know how Palomino resisted so much. His was a torment beyond words. I don’t know through which channels he was informed that someone was plotting to poison him inside the prison and had been doing so even prior to his incarceration. The family of the man he killed prosecuted him far beyond his misfortune. They weren’t satisfied with his fifteen-year sentence or with the way it dragged his family into clamorous ruin: they carried their thirst for revenge even lower. And then they would hide behind the cellar doorjambs and between one spore and the next of the lichens that grow on incarcerated fingers, in search of the most secret passageways of the prison; and so they would move around here, with more freedom than before in the light of day for this unjust sentence, and they would flutter their infamous ambushy eyelashes in the air that the prisoner had no choice but to breathe. Being notified of that, Palomino, as you’ll imagine, suffered a terrible shock; he knew it and could do nothing from then on to make it disappear. A man of good stature, like him, feared such a death, not for himself, of course, but for her and for them, the innocent offspring skewered with stigma and orphanhood. Hence, the minute-by-minute anxiety and fright in the everyday fight for his life. Ten years had passed like this when I saw him for the first time. In his soul there awoke that tormented, not pity and compassion, but religious and almost inexplicable beatific transformation. He didn’t evoke pity. His heart was filled with something perhaps milder and calmer and nearly sweet. When I looked at him, I no longer felt compelled to unlock his shackles or dress the blackish-green wounds that were open at the end of all his ends. I wouldn’t have done any of that. In the face of such a plea, such a superhuman attitude of dread, I always wanted to leave him as he was, to march out step-by-step, startled, with pauses, line-by-line, toward the fatal crossroads, toward death under oath, so much has time revealed. Back then Palomino no longer sought help. He only filled his heart with something more vague and ideal, more serene and sweet; and it was pleasant, a merciful pleasure, to let him climb his hill, to let him walk through the hallways in the dark, entering and exiting the cold cells, in his horrendous game of shaky trapezes, agonizingly flying toward fate, with no fixed point for him to catch. With his fleecy red beard and eyes polar algae green, tattered uniform, skittish, abashed, he always seemed to see everything. An obstinate gesture of disbelief bounced off his dreadful just man lips, his vermilion hair, his mended pants and even his handicapped fingers that sought, in the full extent of his prisoner chapel, a safe place to lean and rest, without ever being able to find one. How many times I saw him at death’s door! During work one day, he came to the print shop. Silent, pensive, taciturn, Palomino was cleaning some black rubber belts in a corner of the shop, and from time to time, he’d shoot a most watchful glance at his surroundings, making his eyeballs furtively roll, with the visionary air of a nocturnal bird that catches sight of dreadful ghosts. He suddenly jerked back. On repeated occasions I had caught one of his coworkers casting, from one landmark to the next, noticeable expressions and uttering strange words of subtle aversion, perhaps without a reason, on the other side of the shop. Since their intention couldn’t have been pleasing to my friend, given the background story I’ve already mentioned, such behavior caused him to experience an awkward jolt and a sharp stinging sensation that frayed his every nerve. The gratuitous hater, in turn, was surprised when he noticed this and, serenity now lost, poured out a few drops from a glass carafe with rather meaningful clumsiness and alarm; the color and density of the liquid was almost completely enveloped and veiled by a winged spiral of smoke coming from over by the motors. I don’t know how to describe where those long mysterious tears ending up falling, but the man who shed them continued rifling through his work tools, each time with more visible alarm until he couldn’t possibly have been aware of what he was doing. Palomino observed him without moving, overwhelmed by thought, with his eyes fixed, hanging on that maneuver that caused in him intense expectation and distressing anxiety. Then the worker’s hands proceeded to assemble a lead ingot between other bars resting on the workbench. Palomino took his eyes off him and, dumbfounded, absorbed, downcast, he superimposed circles on the wounded fantasy of suspicion, released affinities, discovered more knots, reharnessed fatal intentions and summited sinister staircases … Another day a mysterious guest came in off the street. She went up to the typesetter and spoke to him at length: their words were indecipherable with all the noise of the shop. Palomino jumped up, stared at her carefully, studying her from head to toe, pale with fear … ‘Look, Palomino!’ I consoled him. ‘Just forget about it; there’s no way.’ And he, in every response, rested his forehead on his hands, stained from being shut in and abandoned, defeated, powerless. Only a few months after they brought me here, he was the closest, most loyal and righteous friend I had.”
Solís becomes visibly emotional and so do I.
“Are you cold?” he asks with sudden tenderness.
For a while the large room has been filled with a dense fog that turns blue in strange veils around the hourglasses of red light. Through the high-reaching windows one can see that it’s still raining. It really is quite cold.
Notes dispersed from distant sight-singing, as if from between compacted cotton impregnated by swarfs of ice. It’s the penitentiary band rehearsing the Peruvian national anthem. Those notes resound, and in my spirit they exert an unexpected suggestion, to the extent that I almost feel the very lyrics of the song, syllable after syllable, set in, nailed with gigantic spikes into each of the wayward sounds. The notes crisscross, iterate, stamp, squeal, reiterate, and destroy timid bevels.
“Ah, what torture that man endured!” the prisoner exclaims with rising pity. And he continues narrating between ongoing silences, during which he undoubtedly tries to ensnare terrible memories:
“His was an indestructible obsession to keep from falling, consolidated by God knows who. Many people said, ‘Palomino is mad.’ Mad! Is it possible for someone to be mad who, under normal circumstances, is concerned for his endangered existence? And is it possible for someone to be mad who, suffering the claws of hate, even with the very complicity of the justice system, takes steps to avoid that danger and to try to put an end to it with all his exacerbated might of a man who deems everything possible, based on his own painful experience? Mad? No! Too sane perhaps! With that formidable persuasion over such unquestionably possible consequences, who gave him such an idea? Although Palomino had often exposed the hidden grim wires that, according to him, could inwardly vibrate to the very threat of his existence, it was hard for me to clearly see that danger. ‘Because you don’t know those wicked men,” Palomino grumbled undaunted. After arguing with him all I could, I fell silent. ‘They write to me at my house,’ he said to me another day, ‘and they make me see it all over again; while my release could come soon, they’d pay any sum to keep me from getting out. Yes. Today more than ever, danger is at my side, my friend …’ And his final words choked me with thrashing sobs. The truth is that, facing Palomino’s constant despair, I ended up suffering, at times, and especially as of late, sudden and profound crises of concern for his life, admitting the possibility of some form of even the darkest treachery, and I even verified for myself, arguing with the rest of the inmates, thereby testing, with who knows what kind of unexpected grounds of decisive weight, the sensibility with which Palomino was reasoning. But that’s not all. Occasions also arose when it wasn’t doubt I was feeling, but an indisputable certainty of the danger, and I myself left him and went to the meeting with new suspicions and vehement warnings of my own, about the horror of what could transpire, and this is exactly what he did when he was calmly standing in some visionary oblivion. I loved him very much, it’s true; his situation was of great interest to me, always scared stiff from head to toe; and I tacitly helped him search for the carabids59 of his nightmare. In the end, I actually investigated the concealed pockets and minor actions of countless inmates and officers at the establishment, in search of the hidden hair of his imminent tragedy … all this is true. However, given what I’ve said, you’ll also see that by taking so much interest in Palomino, I slowly became his torturer, one of his own executioners. ‘You be careful!’ I’d say to him with foreboding anguish. Palomino would jump in place and, trembling, turn in every direction, wanting to escape and not knowing where to go. And then we both felt terrible despair, fenced in by the invulnerable, implacable, absolute, eternal stone walls. Of course, Palomino barely ate. How could he be expected to? He barely drank too. He might not have breathed. In each morsel he saw latent deadly poison. In each drop of water, each atom of the atmosphere, his tenacious scrupulousness nuanced to the brink of hyperesthesia
