternal entrails, a tenacious and deliberate self-birth with forceps that tear out clumps of hair and scrape against skin. With Polonio’s help, Albino was able to tilt his head at an angle and position it on top of the metal sheet. Down below were the apes, in the box, with all the vacant and inexplicable primordial presence of caged apes. Leaning his back against the door, next to Albino’s guillotined body, Polonio lit a cigarette and drew a long, deep drag into his lungs. The sun was falling across half the cell at an oblique, quadrangular angle, a solid, corporeal column inside whose glowing frame dust particles moved and collided with somnambular vagueness, erratic, distracted, confused, tracing the outline of a window of light with its vertical bars on the floor, not far from Polonio. Across from the solar buttress, the mute, resentful figure of the Prick blurred into the shadows. The billowing mountains of smoke exhaled by Polonio invaded the patch of light with an enveloping chaos of rumps, lips, legs, clouds, and the tumult of his personal cavalry, revolving and writhing in the hand-to-hand combat of shifting yet deliberate volumes of smoke, only then, slowly but surely, moving at the whim of the thick air, to settle with an easy and subtle rhythm on a horizontal plane, resembling a military victory parade. Then the movements shape-shifted to the rolling composition of other rhythms, and the slow, slow spirals paused briefly in their transitory state in poses of drunken idols and startled statues. Albino’s voice reached him from beyond the iron door — mild, confiding, tender. “Visiting time.” Visitors. Drugs. The bodies of smoke dissolved, merged into one another, reconstructed reliefs and structures and trails, subject to their own laws — obedient to those of the solar system — now wholly divine, free of all human traits, part of a new and freshly invented natural world, whose demigod was the sun, and where the nebulae, with scarcely a whisper of geometry, before all Creation, occupied the freedom of a space that had been formed in their own image and likeness, like an immense, interminable desire that never permits its own realization, nor does it describe its own limits, refusing to be in any way contained, just like God. But the Prick was still there, a battered, rotten anti-God, who began shaking with the violent convulsions of a hacking, uncontrollable cough, which made him pound his body against the wall — in a strange, spasmodic, and idiosyncratic manner, beating out the dull, fleeting beat of a bongo with a flabby drumskin. In the corner where he sat huddled, he looked like a possessed man, with his inflamed vulture’s eye, verging on asphyxiation. The lines, spirals, whorled snails, statues, and gods gone mad were scattered, cracked, and banished by the spasms of that cough. He was missing one lung. Albino might have pressed his knee a little too hard against his chest when, moments earlier, he’d tried to throttle him. He really was a pain in the ass, this cripple. With considerable effort, Albino managed to squeeze his hand through the hatch, right up against his face, over the bridge of his nose, ready to grab the drugs at the moment that the women got up close to the cell. All of a sudden, he was blinded by a terrible rage: at the small moist scab, still not hardened, the pus from the Prick’s open wound that the cripple must have left on Albino’s hand during their scuffle, which Albino had been about to wipe on his lips. He closed his eyes, his head rattling the iron grid with the brute force of clenching his teeth. He was hell-bent on killing him, hell-bent with every atom of his soul. He opened his eyes to take another look. It wouldn’t be long before the relatives started filing in. The padlocks had already been removed from both doors to the box in order to admit them, so the two groups were facing one another, on either side of the iron bars. Their women wouldn’t file in as a group, but one at a time, mingling with the other visitors. Albino speculated as to who would appear first, La Chata, the mother, or Mercedes — Meche — with her beautiful body, shoulders, legs, angelic wings, all so enticing. (It was as if, under present circumstances, the evocation of Meche was distorted by unforeseeable new factors full of contradictions, which lent the memory a different, original, strange quality: Meche had just been through an ordeal, the details of which Albino was none the wiser at that point, yet which, ever since he’d found out, a week before — when they plotted how to get the drugs into the penitentiary and Polonio had thought of using the Prick’s mother — had remained imprinted on his mind, in various forms but always alluding to specific physical images. First of all, the clearly defined female guard, and then the diverse and unnerving meaning assumed by two words, who knows when or where Albino had heard them — exchanged between nurses or doctors as he’d waited someplace to be seen for whatever reason, this was all quite dreamlike, or perhaps it really was a dream — words which, given their convoluted technical character, encompassed a series of extensive and suggestive movements and situations: gynecological position. The female guard, and her method of searching one particular sector of the female visitors, not all of them, but a specific number who came to visit the drug addicts, and among them only the more active pushers inside the penitentiary: Albino and Polonio. Would they inspect the women in that gynecological position? The present situation — and those two absurd words — made this Meche slightly different from the usual Meche: violated and prostituted, not that this was a cause for repulsion, no, quite the opposite, a cause to feel closer to her, as if it lent her a natural, undefined loveliness, or at least one that Albino wasn’t capable of defining; it didn’t matter to him that Meche might have slipped into an unfortunate trance — and he would ask her himself, telling her to spare no details — in the event of a somewhat excessive exploration by the female guard during the inspection: it excited a renewed, previously unfamiliar desire in him, and a meticulous and honest retelling by Meche would give him hope, as they went on, for a new kind of bond to develop between them, more intense and complete, no doubt enjoying a healthy dose of lighthearted, happy depravity in which those two medical words would somehow play a role.) Although the “box” formed part of the wing, separated only by the same bars that acted as a barrier between the two of them, the presence of guards, shut up there inside, made it look like a separate prison, a prison for guards, a prison inside the prison, which visitors were obliged to pass through before entering the yard of the wing itself. This was Albino’s entire field of vision from the hatch — a real torture. Being, as he was, taller than the peephole — chest-high to a man of normal height — Albino was forced to remain bent in a horribly awkward position to keep his head aligned at this angle, and after a couple of minutes he started to feel shooting pains down his neck and back, and his leg began to tremble, giving the ludicrous and mortifying impression that he was scared. As soon as one of the three women were through the first and second barred walls of the box — be it Meche, La Chata, or the mother — it was just a matter of doing something, anything — making a sound, kicking the door — to let them know exactly where the