GIRLS AND WOMEN IN OTHER CELLS RELIED UPON MARY CYR TO hand them things—to ask for things, to get them beer, and Mary would dole out—chocolate bars, toothpaste, Tampax—and once or twice a week she sent out for McDonald’s for the whole block, even the guards if they wanted. And Principia would collect the money, and write the orders down, saying:
“A Big a Mac—two a Macs—fren fries—” and run to do this for her new friend Mary Cyr.
The cells were above the dirt floor that ran between them. Cinder blocks were placed along the fringe of this floor every few feet. There were two or three chairs, some plants that grew. Now and then a lizard crawled into the cell window and sunned itself between the bars. Mary quite liked them.
Once in a while the other prisoners would take a walk along that dirt corridor, and all of them would end up standing at her cell, talking to her, smoking cigarettes and asking questions.
“Did you do it?”
“No—I have done nada.”
“Do you like to have—sex?”
“Not as much as people believe, and not with children.”
“Sabemos quién lo hizo,” one young woman said one day. That is, she said she knew who had done it. She said everyone knew.
She was in jail for three months for shoplifting. It was on the tip of her tongue to tell Mary that certain people said it was the wife of Carlos DeRolfo—a woman no one liked at all.
“Who?” Mary asked. She felt sick, became dizzy, began to shake.
But the woman knew better. She shrugged and moved her lips, in an aloof pout, and looked away. She watched other women, to see if they would say anything, and then moved to the back of the crowd. She was only eighteen years old and was just learning to keep her mouth shut.
She didn’t look at Mary Cyr for the rest of the day, didn’t eat her Big Mac with them but took it back to her cell.
“Ah,” Mary said. “Dinero es dinero—and truth is truth.”
“Es peligroso hablar,” one of the other women told her. “Señorita, por favor.”
It is dangerous to talk. Please, miss—
Mary knew nothing would be said about this, to anyone at all.
So she said nothing either.
She once wrote in her diary about Le Select—yes, she was with some French colleagues. Very nice people—they decided that they would finally call each other the intimate tu instead of the formal vous—yes, how symbolic, how kind. Until they got in an argument over who should pay for the extra bottle of wine. Soon they were back to the more formal vous, and Mary Cyr paid for the wine.
“Le Select is exactly as it should be—full of rather select arses—” she wrote. Now that she thought of it, she liked many of the women here better.