Chapter 9 - The Price of Pride
Six months later, the dry heat of early summer settled over the northern outskirts of Mexico City.
The visitor’s courtyard of the Reclusorio Norte was a bleak, concrete expanse enclosed by double layers of chain-link fence and razor wire. The air smelled of cheap bleach, diesel exhaust, and the desperate, lingering sorrow of broken lives.
Esteban sat at a battered metal table bolted to the concrete floor.
He was unrecognizable.
The crisp, imported Italian suits were gone, replaced by a faded beige prison uniform with his inmate identification number stamped across the left breast. His once-immaculate hair was cropped short to prevent lice, his posture was hunched and defensive, and a dark, fading bruise marred his left cheekbone—a brutal reminder of the prison hierarchy he had tried, and miserably failed, to navigate.
Across the table sat Leticia.
She wore a faded polyester dress that had lost its color years ago, her face gaunt and haggard without her expensive cosmetics, her grey hair tied back with a cheap plastic clip. Her hands, once adorned with diamond rings that Esteban had bought on corporate credit, were rough, dry, and spotted from the long hours she now spent working as an assistant in an industrial laundry facility in Monterrey.
"The lawyer says the second appeal was rejected, Esteban," Leticia whispered, her voice lifeless and hollow. "The judge refused to reduce the eight-year sentence. He said the fraud was aggravated by the abuse of executive trust."
Esteban didn't look at her. He kept his eyes fixed on the pitted surface of the metal table, his fingernails bitten down to the quick.
"Did you bring the money for the commissary?" he muttered, his voice hoarse from months of shouting over prison sirens. "The guards take half of it if you don't pay the block boss. I need soap. I need clean socks."
"I only had three hundred pesos, son," Leticia sobbed quietly, dabbing her eyes with a worn tissue. "Valeria lost her job at the call center last week. They found out about the civil fraud judgments against her name and fired her. We can barely afford the rent on the room. We eat beans and tortillas twice a day, Esteban. Beans and tortillas!"
A bitter, hysterical laugh tore from Esteban’s throat. He looked up, his bloodshot eyes boring into his mother’s face with pure, unadulterated venom.
"Beans and tortillas?" he hissed. "You're complaining about beans and tortillas? Do you remember what you said to Doña Rosa the day she made chicken soup for me? Do you remember how you called her an illiterate peasant who smelled like the village?"
Leticia flinched as if struck. "Esteban... I did that for you! I wanted you to have a wife of stature! I wanted you to be respected!"
"You destroyed me!" Esteban roared, slamming his handcuffed wrists onto the metal table with a deafening clang that made the armed guards at the perimeter take a step forward. "You filled my head with your disgusting, pathetic pride! You made me believe that to be a man, I had to treat the woman who gave me everything like a dog! I had the world, Mom! I had a penthouse in Polanco! I had an Audi! I had a son who loved me, and a wife who controlled half the logistics industry in this country!"
He leaned across the table, his face contorted with agony and self-loathing.
"Mariana didn't destroy me," he whispered, tears streaming down his hollow cheeks. "I destroyed myself. Because I listened to you."
The buzzer sounded overhead—a harsh, mechanical wail signaling the end of the visiting hour.
"Inmate Morales! Stand up!" a guard barked from the perimeter gate.
Esteban slowly rose to his feet, his chains clinking against the concrete floor. He didn't say goodbye to his mother. He didn't look back as she reached through the wire partition, calling his name with desperate, broken wails. He simply shuffled forward into the dark, echoing corridor of the cell block, disappearing into the shadows of the prison he would call home for the next eight years of his youth.
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Leticia stood alone in the visitor’s pen, clutching her empty plastic purse against her chest, the heavy iron gates slamming shut behind her with the sound of absolute, irrevocable doom.
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