Money to Burn by Ricardo Piglia Page A

shock to his father was so severe that he died of a heart attack when he heard the news. The judge told Brignone that while the sentence might have been for mere complicity, he deserved to go down for parricide.
    When he came out of jail, despite the money he inherited from his father and his mother's and brothers' desperation - they being respected and honest members of the professional classes - but under the influence of his prison contacts, he embarked on a path of crime.
    'In clink' (he would sometimes recount) 'I learnt what life is: you're inside and they bug you, and you soon learn to lie and to swallow the venom inside you. It was in jail I turned into a rent-boy, a drug addict, I became a real thief, a Peronist, and a card sharp; I learnt to fight dirty, how to use a headbutt to split the nose of anyone who tried to split your soul from your body if you so much as looked at them the wrong way; how to carry a joint hidden in my balls, and to stash the wraps of dope in my arsehole; I read every history book in the library, I didn't know what else to do with myself, you can ask me who won which battle in whatever year you choose and I'll tell you, 'cause in jail you have fuck-all to do and so you read, gaze into space, you get annoyed by the noise made by the brutes they bang up there, you become poisoned and you fill up with venom - you might as well have inhaled the stuff; you listen to the cons forever repeating the same nonsense, you think it must be Thursday by now but it's really still only coming up to Monday afternoon; I learnt to play chess, how to make belts out of silver foil from cigarette packets I stuck together; how to fuck my girlfriend when we were allowed together in the yard during visiting hour, in a kind of small tent made out of a sheet, over to one side. The other prisoners helped you out, if they were also at it with their wives and the kids were there too and they needed to hide to get it off, those whores are made of steel, they pull down their knickers and get astride you, while the screws look on, they really enjoy it, laughing at how dumb and hot you are for them, grown men with no chance to make it, because that's why you're banged up, to stop you fucking, and that's why you fill up with poison, they've got you in an ice box, they put you in a cage full of males and none of you can fuck, you want to and they beat you, or worse, they make you feel like a beggar, a hobo, you end up talking to yourself, hallucinating' (and the Gaucho let him ramble on, saying yes every so often, sometimes going so far as to take his hand, in the darkness, both of them awake, smoking, face upwards, in bed, in some room, in some hotel, in some provincial village, hidden, on guard, two twins hand in hand, slagging off the cops, with the pistol wrapped in a towel on the floor beside them, the car concealed beneath the trees, taking a break, attempting to take a rest and calm down, to leave off going wild for one night at least, and get to sleep in a bed).
    And the Kid wouldn't let up, it was there he'd learnt to feel the screws' venom when they bugged him, just because ... because he was young, because he was pretty, because your cock was bigger than theirs (said the Kid), 'I learnt to store all the hatred inside, that terrible poison, like a fire, loathing is what keeps you alive, you spend the night unable to sleep, in the cage, staring at the lightbulb on the ceiling, swinging away feebly, half yellow, lit up twenty-four hours a day so that they can always spy on you, forcing you to keep your hands outside the bedcovers, so you can't have a wank, and when a screw goes by and looks in through the spyhole, he sees you there, awake and thinking. Above all you learn to think in the clink: by definition a prisoner is a guy who spends the day thinking. D'you remember, Gaucho? You live inside your head, you withdraw inside it, invent yourself another life, right inside your brain, you come and go inside your mind, as