“Remember where you are right now,” she said, as if they could forget. “Take in your heaviness, your loneliness, how far you are from everyone who cares about you. Think about what brought you to serve your time. It is your crime and the decisions that led to it that will keep you shackled to toxic soil and prevent you from soaring as you are meant to do.”
Some of the girls sighed, bored by another obvious tactic to get them to feel regret. Talia wondered why the staff cared so much about contrition when they were already being punished. She asked to use the bathroom. The meditation lady gave her a disappointed stare but nodded.
“I have to go too,” said Lorena, who was there for setting her bedroom on fire after her mother wouldn’t let her go to a party.
Soon everyone was saying they had to piss. A group effort to reclaim what little power they had on that mountain, or just to make their day more interesting. Later, Sister Susana called Talia to her office. She’d heard Talia initiated the bathroom revolt during the meditation workshop.
“You want me to be sorry for having to do what is only natural?”
“I’ve been reviewing your file. It’s time for you to write a letter of apology to the man you hurt. I think it will be healing for both of you.”
“I don’t need to be healed, and I don’t need to be forgiven.”
“Write it anyway.”
“He’s the one who killed a defenseless animal for fun. I did what was fair.”
“It’s not up to you to decide who deserves retribution.”
“Then why is it up to a judge and now you how to discipline me?”
Talia remembered that meeting when she trapped Sister Susana with the pillowcase the night the girls fled. The old nun who thought she knew it all.
She never wrote the letter, but Horacio’s face started coming to Talia’s mind more often. She’d look out the dormitory window, worrying how she was going to get out of there and make it back to Bogotá in time for her flight, and suddenly his face would obscure her vision; skin raw, eyes swollen shut, and she’d try to will him out of her head, wondering if the others were right: she was as much of a beast as he was.
* * *
The road signs for Barbosa became more frequent. Aguja pulled into a gas station and as he fueled up, they listened to a pair of viejos at another pump arguing about the peace accord recently ratified by Congress. One man in a sombrero vueltiao, face shriveled as old fruit, said the guerrillas would never abandon the monte or their criminal activity, that they were made only for battle. The other man, wishbone-legged, insisted that if only to end the massacres of the last decades, a meager treaty was better than none at all. “Talking about the past, the violence, is like digging up the dead,” he said. “The pursuit of peace is the only way to give those who died a proper funeral.”
Aguja returned the gas nozzle to its cradle. “You hear that, ni?a? You’re leaving our country when things are starting to get good.”
“Just because I’m leaving doesn’t mean I won’t come back.”
“Sure you’ll come back, but you’ll be different.”
In the gas station bathroom, she found a urine-coated floor, shit-lined toilet rim. A stench like death. At the facility, Talia was often made to clean lavatories. It was supposedly old-fashioned to assign labor as castigation, but the nuns must have been nostalgic. If a girl was caught cursing or breaking some rule, off to the toilets she was sent to scrub caked menstrual blood and stains from the graying bowls. Talia never cared though. She was used to cleaning. She’d grown up in Perla’s lavandería until it went out of business and Mauro rented it to a dog groomer that went out of business too.
When her grandmother lost control of her body, forgetting how to speak, to eat, and everything else, Talia was the one who changed the liners of her underpants and washed her clothes when she soiled them. It didn’t bother Talia. Her father said it was a gift to care for someone who once took care of you, and love can cure what medicine can’t.
Together, they nursed Perla. Talia tried to wake her sleeping mind with the stories she’d raised her on, like the one about the boy Perla knew in childhood who ate seeds and grew watermelons in his belly that a farmer cut out of him every spring and then sewed him back up for the next harvest. Or about Eutémia, the distant cousin who brushed her hair so much that vanity turned it blue and she had to cut it all off.
Talia’s favorite story was of Don Ismael, who lived on the banks of the Río Magdalena and could wave his hands in the air to make rain start or stop in order to control the river swells and floods. Talia longed for his powers, wishing he could restore her grandmother’s memory, resurrect her dying body the same way he could draw water from the sky.