“We’re almost there.”
“And then I had this idea. I said to him: Listen, I’m going to look in the mirror, and when I look at myself, you’re going to look at me then you’re going to look at my reflection, and you’re going to realize it’s the same, the problem is this filthy mirror and this filthy station and the bad lighting in this corridor. And he didn’t say anything, but I took that as a yes — he could have objected — and I came up to the mirror and leaned forward with my eyes shut.”
“You can see the lights already, compadre, we’re just about there, take it easy.”
“Are you playing deaf, or what? Didn’t you hear me?”
“Of course I heard you. You had your eyes shut.”
“I stood in front of the mirror with my eyes shut. And then I opened them. Maybe that’s normal for you: standing in front of a mirror with your eyes shut.”
“Nothing seems normal to me any more, compadre.”
“Then I opened them, suddenly, I opened my eyes right up and looked at myself and saw someone staring back at me wide-eyed, like he was scared shitless, and behind him I saw a guy about twenty years old, but he looked at least ten years older, a skinny guy with a beard and bags under his eyes, looking at us over my shoulder, and to tell the truth, I couldn’t be sure, I saw a swarm of faces, as if the mirror was broken, though I knew perfectly well it wasn’t, and then Belano said, very softly, it was barely more than a whisper, he said: Hey, Contreras, is there some kind of room behind that wall?”
“The fuckhead! He’d seen too many movies!”
“And when I heard his voice it was like I woke up, but in reverse, and instead of coming back to this side, I’d come out on the other side, where even my own voice sounded strange. No, I said, as far as I know, behind it there’s just the yard. The yard where the cells are? he asked me. Yes, I said, where the regular prisoners are. And then the son of a bitch said: Now I understand. And that completely flummoxed me, because, I mean, what was there to understand? And I said the first thing that came into my head: What the flying fuck do you understand now? But I said it softly, without raising my voice, so softly he didn’t hear me, and I didn’t have the strength to repeat the question. So I looked in the mirror again and saw two old classmates, a twenty-year-old cop with a loose tie, and a dirty-looking guy with long hair and a beard, all skin and bone, and I thought: Jesus, we really have fucked up, haven’t we, Contreras. Then I put my hands on Belano’s shoulders and led him back to the gym. When we came to the door a thought crossed my mind: I could take out my gun and shoot him right here; it would have been so easy, all I had to do was aim and put a bullet through his head, I’ve always been a good shot, even in the dark. Then I could have come up with any old explanation. But of course I didn’t do it.”
“Of course you didn’t. We don’t do that sort of thing, compadre.”
“No, we don’t do that sort of thing.”
Cell Mates
We happened to be in prison in the same month of the same year, although the prisons were thousands of miles apart. Sofia was born in 1950 in Bilbao. She was dark, small and very pretty. In November 1973, while I was a prisoner in Chile, she was sent to jail in Aragon.
At the time she was getting her degree in science at the University of Zaragoza, biology or chemistry, one or the other, and she went to jail with almost all of her classmates. On the fourth or fifth night we slept together, as I was adopting a new position, she told me there was no point tiring myself out. I like variety, I said. If I fuck in the same position two nights in a row, I become impotent. Well, don’t do it for my sake, she said. The room had a very high ceiling, and the walls were painted red, the color of a desert at sunset. She had painted them herself a few days after moving in. It looked awful. I’ve made love every way there is, she said. I don’t believe you, I replied. Every way there is? That’s right, she said, and I was at a loss for words (maybe I was embarrassed) but I believed her.
Later she told me, but this was quite a few days later, that she was losing her mind. She ate hardly anything, only instant mashed potatoes. Once I went into the kitchen and saw a plastic bag beside the refrigerator. It was a twenty-kilo bag of mashed potato flakes. Is that all you eat? I asked. She smiled and said yes — sometimes she ate other things, but mostly when she went out to a bar or a restaurant. At home it’s simpler just to have mashed potatoes, she said. That way there’s always something to eat. She didn’t put milk in it, only water, and she didn’t even wait for the water to boil. She mixed the flakes with warm water, she told me, because she hated milk. I never saw her consume any milk products; she said it was probably some kind of psychological problem that went back to her childhood, something to do with her mother. So when we were both in the apartment at night, she would have her mashed potatoes, and sometimes she would sit up late with me watching movies on TV. We hardly talked. She never argued. At the time there was a Communist living in the apartment; he was in his twenties, like us, and he and I used to get into long, pointless arguments, but she never joined in, although I knew she was more on my side than on his. One day the Communist told me Sofia was hot and he was planning to fuck her at the first opportunity. Go ahead, I said. Two or three nights later, while I was watching a Bardem movie, I heard him go out into the passage and knock discreetly on Sofia’s door. They talked for a while and then the door closed and the Communist was in there for a good two hours.
Sofia had been married, though I didn’t find out until much later. Her husband had been a student at the University of Zaragoza too, and gone to prison with the rest of them in November 1973. When they finished their degrees they moved to Barcelona and after a while they split up. He was called Emilio and they were still good friends. Did you make love every way there is with Emilio? No, but nearly, said Sofia. She also said she was losing her mind and it was a worry, especially if she was driving. The other night it happened in Diagonal, luckily there wasn’t much traffic. Are you taking something? Valium. Lots and lots of Valium. Before we slept together, we went to the movies a couple of times. French movies, I think. One was about a woman pirate; she goes to this island where another woman pirate lives and they have a duel to the death with swords. The other one was set during World War Two; there was a guy who worked for the Germans and for the Resistance at the same time. After we started sleeping together we kept going to the movies and, strangely, I can remember the titles of the films we saw and the names of the directors, but nothing else about them. From the very first night Sofia made it perfectly clear that our relationship wasn’t going to be serious. I’m in love with someone else, she said. Our Communist comrade? No, you don’t know him; he’s a teacher, like me. She didn’t want to tell me his name just then. Sometimes she spent the night with him, but not very often, about once a fortnight. We made love every night. At first I tried to tire her out. We would start at eleven and keep going until four in the morning, but soon I realized there was no way of tiring out Sofia.
At the time I used to hang out with anarchists and radical feminists and the books I read were more or less influenced by the company I was keeping. There was one by an Italian feminist, Carla something, called Let’s Spit on Hegel. One afternoon I lent it to Sofia. Read it, I said, I thought it was really good. (Maybe I said she would get a lot out of it.) The next day Sofia was in a very good mood; she gave me back the book and said that as science fiction it wasn’t bad, but otherwise it sucked. Only an Italian woman could have written it, she declared. What have you got against Italian women? I asked. Did one abuse you when you were little or something? She said no, but if she was going to read that sort of thing, she preferred Valerie Solanas. I was surprised to learn that her favorite author was not a woman but an Englishman, David Cooper, one of R. D. Laing’s associates. I ended up reading Valerie Solanas and David Cooper and even Laing (his sonnets). One of the things that impressed me most about Cooper was that during his time in Argentina (although I’m not sure now whether Cooper was ever really in Argentina, maybe I’m getting mixed up) he used hallucinogenic drugs to treat left-wing activists. These were people who were cracking up because they knew they could die at any moment, people who might not have the experience of growing old in real life, but they could have it with the drugs, and they got better. Sofia used drugs too, sometimes. She took LSD and amphetamines and Rohypnol, pills to speed up and pills to slow down and pills to steady her hands on the steering wheel. I rarely accepted the offer of a lift in her car. We didn’t go out much, in fact. I went on with my life, she went on with hers, and at night, in her room or in mine, our bodies locked in a relentless struggle that lasted till daybreak and left us wrung out.