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Maybe having a dream and being disillusioned is the same thing, two sides of the same coin, the dream that comes first and the letdown that follows. That’s the way the wheel turns, one and then the other, from dreams to disillusions and disillusions to dreams. It seems silly, but it takes a while to admit that life doesn’t proceed in a straight line, but that you wear yourself out in circles. That’s the kind of thing I have had to learn in prison, because here everything’s more intense, like when you were a child and they gave you a coloring book and instead of just coloring things by pressing the pencil softly, you sometimes felt like re-dyeing the whole thing, which is what we called it, re-dyeing, which meant you wet the tip of the pencil with your tongue so that the color would come out more strikingly, brilliantly, and evenly. Re-dyeing. Here in prison, that’s how things seem, re-dyed. Here in Manninpox, I have come to realize that if my mother was a mouse’s tail, my role in this story has been even more pathetic, going down to the category of mouse droppings.

Every morning at seven, unless it’s raining or we’re in isolation, they take us out to an interior yard they call the OSRU, for open space recreation unit. I’m not sure you ever saw it. You have the sky above, cement floor under your feet, and it is forty-two by fifteen steps. A space a little fucking tight for the one hundred thirty to one hundred fifty prisoners that share it. But it doesn’t matter, because you can see the sky, a glorious rectangle of blue, and there’s fresh air that fills your lungs so you can breathe again. In the winter, the yard is covered in snow and it is like a miracle to walk on that intact blanket, so soft and white, so resplendent and fallen from the sky, and that I first came to know here in America. I have told you, Colombia is tropical and there is no winter there. Every time Bolivia called me when I was staying with the Navas, I asked her, “Tell me, Mami, what’s snow like?” “Like lemon ice cream,” she responded. But among other things, the first thing that caught my attention when I saw that yard were the inmates walking around in a circle. Walking fast and faster in a circle, hugging those walls that kept them locked up. You know how this is here, a ridiculous Dracula’s castle with walls of reinforced concrete, without even a little crack to foster dreams of escape. They’d all be there, one hundred thirty to one hundred fifty women going around in circles, one behind the other, two deep, three deep, counterclockwise, like sleepwalkers trapped in their own dreams. This didn’t look like a jail but an insane asylum. And yet, after a week, I was doing it too, possessed of that urge to go around in circles without even asking myself what I was doing. It’s as if you need to break the bonds of confinement, and what drives you to walk in circles is the need to get out of here. Observe a caged tiger. Or any animal in a zoo, have you seen them? They go around and around, staying close to the bars, circling the space of their entrapment. We will never be able to go over the walls of that yard unless they crumble by the grace of God and the trumpets of Jericho. Searchlights and sirens await the spider woman who manages to climb to the top, and rolls of barbed wire, a swarm of blades, and electrified fences that will cut her to pieces, slice her, electrocute her, and mash her until she’s pulp. That’s why we go around in circles, I think. Maybe we are looking to close in that which encloses us, confine what confines us. They say that she who arrives on an island, sooner or later begins to go around it in circles. It’s called “rock fever.” We suffer from it here in Manninpox, and so every day we do the same thing.

Maybe it’s time to tell you why they put me in here. Although it won’t really be possible to explain it because I don’t really understand it myself. All I can tell you is that my chain of missteps in America began when I fell in love with a cop. Or when I didn’t fall in love with him enough, because I’m not going to lie to you, Mr. Rose, I can’t say I fell in love, not that kind of love you’d die for, that didn’t happen. I wonder if you are madly in love with that girl who teaches the deaf. I imagine you are from the way you talked about her. But with Americans you never know. You have this habit of saying things as if you were on camera, so it doesn’t matter what you say, as long as you say it with a smile and “have a nice day.” How I hate that “have a nice day.” They may not even know you or give a shit about your life, or you can drop dead in front of them, and they’ll still blurt out “have a nice day” with that fake smile.

Let’s put it like this, so when you write about it in your novel things are clear: my ruin was marrying Greg, the American ex-cop too many years older than me. He worked for the same company as me as a daytime security guard. Or maybe my mistake was loving him, because I shouldn’t have loved Greg, but I did. In his glory days he must have been a son of a bitch, one of those assholes that stomps on blacks and Latinos with their boots. Or maybe not, I was never quite sure. Anyhow, he had mellowed out by the time fate set him on my path, grown old and crusty, with a half-smile that was his white flag, making it clear he had surrendered long before. And besides, he was a widower, that type of widower with the air of an orphan begging for a good woman to take care of him.

He had the stuff of a bull, but came around the corner seeming like a tired steer. A nice fellow, believe me, with a beer belly and shiny black shoes. But what really attracted me to him, I’ll tell you, although it sounds bad, was that he was tall, white, blond, and English speaking. Well, blond at some point, but by the time I met him he was bald. I was attracted to the fact that he wore his blue-and-white Colorado Rockies T-shirt when he sat down to eat, that he put half a bottle of ketchup on everything, and that he thought if you were Colombian, you surely must know a friend of his who lived in Buenos Aires. Someone like that was a dream come true, just what I had been looking for since the time I ate Milky Ways dreaming about America. I’d had various US Latino boyfriends, one Honduran and another Peruvian. But this would be the first time in all those years that a gringo-gringo expressed serious interest in me, as Bolivia would say, or interests other than sucky-fucky ones. Think about it, Mr. Rose, what it meant for a poor Latina to finally be part of life, not on the side of the violent minorities and the superpredators, but on the side of law and order and the special victims unit.

One Tuesday, I was on my way to the office with thirty-eight completed surveys when I needed forty. I was short two and that was a big drama, because they only paid us for completed jobs, a check for the paperwork for the entire job. Before going in, I was able to get in touch with a contact by phone, something that was prohibited because interviews had to be done in person and at the place of residence. But this time it was a real emergency; in general, I was very diligent about my work, none of these routine proceedings like the rest of the girls. Not me, I got into it in depth, pursuing the task with an investigative reporter’s brio, and asking more questions than I had to, for gossip’s sake, I think, because I got excited about the stories people told. I confess that sin, I like to stick my nose in other people’s business, find out what’s happening in the dormitories and kitchens, and well, now by necessity, inside the cells. Ever since I was a girl, I’ve always liked to butt into private conversations. I try to understand people’s dreams and miseries, and I am fascinated by real-life love stories and follow them as if they were telenovelas. The thing was that on that day I was able to get a survey done, but I still needed one more after that to get to forty. I went into a café to have breakfast, diagonally across from our office, very worried because for the first time I was going to turn in incomplete work. I ordered coffee and toast, and who do I see there but Greg, the security guard. The old man was standing there holding his coffee, feeding pieces of a ham-and-cheese sandwich to his dog Hero, a crippled little pet that was like a mascot for everyone in the company. Greg is my man, I told myself; he had been heaven sent. So I went up to him very demurely, questionnaire in hand. We had never talked before, that is, except for the “have a nice day” or to exchange a few words about how Hero was doing.

“I’ll buy another sandwich for Hero if you answer a few questions for me,” I proposed.

“About what?”

“About your cleaning habits, what do you think?”

“I don’t have many,” he said, but he responded to one question after the other honestly and sincerely. That’s how I first got to know him. He told me that before he joined the police force, he didn’t shower every day.

“How often? Weekly?”

“Let’s say a couple of times a week. But after joining the police I had to take a freezing shower every day.”

“Do you ever shower with hot water, or warm water?”

“That’s for sissies, for faggots,” he told me, and then admitted he didn’t know how to swim, that he had been terrified of water as a child because he grew up in Colorado, where his father worked at a barley farm owned by Coors.

“How is that pertinent?”

“Because there wasn’t a lot of water there, and whatever water there was they used to irrigate the barley fields.”

Moreover, his mother thought that water was dangerous because water opened the pores, and the open pores made the body vulnerable to infections and illnesses. She had only taken two full baths in her whole life and was proud of that, because for her cleanliness wasn’t about taking baths; on the contrary, she thought that if one wasn’t dirty, there was no reason to bathe, and that those who bathed a lot must be hiding some unspeakable sickness, because there was no other reason to explain such behavior.

“So according to your mother,” I told him, “the cleanest ones are the ones who wash the least.”

“Something like that.”

“You said your mother took two full-body baths. Do you remember the occasions?”

“The first on the day of her baptism when she was eleven years old. In her hometown, kids were baptized by plunging them into the Dunaj.”

“What’s the Dunaj?”

“The Dunaj, the Dunaj! Don’t you know it? The Dunaj is the biggest river on the planet.”

“The biggest river is the Amazon,” I said, sticking up for my own. “The Amazon that runs through where I come from. But no one thinks of plunging a girl into it to baptize her, because the piranhas would feast on her. But let’s leave it at that. Everyone has a right to think that their river is the biggest. But tell me about the second bath your blessed mother took.”

“I don’t know. I don’t think she ever told me, but there were only two, I’m sure of that, I heard her mention it a few times. She bathed my brothers and me body part by body part, feet and hands, face, ears, and neck, but she’d never put us in the bathtub, that was for lepers and the ill, according to her.”

“It’s okay, Greg,” I said, because I noticed distress in his voice, as if the memories weren’t pleasing.

It wasn’t long before I’d find out that the problem wasn’t just the mother. Greg as an adult also resisted bathing. My coworkers bragged how their husbands washed their things before doing it and then showered afterward. But that wasn’t going to be the case with me, neither before nor afterward. At that moment, of course, I couldn’t have fully known, so I just responded with the kind of consolation that entails offering someone who tells you a sad story about his life with an even sadder story about your own.

“We all have our issues,” I said, tapping him on the shoulder. “Take my Aunt Alba, Alba Nava, Leonor de Nava’s sister-in-law, aunt to my almost sisters, a rich woman with no kids who lived in an enormous house.”

“Who lived in an enormous house?”

“Alba Nava, the sister-in-law of . . . look, it doesn’t matter, a rich woman in my town. I’m from Colombia. Anyway, this Alba Nava kept her huge house very neat, with a tiled pool in between the living room and the dining room, a pool for fish, but there were no fish in it, not even water. It was empty the whole week except for Wednesdays, the day on which my half-sisters and I went with Leonor to visit Alba. Then the pool was filled, but with us three.”

“Wait, what three?” asked Greg, whose mind was always somewhere else.

“Well, us three, me and Cami and Pati Nava. Us three, the three girls, they’d put us in the pool on Wednesdays.”

“In the water, with the fish?”

“I told you, there was no water or fish. What I’m trying to tell you is that Aunt Alba made us get in there, in that empty pool, for the whole visit. So that we wouldn’t get her house dirty,
capisce
? When it was time to serve tea, she’d bring us hot chocolate and crackers with butter and marmalade that we had to eat there, inside the pool, being very careful that not a single crumb fell outside.”

“That’s pretty pathetic,” Greg said.

“What I’m trying to say is that it’s as awful to be too clean as it is to be dirty.”

My strategy for solace must have worked, because two weeks later, the man was proposing to me. I said yes, without even thinking about it twice, and said to myself, María Paz—only it wasn’t María Paz but my real name—you did it, and I congratulated myself with little taps on the back of my shoulder and told myself to have a nice day, pretty little María Paz, you hit the jackpot finally, you’re going to marry a gringo and become a real American, so from now on have a very nice day every fucking day of your life. The thing is that my mother had come to America but she had never become a real American. Violeta and I grew up in this country, but for us also it was as if we remained at the threshold without being able to step into that enormous and bright hall. We had arrived but we hadn’t gotten here yet. Because getting to America is not landing in Phoenix, Arizona, or Dallas, Texas, or finishing high school with honors, not even speaking English without an accent. America is hidden inside America, and to truly penetrate it, a visa is not enough and neither is a Visa card, nor a green card, nor a MasterCard. All that helps, but they don’t definitively make you a real American.

For me, Greg signified access through the big door. Finally, I’d be a hundred percent American. You know what that means as far as papers? Bolivia had been able to get a green card for herself, but they had denied them for us, her daughters. In time, she had been able to normalize Violeta’s situation with the help of the mental health institute that confirmed that the girl was autistic and could not be deported because she could not take care of herself. But I remained outside. Bolivia wanted to get me in by claiming me as a mental case also, but I refused. So I behaved normally during all the psychological exams and wasn’t diagnosed with anything. Bolivia had gotten her green card when she applied for it through proper channels, but times had changed by the time I applied, and I was denied. That’s why I had to use false papers when I began to work for the survey department of the cleaning products company. It’s easy to get papers. Maybe you’re not aware of this, but the business for false documentation is a multimillion-dollar industry in this country. The problem is if they catch you, you go straight to prison. But I was saved. My marriage to Greg would allow me to obtain the proper paperwork and give me the rights to residency and work. I was going to marry a gringo; what more could I ask for. I was going to marry all these legal rights and a white American.