The Hole José Revueltas

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The Hole
Copyright © 1969 by José Revueltas
Translation copyright © 2018 by Amanda Hopkinson & Sophie Hughes
Introduction copyright © 2018 by Álvaro Enrigue

All rights reserved.

Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website
review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

The Hole was originally published as El apando in 1969 by Ediciones Era, Mexico.

First published as New Directions Paperbook 1426 in 2018

Manufactured in the United States of America
Design by Erik Rieselbach

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Revueltas, Josâe, 1914–1976, author. | Enrigue, Alvaro, 1969– writer of
introduction. | Hopkinson, Amanda, 1948– translator. | Hughes, Sophie (Sophie Elizabeth),
1986– translator.
Title: The hole / by Jose Revueltas ; introduction by Alvaro Enrigue ; translated by Amanda
Hopkinson and Sophie Hughes.
Other titles: Apando. English
Description: New York, NY : New Directions Publishing, 2018.
Identifiers: l c c n 2018021047 (print) | l c c n 2018024712 (ebook) | i s b n 9780811227797
(ebook) | i s b n 9780811227780 (alk. paper)
Subjects: l c s h : Prisoners—Fiction. | Drug addiction—Fiction. | Mexico—Fiction.
Classification: l c c PQ7297.R383 (ebook) | l c c p q 7297.R383 A813 2018 (print) | DDC
863/.64—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018021047

New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin

by New Directions Publishing Corporation
80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011
to Pablo Neruda
 C O N T E N TS

Introduction by Álvaro Enrigue

The Hole
 INTRODUCTION

The Hole begins with the description of what an eye sees through a
confined space: the small hatch of a punishment cell that opens onto
the corridors of Lecumberri Prison in Mexico City. The Hole is at once
a piece of fiction and a deposition: José Revueltas wrote it between
February and March of 1969, while in jail for participating in the
1968 student movement.
Revueltas was not a student in the late 1960s. He was then fifty-
four years old and, in fact, had never attended university: in 1932,
when he was seventeen and should have been thinking about
college, he was already serving his second term in prison, as a result
of his militancy in the then illegal Communist Party of Mexico.
By the late sixties Revueltas was a well-known leftist writer and
activist with views that suited the Student Movement’s demands for
a less vertical government, having maintained his vocal socialist
advocacy and strong links to the trade-union movement, while at the
same time vigorously denouncing both the Institutional
Revolutionary Party’s government (which had ruled the country with
absolute authority for more than forty years) and the Mexican
totalitarian Stalinist organizations that opposed it. The students
considered him a natural ally: the weight of his reputation offered
credible ideological shelter for a movement demanding respect for
civil liberties and fresh attention to the perennial problem of
inequality in Mexico.
The place of The Hole’s creation is important. Lecumberri Prison,
where the manuscript is dated, is an outsized symbol in the Mexican
imagination. It was inaugurated in 1900 as a triumphant
demonstration of the “progressive” rationalist ideology that
dominated the government’s discourse at the turn of the twentieth
century. Porfirio Díaz, the liberal dictator who ruled the country with
an iron fist from 1884 to 1911, built the prison to keep all opposition
to his regime locked up and under close scrutiny in more or less
humanitarian conditions; designed by the architect Miguel Macedo, it
adopted Jeremy Bentham’s model of the panopticon — as set out in
his letters from Russia in 1797.
According to Bentham — whose works Revueltas, well versed in
political philosophy, had no doubt read — the panopticon is
simultaneously a jail and a theater. The greater the visibility of its
inmates, the greater the benefit a society obtains from their
punishment, which keeps the prisoners out of circulation while
transforming them into an example and a spectacle. At the center of
Lecumberri Prison was a watchtower from which seven wings
radiated outward, every one constantly visible from its hub.
When the long and bloody Revolution against Porfirio Díaz’s
regime finally succeeded in installing a stable government (if in the
form of a party dictatorship), the prison continued fulfilling its
primary purpose as a space of atonement for political opponents —
now of the nationalist revolutionary government. By 1929,
Lecumberri’s architect, Miguel Macedo, was occupying a cell in his
own building, having been deemed a collaborator of the previous,
ousted régime: getting locked up in Lecumberri implied being a
victim of a political purge, but also, above all, playing a leading role
in the spectacle of public punishment.
As the twentieth century advanced, the prison became more
crowded — and over-crowded — with petty criminals, even though it
also continued to host the opponents of every successive political
régime until it was finally closed in 1976. Its looming shadow over
Mexico is such that even today people still refer to the building as
“the Black Palace” — as if the mere mention of its real name might
bring misfortune — despite the fact that it’s not black at all and,
since 1980, has been the seat of the National Archives.
Such is the general context of The Hole as it opens with an eye
peering at a piece of this panopticon. The author’s intentions are
clear right from the start: Revueltas’s fable is a meditation on the
way contemporary societies make a performance out of punishment.
He portrays prison life as an avant-garde production, where Antonin
Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty and Jean Genet’s Theater of Hatred
intersect.
What the prisoner’s eye sees in the first pages of The Hole is a
glimpse of two floors of cells in the jail’s wing hosting common
criminals. The eye belongs to Polonio, the tale’s main character, who
is busily calculating how long it takes the guards to make their
rounds through the corridors as he waits for a package of drugs to
be delivered from the outside.
Revueltas, it should be said, was a special case: he was never in
the hole, and unlike many of those detained after the 1968 student
uprising, he was never disappeared or tortured, presumably because
he was an intellectual celebrity. On top of that, “Revueltas” was a
name with public resonance, well known to artistic circles in Mexico
and around the world. José’s older brother, Silvestre, an important
composer during the first half of the twentieth century, had a close,
collaborative friendship with Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein;
Fermín, the second brother, a prominent muralist, had his work
displayed in many government buildings. Rosaura Revueltas, José’s
sister, had her Hollywood career as an actress cut short in 1954
when her name appeared on Senator McCarthy’s blacklist during the
filming of The Salt of the Earth. Despite the relatively good
treatment the novelist received in Lecumberri, he’d been placed in
the common criminals’ wing at the start of his sentence, maybe
because the prison governor regarded him as an ideologue and
preferred to keep him separate from the rest of the political
prisoners, mainly the students who revered him.
There’s a photograph of Revueltas, a half smile on his face, right
next to a punishment cell, which offers useful information about the
story’s setting. A Lecumberri “hole” was a long and narrow
passageway, with cement floors and walls, blocked at one end by a
metal door with a hatch in its middle, more or less chest-high. The
holes looked like containers to transport cattle. A barred window, far
up in one wall, was the only source of light. The hatch, just large
enough for a soup plate and a cup to be passed through, had a little
door that opened outward and could be propped halfway up to serve
as a tray for handing in the prisoners’ dishes. Anyone inside the hole
wanting to look out needed to stick whatever would fit of his head
through the open hatch: this is Polonio’s position when the story
begins, and what he is seeing are the “monos.”
In 1960s Mexican prison slang, a guard was a “mono” — a word
that, depending on the context, might mean an ape, a nobody, or a
character in a comic strip. Polonio sees the monos (“the apes” in
Amanda Hopkinson and Sophie Hughes’s brave and polished English
translation) making their rounds and Revueltas fully employs the
term’s multiple associations to shift the story’s initial image to the
world’s origins, in both the scientific and sacred senses. The guards
might be apes trapped “on the zoological scale,” but are also the
founding couple of a subverted Eden of nobodies: “he-apes and she-
apes in Paradise.” As they move, framed by the box of the hatch,
they appear to the reader as Expressionist comic illustrations — like
Adam and Eve, but primitive and cartoonish.
This opening sequence reveals the author’s approach to the art
of telling: a concept is distilled from a scene and then sublimated to
produce a literary judgment on the limited condition of the
characters: in the beginning there was abjection and the Word was
full of scorn. A meditation on the despair of the human condition can
be extracted from this scenario. And it is reiterated throughout the
whole first half of the story in which nothing occurs beyond awaiting
delivery of a package of drugs.
Polonio is not alone in the hole: Albino and The Prick are there,
and also, like him, come from the most wretched depths of Mexican
society. All three are awaiting the arrival of visitors: The Prick’s
mother, and the girlfriends of Polonio and Albino — the barely
adolescent Meche and la Chata. The three women have to get from
the prison entrance to the hole, and, once there, the girls will create
a commotion to distract the guards, allowing the old woman to hand
over the heroin.
The novel’s plot — unfolding in real time, exactly as long as it
takes to read — opens at the precise moment the female visitors
enter the prison complex. They have to cross several barriers,
submit to extensive searches by the female guards, and then wait
with the rest of the visitors to enter the common prisoners wing. The
final holding area is a quad, barred on all sides, which will play a
vital role in the resolution of the novel. For the three prisoners in the
hole — all of them going through withdrawal — the women appear
to be moving along their route at the speed of tectonic plates.
José Revueltas’s gaze functioned like a CAT scan — what
everyone usually sees is here only outlined: what his writing shows
is everything beating within the organism itself. Maybe all literary
writing operates the same way — I recount A in order to say B —
but Revueltas habitually inverted the realist equation popularized in
the novels of the nineteenth century, primarily the French and
Russian ones, or those drawn from the Mexican Revolution, which
had formed his horizon as a reader. He wrote of what he saw,
devoting attention to verisimilitude, but what he cared about was
not the perceptible, but what lies behind that. He used conventional
narrative strategies, but also a voice that is constantly thinking about
what’s being told.
In addition, as a keen and confirmed Marxist — despite his
reservations regarding the way that the Communist parties of his
time applied the notion of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat — he
perceived economic and political forces driving history where the
rest of us see individuals in action. For this reason, his writing has an
illuminated quality, a biblical flavor, in spite of the fact that he was a
raging atheist. His style was always drawn toward the future, toward
what would happen once history itself was ending. Revueltas acted
and wrote like a prophet — but a prophet from a Political Science
department, sporting a beard like Trotsky’s.
At the very middle of the novel, the three female characters
finally enter Polonio’s field of vision, shifting the narrative from the
hole and the characters’ interior lives to the chaotic world of the
prison. Time, moving with grinding slowness up to this point, turns
back on itself, transforming into a whirlwind.
In a January 11, 1970, letter to Arthur Miller, Revueltas, a fellow
senior member of PEN international, described a terrifying assault in
Lecumberri: on New Year’s Eve 1969, the common prisoners broke
the police cordon and attacked the wing of activists and students.
The assault, so savage and unexpected, was perceived by the
political prisoners as a moment of concentrated reality: “Things,” he
wrote to Miller, “occurred with precipitate, fantastical, and dreamlike
speed.” I cannot find a more concise way to describe the tumult
provoked by the women once they reach the hole, things
precipitating with brutal speed. What had always been the same is
broken and, after that rupture, reality itself undergoes a process of
intensification, dropping the astonished characters into a nightmare.
As I write this introduction, I experience a pang of envy when I
consider that the English reader is about to encounter, for the first
time, the final twenty pages of The Hole, one of the greatest pieces
of twentieth-century writing composed in Spanish. The symbolic
content that Revueltas poured into the first part erupts on all sides.
Everything is atrociously real, saturated with meaning, even as the
spiraling vortex of images exposes the blinding banality of violence
when it becomes an end in itself. The novel does not invite empathy,
any more than it allows for pity or even solidarity, since by distancing
itself morally from the characters, Revueltas’s criticism turns in on
itself: it’s true that both the guards and the prisoners “in the hole”
are “homicidal to the roots of their hair,” but it’s the class that owns
the means of production — to which the author who is giving
testimony belongs — that has alienated them to the point of
becoming beasts.
The Hole is the collision of a thriller and a meditation on political
philosophy, existing between two opposing linguistic registers — that
of the prisoners and that of the narrator — which expose the
ruptures in society as a whole. It reads with the high-speed intensity
of a crime novel: Revueltas, though deeply ideological, understood
the limits of Marxism as a creative form of expression. He had such
a mocking and black sense of humor that — though it made for
political difficulties (surely he set the world record for expulsions
from Communist organizations) — his writing remained always free
of the servility that destroyed the literary ambitions of two or three
generations of radical Latin American novelists.
Maintaining his sense of humor and literary imagination even in
the direst circumstances, Revueltas, while still detained in
Lecumberri’s wing reserved for murderers — he was only transferred
to another wing with the rest of the political prisoners a year later,
following a hunger strike — sent a letter on December 7, 1968, to
his protégé Martín Dozal, imprisoned with the students. It was to be
read aloud to his fellow inmates, announcing that he was soon due
to receive a typewriter, something that would facilitate
communication with his comrades in the struggle. “From then on,”
he noted, mocking the Marxist jargon of the students’ committees,
“there will be a marked improvement in my calligraphical
superstructure.”
This sense of humor, as corrosive as it was intolerable to the
hard-line Communists of his time, brought with it an infinite number
of problems — which is probably the reason why, outside Mexico, he
still remains mostly unknown: he was simply too much for the
loftiest figures of the international left.
When Revueltas published his first novel, Walls of Water, Pablo
Neruda denounced it for its pessimism: such existentialist themes
were disrespectful of Stalinist orthodoxy. Neruda failed to understand
the literary potential of young José Revueltas, who in turn held the
Chilean poet — the loftiest of all lofty Communists — in such high
esteem that he took Walls of Water off the market. Nevertheless,
Neruda was correct in pointing out the link between Revueltas and
post-war French literature. His tragic characters belong to the race of
Albert Camus’s existential heroes: “indifferent to the future.”
The ending of The Hole, stripped of all theatricality despite being
intensely tragic and brutally comic in its existential way, can only be
fully understood by recognizing that Polonio’s “Why bother” echoes
Meursault’s indifference in the face of his own death at the end of
L’Étranger. Those in the hole are visionaries with both feet planted
beyond the limits, creatures beside themselves, like Jean Genet’s
martyrs of Modernity.
The Hole might be only a well-written prison story were it not for
Revueltas’s sophisticated play with the point of view of the narrator,
who is never seen but judges the events which are all told in his
cynical, intensely literary voice. The panopticon alienates the lower
class to the extent of erasing its humanity — in this tale there’s no
difference between the prisoners and their guards — but the most
abject among these brutalized characters are busy testing the limits:
there’s something enterprising and adventurous in their barbarism.
On the other hand, the narrator — an outsider to this violence who
gives the novel’s testimony thanks to the fact that his social class
owns the grammar and the vocabulary, the syntax and the reference
book of Western culture — has become even less human than his
characters. He merely reports on the horror out of curiosity.
His account demonstrates that barbarism exists, but also explains
why: the writer owns the fruits of his labor and the very act of
conveying a battle of the lesser members of the society through
language shows that some get the suffering while others benefit
from it. Revueltas’s narrator regards the gladiators as savages who
lack all moral scruples simply because he can: the master of the
grammatical rules that shape society’s norms (integral to authority),
he is there to narrate the theater of the panopticon as the public
applauds from the outside.
A Christological reading of the novel’s Expressionist ending —
“lines and more lines, bars and more bars . . . the monstrous
blueprint of this gargantuan defeat of liberty, all the fault of
geometry” — is inevitable: Revueltas himself uses crucified to
describe how the prisoners are ultimately subjugated. An April 5,
1969, journal entry from the author (twenty days after he finished
writing the book) suggests, however, a different reading of these
mysterious final pages: “An invisible web of fiction surrounds us and
we struggle as prisoners inside it like those who struggle to free
themselves from a spider’s web from which there is no escape.” This
fiction that secures us as in a spider web is the whole political
system — and its masters, us, the owners of speech, should be held
responsible for the inequality it produces even when our acts are
generally well intended and harmless. There is no way out, but there
is a thread to follow: imagining a justice system that could do
without the spectacle of punishment.
The publication of The Hole in the United States at this precise
moment in time could not be more pertinent: it’s a perfect fable
about our complicity — all writers and readers — in the triumph of
mass incarceration as the only solution to problems that could be
resolved in more rational ways.
Everybody knows that jail doesn’t help reintegrate those who
have renounced the pursuit of society’s norms; it only serves as a
spectacle that feeds our leisure hours with the newspaper and
television — the panopticon that we contemplate as evidence of our
moral superiority. In a country and an era of unparalleled
imprisonment we are all, along with the novel’s narrator, an amused
audience, a bunch of cold witnesses. We are accomplices and we are
all directly compromised.

— á lv a r o enrigue
t r a n s l at e d b y a m a n d a h o p k i n s o n
 THE HOLE

They were captive there, the apes, just like the rest, male and
female; or rather, male and male, the pair of them in their cage, not
quite despairing, not yet totally desperate, pacing from one side to
the other, detained but in motion, trapped on the zoological scale as
if someone, the others, all humanity, had irreverently washed their
hands of the matter, this matter of them being apes, which they to
wanted to forget, apes when all’s said and done, who didn’t or
refused to get it, captive whichever way you looked at them, penned
in that two-story-high barred cage, in their blue uniforms with
shining badges on their heads, in their unregimented to- and fro-ing,
easy and yet fixed, never managing to take the one step that would
allow them to emerge from their interspecies, where they moved,
walked, copulated, cruel and lacking all recollection, he-apes and
she-apes in Paradise, identical, same hair, same sex, but male and
female, imprisoned, fucked. His head carefully and expertly cocked
to press his left ear against the horizontal metal sheet that closed
the narrow hatch, Polonio squinted down on them from above, his
right eye looking along the sharp line of his nose, watching how they
paced from one side to the other, the bunch of keys hanging from
their blue cloth jackets, jangling against their thighs to the swing of
each step. First one then the other, the two apes were sized up,
monitored from the second floor by that head with just one eye to
observe them, the head on Salome’s platter, poking out of the hatch,
the talking fairground head, detached from the torso — like at the
fair, the head that tells the future and recites rhymes, John the
Baptist’s head, only in this case tilted sideways, resting on its ear —
preventing the left eye from seeing anything below, just the surface
of the metal sheet that sealed the hatch, while the apes, in the cage,
crossed paths as they paced from one end to the other, and that
talking head — delivering insults in a long, slow, plangent, cynical
drawl, dragging out the vowels on a wave of something like a
melody of jarring alternate accents — told them to go fuck their
mothers each time either one of them moved into his good eye’s
field of vision. “Those fucking ape sons of bitches.” They were
captive. More captive than Polonio, more captive than Albino, more
captive than the Prick. For a few seconds it was empty, that
rectangular cage, the apes disappearing momentarily as they paced
back and forth in opposite directions to the far walls of the cage —
thirty meters or so, sixty there and back — and that virgin, formless
space transformed into inalienable sovereign territory under Polonio’s
stubborn right eye, which took in, millimeter by millimeter, each and
every detail of that section of the wing. Apes, arch-apes, stupid, vile,
and naïve, naïve as a ten-year-old whore. So stupid they didn’t seem
to notice that they alone were the captives, they and their mothers
and their children and their forefathers. They were born to keep
watch and they knew as much, to spy, to constantly look around,
making sure no one escaped their clutches in that city with its iron
grid of streets, barred corridors, corners multiplying on all sides, and
that stupid face they wore was nothing but the manifestation of a
certain, hazy longing for other unattainable aptitudes, a certain
stutter of the soul in their simian features, underlaid with grief for an
irremediable loss of which they remained ignorant, eyes all over
them, a mesh of eyes covering their bodies, a river of pupils rushing
over their limbs, napes, necks, arms, chests, balls, all to put food on
the table at home, or so they told themselves, where their ape
families danced and screeched — the little boys and girls and the
wife, hairy on the inside — during their twenty-four long hours with
the master ape at home, after his twenty-four hour shift in the
penitentiary, stretched out on the bed, foul and clammy, the grease-
smeared banknotes from petty bribes laying on the bedside table,
but never leaving the prison, vile and captive in an endless
circulation, ape-notes, which the wife repeatedly smoothed and
pressed in the palm of her hand, slowly, terribly, not knowing what
she was doing. Life was one long not knowing anything at all: not
knowing that there they were in their cage, husband and wife,
husband and husband, wife and children, father and father, sons and
fathers, terrified, universal apes. The Prick begged to watch them
from the hatch, too. Polonio could think of nothing but how vile it
was to have the Prick there, just as caged, just as holed. “You know
you can’t, man . . . !” He spoke in the same long, rolling cadences he
used to abuse the guards in their box, one voice and yet indifferent,
used by all like a personal trademark, and which, whether blindly or
merely in the dark, didn’t much help to tell them apart, except for
the fact that it was the kind of voice that oozed smug complacency
and a sense of superiority and hierarchy upheld by a certain class
oblivious of what thugs they really were. Of course he couldn’t. Not
because of the skill it required to place your head through the hatch
and position it there, at an angle, ears catching as it slid across the
metal sheet to rest on Salome’s platter, but because the Prick was
missing his right eye, and with the left one alone he wouldn’t see a
thing apart from the metal surface, close up, coarse, abrasive — and
well, that’s why they called him the Prick, for being such a useless
prick, blind in one eye, dragging himself around with the shakes and
a lame leg, no dignity at all, known throughout the Penitentiary for
his habit of carving up his veins each time he was banged up in the
hole, his forearms covered in laddered scars like a guitar fretboard,
as if he were beyond desperate — but no, he never killed himself —
forsaken, sunk, always on edge, not giving a damn about the body
that didn’t seem to belong to him, yet a body that he relished,
safeguarded, and inside which he hid, appropriating it fiercely with
urgent, restless fervor whenever he was able to possess it, climbing
inside, all the way down, to lie in its abyss, flooded by a warm,
unguent pleasure, climbing inside his own corporeal cage, the drug
like a faceless white angel leading him by the hand through rivers of
blood, as if he were coursing through an infinite palace with no
rooms and no echoes. The goddamn disgrace of a mother who bore
him. “I’m telling you, you can’t, man. Get off my fucking back!”
Despite everything, the Prick’s mother was due to visit, she existed,
however inconceivable her existence. During visiting hours — in a
narrow, irregularly shaped room, filled with benches and hordes of
people, inmates and relatives, where it was easy to pick out the
lawyers and (easier still) the con men, recognizable by their poise
and the excessively cunning airs they assumed as they studied a
particular document, affecting a dumb ponderousness as their words
slipped into their clients’ ears, and as they shot rapid and
deliberately suspicious glances at the door (one of numerous ruses
to bolster their clients’ trust and, simultaneously, their sense of
bemusement) — during these interviews, the Prick’s mother —
amazingly just as ugly as her son, a knife scar running from her
eyebrow to the tip of her chin — kept her head down, not looking at
him or anything else, only at the floor, her bearing laden with
resentment, reproach, and regret, God only knows under what
sordid and abject conditions she’d coupled, or with whom, in order
to engender him, and perhaps the memory of that distant, grim
deed still tormented her each time. Every now and then she’d let out
a heavy, rasping sigh. “It’s no-oneses fault, no-oneses but mine for
having had you.” The word no-ones had become etched in Polonio’s
memory, strange and curious, as if it were the sum of an infinite
number of meanings. No-ones, that sad plural. It was no-oneses
fault, just fate’s, life’s, damned misfortune’s, no-oneses. For having
had you. The rage at having the Prick banged up beside them now
in the same cell, right beside Polonio and Albino, and the acute,
urgent, craven desire for him to die once and for all, to cease
roaming the earth in that debased body of his. His mother desired it
too, just as deeply, just as keenly, you could tell. Die die die. He
inspired livid, revulsion-fueled compassion. Nothing ever came of his
vein cutting, nothing but ranting and raving, despite their hoping,
genuinely and devoutly, every time, that he’d finish the job. He
would cower by the cell door — any given day, any day he spent
banged up in the hole — deliberately against the doorframe, so that
the runnel of blood welling up from his vein would flow out as soon
as possible into the narrow hallway, on the wing’s upper floor, and
from there drip down onto the yard, forming a puddle on the
concrete; having worked out how long it would take for all this to
happen, the Prick could be sure they would get wise to his suicide
and he’d howl like a dog, his breath squeezed through a broken
bellow, never dying, just enough to cause a scene so they’d take him
from the hole to the infirmary where he’d find a way to wangle more
drugs, setting off the cycle all over again, a hundred, a thousand
times, never reaching the end before he found himself in the next
hole. It was on one such occasion that he and Polonio first met, the
Prick dancing a kind of semi-orthopedic jig halfway up a footpath in
the infirmary garden, tripping over his tongue as he reeled off verses
from the Bible. Around his neck he wore a tie fashioned from a
greasy length of cord, and through the rags of his blue jacket, as his
dance evolved, you caught flashes of his naked chest and torso,
scored with barbaric scars and faded tattoos showing beneath his
skin. His good eye and the flower were stomach turning,
bloodcurdling: the flower was new, freshly picked, a mutilated
gladiola missing some petals, fastened by a piece of rusty wire to
the tatters of his jacket, and there, beneath his drooping, half-shut
eyelid, which had no lashes at all, his good eye was glazed over with
a malicious, calculating, mocking, self-pitying, and tender look. He
bent his good leg, the lame one stood to attention, and with his
hands on his hips and his feet turned out in that squatting pose of
erotic dancers from old illustrated magazines, he attempted a few
short jerks forward, during which he lost his balance and fell to the
floor, where he tried to get up, writhing and kicking furiously,
sending himself spinning on the spot, without it occurring to anyone
to come to his aid. At that point his good eye seemed to die on him,
as still and artificial as a bird’s. It was with this eye that he kept his
mother under observation during visiting hours, not breathing a
word. Beyond a doubt she wished him dead, perhaps because of
that eye in which she herself was dead, but in the meantime she got
him his drug money, twenty, fifty pesos, and she would sit there,
having passed it to him — the notes scrunched into a ball like a
candy, sticky and sweaty in the hollow of her fist — across the bench
in the visitors’ room, her worm-filled belly like a bundle of laundry
slumped over her stumpy legs, which didn’t quite touch the floor,
hermetic and supernatural in the interminable pain of bearing this
son who still clung to her entrails, where he watched her with his
miscreant’s eye, refusing to leave the womb, trapped in the amniotic
sac, in his cell, surrounded by bars, by apes, of which he was one,
propelling himself in circles, always with that one eye of his,
powerless to get up from the floor, like a bird with one wing,
powerless to leave his mother’s belly, banged up inside his mother’s
hole. Since this was more or less the plan, and Polonio was its
mastermind, it fell to him to convince her; in the end — without
much difficulty — she consented. “You’re a woman of a certain age,
mature, respected. The bitches don’t dare try any funny business
with you.” The thing was just there, inside her, something maternal.
Polonio described it as a cotton plug attached to a thread about
twelve inches long, its end dangling loose, a tip to pull the thing out
after the event — all the rage these days among women — and it
was merely a question of Mecha and La Chata talking her through it,
assisting her, so they wouldn’t wind up pregnant only to have to get
rid of the child in some horrible manner, one of the latest methods,
Meche or La Chata would explain everything and help her put it up
there nice and snug. In there everything died, in there spermatozoa
became trapped, condemned to death, wild and raging at the
barrier, banging on the door just like the guards, apes just like the
rest of them — an endless throng of apes banging on locked doors.
Polonio hooted with laughter and the two women, Meche and La
Chata, did the same, thrilled by how ballsy the old girl had been to
accept. But then: of course it hadn’t occurred to anyone that the
mother might want to take the chance to use it for any other
purpose, to put it like that. The makeshift tampon, tied nice and
firmly in a knot, would contain some twenty or thirty grams of drugs,
which the other two girls would hand over to the Prick’s mother.
“The bitches have never tried it on with you, right? Because you’re a
woman in your prime, well respected. Not like us. When they pat us
down they always slip the finger in, filthy bitches.” The memory and
the idea and the image all made Polonio blind with jealousy, with a
strange, absolute jealousy, a kind of incapacity for existing in his
own space, for recognizing himself or feeling the limits of his own
body, vague, bereft, jealousy in his throat and the pit of his stomach,
and a faint and terrible tingling sensation behind his penis, it felt like
a premature ejaculation, as opposed to a real one, a kind of contact
without semen, which fluttered, vibrated in tiny microscopic, tangible
circles, beyond the body, beyond any organism at all, and there
before his eyes La Chata would appear, jocund, bestial, and the lines
of her thighs, which, when she stood upright, instead of coming
together to form the cradle of her sex, left a small gap between the
two walls of solid, firm, young, heart-rending flesh. Seen through
her dress, backlit — and now Polonio was struck by a vivid rush of
nostalgia, from the time when he walked free: of hotel rooms heady
with disinfectant, the clean but not-quite-bleached sheets in the two-
bit hotels, La Chata and he traveling from one side of the country to
the other, or across the border, to San Antonio, Texas, Guatemala,
and that time in Tampico, as the sun went down over the Pánuco
River, La Chata leaning against the balcony, facing the room, her
body naked beneath a flimsy dressing gown and her legs slightly
apart, her mound of Venus like a capital of hair atop the two
columns of her thighs — it was impossible to resist, and Polonio,
overcome by the same sensations as someone possessed by a
religious trance, dropped to his knees to kiss it and sink his lips
between hers. “They slip their finger in.” Those mother-fuck-ing les-
bian bit-ches. The Prick’s mother would carry the little packet of
drugs inside her — despite the unforeseen changes to the original
plan, what with them now being in the hole, the mother’s task, as it
were, remained the same — the little packet to feed her son’s vice,
just like before, in her belly, also inside her, she had fed him with
life, with the horrible vice of living, of hauling oneself along, of
crumbling like the Prick was crumbling, yet still relishing, to an
indescribable degree, each and every morsel of life granted to him.
Right now the Prick was draped around Polonio’s neck begging to be
allowed to look through the hatch; on his nape, below and behind
his ear, Polonio felt the moist kiss of a purulent ulcer upon his skin,
one of the Prick’s unhealed wounds, the lips of an oyster kiss wetting
him with a thin thread of saliva that ran down to his back, all
because he didn’t look after himself, all because of negligence, the
hopeless miserable neglect to which he submitted himself. With his
left hand, Polonio punched him in the stomach — a clumsy blow on
account of his awkward position, his head poking through the hatch
— and then kicked him lower down, far more effectively, sending
him flying across the cell where he landed against the iron wall with
a stunned and muffled cry. “Dickhead,” the Prick grumbled,
unperturbed and showing no hostility. “All I wanted was to see when
my mami gets here.” He spoke like a child, my mami, when he
should have said my mother — my whore of a mother. For that’s
what she was. They’d had to come up with a new set of plans and
the one in charge of executing them was Meche, Albino’s girl. The
women wouldn’t come to visit them, but would instead use the
names of other inmates, since their own men no longer had the
right to visitors, not now they were in the hole. Albino was the most
desperate of them all, maybe because he was the biggest, going so
far as to weep from the lack of drugs, but stopping short of slitting
his wrists, something all the addicts did when the anguish became
too much. He had been a soldier, a sailor, and even a pimp — but
not to Meche, she was no one’s whore, she was an honorable
woman, a slut for sure, but when she slept with other men it wasn’t
for money, no, it was purely for pleasure, behind Albino’s back, of
course. That’s why she’d slept with Polonio so often. She was hot,
absolutely smoking hot, but she was honorable, and to each her
own. During their first days in the hole Albino distracted and
entertained them — or rather he entertained Polonio, since the Prick
remained hostile, listless, and incapable of understanding a fucking
thing going on around him — with Albino’s tremendous, rousing
belly dance, renowned throughout the penitentiary, which caused
such intense excitement that some, pointlessly trying to conceal
their intentions, instead revealed their arousal and the coarse and
harried sense of shame that threatened to engulf them,
masturbating with furious and flagrant zeal, their hand under their
clothes. It was a real privilege for Polonio to have watched him
perform here, at his own leisure, in the cell, because elsewhere
Albino provoked untold resentment as to who was allowed to join his
audience; like any well-respected performer, he ejected all onlookers
he considered inconvenient, frivolous, flippant, incapable of
appreciating the hard-won attributes of a true virtuoso. Lower down
his stomach was a tattoo of a Hindu figure — etched in the brothel
of some Hindustani port, or so his story went, by the in-house
eunuch, a member of an unpronounceable esoteric sect, while
Albino dreamed a deep and almost lethal opium sleep beyond all
possible recollection — the tattoo depicted an amusing couple, a
young man and woman in the throes of passion, their bodies
entwined, enlaced in an incredible foliage of thighs, legs, arms,
breasts, and marvelous organs — the Brahmanic tree of Good and
Evil — positioned in such a way and with such kinetic wisdom that
Albino only had to set it in motion with the right contractions and
muscle spasms, its rhythmic oscillations rising at intervals on the
surface of his skin, and a subtle, inapprehensible rocking of the hips,
for those flailing and capricious-looking body parts — torso and
armpits, feet and pubis and hands and wings and stomachs and hair
— to assume a mystical unity in which the miracle of the Creation
was repeated and human copulation was portrayed in all its
magnificent and marvelous splendor. In the cubicle where visitors
were inspected before entering the prison, the hands of the female
guard felt her through her dress — the finger would follow, the
finger of God — but Meche’s mind was elsewhere now: on Albino’s
dance to be exact, from the week before, in the visitors’ lobby, just
after they’d settled on the final details of the original plan, a plan
they then abandoned on account of being sectioned in the hole, the
Prick’s mother also there, transfixed by the contortions of the tattoo,
apparently confounded, but her lips drawn in a sly smile, and who,
despite being well over sixty, was still well capable of making the
beast with two backs, the old mule. In a corner of the room, hidden
from prying eyes by a barrier of five people — the three women, the
Prick, and Polonio — Albino had unfastened his trousers, his t-shirt
now raised above his waist like a curtain to set the stage, using his
mesmerizing stomach tremors to bring the coitus to life, emerging
out of those inky blue lines with every step, with every rift and roll,
every ripple and undulation, until all of them — except the Prick and
his mother, who were doing their best to mask their reactions — felt
a suffocating wave of desire course through their bodies, and, in
Meche and La Chata’s case, a brief and ambiguous giggle also
danced on the roof of their mouths. Now naked from the waist
down, Meche could anticipate the next moves of the guard’s hand,
something that had never happened to her before, disturbed by a
strange and indecipherable willingness deep within her spirit and a
half-hearted resistance, and in that moment Albino appeared in her
imagination (in a previously forgotten memory, the first time they’d
possessed each other, with intriguing new details now arising in her
mind, absolutely fresh as if belonging to someone else), preventing
her from assuming the proud indifference and fierce composure that
she needed to withstand, patiently, angrily, coldly, the woman
groping between her legs. For example, the heavy yet
simultaneously repressed breathing, or rather irregular panting,
neither steady nor erratic — only now did she realize it had all been
air exhaled through his nose; Albino on top of her mound of Venus,
for now the thumb and index finger of the female guard were
already there, relentless, urgent, that female guard parting her lips,
while suddenly, with the middle finger, she began a sweet, delicate,
and highly suspicious internal exploration, a slow and deliberate in
and out, the eyes utterly fixed as if unto death. The plan was for the
women to enter the wing with the rest of the visitors, mingle with
other prisoners’ friends and families, and then appear unexpectedly
at the door to the hole, willing to do anything to make the apes
reconsider their men’s punishment — refusing to move, standing
firm for all time, like loyal, rabid she-dogs. The female guard, then,
and her wandering hand, were the source of the double, triple,
quadruple memories piling up and merging together, Meche at a loss
to stop, remedy it, repress a dumb yet absolutely unavoidable
attitude of acquiescence, which the bitch savored with a nervous
quiver and fitful panting — almost ferocious, breathing only through
her nose, actually just like Albino; at which Meche’s own belly
seemed to transform, indeed was transformed — by dint of a
rebellious transposition — into his belly (Meche, good God, as if
letting herself take the man’s role in relation to the bitch) while the
image of Albino seeped into her latest sensations, scenes from their
first performance, when he straddled her at eye-level, infusing the
figures from the Brahmanic tattoo with spine-chilling and prodigious
life, and now Meche imagined that it was she who in that moment
made her belly dance — identical, albeit secret, invisible undulations
— like a seduction technique aimed at the bitch, her eyes closing in,
meaning that not only did she not put up any resistance, but,
without knowing why, impelled by the mysterious force dictating
these new internal relations between Albino, herself, and the guard
— which overtook those strangers by chance — she lay down, barely
metaphorically speaking (one word would be enough to make her do
it for real), in the same position as that other Meche beneath
Albino’s body, completely and utterly intoxicated by those Hindustani
teenagers. Meche couldn’t formulate in any coherent or logical way,
either in words or in thoughts, what was happening to her: what
type of rarefied event and new language — secret, with exclusive
and singular peculiarities — was now being expressed, although it
wasn’t things in general or taken all together, but rather each thing
separately, specifically, each thing apart, with their own words,
emotions, and subterranean network of communications and
significances, which connected them beyond time and space,
regardless of the differences between them, so turning them into
symbols and codes that were indecipherable to all those who fell
outside of the biographical conspiracy by which things constituted
themselves in their own particular hermetic disguise. Archaeology of
passion, emotion, and sin, in which the weapons, tools, and abstract
organs of desire and the tendency of every imperfect deed to seek
out its consanguinity and completion in its own twin — however
incestuous this may seem — get closer to their goal by means of a
long, dogged, and tireless adventure of superimpositions, which
slowly begin to assume the image of that whose form is but an
unfulfilled yearning, condemned to be merely the nameless
foundation of an eternally grasping proximity, restlessly clamoring
signs that wait, febrile, for the moment when they finally unite with
their twin meaning, and are decoded by their mere presence. So
something — a face, a look, an expression, together constituting the
object’s defining feature — is distilled and complemented in another
person, another love, and even in other circumstances entirely, like
archaeological horizons where details from each period — a frieze, a
gargoyle, an apse, a surround — are but the moveable parts of a
kind of despairing eternity that time contracts, and where hands,
feet, knees, the way in which one looks at another, a kiss, a stone, a
landscape, through repetition are perceived by senses which no
longer belong to that then, even if the past refers to just a minute
ago. When Meche crossed the first barred door into the yard leading
onto numerous wings, radiating outward from a corridor, or rather a
roundel, in the center of which loomed the watchtower — a raised
iron polygon constructed to monitor every inch of the prison from
above — her mind was still imprinted with the image of the black
and fatally eloquent eyes of the female guard, her motionless,
imperturbable, terrible eyes that might have been staring at her
forever. Polonio could no longer bear to have his head lodged
awkwardly against the metal hatch, so he decided to cede his
lookout post to Albino, but, on shooting a sideways glance back
inside the cell, he thought he noticed a strange movement, and at
just at the same instant he realized that the Prick had stopped
moaning for the first time since being punched in the gut. Using
great care and attention, slowly and cautiously, Polonio folded the
ear poking through the hatch and drew back his head, worrying the
whole time that Albino might have finally succeeded in choking the
cripple. Truth to tell — he thought — there were more than enough
reasons to do so, but Albino must keep his cool, at least for now,
they would kill him under more favorable circumstances, as soon as
the drugs were safely in their hands, not a moment earlier and not
in that cell, since the plan might come crashing to the ground, and,
whether they liked it or not, the Prick’s mother was a vital part of the
equation. It was a question of carefully planning where and how to
kill him in the future (or the not too distant future, if that’s what
Albino wanted) — but all in good time. In reality, the Prick hadn’t
stopped moaning ever since Polonio had pummeled him in the
stomach. His moans were irritating, repetitive, and ingeniously false,
revealing quite openly and in perfect detail the monstrous state of
his perverse, contemptible, despicable, abject soul. The beating
hadn’t even been that bad — his miserable body was used to even
more brutal and violent ones — so this phony anguish, affected
purely to humiliate himself while pleading for pity had the opposite
effect, producing a mounting hatred and disgust, a blind rage that
unleashed the most lurid desires, from the very depths of his heart,
that he should suffer to ridiculous extremes, that someone should
inflict more pain, real pain, capable of leaving him in shreds (and
here a childhood memory), just like a malign tarantula, the same
sensation that invades the senses when the spider, under the effects
of boric acid, goes into a frenzy, shrivels into itself — making a
furious but impotent sound — curling up inside its own legs,
completely out of its mind, but doesn’t die, it doesn’t die, and you’d
like to squash it but you don’t have the energy for that, you don’t
dare, and not being able to go through with it is enough to drive you
to tears. He whimpered in a hoarse, weak, sticky voice, every now
and then feigning a woeful and shameless death rattle, while with
his tearful, dirty eye he managed to hold his gaze still, a profoundly
imploring gaze pierced with piety, full of self-pity, hypocrisy,
falsehood, a distant malevolence. Polonio and Albino had only
teamed up with the cripple because his mother was willing to help
them, but once their business was done, he could go to hell, could
go fuck himself, killing him was the only way out, the only way of
recovering any peace or tranquility. “Leave him be!” Polonio barked
at Albino, putting all his weight into giving him a hefty shove. Now
released from Albino’s clutches, the Prick was slumped like a lifeless
sack in the corner. In fact, Albino had very nearly choked him to
death, and now he didn’t dare moan or kick up a fuss. Shaking and
clumsily raising one hand to his chest, he rubbed his neck and
massaged his Adam’s apple between his fingers as if attempting to
put it back in place. Now his one eye glinted in silent horror, so
stupefied that suddenly he seemed unable to make sense of
anything at all. The minute they pulled off the plan and the situation
took a new turn, he planned to tell his mother — recounting all his
terrible woes, and how nothing mattered to him, nothing apart from
the small and fleeting pleasure, the sense of calm the drug provided,
and how, minute by minute and second by second, he was locked in
battle to find that peace, the only thing he loved in this life, his only
respite from the nameless torments he endured and from the way
he was forced, literally, to trade his body’s pain, piece by piece of his
flesh, in exchange for an indefinite and limitless interval of freedom
in which, with each fresh torture, he floundered a little happier.
Inserting — or extracting — his head in and out of that iron
rectangle, back into the guillotine, moving his skull, with all its parts
— nape, forehead, nose, and ears — to the world beyond the cell,
placing it there just as you would the head of a man sentenced to
death, unreal simply for still being alive, would require careful,
meticulous effort, the same way the fetus is extracted from its
maternal entrails, a tenacious and deliberate self-birth with forceps
that tear out clumps of hair and scrape against skin. With Polonio’s
help, Albino was able to tilt his head at an angle and position it on
top of the metal sheet. Down below were the apes, in the box, with
all the vacant and inexplicable primordial presence of caged apes.
Leaning his back against the door, next to Albino’s guillotined body,
Polonio lit a cigarette and drew a long, deep drag into his lungs. The
sun was falling across half the cell at an oblique, quadrangular
angle, a solid, corporeal column inside whose glowing frame dust
particles moved and collided with somnambular vagueness, erratic,
distracted, confused, tracing the outline of a window of light with its
vertical bars on the floor, not far from Polonio. Across from the solar
buttress, the mute, resentful figure of the Prick blurred into the
shadows. The billowing mountains of smoke exhaled by Polonio
invaded the patch of light with an enveloping chaos of rumps, lips,
legs, clouds, and the tumult of his personal cavalry, revolving and
writhing in the hand-to-hand combat of shifting yet deliberate
volumes of smoke, only then, slowly but surely, moving at the whim
of the thick air, to settle with an easy and subtle rhythm on a
horizontal plane, resembling a military victory parade. Then the
movements shape-shifted to the rolling composition of other
rhythms, and the slow, slow spirals paused briefly in their transitory
state in poses of drunken idols and startled statues. Albino’s voice
reached him from beyond the iron door — mild, confiding, tender.
“Visiting time.” Visitors. Drugs. The bodies of smoke dissolved,
merged into one another, reconstructed reliefs and structures and
trails, subject to their own laws — obedient to those of the solar
system — now wholly divine, free of all human traits, part of a new
and freshly invented natural world, whose demigod was the sun, and
where the nebulae, with scarcely a whisper of geometry, before all
Creation, occupied the freedom of a space that had been formed in
their own image and likeness, like an immense, interminable desire
that never permits its own realization, nor does it describe its own
limits, refusing to be in any way contained, just like God. But the
Prick was still there, a battered, rotten anti-God, who began shaking
with the violent convulsions of a hacking, uncontrollable cough,
which made him pound his body against the wall — in a strange,
spasmodic, and idiosyncratic manner, beating out the dull, fleeting
beat of a bongo with a flabby drumskin. In the corner where he sat
huddled, he looked like a possessed man, with his inflamed vulture’s
eye, verging on asphyxiation. The lines, spirals, whorled snails,
statues, and gods gone mad were scattered, cracked, and banished
by the spasms of that cough. He was missing one lung. Albino might
have pressed his knee a little too hard against his chest when,
moments earlier, he’d tried to throttle him. He really was a pain in
the ass, this cripple. With considerable effort, Albino managed to
squeeze his hand through the hatch, right up against his face, over
the bridge of his nose, ready to grab the drugs at the moment that
the women got up close to the cell. All of a sudden, he was blinded
by a terrible rage: at the small moist scab, still not hardened, the
pus from the Prick’s open wound that the cripple must have left on
Albino’s hand during their scuffle, which Albino had been about to
wipe on his lips. He closed his eyes, his head rattling the iron grid
with the brute force of clenching his teeth. He was hell-bent on
killing him, hell-bent with every atom of his soul. He opened his eyes
to take another look. It wouldn’t be long before the relatives started
filing in. The padlocks had already been removed from both doors to
the box in order to admit them, so the two groups were facing one
another, on either side of the iron bars. Their women wouldn’t file in
as a group, but one at a time, mingling with the other visitors.
Albino speculated as to who would appear first, La Chata, the
mother, or Mercedes — Meche — with her beautiful body, shoulders,
legs, angelic wings, all so enticing. (It was as if, under present
circumstances, the evocation of Meche was distorted by
unforeseeable new factors full of contradictions, which lent the
memory a different, original, strange quality: Meche had just been
through an ordeal, the details of which Albino was none the wiser at
that point, yet which, ever since he’d found out, a week before —
when they plotted how to get the drugs into the penitentiary and
Polonio had thought of using the Prick’s mother — had remained
imprinted on his mind, in various forms but always alluding to
specific physical images. First of all, the clearly defined female
guard, and then the diverse and unnerving meaning assumed by two
words, who knows when or where Albino had heard them —
exchanged between nurses or doctors as he’d waited someplace to
be seen for whatever reason, this was all quite dreamlike, or
perhaps it really was a dream — words which, given their convoluted
technical character, encompassed a series of extensive and
suggestive movements and situations: gynecological position. The
female guard, and her method of searching one particular sector of
the female visitors, not all of them, but a specific number who came
to visit the drug addicts, and among them only the more active
pushers inside the penitentiary: Albino and Polonio. Would they
inspect the women in that gynecological position? The present
situation — and those two absurd words — made this Meche slightly
different from the usual Meche: violated and prostituted, not that
this was a cause for repulsion, no, quite the opposite, a cause to feel
closer to her, as if it lent her a natural, undefined loveliness, or at
least one that Albino wasn’t capable of defining; it didn’t matter to
him that Meche might have slipped into an unfortunate trance —
and he would ask her himself, telling her to spare no details — in the
event of a somewhat excessive exploration by the female guard
during the inspection: it excited a renewed, previously unfamiliar
desire in him, and a meticulous and honest retelling by Meche would
give him hope, as they went on, for a new kind of bond to develop
between them, more intense and complete, no doubt enjoying a
healthy dose of lighthearted, happy depravity in which those two
medical words would somehow play a role.) Although the “box”
formed part of the wing, separated only by the same bars that acted
as a barrier between the two of them, the presence of guards, shut
up there inside, made it look like a separate prison, a prison for
guards, a prison inside the prison, which visitors were obliged to
pass through before entering the yard of the wing itself. This was
Albino’s entire field of vision from the hatch — a real torture. Being,
as he was, taller than the peephole — chest-high to a man of normal
height — Albino was forced to remain bent in a horribly awkward
position to keep his head aligned at this angle, and after a couple of
minutes he started to feel shooting pains down his neck and back,
and his leg began to tremble, giving the ludicrous and mortifying
impression that he was scared. As soon as one of the three women
were through the first and second barred walls of the box — be it
Meche, La Chata, or the mother — it was just a matter of doing
something, anything — making a sound, kicking the door — to let
them know exactly where the hole was. Naturally, the proper thing
to do, he thought, would be to yell insults, hurl abuse at the apes.
After all, that’s what they were there for. The important thing was to
see them enter, first the box and then the yard, to be sure that
everything had gone smoothly during the inspection, with the
bitches. Meche and La Chata wouldn’t have had any trouble: the
apes would have felt them up and that would’ve been that, nothing
to find inside them. The mother was the important one. Please,
please let the old hag through with those thirty grams tucked up her
crack. For lack of a better word, they called what was about to
happen a strike: a women’s strike. But before Meche, La Chata and
the mother went up there, to the cell door, so they could shout,
scream, and stomp their feet, before the ruckus really kicked off, the
mother was meant to hand over the little wrap of drugs to whoever
had his head poking through the hatch. In this case Albino, the
Baptist, was on duty, leaning his head against the metal plate. Later,
loaded up on the drugs, he’d take care of the Prick. It was easy
enough to pull off on movie night: deep in the shadows, drive the
sharp end of an iron bar through his ribcage, while Polonio covered
his mouth to stop him from squealing like a pig. They hadn’t
associated the Prick with him — or Polonio, precisely because of his
baby face. Albino laughed: all because he had a mother. Having a
mother was a big deal for that fucker, the real deal. The visitors
formed a line in the central yard, not far away — all the same,
beyond Albino’s line of vision — before filing, one by one, onto the
respective wings. Mothers, wives, daughters, young men, very few
older men, two or three in each group, the air thick with suspicion,
eyes down. Curiously enough, their conversations were never about
why their relatives had been locked up. Nobody questioned the guilt
or innocence of a child, husband, brother: they were there and that
was that. The same couldn’t be said for every visitor. Whenever
some high-class lady set foot in the place, for the first few times at
least, her sole, obsessive, and blatant concern — ultimately lacking
all logic or even plain coherence — was to establish a clear social
distinction between her inmate — why he was arrested, the
temporary and purely incidental nature of his stay there in prison —
and the rest of the visitors’ inmates. Hers was merely “accused of,”
since no actual crime had been committed — no matter how shady
things appeared — some friends in high places had been rallied in
his favor, and two or three high-court judges were on the case.
Those listening to her invariably nodded, incredulous but indulgent,
going along with the gran señora who didn’t pause for breath in her
display of piously refined manners, who took their silence as wonder
engendered by her ostentatiously luxurious attire. But as her
presence in the line of visitors became more frequent, the lady of
fine lineage gradually began to change her attitude, she began see
things as they really were. Each time she would speak a little less of
influential personages, and the innocence or guilt of “her” inmate
noticeably dropped out of the conversation, as her outfits became
plainer, until in the end she was just another visitor, eventually
passing unnoticed, indistinguishable from the rest. La Chata spotted
Meche behind her, among the other women in the line. She sighed.
Oh, how she envied her. She really had it bad for Meche’s man,
Albino, and ever since he’d shown them his belly dance in the
visitors’ room, she went weak at the knees at the very thought of
him. She would ask Meche if, without jeopardizing their friendship,
she could sleep with Albino. Once or twice, that’s all, no strings, or
rather, without Meche getting all strung up about it. Further behind
Meche, the Prick’s mother hobbled in, looking suspicious. She’d let
Meche and La Chata insert that contraceptive tampon as if it were
nothing, with the indifference of a cow letting herself be milked.
There were the udders; here was a vagina. Just as they’d predicted,
she hadn’t been searched. They’d shown some respect for her age,
and the dairy cow passed through, as inoffensive as a virgin. But
now they’d reached the apes’ cage, the box. The Prick was pleading
with them to let him poke his head through the hatch, because, he
said, his mother wasn’t going to hand over the drugs to anyone but
him. But his pleas were feeble, despondent. Albino, with his head
poking out of the cell, barked back at him. At last, Meche and La
Chata appeared down below. “Those fucking bitches, stupid cunts!”
The two women’s eyes spun towards the voice: it was their man. But
the old mule of a mother wasn’t there — she was late, the wretch.
The head in the guillotine flatly refused to give up the lookout post.
His mother wasn’t going to be so stupid as to give them the drugs,
the Prick whined. Utter bullshit. Just like him to be pining to see his
mother right here and now, needing her so desperately. He would
tell her everything, not holding back like before. Everything. The
interminable nights in the infirmary, strapped into a straightjacket,
the ice-cold baths, the vein-cutting: of course he didn’t want to die,
but all the same he wanted to die — and the way he let himself go,
let his body go like a loose thread, drifting, the boundless
impiousness of human beings, his own infinite impiety, the evils of
his cursed soul. Everything. He went on whining. “I told you to give
it a fucking rest!” Just then the Prick’s mother came through the two
barred walls of the box and stepped into the yard in front of the
wing. They were saved. Thanks to Albino’s outburst, the women
were able to make their way to the holed men’s cell, transported as
if by magic, invisible and swift, in a single movement, through the
ebb and flow, the searching for one another in the crowd, in such a
natural, confident, and self-possessed way that they didn’t stand out
or seem to have their own private agenda, so here they were
already, just like that, and Meche had thrown herself at Holofernes’s
head and was showering it with kisses, on the ears, eyes, nose,
smack on the lips. Helpless to escape, Albino merely flapped like the
body of a monstrous fish, a fish with a human head, beached by a
crashing ocean wave. “M’boy! W’is he?” cried the Prick’s mother in a
cavernous and somehow stupid voice; stupid because she seemed to
be convinced that she would come face to face with her son right
away, and when this didn’t happen she became lost and confused,
her expression full of fear and distrust toward the other two women.
“W’is he? W’is he?” she repeated, lurching clumsily as if she were
drunk, without taking her eyes off the head and hand protruding
from the metal hatch. The head separated from the torso —
guillotined and alive with its one visible eye rolling crazily, like what
happens with cattle when they’re thrown to the ground and know
they’re about to die — sent Meche and La Chata into a wild frenzy.
Wild but also amused and merry, despite how deranged the whole
situation was. They seemed younger than their years — they
couldn’t have been more than twenty-five — resembling a couple of
teenage girls, sporty, bendy, agile, and as swaggering as they were
vulgar. They’d climbed up onto the corridor handrail, and now sat
with their legs crossed, feet clamped around the vertical bars, and
from that position, skirts hitched high, exposing their thighs, they let
out the most extraordinary howls and screeches, wildly flailing their
clenched fists in the air, their toned arms like sturdy, steel roots,
shaken by short, sharp electric shocks, while their eyes, open
unnaturally wide, maddened and inflamed, glinted with unleashed
rage. “Let them out, let them out,” three words spliced into one
furious emission: leddemaat, leddemaat. The mother didn’t budge
from between the two women. She clutched the handrail with both
hands, as if on a ship’s bridge, every now and then turning toward
the yard and looking out of the corner of her eye in the direction of
the hatch, hoping to see her son’s head and not the other guy’s, a
man for whom she felt not the least affection or warmth. The head,
now directly behind her, was spitting out demands with growing
urgency, nearing hysteria. “The drugs, come on, old woman,”
sweetly at first, but with a note of aggression rapidly permeating his
muted, restrained intonation. “The gear, you old hag! Give us the
gear, you cunt!” It was quite possible that the mother really couldn’t
hear him. She looked like a stone slab, barely touched by a Neolithic
tool — vast, heavy, solemn, and hideous. Her silence had something
zoological, even lapidary about it, as if she lacked the organ
necessary to make a single sound, to talk or shout, a beast mute
from birth. All she did was weep, and even her tears filled you with
the same horror as a strange animal seen for the first time, and for
whom it is impossible to feel either compassion or love, just as was
true of her son. Rather than falling vertically, the thick, slow tears
slipped down her cheek along the old knife slash running from her
forehead to her jaw, tracing the line of the scar, and then dripping
from the tip of her chin — the tears were alien to her eyes, alien to
the tears of all humanity. In the yard adjoining the prisoners’ wing,
with a subdued air of distraction, in vague need of something
beyond themselves, something they found irresistible, the inmates
and their relatives slowly gathered beneath the women perched on
the rails. Nobody dared to yell or call out, but from the crowd there
came a muffled buzzing, a unanimous hum of solidarity and
satisfaction, which the apes couldn’t pin on any one person. During
visiting hours, the yard was transformed into a bizarre sort of
campsite, with blankets spread across the floor and hung wall to wall
between the cell doors, making a sort of temporary roof, beneath
which each clan gathered, shoulder to shoulder — women, children,
and inmates — in a kind of helpless throng of brutish castaways,
strangers among strangers, or perhaps people who’d never had a
home and today were practicing, entirely by instinct, a kind of
warped, primitive cohabitation. Below the three women, the tide
rose in small, slow successive waves, people congregating as if out
on a stroll, the men never once averting their wide, cynical gaze,
simultaneously expectant, amused and unnerved by Meche and La
Chata’s black panties. “Go on out then, you stupid Prick!” He didn’t
get it. “You, you, get out there!” Albino’s head retreated arduously
back into the cell allowing the mother to watch, almost immediately,
exactly as if she were looking at herself in the mirror, how she gave
birth to her son again, first the tousled, damp hair and then, bone
by bone, forehead, cheekbones, jawbone, the flesh of her flesh,
blood of her blood — dried up, bitter, and spent. She placed her
tough, trembling hand on her son’s forehead as if wanting to protect
the blind eye from the intensity of the sun’s rays. “The packet, Mami
dearest, the packet you were going to bring,” the man pleaded in a
whining, desolate voice. Scared, speechless, sleepwalking in
suffering, that hand resting instinctively on her son’s forehead, all of
a sudden she took on the hallucinatory and shocking likeness of a
crudely-fashioned Our Lady of Sorrows, made of mud and stones
and clay, unplaned and unpolished, an ancient, broken idol. Amid the
increasingly frequent banging of muffled drums down below, a
distinct isolated voice was calling out in chorus with the women.
Leddemaat, Leddemaat. On their way from the Governor’s office, a
posse of ten guards entered the box. Nobody was prepared to take a
risk: a path gradually cleared for those irregular and terrifying
strides, apes released from captivity and still not used to running,
above all wary of becoming separated from the group, from the
tribe, not to end up caught in the middle of the stormy, impersonal
crowd, acting with impunity, pretending not to see the apes pass,
looking through them as if their bodies were transparent. The
struggle against Meche, La Chata, and the old woman seemed to go
on forever, a bloodless, painless, and somehow distant affair. Half-
naked now, their clothes in shreds, they always found something,
anything — a ledge, a crossbar, a fissure — to cling to, while three
or four apes per woman made grotesque efforts to drag them
toward the stairs. From the crowd’s hoarse voice below erupted all
sorts of exclamations, shouts, insults, and guffaws, some in protest,
some in sympathy, and some savagely gleeful, demanding even
more indecency, vulgarity, and shamelessness from the fabulous and
once-in-a-lifetime spectacle that was all those bared breasts, asses,
and midriffs. The mother, her short arms raised above her head,
stood between the women and the apes, without doing a thing,
making lumbering and labored jumps, like a fat old fowl who’d
forgotten how to fly, a prehistoric link, not quite reptile, not quite
bird. In the course of one of these jumps she tripped and went
sliding across the iron surface of the walkway, only coming to a halt
when her wide-open legs straddled a vertical bar of the handrail,
preventing her, for now, from falling off the edge, but which wouldn’t
stop the other half of her body, suspended in midair, from
plummeting into to the yard at any moment. There followed a roar
of collective terror from everyone watching, followed by a
suffocating, weird silence, as if there were not a single soul left on
the face of the earth. The holed men, struck dumb in their cell and
without having seen a thing, sensed that something immense was
about to occur. The woman was beating her arms frantically,
irrationally, flapping hard. “Don’t move, old lady!” cried one of the
apes, breaking the silence and dragging the mother from danger by
her armpits. Silence returned, but now it was not only due to the
absence of noise and voices, no, it was a silence that reigned over
movements too, movements now entirely devoid of sound, wholly
inaudible, as if all was a slow and imaginary underwater act
performed by hypnotized divers, where everybody, actors and
spectators alike, both present and far away, inhabited the diving
suits of their own bodies, immobile and displacing their movements
little by little, in stages, in autonomous and independent fragments,
synchronized in their visible outward unity not by a causal and
logical coherence, but precisely, by the icily rigid thread of madness.
Something was stirring in this silent movie. Who knows what the
Governor said to the apes and the women: an unfamiliar and tense
calm descended, two apes bent down over the lock to the cell door
and unholed the three recluses, and then the whole group — the
three women, their men, and the guards — quietly, despite the
crazed faces of Polonio, Albino, and even the Prick, began to head
down the stairs. At the door to the box, the Governor let the two
guards pass and then turned toward the women. He was quite sure
his plan would work. “You can talk to your inmates in here all you
like, under a watchful eye,” he said. “Ladies first.” The women
obeyed with an air of weary victory. But they’d hardly stepped across
the threshold when the first two apes, with lightning speed, pushed
them back out of the box, through the other door that led out into
the yard, immediately locking the door behind them. Suddenly,
without warning, barely realizing what was happening, they’d been
left behind on the other side of the wing, the other side of the world.
The Governor didn’t have time to laugh at his own ploy. In an
unhinged, blind rage, Albino and Polonio, with the Prick between
them, sprang forth unleashed, barging blindly and aggressively into
the box, unwittingly followed by the Governor and another guard. In
one abrupt gesture, Albino locked the door leading onto the wing.
Now they were alone with the Governor and the three guards,
captive in the same zoo cage. Four against three; no, two against
four, given that the Prick was an absolute waste of space. “Let’s see
how you level with us now, you fucking ape pieces of shit,” Albino
yelled, while removing his cowhide belt to wield in the fight. A blow
to the face, across his cheekbone and nose, suddenly caused a
blood-red flower to bloom there, as if out of nowhere. Polonio and
Albino transformed into two ancient gladiators, homicidal to the
roots of their hair. The fight was hushed and precise, and as they
prowled around the box not a single voice was raised, not a single
groan heard. They were going for it, out to kill or wound their
enemies in the most excruciating way possible, using their feet, fists,
teeth, and sticks to tear out eyes and break their balls. Every look,
expression, and gasp, every movement of an arm or a leg was
calibrated, wholly sacrificed to the taut will of one unambiguously
implacable goal, all of them oozing death in its fullest, most
incredible manifestation. The women, powerless on the other side of
the bars, screamed like demons, kicked out at whichever guard
happened to be closest, and yanked the hair of anyone who
momentarily toppled in their direction, pulling it out in great clumps,
bleeding at the roots, often with whitish bits of hairy scalp attached.
The mother was on her knees banging her forehead repeatedly
against the floor, as if enacting an excessively outlandish prayer,
while the Prick curled against the metal bars in a fervent attempt to
shrink the volume of his body to an absolute minimum, howling
endlessly, doing nothing but howling. More apes showed up from the
Governor’s office, at least twenty of them armed with very long
metal poles. It was a matter of slotting the poles between the bars,
rod by rod, from the grids on one side of the cage through to the
other, and with the help of the guards who’d remained on the other
side of the wing to hold them there, with two or three men securing
each end, raising a line of barricades all the way across and up the
rectangle, creating the most random and unpredictable arrangement
of elevations and angles, as many as necessary to do battle against
the two beasts, and at the same time mindful not to impede or
thwart the actions of the Governor and the three apes, all in all a
diabolical mutilation of the space, triangles, trapezoids, parallels,
oblique or perpendicular divisions, lines and more lines, bars and
more bars, until every possible move those gladiators could make
was blocked and they were left crucified on the monstrous blueprint
of this gargantuan defeat of liberty, all the fault of geometry. The
first three of five horizontal bars perpendicular to the vertical ones
flanking the box — primarily acting as supports for the poles which
would be slotted from one side to the other, but also to sustain the
vertical bars and thereby to structure the space — worked in the
operation’s favor: the lower bar, at knee height, and the middle and
upper bars, which came up to just below the stomach and up to the
neck of a man of average height respectively (although Albino’s head
towered above the tallest bar) meant that the apes could position
the poles in such a way as to restrain that pair of crazed rebels,
rendering them absolutely immobile. They, the gladiators, were
invincible, higher than God, but this was too much for them. They
tried to drive the poles upward, they jumped about and struggled in
a thousand ways, but in the end they could do no more. The guards
entered the cage to retrieve the Governor and his three helpers,
who’d also been reduced to pieces. The women were dragged away,
so hoarse their shouts had become inaudible. While all this was
going on, the Prick managed to slide himself toward the feet of the
officer who’d arrived with the guards. “Her,” he whispered, gesturing
toward his mother, with a sideways glance from his misty, teary eye,
“it’s her, she’s who’s carrying the drugs inside, up her crack, in her
bits. Have her searched, see for yourself.” Only the officer heard. He
smiled, a sorry grimace. Hanging from the metal poles, more captive
than any captive, Polonio and Albino resembled bloody rags,
dismembered apes left out to dry in the sun. All they knew for sure
was that the mother hadn’t managed to hand the drugs to her son,
not to him, not to no-ones, as she would say. It occurred to them
both, in the same moment, that there was no point in killing the
cripple now. Why bother.

lecumberri penitentiary
mexico, february–march ( 15), 19 69
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 COCOA-NUT SOUP.

Pare the dark rind from a very fresh cocoa-nut, and grate it down
small on an exceedingly clean, bright grater; weigh it, and allow two
ounces for each quart of soup. Simmer it gently for one hour in the
stock, which should then be strained closely from it, and thickened
for table.
Veal stock, gravy-soup, or broth, 5 pints; grated cocoa-nut, 5 oz., 1
hour. Flour of rice, 5 oz.; mace, 1/2 teaspoonful; little cayenne and
salt; mixed with 1/4 pint of cream: 10 minutes.
Or: gravy-soup, or good beef broth, 5 pints: 1 hour. Rice flour, 5
oz.; soy and lemon-juice, each 1 tablespoonful; finely pounded
sugar, 1 oz.; cayenne, 1/4 teaspoonful; sherry, 2 glassesful.
Obs.—When either cream or wine is objected to for these soups, a
half-pint of the stock should be reserved to mix the thickening with.
 CHESTNUT SOUP.

Strip the outer rind from some fine, sound Spanish chestnuts,
throw them into a large pan of warm water, and as soon as it
becomes too hot for the fingers to remain in it, take it from the fire, lift
out the chestnuts, peel them quickly, and throw them into cold water
as they are done; wipe, and weigh them; take three quarters of a
pound for each quart of soup, cover them with good stock, and stew
them gently for upwards of three quarters of an hour, or until they
break when touched with a fork; drain, and pound them smoothly, or
bruise them to a mash with a strong spoon, and rub them through a
fine sieve reversed; mix with them by slow degrees the proper
quantity of stock; add sufficient mace, cayenne, and salt to season
the soup, and stir it often until it boils. Three quarters of a pint of rich
cream, or even less, will greatly improve it. The stock in which the
chestnuts are boiled can be used for the soup when its sweetness is
not objected to; or it may in part be added to it.
Chestnuts, 1-1/2 lb.: stewed from 2/3 to 1 hour. Soup, 2 quarts;
seasoning of salt, mace, and cayenne: 1 to 3 minutes. Cream, 3/4
pint (when used).
 JERUSALEM ARTICHOKE, OR PALESTINE SOUP.

Wash and pare quickly some freshly-dug artichokes, and to

preserve their colour, throw them into spring water as they are done,
but do not let them remain in it after all are ready. Boil three pounds
of them in water for ten minutes; lift them out, and slice them into
three pints of boiling stock; when they have stewed gently in this
from fifteen to twenty minutes, press them with the soup, through a
fine sieve, and put the whole into a clean saucepan with a pint and a
half more of stock; add sufficient salt and cayenne to season it, skim
it well, and after it has simmered for two or three minutes, stir it to a
pint of rich boiling cream. Serve it immediately.
Artichokes, 3 lbs., boiled in water: 10 minutes. Veal stock, 3 pints
15 to 20 minutes. Additional stock, 1-1/2 pint; little cayenne and salt
2 to 3 minutes. Boiling cream, 1 pint.
Obs.—The palest veal stock, as for white soup, should be used for
this; but for a family dinner, or where economy is a consideration
excellent mutton-broth, made the day before and perfectly cleared
from fat, will answer very well as a substitute; milk too may in part
take the place of cream when this last is scarce: the proportion of
artichokes should then be increased a little.
Vegetable-marrow, when young, makes a superior soup even to
this, which is an excellent one. It should be well pared, trimmed, and
sliced into a small quantity of boiling veal stock or broth, and when
perfectly tender, pressed through a fine sieve, and mixed with more
stock and some cream. In France the marrow is stewed, first in
butter, with a large mild onion or two also sliced; and afterwards in a
quart or more of water, which is poured gradually to it; it is next
passed through a tammy,[26] seasoned with pepper and salt, and
mixed with a pint or two of milk and a little cream.
26. Derived from the French tamis, which means a sieve or strainer.
 COMMON CARROT SOUP.

The most easy method of making this favourite English soup is to

boil some highly coloured carrots quite tender in water slightly salted,
then to pound or mash them to a smooth paste, and to mix with them
boiling gravy soup or strong beef broth (see Bouillon) in the
proportion of two quarts to a pound and a half of the prepared
carrots; then to pass the whole through a strainer, to season it with
salt and cayenne, to heat it in a clean stewpan, and to serve it
immediately. If only the red outsides of the carrots be used, the
colour of the soup will be very bright; they should be weighed after
they are mashed. Turnip soup may be prepared in the same manner.
Obs.—An experienced and observant cook will know the
proportion of vegetables required to thicken this soup appropriately,
without having recourse to weights and measures; but the learner
had always better proceed by rule.
Soup, 2 quarts; pounded carrot, 1-1/2 lb.; salt, cayenne: 5
minutes.
 A FINER CARROT SOUP.

Scrape very clean, and cut away all blemishes from some highly-
flavoured red carrots; wash, and wipe them dry, and cut them into
quarter-inch slices. Put into a large stewpan three ounces of the best
butter, and when it is melted, add two pounds of the sliced carrots,
and let them stew gently for an hour without browning; pour to them
then four pints and a half of brown gravy soup, and when they have
simmered from fifty minutes to an hour, they ought to be sufficiently
tender. Press them through a sieve or strainer with the soup; add
salt, and cayenne if required; boil the whole gently for five minutes,
take off all the scum, and serve the soup as hot as possible.
Butter, 3 oz.; carrots, 2 lbs.: 1 hour. Soup, 4-1/2 pints: 50 to 60
minutes. Salt, cayenne: 5 minutes.
 COMMON TURNIP SOUP.

Wash and wipe the turnips, pare and weigh them; allow a pound
and a half for every quart of soup. Cut them in slices about a quarter
of an inch thick. Melt four ounces of butter in a clean stewpan, and
put in the turnips before it begins to boil; stew them gently for three
quarters of an hour, taking care that they shall not brown, then have
the proper quantity of soup ready boiling, pour it to them, and let
them simmer in it for three quarters of an hour. Pulp the whole
through a coarse sieve or soup strainer, put it again on the fire, keep
it stirred until it has boiled three minutes or four, take off the scum,
add salt and pepper if required, and serve it very hot. Turnips, 3 lbs.;
butter, 4 oz.: 3/4 hour. Soup, 2 quarts: 3/4 hour. Last time: three
minutes.
 A QUICKLY MADE TURNIP SOUP.

Pare and slice into three pints of veal or mutton stock or of good
broth, three pounds of young mild turnips; stew them gently from
twenty-five to thirty minutes, or until they can be reduced quite to
pulp; rub the whole through a sieve, and add to it another quart of
stock, a seasoning of salt and white pepper, and one lump of sugar:
give it two or three minutes’ boil, skim and serve it. A large white
onion when the flavour is liked may be sliced and stewed with the
turnips. A little cream improves much the colour of this soup.
Turnips, 3 lbs.; soup, 5 pints: 25 to 30 minutes.
 POTATO SOUP.

Mash to a smooth paste three pounds of good mealy potatoes,

which have been steamed, or boiled very dry; mix with them by
degrees, two quarts of boiling broth, pass the soup through a
strainer, set it again on the fire, add pepper and salt, and let it boil for
five minutes. Take off entirely the black scum that will rise upon it,
and serve it very hot with fried or toasted bread. Where the flavour is
approved, two ounces of onions minced and fried a light brown, may
be added to the soup, and stewed in it for ten minutes before it is
sent to table.
Potatoes, 3 lbs.; broth, 2 quarts: 5 minutes. (With onions, 2 oz.) 10
minutes.
 APPLE SOUP.

(Soupe à la Bourguignon.)
Clear the fat from five pints of good mutton broth, bouillon, or shin
of beef stock, and strain it through a fine sieve; add to it when it
boils, a pound and a half of good cooking apples, and stew them
down in it very softly to a smooth pulp; press the whole through a
strainer, add a small teaspoonful of powdered ginger and plenty of
pepper, simmer the soup for a couple of minutes, skim, and serve it
very hot, accompanied by a dish of rice, boiled as for curries.
Broth, 5 pints; apples, 1-1/2 lb.: 25 to 40 minutes. Ginger, 1
teaspoonful; pepper, 1/2 teaspoonful: 2 minutes.
 PARSNEP SOUP.

Dissolve, over a gentle fire, four ounces of good butter, in a wide

stewpan or saucepan, and slice in directly two pounds of sweet
tender parsneps; let them stew very gently until all are quite soft,
then pour in gradually sufficient veal stock or good broth to cover
them, and boil the whole slowly from twenty minutes to half an hour;
work it with a wooden spoon through a fine sieve, add as much stock
as will make two quarts in all, season the soup with salt and white
pepper or cayenne, give it one boil, skim, and serve it very hot. Send
pale fried sippets to table with it.
Butter, 4-1/2 oz.; parsneps, 2 lbs.: 3/4 hour, or more. Stock, 1
quart; 20 to 30 minutes; 1 full quart more of stock; pepper, salt: 1
minute.
Obs.—We can particularly recommend this soup to those who like
the peculiar flavour of the vegetable.
 ANOTHER PARSNEP SOUP.

Slice into five pints of boiling veal stock or strong colourless broth,
a couple of pounds of parsneps, and stew them as gently as
possible from thirty minutes to an hour; when they are perfectly
tender, press them through a sieve, strain the soup to them, season,
boil, and serve it very hot. With the addition of cream, parsnep soup
made by this receipt resembles in appearance the Palestine soup.
Veal stock or broth, 5 pints; parsneps, 2 lbs.: 30 to 60 minutes.
Salt and cayenne: 2 minutes.
 WESTERFIELD WHITE SOUP.

Break the bone of a knuckle of veal in one or two places, and put it
on to stew, with three quarts of cold water to the five pounds of meat;
when it has been quite cleared from scum, add to it an ounce and a
half of salt, and one mild onion, twenty corns of white pepper, and
two or three blades of mace, with a little cayenne pepper. When the
soup is reduced one-third by slow simmering strain it off, and set it
by till cold; then free it carefully from the fat and sediment, and heat it
again in a very clean stewpan. Mix with it when it boils, a pint of thick
cream smoothly blended with an ounce of good arrow-root, two
ounces of very fresh vermicelli previously boiled tender in water
slightly salted and well drained from it, and an ounce and a half of
almonds blanched and cut in strips: give it one minute’s simmer, and
serve it immediately, with a French roll in the tureen.
Veal, 5 lbs.; water, 3 quarts; salt, 1-1/2 oz.; 1 mild onion; 20 corns
white pepper; 2 large blades of mace: 5 hours or more. Cream, 1
pint; almonds, 1-1/2 oz.; vermicelli, 1 oz.: 1 minute. Little thickening if
needed.
Obs.—We have given this receipt without any variation from the
original, as the soup made by it—of which we have often partaken—
seemed always much approved by the guests of the hospitable
country gentleman from whose family it was derived, and at whose
well-arranged table it was very commonly served; but we would
suggest the suppression of the almond spikes, as they seem
unsuited to the preparation, and also to the taste of the present day.
 A RICHER WHITE SOUP.

Pound very fine indeed six ounces of sweet almonds, then add to
them six ounces of the breasts of roasted chickens or partridges,
and three ounces of the whitest bread which has been soaked in a
little veal broth, and squeezed very dry in a cloth. Beat these
altogether to an extremely smooth paste; then pour to them boiling
and by degrees, two quarts of rich veal stock; strain the soup
through a fine hair sieve, set it again over the fire, add to it a pint of
thick cream, and serve it, as soon as it is at the point of boiling.
When cream is very scarce, or not easily to be procured, this soup
may be thickened sufficiently without it, by increasing the quantity of
almonds to eight or ten ounces, and pouring to them, after they have
been reduced to the finest paste, a pint of boiling stock, which must
be again wrung from them through a coarse cloth with very strong
pressure: the proportion of meat and bread also should then be
nearly doubled. The stock should be well seasoned with mace and
cayenne before it is added to the other ingredients.
Almonds, 6 oz.; breasts of chickens or partridges, 6 oz.; soaked
bread, 3 oz.; veal stock, 2 quarts; cream, 1 pint.
Obs. 1.—Some persons pound the yolks of four or five hard-boiled
eggs with the almonds, meat, and bread for this white soup; French
cooks beat smoothly with them an ounce or two of whole rice,
previously boiled from fifteen to twenty minutes.
Obs. 2.—A good plain white soup maybe made simply by adding
to a couple of quarts of pale veal stock or strong well-flavoured veal
broth, a thickening of arrow-root, and from half to three quarters of a
pint of cream. Four ounces of macaroni boiled tender and well-
drained may be dropped into it a minute or two before it is dished,
but the thickening may then be diminished a little.
 MOCK TURTLE SOUP.

To make a single tureen of this favourite English soup in the most

economical manner when there is no stock at hand, stew gently
down in a gallon of water four pounds of the fleshy part of the shin of
beef, or of the neck, with two or three carrots, one onion, a small
head of celery, a bunch of savoury herbs, a blade of mace, a half-
teaspoonful of peppercorns, and an ounce of salt. When the meat is
quite in fragments, strain off the broth, and pour it when cold upon
three pounds of the knuckle or of the neck of veal; simmer this until
the flesh has quite fallen from the bones, but be careful to stew it as
softly as possible, or the quantity of stock will be so much reduced
as to be insufficient for the soup. Next, take the half of a fine calf’s
head with the skin on, remove the brains, and then bone it[27]
entirely, or let the butcher do this, and return the bones with it; these,
when there is time, may be stewed with the veal to enrich the stock,
or boiled afterwards with the head and tongue. Strain the soup
through a hair-sieve into a clean pan, and let it drain closely from the
meat. When it is nearly or quite cold, clear off all the fat from it; roll
the head lightly round, leaving the tongue inside, or taking it out, as
is most convenient, secure it with tape or twine, pour the soup over,
and bring it gently to boil upon a moderate fire; keep it well skimmed,
and simmer it from an hour to an hour and a quarter; then lift the
head into a deep pan or tureen, add the soup to it, and let it remain
in until nearly cold, as this will prevent the edges from becoming
dark. Cut into quarter-inch slices, and then divide into dice, from six
to eight ounces of the lean of an undressed ham, and if possible,
one of good flavour; free it perfectly from fat, rind, and the smoked
edges; peel and slice four moderate-sized eschalots, or if these
should not be at hand, one mild onion in lieu of them. Dissolve in a
well-tinned stewpan or thick iron saucepan which holds a gallon or
more, four ounces of butter; put in the ham and eschalots, or onion,
with half a dozen cloves, two middling-sized blades of mace, a half-
teaspoonful of peppercorns, three or four very small sprigs of thyme,
three teaspoonsful of minced parsley, one of lemon thyme and winter
savoury mixed, and when the flavour is thought appropriate, the very
thin rind of half a small fresh lemon. Stew these as softly as possible
for nearly or quite an hour, and keep the pan frequently shaken: then
put into a dredging box two ounces of fine dry flour, and sprinkle it to
them by degrees; mix the whole well together, and after a few
minutes more of gentle simmering, add very gradually five full pints
of the stock taken free of fat and sediment, and made boiling before
it is poured in; shake the pan strongly round as the first portions of it
are added, and continue to do so until it contains from two to three
pints, when the remainder may be poured in at once, and the pan
placed by the side of the fire that it may boil in the gentlest manner
for an hour. At the end of that time turn the whole into a hair-sieve
placed over a large pan, and if the liquid should not run through
freely, knock the sides of the sieve, but do not force it through with a
spoon, as that would spoil the appearance of the stock. The head in
the meanwhile should have been cut up, ready to add to it. For the
finest kind of mock turtle, only the skin, with the fat that adheres to it,
should be used; and this, with the tongue, should be cut down into
one inch squares, or if preferred into strips of an inch wide. For
ordinary occasions, the lean part of the flesh may be added also, but
as it is always sooner done than the skin, it is better to add it to the
soup a little later. When it is quite ready, put it with the strained stock
into a clean pan, and simmer it from three quarters of an hour to a
full hour: it should be perfectly tender, without being allowed to
break. Cayenne, if needed, should be thrown into the stock before it
is strained; salt should be used sparingly, on account of the ham,
until the whole of the other ingredients have been mixed together,
when a sufficient quantity must be stirred into the soup to season it
properly. A couple of glasses of good sherry or Madeira, with a
dessertspoonful of strained lemon-juice, are usually added two or
three minutes only before the soup is dished, that the spirit and
flavour of the wine may not have time to evaporate; but it is
sometimes preferred mellowed down by longer boiling. The
proportion of lemon-juice may be doubled at will, but much acid is
not generally liked. We can assure the reader of the excellence of
the soup made by this receipt; it is equally palatable and delicate,
and not heavy or cloying to the stomach, like many of the elaborate
compositions which bear its name. The fat, through the whole
process, should be carefully skimmed off. The ham gives far more
savour, when used as we have directed, than when, even in much
larger proportion, it is boiled down in the stock. Two dozens of
forcemeat-balls, prepared by the receipt No. 11, Chap. VIII., should
be dropped into the soup when it is ready for table. It is no longer
customary to serve egg-balls in it.
27. This is so simple and easy a process, that the cook may readily accomplish it
with very little attention. Let her only work the knife close to the bone always,
so as to take the flesh clean from it, instead of leaving large fragments on.
The jaw-bone may first be removed, and the flesh turned back from the edge
of the other.

First broth:—shin, or neck of beef, 4 lbs.; water, 4 quarts; carrots,

2 or 3; large mild onion, 1; celery, small head; bunch savoury herbs;
mace, 1 large blade; peppercorns, 1/2 teaspoonful; cloves, 6; salt, 1
oz.: 5 hours or more, very gently. For stock: the broth and 3 lbs. neck
or knuckle of veal (bones of head if ready): 4 to 5 hours. Boned half-
head with skin on and tongue, 1 to 1-1/4 hour. Lean of undressed
ham, 6 to 8 oz. (6 if very salt); shalots, 4, or onion, 1; fresh butter, 4
oz.; cloves, 6; middling-sized blades of mace, 2; peppercorns, 1/2
teaspoonful; small sprigs of thyme, 3 or 4; minced parsley, 3 large
teaspoonsful; minced savoury and lemon-thyme mixed, 1 small
teaspoonful (thin rind 1/2 small lemon, when liked): 1 hour. Flour, 2
oz.: 5 minutes. Stock, full five pints; flesh of head and tongue, 1-3/4
to 2 lbs.: 3/4 of an hour to 1 hour (salt, if needed, to be added in
interim). Good sherry or Madeira, 2 wineglassesful; lemon-juice, 1 to
2 dessertspoonsful; forcemeat-balls, 24.
Obs. 1.—The beef, veal, bones of the head, and vegetables may
be stewed down together when more convenient: it is only necessary
that a really good, well flavoured, and rather deeply-coloured stock
should be prepared. A calf’s foot is always an advantageous addition
to it, and the skin of another calf’s head[28] a better one still.
28. Country butchers, in preparing a calf’s head for sale in the ordinary way, take
off the skin (or scalp), considered so essential to the excellence of this soup,
and frequently throw it away; it may, therefore, often be procured from them
at very slight cost, and is the best possible addition to the mock turtle. It is
 cleared from the head in detached portions with the hair on, but this may
easily be removed after a few minutes’ scalding as from the head itself, or
the feet, by the direction given in Chapter of Sweet Dishes. In London it is
sold entire, and very nicely prepared, and may be served in many forms,
besides being added to soup with great advantage.

Obs. 2.—A couple of dozens mushroom-buttons, cleaned with salt

and flannel, then wiped very dry, and sliced, and added to the ham
and herbs when they have been simmered together about half an
hour, will be found an improvement to the soup.
Claret is sometimes added instead of sherry or Madeira, but we do
not think it would in general suit English taste so well. From two to
three tablespoonsful of Harvey’s sauce can be stirred in with the
wine when it is liked, or when the colour requires deepening.
 OLD-FASHIONED MOCK TURTLE.

After having taken out the brain and washed and soaked the head
well, pour to it nine quarts of cold water, bring it gently to boil, skim it
very clean, boil it if large an hour and a half, lift it out, and put into the
liquor eight pounds of neck of beef lightly browned in a little fresh
butter, with three or four thick slices of lean ham, four large onions
sliced, three heads of celery, three large carrots, a large bunch of
savoury herbs, the rind of a lemon pared very thin, a dessertspoonful
of peppercorns, two ounces of salt, and after the meat has been
taken from the head, all the bones and fragments. Stew these gently
from six to seven hours, then strain off the stock and set it into a very
cool place, that the fat may become firm enough on the top to be
cleared off easily. The skin and fat of the head should be taken off
together and divided into strips of two or three inches in length, and
one in width; the tongue may be carved in the same manner, or into
dice. Put the stock, of which there ought to be between four and five
quarts, into a large soup or stewpot; thicken it when it boils with four
ounces of fresh butter[29] mixed with an equal weight of fine dry
flour, a half-teaspoonful of pounded mace, and a third as much of
cayenne (it is better to use these sparingly at first, and to add more
should the soup require it, after it has boiled some little time); pour in
half a pint of sherry, stir the whole together until it has simmered for
a minute or two, then put in the head, and let it stew gently from an
hour and a quarter to an hour and a half: stir it often, and clear it
perfectly from scum. Put into it just before it is ready for table three
dozens of small forcemeat-balls; the brain cut into dice (after having
been well soaked, scalded,[30] and freed from the film), dipped into
beaten yolk of egg, then into the finest crumbs mixed with salt, white
pepper, a little grated nutmeg, fine lemon-rind, and chopped parsley
fried a fine brown, well drained and dried; and as many egg-balls,
the size of a small marble, as the yolks of four eggs will supply. (See
Chapter VIII). This quantity will be sufficient for two large tureens of
soup; when the whole is not wanted for table at the same time, it is
better to add wine only to so much as will be required for immediate
consumption, or if it cannot conveniently be divided, to heat the wine
in a small saucepan with a little of the soup, to turn it into the tureen,
and then to mix it with the remainder by stirring the whole gently after
the tureen is filled. Some persons simply put in the cold wine just
before the soup is dished, but this is not so well.
29. When the butter is considered objectionable, the flour, without it, may be
mixed to the smoothest batter possible, with a little cold stock or water, and
stirred briskly into the boiling soup: the spices should be blended with it.

30. The brain should be blanched, that is, thrown into boiling water with a little
salt in it, and boiled from five to eight minutes, then lifted out and laid into
cold water for a quarter of an hour: it must be wiped very dry before it is fried.

Whole calf’s head with skin on, boiled 1-1/2 hour. Stock: neck of
beef, browned in butter, 8 lbs.; lean of ham, 1/2 to 3/4 lb.; onions, 4;
large carrots, 3; heads of celery, 3; large bunch herbs; salt, 2 oz. (as
much more to be added when the soup is made as will season it
sufficiently); thin rind, 1 lemon; peppercorns, 1 dessertspoonful;
bones and trimmings of head: 8 hours. Soup: stock, 4 to 5 quarts;
flour and butter for thickening, of each 4 oz.; pounded mace, half-
teaspoonful; cayenne, third as much (more of each as needed);
sherry, half pint: 2 to 3 minutes. Flesh of head and tongue, nearly or
quite 2 lbs.: 1-1/4 to 1-1/2 hour. Forcemeat-balls, 36; the brain cut
and fried; egg-balls, 16 to 24.
Obs.—When the brain is not blanched it must be cut thinner in the
form of small cakes, or it will not be done through by the time it has
taken enough colour: it may be altogether omitted without much
detriment to the soup, and will make an excellent corner dish if
gently stewed in white gravy for half an hour, and served with it
thickened with cream and arrow-root to the consistency of good
white sauce, then rather highly seasoned, and mixed with plenty of
minced parsley, and some lemon-juice.
 GOOD CALF’S HEAD SOUP.

(Not expensive.)

Stew down from six to seven pounds of the thick part of a shin of
beef with a little lean ham, or a slice of hung beef, or of Jewish beef,
trimmed free from the smoky edges, in five quarts of water until
reduced nearly half, with the addition, when it first begins to boil, of
an ounce of salt, a large bunch of savoury herbs, one large onion, a
head of celery, three carrots, two or three turnips, two small blades
of mace, eight or ten cloves, and a few white or black peppercorns.
Let it boil gently that it may not be too much reduced, for six or seven
hours, then strain it into a clean pan and set it by for use. Take out
the bone from half a calf’s head with the skin on (the butcher will do
this if desired), wash, roll, and bind it with a bit of tape or twine, and
lay it into a stewpan, with the bones and tongue; cover the whole
with the beef stock, and stew it for an hour and a half; then lift it into
a deep earthen pan and let it cool in the liquor, as this will prevent
the edges from becoming dry or discoloured. Take it out before it is
quite cold; strain, and skim all the fat carefully from the stock; and
heat five pints in a large clean saucepan, with the head cut into small
thick slices or into inch-squares. As quite the whole will not be
needed, leave a portion of the fat, but add every morsel of the skin to
the soup, and of the tongue also. Should the first of these not be
perfectly tender, it must be simmered gently till it is so; then stir into
the soup from six to eight ounces of fine rice-flour mixed with a
quarter-teaspoonful of cayenne, twice as much freshly pounded
mace, half a wineglassful of mushroom catsup,[31] and sufficient
cold broth or water to render it of the consistence of batter; boil the
whole from eight to ten minutes; take off the scum, and throw in two
glasses of sherry; dish the soup and put into the tureen some
delicately and well fried forcemeat-balls made by the receipt No. 1,
2, or 3, of Chapter VIII. A small quantity of lemon-juice or other acid
can be added at pleasure. The wine and forcemeat-balls may be
omitted, and the other seasonings of the soup a little heightened. As