When I first arrived at San Pedro, I didn’t feel safe leaving my room; now, nine months later, I didn’t even want to. Even if I had wanted to, I couldn’t have, because I didn’t have the energy. For two days I hardly ate, and after that I couldn’t get my appetite back. The sight of meat made me sick and I stopped eating it altogether. Even if it was cooked, I still saw that man’s brains spilling out onto my plate.
I couldn’t do anything. I was depressed. On the rare occasions when I was hungry, I ate. I drank when I was thirsty and went to the toilet when my body told me to. That was all. The only thing I actually wanted to do was sleep. And much of the time I couldn’t even do that.
That was the period when I started taking sleeping pills. I was having real trouble sleeping, so I went to see the doctor for a prescription. He didn’t ask any questions. Why would he, I suppose? On the scale of drug problems in San Pedro prison, sleeping pills didn’t even rate.
Once I started taking pills, I did even less. I only saw light once a day. With less food in my body, I didn’t need to go to the bathroom as much. When I needed to urinate, I did so in a bucket that I emptied whenever it became full. And when I got sick of emptying it all the time, I bought another bucket.
I couldn’t think properly. Even my mind had slowed down. The only reason I ever had to get out of bed was for the lista, and if that hadn’t been compulsory, I wouldn’t have gone. Getting up was a lot more of a struggle with the sleeping pills in my system, but somehow I still managed to set my alarm clock and make it down to the courtyard every morning. If ever I didn’t wake up, my neighbour Gonzalez would bang on my door and force me to get up, or they’d send for Ricardo, who had a spare key to my room.
After falling out of bed and stumbling down the stairs, it was easy to pass the actual roll call. All you had to do was wait, hidden among the other prisoners, listen for your name and then call out ‘¡Presente!’ before heading back to your room. The guards sometimes looked at me suspiciously because I could hardly keep my eyes open. Once or twice they checked my breath for alcohol, but nothing ever happened. They all knew that the governor was my friend.
After lista, I would take another sleeping pill. And when I woke up, I would take another one. With the pills, sometimes I could sleep for sixteen hours straight, although at other times I hardly slept for days and nights on end, even if I took three or four. It was dark in my room and I began to lose track of time. Eventually, my whole body clock became completely disoriented. Sometimes I would look at the clock, just out of habit, but after reading it I wouldn’t have known whether it was three o’clock in the afternoon or three o’clock in the morning.
I began ordering more and more pills from the doctor to help me get back into a normal sleeping routine. There was no limit to the number of boxes he could order from the prison clinic, and they were very cheap because the pills were copies manufactured in the factories in El Alto. When I needed stronger dosages, one of the inmates knew of a farmacia on the outside that didn’t ask for prescriptions. These pills were more expensive and I had to pay someone else a propina to get them, but it was worth it because I didn’t need to take so many doses in one go.
I don’t recall much of what happened during those few weeks, but it wasn’t much, I know that. When I wasn’t asleep, I often got drunk on my own. One afternoon, I woke up and felt that my lips were caked with dry blood. When I looked in the mirror, I had cuts and bruises all over my face. I didn’t know if I had been in a fight or if I had simply fallen over. I never found out. I was too embarrassed to ask anyone.
The few times that my head was clear, I remember the main feeling I had was simply that I wanted to die. I thought about death a lot, but I was afraid to kill myself. I was a coward. Every time I thought of suicide, the image of that rapist’s head being stomped on came into my mind. So, I started fantasising about a little red button in the middle of my wooden table that I could press to end my life in an instant, without pain. I could press it and just disappear.
One thing I noticed about sleeping pills is that they rob you of your dreams. I think I stopped having dreams completely, or maybe I just couldn’t remember them. Whenever I tried to get off the pills, I had the most horrible nightmares, usually about Yasheeda, and I always remembered the exact details. The one that recurred most strongly involved her ex-boyfriend. I had seen his photo when it fell out of her diary one morning, so I knew what he looked like. He was tall and strong and, in my nightmares, he was always nice to me.
The worst nightmare occurred on the night that the police informed me I was due to go to court the following day for the beginning of my trial. In the nightmare, Yasheeda’s ex-boyfriend sat me down and explained that she had made a big mistake because she had been confused at the time she met me.
‘She’s with me now,’ he said. ‘I just wanted you to know it was nothing you did wrong. Don’t feel bad.’ He was really apologetic. And then they kissed in front of me and it was like I wasn’t even there.