MANAUS
Marta awoke to find her door ajar, a crack of light spilling in from the corridor. At first, she was too wary to approach it. What if they were toying with her, what if someone, maybe The Goat, was standing on the other side?
She sat up, legs together, fighting the urge to urinate. After a while she could stand it no more. She stood, reached for the knob and drew the door toward her.
No Goat.
She stuck her head into the corridor.
Nobody.
She went to the bucket and used it.
No one disturbed her.
She pulled up her panties, washed her hands at the sink, and resumed her seat on the bed.
Reason told her the open door was no accident, no mistake. But it might have been, and so she’d be foolish not to take advantage of it.
When they’d brought her in, there’d been a dusty burlap sack over her head. She hadn’t seen anything of the building, and had little idea of its floor plan, except for the location of the shower. That was about ten meters down the corridor to the right. Roselia took her there every other day in the small hours of the morning when the rest of the house was asleep. The soap was brown and smelled like medicine. The water was lukewarm, never hot. She only got two minutes, and she was expected to dry herself with a rough fragment of terrycloth; but after the grinding monotony of her prison, every shower felt like a holiday.
When it was over, Roselia would throw some clean clothing at her and push her back to her cell where she was permitted to dress.
But it wasn’t the bathroom she was thinking of at the moment. She was thinking about another door she’d seen in the corridor, bigger and heavier than all the others. She just knew it led to the outside.
Gingerly, she stepped through the doorway. To her left, she could hear voices. Except for the choice of words, they could have been coming from the playground of an all-girls’ school
One girl said, “I told her she could kiss my ass.”
Another was saying she didn’t care about how many other girls he’d done it to, there was no way she was going to let him do it to her.
Still another exclaimed “… three hundred Reais. Can you imagine? Three hundred Reais?” As if that was a fortune, when it wasn’t even half of what Marta used to pay for one of her dresses.
The whores. It had to be them.
Marta turned the other way, to the right, toward the bathroom, toward the door that led to freedom. As she scurried along, a random thought popped into her head: her uncle had once given her a pair of hamsters for Christmas. By Easter, they were dead, but she remembered how there’d been a maze inside their cage. They’d scurry back and forth along the corridors of that maze. They’d gone on scurrying, every waking hour, until they died.
Her heart gave a leap. She’d been right about the door. It did lead to the outside. She could see daylight shining through a gap at the bottom.
Cautiously, she reached out a hand and turned the knob. The door didn’t budge, but a loud bell began ringing with an ear-splitting clang.
She ran back to her cell and sat on the bed. A moment later, she heard a door open and a woman’s unhurried steps coming along the corridor to her left. The steps paused. The ringing stopped. The girls, too, had fallen silent.
Roselia appeared in the doorway.
“Tomorrow,” she said, with a triumphant grin, “try going the other way.”
She slammed the door, and Marta heard the key turning in the lock.