The days at Santa Águeda went by calmly, with a lot of delirious praying as well as a great deal of what might be thought of “lower activities.” It was an explosion of hormones, the final holocaust of the hymen. We were young, we were discovering freedom and the power that came from our bodies. If we had been outside, in a public school, we would have done the same, which is why there are so many teenage pregnancies.
My group of rebel novices established itself and became my new tribe. Time passed and I turned sixteen, and we celebrated it with a big party, held in secret, of course, at the bottom of the garden and in the middle of the night, fucking two young social studies teachers on loan from the Esculapian community, and a couple of police officers, too. All drinking and doing coke out of cans. Well, I was doing coke, being the most concerned about my health among us, while Vanessa and Estéfany each smoked at least half a dozen pipes of crack from a huge bag that the police officers brought them as a gift, in return for what I don’t know but I can imagine. That was the beginning of the end, because after the party there was some left over and Vanessa started selling it to other girls in the convent. She gave it to them to try and then sold it.
Soon afterwards, one day when we were in the gym, the nuns went to the dormitory and searched it. They looked in suitcases, trunks, and overnight bags, and that’s how they found Vanessa’s rucksack filled with small bags of crack, along with coke, condoms, and anal lubricant. In another case they found a whole lot of money in cash and half a bottle of aguardiente.
All hell broke loose.
The first thing the mother superior did was call the police, and since they knew we were a group they immediately separated us, each of us alone in an office while they went through all our things with a fine-tooth comb. Then the police sniffer dogs arrived, and one of them practically swallowed one of Vanessa’s G-strings. In Estéfany’s things they found six boxes of contraceptive pills and in Lady’s overnight bag some condoms, but nothing serious. In mine they didn’t find a thing, because I didn’t have anything. I never kept anything with me.
Vanessa’s parents, wealthy people from Cauca who owned land rich in sugarcane, which they rented out to sugar manufacturers, came to take charge of the situation, because the mother superior had made an official complaint. Heads would have to roll, and the convent was determined to impose a severe punishment in order to avoid scandal. After a long meeting, the lawyer for Vanessa’s parents asked to speak with me in private, so I was taken to another office where her mother was. The poor woman’s face was distorted with anger and frustration, but when I went in she greeted me in a very friendly manner and took off her dark glasses to speak. The lawyer explained the situation. He said that Vanessa’s family was prepared to give me a huge reward.
“Look, Manuela, if you help us out with Vanessa, we’ll remunerate you very well in the future. We hear you’ve had problems with your mother . . . ”
Vanessa must have told them that, I thought, but what was the deal? what did they want from me?
“We want you to say those drugs were yours and that Vanessa knew nothing about them,” the lawyer said. “That you asked her as a favor to keep that package for you without telling her what it was.”
It took my breath away, how could they ask that of me? The woman saw the look of distress on my face and made a sign to the lawyer.
“You’ll spend a maximum of two years in a reform school,” he said. “I’ll deal with your case personally to make sure you come out as early as possible. The Cáceres family will pay for you to go to university in Bogotá or wherever you like, inside Colombia, with a monthly maintenance equivalent to at least three salaries and accommodation paid while you study. When you come of age, you can go out into the world, with a bright future ahead of you, what do you think? Consider it carefully. In two days there’ll be a preliminary hearing that you’ll attend with your classmates. That’s the right moment for you to speak up. It’s your big opportunity.”
That night I fell asleep thinking about my life, about how hard it had all been because of being the daughter of a feckless man and a vain and crazy woman. In what way was I to blame for what was happening around me? They didn’t call my mother, and she hadn’t been to see me in a while. She only talked to me on the telephone every now and again. My life belonged to me, and me alone.
Plus, there was “the thing.”
My great tragedy, which I plan to tell you about in a while, Doctor, when I’ve finally summoned up the strength. Now I had an opportunity to start over, from scratch, with a new pack of cards. Reform school would be hell, but I was already used to various kinds of hell. I doubted it was worse or more savage than the hell I carried inside me, so I made up my mind. On the day of the hearing, the convent van picked the six of us up. As punishment, we had been separated. We hadn’t been able to talk and now, in the Chevrolet, with the mother superior in front, there was no way to find out anything. We parked outside the juvenile court and with each step I took up the stairs, my heart sank. Would I be able to go through with it? We entered the courtroom where Vanessa’s family was and everything seemed unreal. Soon afterwards they brought her in, pale and shaking. Everyone thought it was from fear, but I knew it was because she’d been deprived of crack. Her parents knew that, too. The hearing started and the charge against her from the school was read out. Then the juvenile judge said that if nobody had any comment to make, we could proceed.
It was then that the lawyer looked at me, as if to say: “Now!”
So I stood up and raised my hand, very determined, and an usher led me to a microphone installed on the left-hand side of the courtroom. My voice came out sounding strong. When I reached the point of what I had to say there was a big ohhh! from those who were there. I sneaked a glance at Vanessa’s mother and she made a friendly gesture. Then two officials took me to an office and the judge spoke to me on my own and asked me if I confirmed what I had said in court.
“Yes,” I said, “I deceived Vanessa Cáceres. Those drugs were mine, I persuaded some of the novices to try the stuff and then starting selling it to them to pay for my own habit.”
We went back to the courtroom and the judge asked me to repeat my confession. I did it without blinking. I didn’t even look at Vanessa for fear that something would give us away. The judge asked why I had waited until now and I said, because it wasn’t until now that I’d understood the seriousness of what I had done and the consequences for my innocent friend, Señorita Vanessa Cáceres. And I concluded by saying:
“It is the Lord who is resolving this, separating the innocent from the guilty, and putting lies in the horrible place reserved for lies.”
As I was speaking I had a hallucination: the courtroom had turned into an abandoned church. And I saw myself on my knees, begging forgiveness. In the semidarkness, I recognized the figure of the judge, but now he was a priest. He stood looking at me in silence and I withdrew in fear along the aisle, at first on my knees and then with slow, clumsy steps, one by one, to get away from that terrible silence accusing me from the altar, at the far end of the church, and I was almost at the front door when the priest or judge spoke, or rather cried out, and when I heard him it seemed as if the sound was coming from the darkest part of the sky, as if the air had filled with sparks and fires and the whole of mankind, defenseless, was getting ready to surrender. That’s what I thought when I heard the judge’s voice.
“Manuela Beltrán! Do you repent?”
I again fell to my knees, as enraptured with guilt as the first man sentenced in court, in the name of God or of something greater than God, before the innocent.
At this point, the eyes of all those present in that wretched courtroom became visible again in my dream, and I felt that their looks were knives about to tear my flesh, because that ceremony was no longer about forgiveness or guilt, but a human sacrifice, and then I saw the judge approach with a very thin knife while the guards, giving way to each other and bowing, very politely, almost lovingly, asked me to lie down on the table; then one of them opened my dress down the middle while the other arranged my head on a bundle of papers to make me more comfortable, and from there I again met the eyes of Vanessa’s mother, who seemed to be whispering in my ear, goodbye . . . goodbye . . . goodbye . . . while the mother superior lifted a finger to her lips, silence, don’t speak or think, silence and more silence, and beyond her, beyond the backs of the seats and the railing, the eyes of my depraved friends, who were closing their mouths with two fingers in order not to laugh, and all the others, the public in the courtroom, started to chant hallelujahs and prayers, until the judge raised his arms and brought them down hard, sinking the knife in my chest, up to the hilt, making a first clean cut and a second in the shape of a cross, and then, separating tissue and muscle, pulled out my heart with his hand and raised it so that everyone could see it, and I saw it, a horrible, throbbing mass, full of little side hearts that were also swelling, and the blood gushed down the judge’s forearms and into the sleeves of his robe, and then he asked aloud:
“How is the blood and how the heart of the guilty?”
He paused and responded:
“Black like this blood and black like this heart!”
I managed to see it throbbing and felt sorry for myself, but I didn’t feel any pain, quite the contrary, rather a strange kind of relief since in there, in that muscle that already seemed to be dying, all the horrible things I had experienced were kept, and now at last they were separated from me, far away from me, and I realized it was better to keep going without a heart in my chest.
I woke up in the hospital. It was already dark. Seeing me open my eyes, a nurse looked at me contemptuously and called a guard. Come in, I heard her say. A doctor told me that I would stay there until I recovered, but in detention. That was why my arms were tied to the tubing of the bed. It’s strange to be tied to a bed in a clinic.
“You fainted in the courtroom,” the doctor said, “but the blow on the head isn’t serious. You hit the edge of the step.”
Then came a horrible scene, Doctor, which I wouldn’t tell you about if I didn’t like you: my mother’s visit to the hospital. She came with her disgusting boyfriend and asked what had happened. Without letting me answer she screamed that she couldn’t believe I would have done that, but I looked at her and said, look, Mother, it’s best if you go, what I confessed is true, get out of here with your man and never come to see me again, let me get on with my life.
They had torn out my heart and nobody could hurt me. I insisted on her leaving and she slapped me in the face.
“You spoiled brat!” she said. “The same bad blood as your father.”
The guy had spent the whole time to one side, without looking at me, but before going out he glanced at me over his shoulder and I could see his eyes. The son of a bitch was laughing. Maybe he thought he’d won once and for all, getting rid of this stupid teenager who was grown up now and was strong and could tell so many bad things about him. He was right to laugh, the bastard. I also laughed, but about something else, because in a sudden daydream I saw him lying on a camp bed, writhing with pain and humiliation, screaming in fear. Hate, humiliation, and pain. That’s what I wanted with all my heart for the two of them, the two scumbags.
My time in reform school was quieter than my days at the convent. There were drugs, violence and punishment, survival, and a few deep friendships. Life in all its splendor. The advantage is that we were all more or less equal and all of us had had our hearts ripped out. That’s why if they punished us it was with deep respect. Among the many things I saw, Doctor, I’ll tell you one: some of the women guards had a lucrative little business going that consisted of selling the girls for sex. They told the youngest ones they were being punished for indiscipline and this was the punishment. They made them pass through the infirmary and there, in a soundproofed room, they handed them over to their clients for an hour or two. I don’t know how much they charged, but the men could do whatever they wanted to them, as long as they didn’t beat them. But those girls came back from the punishment covered in bruises and with their eyes fixed on the ground. I knew what they were doing to them and thought, sooner or later one of these girls will go crazy in there.
And that’s what happened.
There was a girl of about thirteen, a peasant girl, who, as far as I was able to find out, was really liked by a regular client. It was something like the third time she had been handed over to the same man and when she left the cell block I saw her eyes and said to myself, there’s going to be blood, because she had that placid but also nervous look in her eyes, the kind you see in people who are about to explode. The girl had no weapons but she did have teeth, and that’s what she did: she bit the client’s testicles off, and he bled to death in the ambulance. With that scandal, the guards’ business came to an end. They were replaced and for a few months everything was quiet, until another business was set up: hiring the girls out to restaurants near the reform school. But that left you with money, so I put myself forward for one of these jobs. I ended up washing dishes in a fried chicken joint called El Pollo Madrugador, maybe my mother’s influence. I made good money to buy things. No drugs, no booze. A radio, a hairbrush, a little mirror. Things for me.
One day, I saw one of the guards reading a book. Sitting alone on a bench at the end of the corridor, she was reading and reading, and to me it seemed that the expression on her face and even the position of her body was like someone who wasn’t there, in the middle of that pigsty, smelling the damp and the shit. I was so surprised that I asked her, why are you reading? and the woman answered, because it helps me to pass the time and takes me out of here a little. That made me even more curious and I said to her, can you lend it to me afterwards? Three days later she handed it over to me, with the covers wrapped in newspaper. You may be wondering, Doctor, how it is that a single book can awaken a love of literature, and I’ll give you a Biblical answer, “the spirit blows where it wants,” or where you want it to blow, which is almost the same thing, and it blew on me that day, because as soon as I read the first page I was confined in a prison of words, a world I never wanted to leave, and that’s why that night, when they switched out the lights, I continued reading in secret with just the distant yellowish light from a lamppost out in the yard.
When I finished, I raised my eyes and looked at the world, and I swear it wasn’t the same anymore. So at the end of the month, when the Cáceres family’s lawyer came and brought me things, I asked him if he could send me books, novels. Five days later a box with five books in it arrived and a note from Vanessa’s mother saying, “How good that you are reading, Manuelita, my daughter is fine and sends you greetings.” And that became the new routine. Every two weeks a box arrived with more books, so I must have read something like half the catalog of the Book of the Month Club, which is what they had, probably decorating the study that nobody used.
Time went on, like a ball rolling down a slope, and then suddenly came to a stop, slowed down by something, and when I looked at the calendar there was already only a month left before I would leave the reform school. I was going to come of age. Plus, I’d be graduating at a distance, because while we were locked up we still followed the state educational program. It was time to be born again, and Vanessa’s family did their duty.
The lawyer came to pick me up. He carried my small overnight bag along the corridor to the exit and when we got into the car he asked, where shall I take you? I didn’t know what to say and he asked again, what’s your mother’s address? I told him I didn’t have a mother. He looked at me and nodded, laughing, and took me to a restaurant to have lunch. From there he called Vanessa’s mother and they talked for a while. Finally we went to a furnished apartment. I would live there until I decided what I wanted to do. That sounded fine to me, I had nothing to lose because I had absolutely nothing. If they had decided to leave me on the streets I wouldn’t have been able to do anything either, it all depended on them, but also on me.
The apartment had two bedrooms and a living room, it was nice. The window looked out on a school and on the roofs of the houses of the Vipasa neighborhood. I didn’t know Cali well and wasn’t sure where I was, but that didn’t bother me. For the first time I was going to sleep alone and that was a bit scary, but I also felt happy. At last, nobody could see me.
The lawyer came back the next day and we had breakfast together in a corner shop: coffee with milk, cheese bread, orange juice, and scrambled eggs with onion and tomato. He was a pleasant guy. His name was Antonio Castillejo and he must have been about forty. He gave off a sense of self-confidence, but the effort he made to appear more elegant than he was was obvious. With his neatly knotted tie and his already old but very well ironed shirt. If they had offered him some superpower he would have chosen to be invisible rather than to fly or read minds. That’s how I saw him. After breakfast we went to a branch of Bancolombia and he helped me to open a savings account. Then he transferred into it all the money the Cáceres family had promised me two years earlier, plus the eleven percent interest. I said yes to everything. Then we went to buy a cell phone and set up an account. Which they paid for. He kept saying, is that okay? do you like it? I said yes to everything, without thinking. Because if you don’t agree with anything, you’ll tell me, won’t you? And I said, yes, counselor, yes, everything’s fine. I felt too lazy to talk, I had to wait a little. I needed time.
After two weeks—I hardly left the apartment—Vanessa’s mother came to see me. She asked if I was comfortable, if there was anything I needed. I told her everything was fine, I didn’t need anything. Then she remembered her promise to pay for my university studies, and asked if I had any ideas. It was only when we got to that point that something came into my head and I said, what’s Vanessa studying? The woman fell silent, her face twisted and her eyes watered. She said they had taken Vanessa to a specialist clinic, but that before finishing the treatment she’d run away with two of the girls. They’d spent three months looking for her and finally found her in Bogotá, in a horrible crack house. She was half unconscious. After that, they’d put her in various clinics and other places, some of them run by former addicts, but the same thing always happened: the running away, the anguish, the months lost on the streets, and then starting all over again.
“So she wasn’t able to graduate,” she said. “Right now she’s in a medical center in Cuba that they say is the best. The one Maradona went to. And we keep praying for her, what a burden that girl has been!”
It was only then that I saw the tears behind the dark glasses she never took off, like an old movie star. I felt sorry for her. That woman and I weren’t so different. I had lost a mother and she had lost a daughter, and we were alone. The husband—I later found out—preferred to look elsewhere, toward an area of life and the world that was distant from that sad face and those glasses that hid even sadder eyes. And what did Señor Cáceres find? Young, lively students, on one hand, or languid thirtysomething divorcées on the other, who probably admired him or pretended to admire him. He was a successful lawyer with his own practice, taught history of law at the Javeriana, was a member of at least three clubs, and looked good for a man of fifty. He had friends in every circle and knew his way around a list of Chilean or French wines. He was a supporter of both América de Cali and Real Madrid, with a solid balance on his credit card and plenty of journeys and appointments lined up that took him away from his home, where his wife was, and that uncomfortable shadow over his life: the memory of his daughter.
That’s what men always do, Doctor, sorry to say this: they take life easy. He never completely left her, but by leaving the problem of Vanessa to her it was as if he was saying to her: it’s your fault for bringing her up badly, mothers bring up their daughters badly and when they in turn become mothers they also bring up their daughters badly, it’s a story that never ends. That’s what all those whims, those nail stylists at home, those tons of Barbie dolls and those princess costumes led to, there’s your little princess, the twentieth-century Cinderella who needs sedatives to exist for an hour without doing a bag of crack.
Suddenly she gave me a hug and said:
“I’ll never forget what you did for her, Manuelita. You’re a good girl and we’re going to help you. I owe you a debt.”
I felt like telling her that I had done it for me, to wash away a little of my past life. But I said nothing.
“Why don’t you choose a good major and enroll in a university in Bogotá? Wouldn’t you like to study there?”
I told her I liked to read.
“I know that, sweetheart, I emptied the library for you. Why don’t we go and see if it can be studied? I guess it can.”
I searched on the Internet and found a literature course at the Javeriana in Bogotá. I told the woman, whose name by the way was Gloria Isabel and she was forty-eight. In her sad biography, as she put it, she had three times been Queen of the Cali Fair and had taken part in the Miss Cauca contest for the municipality of Candelaria, where her parents had a ranch.
The next day, Gloria Isabel came to me early and we went to the airport to go to Bogotá. It was my first time on a plane and it made me so happy that I almost screamed. We spent the day filling out registration forms at the university, and getting an idea of the surroundings. Do you like it? she asked me, and I said, yes, everything’s very nice, I couldn’t believe this was really happening.
I had to return to take the exam and with my grades, which incredibly enough were high, they gave me a place in the Javeriana. Gloria Isabel let out a cry of joy, and when the date grew near we again went together to Bogotá. We looked for a room to rent and found a very good one in a house in Chapinero Alto, opposite the Portugal Park, at the bottom of those dark mountains that had impressed me so much the first time. I could feel the cold, but what joy it was to be able at last to start a new life. Then we bought some good sets of clothes to go to class in, exercise books, and a satchel.
“You’re going to look really beautiful, Manuelita,” Gloria Isabel, said, looking at me in one of those outfits in the fitting room on a department store on Thirteenth Street, “the boys will go crazy for you.”
A few days later, with everything ready to begin classes, Gloria Isabel said she was going back to Cali. I thanked her for everything and went with her to the airport where she was going to catch a plane.
“How proud you make me, my girl,” she said.
When we said goodbye, she gave me a hug and I felt her anxious breathing. Then she kissed me on the forehead and walked off toward departures. I didn’t see her eyes, but I knew she was crying. After a while, she stopped and turned. We waved goodbye again and when I lost sight of her I went back out on the street and took the Transmilenio. It had started raining. The drops ran through my hair and down my cheeks, but there was something more. I, too, was crying. It was the first time I’d cried, but I didn’t hide my face. It isn’t the same crying in the rain in a city where nobody knows you. I felt strong. At that precise moment, my cell phone rang and I answered immediately, thinking it was Gloria Isabel calling me from the plane.
It was Castillejo, the lawyer from Cali.
“Manuela?” he said. “I know you’re in Bogotá, but I have some very bad news for you.”
My muscles tensed, like an animal that senses danger or is about to be attacked.
“It’s your mother. She’s been taken to hospital urgently. The best thing you can do is go to the airport and get on a flight.”
“I’m already at the airport,” I said, “what happened?”
Castillejo was silent for a few seconds.
“She had acid thrown in her face.”