Hot Sur by Laura Restrepo Page B

that’s going on in the Middle East. Not California—too long, and it doesn’t go with María. What if you call me Paz? Or Paz María? Or better yet, María Paz. I like María Paz. La Paz, capital of Bolivia, daughter of my mother. In the novel you write I can be María Paz, named after a city in the clouds, sixteen thousand feet high. I like it because no one talks about La Paz and no one goes there.
    You and I will not see each other again, Mr. Rose, so you won’t be able to record my testimony as you said you would once. It’s better this way, I don’t like tape recorders; the cassettes always remain and end up who knows where. Anyhow, I’m asking you to care well for these pages I’m sending you so they don’t end up in the wrong hands. It’s ironic that I’m writing you these things on rose-colored paper, but I couldn’t get white. I wanted a more formal kind of paper, not one for children, but this is what they gave me and I shouldn’t complain because at least they gave me something. Anyway, it would be best if you burn all this after you rewrite it, I mean, change it as you see fit, you’re the pro here. Burn the papers so there are no traces of my handwriting, which is like my signature. The truth is that I’ve been dreaming of telling you my story for a while, Mr. Rose, the whole thing, because you know parts of it already.
    I don’t know if you remember the day they took away our shelves. It was two shelves for each inmate, four inmates per cell. Small shelves twenty inches long and eight inches deep, that’s it; and yet, we were never as demoralized as the day they took them from us. They called it PRSS: the Policy for the Renovation and Strengthening of Security. They pulled out that highfalutin name any time they wanted to fuck with us. Can you imagine? Just to take away our shelves, where we placed whatever little belongings we had: family pictures, hand lotions, a change of clothes, a bundle of letters, a little radio, a pack of chips or crackers, the small things any inmate was allowed to have. They took off the shelves and left the walls bare, as if to remind us that this is not a fucking home for anyone, not even a shadow of a home, nothing but a hole where we were locked up. While they were doing this, they had forced us to stay away from our cells all day long. When they allowed us to return, we realized all the shelves were gone. All our things were thrown on the bunk beds. They had torn apart the walls, confiscated most of our stuff, and whatever was left was just scattered there covered with dust. Like garbage. They needed us to feel we were garbage, that what belonged to us was garbage because we were no longer human. They were human, we were scum; those were the rules of the game. The day after that, we had the writing workshop with you, Mr. Rose, but our spirits were dragging. No one was paying attention, although you were trying, coaxing us from the blackboard, but we weren’t listening. We were furious and defeated, our minds poisoned and miles away from there. Until you stopped the class and asked what was wrong. And as if you had opened a dam, we let loose, cursing our fate and grumbling about our shelves and all the knockdowns we suffered every day in this deathtrap called Manninpox prison.
    You said you were sorry about what had happened with such feeling that we knew you meant it. Then you said that you could offer us a consolation prize, a very simple one: language. Language! We looked up at you as we did sometimes, as if you were a child who says outrageous things, and you blushed on that scar right in the middle of your forehead, really something peculiar, that pallid scar shaped like a lightning bolt that sometimes comes alive flashing in rabid red, no doubt your oddest feature. And because your skin is so white, you can’t hide it, and blush often, like that time you tried to dig yourself out of the hole by saying that language made up the shelves where we put the