Jorge, on the other hand, is really showing his stripes. His goggley old eyes, his slipping mind. He’s only sixty-seven, ten years Moses’ elder, but in here you age fast, like a dog. That combined with the piss-poor medical treatment and a lifetime of phenobarbital has Jorge acting like an old bat. Moses isn’t having any of it.
He’s just begun his second read of “Death in Venice.” He’s only now seeing how Aschenbach became a puff and how he should have seen it coming. What Moses wants to know is why Mann would write such a story. Aschenbach seemed like an upstanding man in the beginning. Moses is waiting for Miller to call him to report to work. He plans on asking Lila this very question when he gets there. In any case, his preliminary thesis: Aschenbach got what he deserved.
Just then, Jorge throws the blanket off his lap, looks at Moses with the veined eyes of a madman and asks, “Moses, is Gina mi hija or is she the girl that I strangled?”
Moses drops to his knees. He takes the cigarette out of his mouth and sits back on his heels. “Oh, Jesus. Let me see the letters.” He walks into the cell and takes his eyeglasses from the locker where they lay next to his typewriter and a few false starts of a paper’s beginning. He puts them on. They’re already missing an arm.
Friday night, Miller called them and as they made their way to chow, Collin caught sight of Moses’ glasses and he punched Moses in the back of his head with as much strength as he could gather, which was a lot because Collin is young and covered in tattoos. He is almost always high and either sleepy or violent because of it. Moses’ glasses soared through the air and he could hear them skid across the floor somewhere near everyone’s feet. The only guard who saw it was Miller, which meant nothing was going to be done about it. Moses had a horrible ringing in his ears and an ache in his temple from that Latino keeplock and one screaming pain radiating up from his shoulders through the base of his skull. When he stood up again, he looked Collin right in the eye and spat at him there. Collin decided to kill Moses; Moses could tell by the look that came over him. But Jorge held up his hand. Just held it up. Like Jesus or some saint. And Collin lowered his fist and instead of killing Moses, he pushed his chest into him so Moses fell against the wall. Collin slapped his face a few times to let him know what he was. “You’re nothing. You realize that?” Collin looked around and someone handed him Moses’ glasses. He took a look at them and smirked, put them on, pulled his pants up to his ribs, and pretended to be a geezer.
Georgy, hopping like a flea in a flea circus, was still screaming Fight! Fight! But Jorge turned to him and said, “Georgy, my boy, no fights tonight, or they might take away your book of numbers.” Georgy stopped his hopping; the crew of them fell back in line and made their way into the chaos of the mess hall for their nightly poisoning. At the long table, Collin looked at Moses. He was pretending to try to see him, pretending to be old. Moses stared back, took a bite of his food and nearly threw it up from pain. He stopped eating for fear he would end up in the infirmary and miss a day with Lila. Instead he focused on the silky texture of the blood red sauce the bits of chipped meat floated in and prayed the day would end soon.
He wouldn’t indulge Jorge like this normally, but truth is he got a late start on the reading and the paper because Collin held Moses’ glasses hostage for the weekend until Jorge finally went and negotiated for them last night. Moses only had to give Collin ten bucks in commissary, and even though this nearly wiped him out, it was nothing compared to what Collin might have asked for. He owes Jorge some mind.
“Moses, look at this letter and compare it to this other letter. Are you sure it is the same hand that wrote both of these?”
Moses looks up at Jorge and he can’t believe the weak old man who looks at him desperately is his longtime friend and protector. Jorge has diminished. Always of a medium build, he’s the size of a woman now. That big, rectangular head of his, his powerful Indian nose, that shock of black hair, the deep wealth of color in his skin, the strong teeth, these have all withered and begun to disappear. Moses is disgusted by him. Repulsed by his age. His smell. He sits next to Jorge, who is holding one letter from Gina written when she was fifteen, just before his wife, Marie, told Jorge she was dead, and another letter from a few months later, after Ed Cavanaugh told Jorge that Gina was still living and began arranging weekly meetings.
Poor Jorge, Moses thinks as he compares the letters. He endured Marie’s lies for so long that, even though he saw Gina with his own eyes at Christmas five months ago, he has started to worry again that maybe Gina really was murdered by those boys. Maybe all that he’s enjoyed of her success, her acceptance to Brown, his fatherly struggle to accept her disinterest in science, her big job in television, the news that she bought herself an apartment on New York’s Upper East Side with all the rich, white people, even the postcards and letters she sends, have been nothing more than mirage. Moses blames it mostly on this place. The lack of a horizon line, or maybe it’s the constant color of cement, or it could be the half-rotten beef they’ve been eating for what seems like months that must have been rejected by the retard institutions. Whatever the cause, Jorge has convinced himself Gina is dead.
There is a change in the handwriting. Moses looks closely and can see the difference. The first is written in a big swooping hand. The second is different. The letters are small and constricted, it appears, by lines that aren’t even on the page.
“It’s the same, Jorge. Just more adult. It’s the same. I assure you.”
Jorge looks at Moses with the look of a child searching for reassurance and truth. “I don’t believe you, Moses. Thank you, my friend, mi amigo, for trying to make me feel better. Thank you. But I deserve her to be dead.”
Moses pushes the letters back into Jorge’s hands, waves his hand at him and returns to his post at his typewriter. He swats a sparrow off the top of it. But he can’t work.
He wedges himself onto the floor between the cots, pulls out his cooler, draws the hair to the side, and pulls out Lila’s compact. He looks over his shoulder to see if Jorge is looking. He’s not. He’s shuffling the letters, turning them over, looking for clues. Moses sneers and turns back to the compact, puts on his glasses and looks at himself. He looks better and stronger than he did the day before. The bruise from last week’s keeplock has blued and veined, giving him a tough-guy look. His gray skin is now pink with blood. The silver at his temples not as prominent in the cell’s dim light. He places the compact under the bed of hair and selects a soft ball of it, rolls it between his fingers, rubs it along his cheek, stashes it in his pocket.
Lila gathers letters and strides efficiently through the swinging door in the low wall. “Here,” she says. “The keeplock letters for D block, and here are the forward lists.” She hands Moses the stack and list of inmates who have been transferred to other facilities or moved to a different block. He smiles at her. She winces. “Are you OK?” She brings her right hand to her face, “Do you want to go to the infirmary?”
“I’m fine. Hey, why do you think Mann would write a story like that? Aschenbach seems like a good enough guy at the beginning. Why does he make him suffer like that?”
“That’s interesting,” she says, turning to him and putting her hand on her hip. “Wilthauser says you have to resist the desire to bring the author into it. You should look at how the story functions instead. There is a striking connection, though, between the character and Mann himself, you can tell by just reading the footnotes. So I don’t know why he does it. Maybe he does it to punish himself and his own urges.”
Moses hasn’t thought of that. He read the footnotes and now that she mentions it he remembers the connection between Aschenbach and Mann. “I have a preliminary thesis. Would you like to hear it?” he asks.
“Preliminary? Moses, the paper’s due in two days!”
“There was a delay,” he says. He would tell her Collin commandeered his glasses and he couldn’t get started until yesterday, but he’s embarrassed that he was pushed around like a weak old man.
She seals her lips shut and closes her teeth, setting her face in professorial judgement. “OK. Let’s