Severe understaffing has also forced the institution to accept the help of different religious groups that run the daycare, teach courses or just come to talk to the inmates. Supply shortage of everything, including uniforms, make it possible for volunteers to walk the institution unmarked and blend in with the boarding population. Cristina walks, inconspicuously, along a ramp that leads to the open playground. The sky is a deep blue, not a single cloud to spoil its beauty. The day is warm and dry; the breeze is cooled by its trajectory across cold and hard surfaces. People sit on concrete benches on the periphery of the open space and talk, knit or text on their cellular phones while a game of kicking ball unfolds. The cheers rise and fall with the skill of the kickers or in celebration of an air catch. There are no cheerleader outfits or pom-poms, just random cheers and the bump, bump noise of empty two liter soda bottles beat against hard concrete. Different, maybe simpler, but still recess.
Cristina finds a bench next to Maigualida. From the top of her shaved head, to the hard soles of her cracked feel, Maigualida’s coffee colored skin is mined by scars and burns of different shapes that have not healed well or completely. In the absence of a bra under the extra large white t-shirt, her breasts seem almost unnoticeable. Unfazed, Maigualida pulls out her left boob and feeds the newborn infant. She turns and looks Cristina in the eyes as she sits down.
“Get any visitors during the weekend?”
“No. My family has their own problems. They don’t have time for me.”
“Did you get to work at all?”
“The Director asked a group of us to clean the classrooms on the second floor. But then she paid us shit. I am not working for her again.”
With a second grade education, Maigualida’s only alternative is physical labor. She refuses to attend the courses offered in the INOF to learn how to read and write. Getting a high school diploma is a goal that has never crossed her mind. Like more than half of the inmate population, Maigualida has spent most of her life inside state institutions for crimes such as aggravated armed robbery and recently, raping a woman with a broom stick. At nine month pregnant, she threw herself down a flight of stairs in a final attempt to have a miscarriage. Five days later, Maigualida gave birth to her child inside the prison system. Jorge suckles happily from her breast, unaware of all the things she did to prevent his birth. He wears a black hoody, like a preemie malandro, and snuggles comfortably into his mother’s mutilated arm. Maigualida has two long, shiny, pale scars extending from her wrists to the inside of her elbows. Even though she does not wear long-sleeves, she turns the inside of her arm downward when Cristina sees it.
“You know, many people cut their skin; it is very common. People do it because they can’t express their pain through crying or screaming. It is a silent way to cry.” Cristina had looked up self-mutilation after the first day of volunteering, when she noticed many women with thin scars on the arms, face and legs. Cristina thought that diffusing the situation and making inmates feel normal was the best way to broach the subject. “Maybe you could go to group therapy and find a better way to express your pain.”
“My blood is worth the same as my tears… nothing. And anyway, group therapy is for locas. I am not trading stories with a bunch of crazies.” Even though it is the first time most of these women have access to education and psychological treatment, the classrooms of the institution remain almost empty. Every day the women do the same thing: talk, play cards, send text messages, watch the game or, in the case of Maigualida, wait for an odd job to come up. They waste away in boredom and fail to attend a single class even for the sake of varying the routine and breaking the monotony. Everything changes in the penitentiary. The social structure reverts to its basic form and hierarchies materialize around the strongest inmates, the women who assume the role of men in their absence. One has been circling Cristina for ten minutes, observing her from behind walls and columns, like a coyote circles a lost lamb. Finally, she decides to walk over.
“Hey Maigualida, is she fresh meat?”
Cristina does not feel threatened. She sees a handful of security guards chatting less than twenty feet away. Two more walking around the prison yard scanning, reading the overall mood of the population.
“Yeah, she’s fresh, too bad for you she is not a boarder.” The harshness of Maigualida’s retort stops the inmate in her tracks. She waits, thinking that maybe it’s a joke. Maigualida doesn’t lift her gaze from Jorge’s face, but whispers to him as his tender fingers coil around her hardened thumb. Without waiting for the punch line, the coyote woman makes a retreat back into the horde and disappears. Cristina is grateful, but knows better than to express her thankfulness out loud.
“Well Maigualida, it’s been nice talking to you. I’m going to a session of group therapy.”
“Wait, I’ll walk with you. There are bad people roaming this place.” Maigualida smiles at her own joke and puts the baby in the stroller. “I am going back to my room.”
They walk together down one side of the yard, common ground and stop before they go in different directions. “Are you sure you don’t want to go with me?”
“Are you crazy? No therapy is going to cure me.” Without ceremony, Maigualida turns away and pushes the stroller with Jorge inside down a ramp leading to the dormitories of the most dangerous criminals. Her gaunt figure disappears in the darkness.
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