There's a hole,
there's a hole in the stout wooden door
of the cell in the cellar of the jail
(where the Medical School now stands
in the Plaza de Santo Domingo).
There were mice in this jail.
There were cats for the mice.
There were holes in the doors for the cats
to catch mice in the cold prison cellars.
It is fifteen ninety-five.
Justa Méndez lies sick
on her cot in the cell
with the hole in the door.
And the mice come and go.
And her cell-mate calls out:
Catalina Enríquez cries
for her husband who may
or may not lie awake
in some cell in the cellar
of this Mexican jail
with its cats and its mice.
(Upstairs, doctors parade
in their coats and their ties,
talking brightly of cures
and of saving lives.)
Domingo, the African slave
of the man with the keys,
knows the taste of despair
— to be caged without light —
and he kneels on the floor
by the hole for the cats.
And he whispers: "What tale
shall I tell? Whose name
shall I seek in this prison?"
(Upstairs, telephones ring
and computer screens blink.)
Catalina Enríquez
lies prone by the hole.
"Tell my husband I'm well.
Tell him I have confessed
all the Sabbaths we kept,
and that he must confess,
he most hold nothing back,
for in silence is death,
and the loss of his soul."
Upstairs,
(where old medical tools are displayed
next to walls scarred with names)
Justa Méndez is called to account.
And her face streaks with tears
as she tells the men all
she has seen at the hole in the door
where the cats wait for mice
in the cells in the cellars.
The Inquisitors show
no concern, no surprise,
for they already know
of the whispers and sighs.
Domingo has told them
what passed through the hole
in the door in the cell
in the cellar. The scribes
dip their pens.
[It's all there
in cold ink, across town,
in Book One-fifty-four
on page one-sixteen R,
in Gallery Four:
"Inquisitors' Papers";
in Archives locked safe
in the cellblocks
of old Lecumberri,
that prison where so many
patriots, killers, and thieves
took their last earthly breath
against bullet-chipped stone;
and where cells racked with books
invite scholars to peer
through the holes in the doors.]