Hot Sur by Laura Restrepo Read Free Book Online

Manninpox prison, which hadn’t been easy. Like he told me, you need to do a lot of yoga and take very long walks in the woods to go on with your life when the agony of strangers is just around the corner.
    “It’s not the most pleasant thing in the world to have a women’s maximum security prison up the road from where you sleep,” Ian Rose tells me. “If the concept of men locked up is perverse, women caged up is outright monstrous.”
    He had bought the house not knowing what was nearby. The real estate agent hadn’t told him anything, perhaps knowing he’d lose his client. And indeed he would have. But Rose had fallen in love at first sight with the house; everything about it had seemed a fulfillment of his dreams: the beauty of the surroundings, stone chimneys, high ceilings, spacious rooms, oak floors, the silence and splendid views. And while he was looking at it, his dogs had taken over the surrounding woods and did not want to leave. Besides, the price was unbeatable, so Rose took the offer on the fly without investigating the reason it was such a bargain.
    “I’m a liberal guy,” he asserts, “not sure I like the idea of locking up people as punishment so society can function. I find it appalling that two-thirds of the population of the United States trembles at what the other third can inflict on us, or that one-tenth of the population spends their lives in cages so the other nine-tenths can live in peace. And yet, if someone gave me the keys of all the cells of all the jails in the country and told me, ‘The freedom of the criminals is in your hands,’ I’d return the keys without using them.”
    He felt for the girls in Manninpox, but the truth was that he wouldn’t have liked to come upon one of them hiding in his garage, or rummaging through his kitchen. If Ian Rose didn’t want to think about Manninpox, it was because he did not know what to think. So he sidestepped the issue. The prison was some nine or ten miles from his house, up the road that blocked the view of the landscape those early mornings when he watched by the window. Even the name Manninpox sickened him. He hadn’t seen all of the prison’s structures up close, but he could imagine them; like all humans, he had a vivid impression of what a prison was. Where did such an impression come from? Maybe the movies or television, or some book or painting, or even some photograph  . . . but he had the feeling that things went beyond this, that the issue was more complicated than he imagined.
    “The concept of prison is so clearly engraved in our minds,” he tells me, “it’s almost as if we were born with it. Same thing with the grave. That sensation of being buried under the earth, with all the terror it implies, must also be innate. It’s not philosophy; it’s just common sense. We know what it is to take a deep breath, and we know how much space we need to move around. Thus, we deduce negatively what it would be like not being able to do either; we can imagine what it would be like to suffocate for lack of air, or to suffer a heart attack from the claustrophobia of being squeezed into a narrow cave. The grave, prison: different versions of the same thing.”
    In Ian Rose’s mind, Manninpox was a series of stark, immense interior spaces, six or seven floors of cages pressed on top of each other like a vertical zoo where the animals were only allowed the minimum living space. The outside was probably a great bulk of dark concrete with sharp angles, surrounded by barbed wire and electrified fences. A simple, impenetrable, abject monument in the middle of that idyllic greenery of pine, maple, and birch. Compared to such an imposing structure, the natural inhabitants of those woods—the black bear, the red fox, or the white-tailed deer—were dwarfed. That corner of the universe had fallen under the shadow of that fortress of cement, in which who knows how many women were packed in, making the air heavy with their distress and