Money to Burn by Ricardo Piglia Page B

though it were a screen, as if you had your own personal television set, you have your very own channel and project your life on it, the life you could be leading, isn't that right, little brother? You turn to rubber, and you go deep inside and travel, with whatever quantity of drug you can muster, bye-bye, you're off, taking a taxi, getting down at the street corner where your old woman lives, going into the bar at the crossroads of Rivadavia and Medrano Streets, to look out of the window at the fellows sweeping the pavement, or at whatever takes your fancy. On one occasion I spent three days building a house, I swear, beginning with the foundations and then building upwards, working by memory, the structure, the joints, every floor and wall, the staircase, the roof, all the furniture and soft furnishings. Once you've finished building, you set a bomb and blow it all up, 'cause the whole time you're there thinking that everyone is trying to drive you mad. That's what they're there for. And, sooner or later, they do drive you mad. That's if you spend the whole time thinking. At the end of the day you've had so many thoughts and so little movement that you are, I dunno, like those fellows who go off and climb a mountain and sit themselves down to meditate for six or seven years, right? Hermits, they used to call them, off in a cave, those guys, thinking about God, the Holy Virgin Mary, making vows, refusing to eat, just like you, really, when you're inside, so many thoughts and so little actual experience, you end up like a skull, like a flower-pot growing a plant, those thoughts are devouring you like worms in dung. If I told you everything I thought when I was inside I'd have to keep talking, I dunno, probably for the same amount of time I was a prisoner. I'd remember little girls of eight or ten years old I'd known at school, and I'd see them grow up, I'd see them develop, filling out, and at siesta time I'd watch their skinny legs in their little white ankle socks, their little tits starting to stick out, and within a week of being in that state I was already getting them moving, I didn't allow them to grow up too much. And I'd take and shove them down on to the embankment, 'cause alongside the traintrack there's some wasteland, there before you get to the canefields and a short strip of countryside, and it was there I went and shagged them, making them lie on their backs, holding them face upwards too, both my hands under their butt, then I pushed it into them, well all this thinking took about an hour, and in the end I took their virginity. In fact there was one who went to school with me, it must have been in about third grade, and afterwards I began to think I'd really taken her to the embankment at Adrogué where the train goes around the bend towards Burzaco. This girl wanted to be a virgin on her wedding night because her fiancé was a doctor, you know, someone with plenty of money, and so I took her the other way. I told her, your hubby won't notice anything, you'll stay sealed and intact, and she lay there face down in the field, with my cock stuck in her arse, a young girl aged fifteen, maximum, a real little whore, placid as could be because she was going to her wedding with an unruptured hymen, all very medical. Sometimes I'd think of a woman and I'd sense her there on the cell windowsill and I'd begin sucking her clitoris, she could be any kind of girl, my sister if you like. But the women aren't the worst of it because, for good or ill, you can see the women, the worst part is being banged up so you can't live, it's as if you were dead, and you have to do what they want, and that whole empty life breaks you apart in the end, it fills you with resentment and with venom. That's why whoever goes to prison is jail-meat, goes in and out, in and out, and that's because of the well of poison they fill you up with.'
    The Kid had sworn that they would never get him inside again, they'd have to catch him asleep, but