leddemaat, leddemaat. The mother didn’t budge from between the two women. She clutched the handrail with both hands, as if on a ship’s bridge, every now and then turning toward the yard and looking out of the corner of her eye in the direction of the hatch, hoping to see her son’s head and not the other guy’s, a man for whom she felt not the least affection or warmth. The head, now directly behind her, was spitting out demands with growing urgency, nearing hysteria. “The drugs, come on, old woman,” sweetly at first, but with a note of aggression rapidly permeating his muted, restrained intonation. “The gear, you old hag! Give us the gear, you cunt!” It was quite possible that the mother really couldn’t hear him. She looked like a stone slab, barely touched by a Neolithic tool — vast, heavy, solemn, and hideous. Her silence had something zoological, even lapidary about it, as if she lacked the organ necessary to make a single sound, to talk or shout, a beast mute from birth. All she did was weep, and even her tears filled you with the same horror as a strange animal seen for the first time, and for whom it is impossible to feel either compassion or love, just as was true of her son. Rather than falling vertically, the thick, slow tears slipped down her cheek along the old knife slash running from her forehead to her jaw, tracing the line of the scar, and then dripping from the tip of her chin — the tears were alien to her eyes, alien to the tears of all humanity. In the yard adjoining the prisoners’ wing, with a subdued air of distraction, in vague need of something beyond themselves, something they found irresistible, the inmates and their relatives slowly gathered beneath the women perched on the rails. Nobody dared to yell or call out, but from the crowd there came a muffled buzzing, a unanimous hum of solidarity and satisfaction, which the apes couldn’t pin on any one person. During visiting hours, the yard was transformed into a bizarre sort of campsite, with blankets spread across the floor and hung wall to wall between the cell doors, making a sort of temporary roof, beneath which each clan gathered, shoulder to shoulder — women, children, and inmates — in a kind of helpless throng of brutish castaways, strangers among strangers, or perhaps people who’d never had a home and today were practicing, entirely by instinct, a kind of warped, primitive cohabitation. Below the three women, the tide rose in small, slow successive waves, people congregating as if out on a stroll, the men never once averting their wide, cynical gaze, simultaneously expectant, amused and unnerved by Meche and La Chata’s black panties. “Go on out then, you stupid Prick!” He didn’t get it. “You, you, get out there!” Albino’s head retreated arduously back into the cell allowing the mother to watch, almost immediately, exactly as if she were looking at herself in the mirror, how she gave birth to her son again, first the tousled, damp hair and then, bone by bone, forehead, cheekbones, jawbone, the flesh of her flesh, blood of her blood — dried up, bitter, and spent. She placed her tough, trembling hand on her son’s forehead as if wanting to protect the blind eye from the intensity of the sun’s rays. “The packet, Mami dearest, the packet you were going to bring,” the man pleaded in a whining, desolate voice. Scared, speechless, sleepwalking in suffering, that hand resting instinctively on her son’s forehead, all of a sudden she took on the hallucinatory and shocking likeness of a crudely-fashioned Our Lady of Sorrows, made of mud and stones and clay, unplaned and unpolished, an ancient, broken idol. Amid the increasingly frequent banging of muffled drums down below, a distinct isolated voice was calling out in chorus with the women. Leddemaat, Leddemaat. On their way from the Governor’s office, a posse of ten guards entered the box. Nobody was prepared to take a risk: a path gradually cleared for those irregular and terrifying strides, apes released from captivity and still not used to running, above all wary of becoming separated from the group, from the tribe, not to end up caught in the middle of the stormy, impersonal crowd, acting with impunity, pretending not to see the apes pass, looking through them as if their bodies were transparent. The struggle against Meche, La Chata, and the old woman seemed to go on forever, a bloodless, painless, and somehow distant affair. Half-naked now, their clothes in shreds, they always found something, anything — a ledge, a crossbar, a fissure — to cling to, while three or four apes per woman made grotesque efforts to drag them toward the stairs. From the crowd’s hoarse voice below erupted all sorts of exclamations, shouts, insults, and guffaws, some in protest, some in sympathy, and some savagely gleeful, demanding even more indecency, vulgarity, and shamelessness from the fabulous and once-in-a-lifetime spectacle that was all those bared breasts, asses, and midriffs. The mother, her short arms raised above her head, stood between the women and the apes, without doing a thing, making lumbering and labored jumps, like a fat old fowl who’d forgotten how to fly, a prehistoric link, not quite reptile, not quite bird. In the course of one of these jumps she tripped and went sliding across the iron surface of the walkway, only coming to a halt when her wide-open legs straddled a vertical bar of the handrail, preventing her, for now, from falling off the edge, but which wouldn’t stop the other half of her body, suspended in midair, from plummeting into to the yard at any moment. There followed a roar of collective terror from everyone watching, followed by a suffocating, weird silence, as if there were not a single soul left on the face of the earth. The holed men, struck dumb in their cell and without having seen a thing, sensed that something immense was about to occur. The woman was beating her arms frantically, irrationally, flapping hard. “Don’t move, old lady!” cried one of the apes, breaking the silence and dragging the mother from danger by her armpits. Silence returned, but now it was not only due to the absence of noise and voices, no, it was a silence that reigned over movements too, movements now entirely devoid of sound, wholly inaudible, as if all was a slow and imaginary underwater act performed by hypnotized divers, where everybody, actors and spectators alike, both present and far away, inhabited the diving suits of their own bodies, immobile and displacing their movements little by little, in stages, in autonomous and independent fragments, synchronized in their visible outward unity not by a causal and logical coherence, but precisely, by the icily rigid thread of madness. Something was stirring in this silent movie. Who knows what the Governor said to the apes and the women: an unfamiliar and tense calm descended, two apes bent down over the lock to the cell door and unholed the three recluses, and then the whole group — the three women, their men, and the guards — quietly, despite the crazed faces of Polonio, Albino, and even the Prick, began to head down the stairs. At the door to the box, the Governor let the two guards pass and then turned toward the women. He was quite sure his plan would work. “You can talk to your inmates in here all you like, under a watchful eye,” he said. “Ladies first.” The women obeyed with an air of weary victory. But they’d hardly stepped across the threshold when the first two apes, with lightning speed, pushed them back out of the box, through the other door that led out into the yard, immediately locking the door behind them. Suddenly, without warning, barely realizing what was happening, they’d been left behind on the other side of the wing, the other side of the world. The Governor didn’t have time to laugh at his own ploy. In an unhinged, blind rage, Albino and Polonio, with the Prick between them, sprang forth unleashed, barging blindly and aggressively into the box, unwittingly followed by the Governor and another guard. In one abrupt gesture, Albino locked the door leading onto the wing. Now they were alone with the Governor and the three guards, captive in the same zoo cage. Four against three; no, two against four, given that the Prick was an absolute waste of space. “Let’s see how you level with us now, you fucking ape pieces of shit,” Albino yelled, while removing his cowhide belt to wield in the fight. A blow to the face, across his cheekbone and nose, suddenly caused a blood-red flower to bloom there, as if out of nowhere. Polonio and Albino transformed into two ancient gladiators, homicidal to the roots of their hair. The fight was hushed and precise, and as they prowled around the box not a single voice was raised, not a single groan heard. They were going for it, out to kill or wound their enemies in the most excruciating way possible, using their feet, fists, teeth, and sticks to tear out eyes and break their balls. Every look, expression, and gasp, every movement of an arm or a leg was calibrated, wholly sacrificed to the taut will of one unambiguously implacable goal, all of them oozing death in its fullest, most incredible manifestation. The women, powerless on the other side of the bars, screamed like demons, kicked out at whichever guard happened to be closest, and yanked the hair of anyone who momentarily toppled in their direction, pulling it out in great clumps, bleeding at the roots, often with whitish bits of hairy scalp attached. The mother was on her knees banging her forehead repeatedly against the floor, as if enacting an excessively outlandish prayer, while the Prick curled against the metal bars in a fervent attempt to shrink the volume of his body to an absolute minimum, howling endlessly, doing nothing but howling. More apes showed up from the Governor’s office, at least twenty of them armed with very long metal poles. It was a matter of slotting the poles between the bars, rod by rod, from the grids on one side of the cage through to the other, and with the help of the guards who’d remained on the other side of the wing to hold them there, with two or three men securing each end, raising a line of barricades all the way across and up the rectangle, creating the most random and unpredictable arrangement of elevations and angles, as many as necessary to do battle against the two beasts, and at the same time mindful not to impede or thwart the actions of the Governor and the three apes, all in all a diabolical mutilation of the space, triangles, trapezoids, parallels, oblique or perpendicular divisions, lines and more lines, bars and more bars, until every possible move those gladiators could make was blocked and they were left crucified on the monstrous blueprint of this gargantuan defeat of liberty, all the fault of geometry. The first three of five horizontal bars perpendicular to the vertical ones flanking the box — primarily acting as supports for the poles which would be slotted from one side to the other, but also to sustain the vertical bars and thereby to structure the space — worked in the operation’s favor: the lower bar, at knee height, and the middle and upper bars, which came up to just below the stomach and up to the neck of a man of average height respectively (although Albino’s head towered above the tallest bar) meant that the apes could position the poles in such a way as to restrain that pair of crazed rebels, rendering them absolutely immobile. They, the gladiators, were invincible, higher than God, but this was too much for them. They tried to drive the poles upward, they jumped about and struggled in a thousand ways, but in the end they could do no more. The guards entered the cage to retrieve the Governor and his three helpers, who’d also been reduced to pieces. The women were dragged away, so hoarse their shouts had become inaudible. While all this was going on, the Prick managed to slide himself toward the feet of the officer who’d arrived with the guards. “Her,” he whispered, gesturing toward his mother, with a sideways glance from his misty, teary eye, “it’s her, she’s who’s carrying the drugs inside, up her crack, in her bits. Have her searched, see for yourself.” Only the officer heard. He smiled, a sorry grimace. Hanging from the metal poles, more captive than any captive, Polonio and Albino resembled bloody rags, dismembered apes left out to dry in the sun. All they knew for sure was that the mother hadn’t managed to hand the drugs to her son, not to him, not to no-ones, as she would say. It occurred to them both, in the same moment, that there was no point in killing the cripple now. Why bother.