Also as Miss Ruby had said, most of the women in the clothes shop were housed together. They arrived in a group in the morning, were escorted to the dining hall or commissary in a group, and were taken off together to a separate floor at night. I hadn’t been moved over to their quarters, but I was closely monitored now by the CO’s. So closely that I decided I had better speak only Italian, or my fractured Spanish, from now on, even in my cell.

My withdrawal from English made Solina and the crowd begging for letters at first tearful, and then furious. In revenge, Solina started smoking heavily in the cell, as if hoping to provoke me into yelling at her in English instead of Italian. She fell asleep each night with a cigarette burning on the floor beside her, when I would climb down to make sure it was out—I didn’t want to go through everything I was enduring only to suffocate in a cigarette fire.

It seemed absurd to think that I could fool the CO’s into thinking I wasn’t really an English speaker, but I hoped to keep the pretense in place long enough to learn something about Nicola’s end. CO Polsen was the likeliest to get me into trouble. When he was on duty in the afternoon, responsible for taking me over for recreation after my work shift ended, he showered me with foul language. When he did that, I treated him as if he were part of the ambient air, but if he tried touching me I would shout loudly—still in Italian—and keep shouting until I could move away from him to a public space. It wasn’t a great defense, but it was the only one I could think of. I hoped I learned something useful soon, because I didn’t know how much time I’d have before either the women or Polsen decided to take me apart.

In the shop I trailed around with the smokers during our brief breaks, trying to ask them about Nicola or about the clothes—where did they go when we finished them? Illinois law said that anything manufactured in the prisons had to be for prison consumption, but I’d never seen any of these plain shirts or jackets for sale in our commissary. And our—or at least my coworkers’—output was enormous.

It was the size of the production, and the fact that no English speakers were working in the shop, that kept me going, despite my hacked–up hands and the fury that the foreman Erik Wenzel kept unleashing on me.