hole was. Naturally, the proper thing to do, he thought, would be to yell insults, hurl abuse at the apes. After all, that’s what they were there for. The important thing was to see them enter, first the box and then the yard, to be sure that everything had gone smoothly during the inspection, with the bitches. Meche and La Chata wouldn’t have had any trouble: the apes would have felt them up and that would’ve been that, nothing to find inside them. The mother was the important one. Please, please let the old hag through with those thirty grams tucked up her crack. For lack of a better word, they called what was about to happen a strike: a women’s strike. But before Meche, La Chata and the mother went up there, to the cell door, so they could shout, scream, and stomp their feet, before the ruckus really kicked off, the mother was meant to hand over the little wrap of drugs to whoever had his head poking through the hatch. In this case Albino, the Baptist, was on duty, leaning his head against the metal plate. Later, loaded up on the drugs, he’d take care of the Prick. It was easy enough to pull off on movie night: deep in the shadows, drive the sharp end of an iron bar through his ribcage, while Polonio covered his mouth to stop him from squealing like a pig. They hadn’t associated the Prick with him — or Polonio, precisely because of his baby face. Albino laughed: all because he had a mother. Having a mother was a big deal for that fucker, the real deal. The visitors formed a line in the central yard, not far away — all the same, beyond Albino’s line of vision — before filing, one by one, onto the respective wings. Mothers, wives, daughters, young men, very few older men, two or three in each group, the air thick with suspicion, eyes down. Curiously enough, their conversations were never about why their relatives had been locked up. Nobody questioned the guilt or innocence of a child, husband, brother: they were there and that was that. The same couldn’t be said for every visitor. Whenever some high-class lady set foot in the place, for the first few times at least, her sole, obsessive, and blatant concern — ultimately lacking all logic or even plain coherence — was to establish a clear social distinction between her inmate — why he was arrested, the temporary and purely incidental nature of his stay there in prison — and the rest of the visitors’ inmates. Hers was merely “accused of,” since no actual crime had been committed — no matter how shady things appeared — some friends in high places had been rallied in his favor, and two or three high-court judges were on the case. Those listening to her invariably nodded, incredulous but indulgent, going along with the gran señora who didn’t pause for breath in her display of piously refined manners, who took their silence as wonder engendered by her ostentatiously luxurious attire. But as her presence in the line of visitors became more frequent, the lady of fine lineage gradually began to change her attitude, she began see things as they really were. Each time she would speak a little less of influential personages, and the innocence or guilt of “her” inmate noticeably dropped out of the conversation, as her outfits became plainer, until in the end she was just another visitor, eventually passing unnoticed, indistinguishable from the rest. La Chata spotted Meche behind her, among the other women in the line. She sighed. Oh, how she envied her. She really had it bad for Meche’s man, Albino, and ever since he’d shown them his belly dance in the visitors’ room, she went weak at the knees at the very thought of him. She would ask Meche if, without jeopardizing their friendship, she could sleep with Albino. Once or twice, that’s all, no strings, or rather, without Meche getting all strung up about it. Further behind Meche, the Prick’s mother hobbled in, looking suspicious. She’d let Meche and La Chata insert that contraceptive tampon as if it were nothing, with the indifference of a cow letting herself be milked. There were the udders; here was a vagina. Just as they’d predicted, she hadn’t been searched. They’d shown some respect for her age, and the dairy cow passed through, as inoffensive as a virgin. But now they’d reached the apes’ cage, the box. The Prick was pleading with them to let him poke his head through the hatch, because, he said, his mother wasn’t going to hand over the drugs to anyone but him. But his pleas were feeble, despondent. Albino, with his head poking out of the cell, barked back at him. At last, Meche and La Chata appeared down below. “Those fucking bitches, stupid cunts!” The two women’s eyes spun towards the voice: it was their man. But the old mule of a mother wasn’t there — she was late, the wretch. The head in the guillotine flatly refused to give up the lookout post. His mother wasn’t going to be so stupid as to give them the drugs, the Prick whined. Utter bullshit. Just like him to be pining to see his mother right here and now, needing her so desperately. He would tell her everything, not holding back like before. Everything. The interminable nights in the infirmary, strapped into a straightjacket, the ice-cold baths, the vein-cutting: of course he didn’t want to die, but all the same he wanted to die — and the way he let himself go, let his body go like a loose thread, drifting, the boundless impiousness of human beings, his own infinite impiety, the evils of his cursed soul. Everything. He went on whining. “I told you to give it a fucking rest!” Just then the Prick’s mother came through the two barred walls of the box and stepped into the yard in front of the wing. They were saved. Thanks to Albino’s outburst, the women were able to make their way to the holed men’s cell, transported as if by magic, invisible and swift, in a single movement, through the ebb and flow, the searching for one another in the crowd, in such a natural, confident, and self-possessed way that they didn’t stand out or seem to have their own private agenda, so here they were already, just like that, and Meche had thrown herself at Holofernes’s head and was showering it with kisses, on the ears, eyes, nose, smack on the lips. Helpless to escape, Albino merely flapped like the body of a monstrous fish, a fish with a human head, beached by a crashing ocean wave. “M’boy! W’is he?” cried the Prick’s mother in a cavernous and somehow stupid voice; stupid because she seemed to be convinced that she would come face to face with her son right away, and when this didn’t happen she became lost and confused, her expression full of fear and distrust toward the other two women. “W’is he? W’is he?” she repeated, lurching clumsily as if she were drunk, without taking her eyes off the head and hand protruding from the metal hatch. The head separated from the torso — guillotined and alive with its one visible eye rolling crazily, like what happens with cattle when they’re thrown to the ground and know they’re about to die — sent Meche and La Chata into a wild frenzy. Wild but also amused and merry, despite how deranged the whole situation was. They seemed younger than their years — they couldn’t have been more than twenty-five — resembling a couple of teenage girls, sporty, bendy, agile, and as swaggering as they were vulgar. They’d climbed up onto the corridor handrail, and now sat with their legs crossed, feet clamped around the vertical bars, and from that position, skirts hitched high, exposing their thighs, they let out the most extraordinary howls and screeches, wildly flailing their clenched fists in the air, their toned arms like sturdy, steel roots, shaken by short, sharp electric shocks, while their eyes, open unnaturally wide, maddened and inflamed, glinted with unleashed rage. “Let them out, let them out,” three words spliced into one furious emission: