25

TROUBLED TIMES

The night I got my sentence, I got drunk. Really drunk. And I got high, but it didn’t seem to work like it usually did. Maybe the stuff was cut with something, or maybe I just wasn’t feeling anything. When I arrived back from court, I bought two packs of cocaine on the way up to my room. Yasheeda was lying on our bed, watching TV. She had been waiting all afternoon for me to return, but I wished she hadn’t. I wanted to be alone.

‘How did it go?’ she asked as soon as I came in. In the transport bus on the way back to San Pedro I had decided not to say anything about what had happened. I would tell her at a better time.

‘The same as last time,’ I answered, sitting down to make a few lines on a CD cover. ‘Postponed again.’ Deep down, however, I was afraid of telling her. It had been six months since we had met, but I thought that if I told her, she would leave me.

Although I had been a prisoner all the time I had known Yasheeda, it had never felt that way. We had been able to do most things that normal couples do. We had lived together, we’d had friends around for dinner parties, we had eaten in restaurants. I had even been able to go out of the prison occasionally to spend time with her on the outside. One time, I had a guard escorting me who trusted me a lot and he left us alone together in a hotel room while he waited downstairs in reception.

One night before I was sentenced, Yasheeda and I had talked about our future together. We were both drunk, but she said that she would wait. ‘I want to be the first person to hug you when you’re a free man,’ she said. ‘I’ll be waiting at the gates when you get out.’ At the time, we didn’t know how long that would be, but Yasheeda said it didn’t matter; she would wait for me. If it took longer than expected and she couldn’t stay in Bolivia, then she would fly over from wherever she was.

Now that I had been sentenced, I was worried that everything would change. For a start, I could no longer pay to go out of the prison because the police considered me a higher escape risk. Also, I had spent my last five thousand dollars on bribing the judge. And any money I did get, I would need to save for my appeal.

Yasheeda had never cared about whether I was rich or not, but being completely poor meant that we wouldn’t be able to live like we used to. And the thing that would change most would be me. The whole time I had known her I’d been expecting to get out at any moment, so I had always felt like a free man. But now I wasn’t.

I couldn’t tell her. I did a line and held the CD case out to her.

‘Mmm. Not tonight,’ she said, looking at the coke out of the corner of her eye and waving it away. ‘I’m tired, honey. Let’s just relax and watch some TV.’

‘There’s nothing on. Come on. Just a little one. It’s no fun doing it on my own.’

She looked at the coke again and hesitated. ‘No, Tommy. What for? It’s a Tuesday night. Let’s do something else. We could borrow your friend’s video player, like you promised.’

‘Fine, then.’ I did Yasheeda’s line for her. She shook her head and sighed loudly so that I would notice, then went back to watching television.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ I could tell that she wanted to start an argument.

‘You know exactly what,’ she said, trying to change the channel with the remote control, but the batteries were flat.

‘What, then? Come on. Tell me.’

Yasheeda sat up in bed and leaned forward to get the remote closer to the TV. She held the button down, waving the control in front of the screen, still refusing to look at me. She always did that when we argued. Finally, she answered.

‘Tommy, I love you without the drugs. That’s not what I’m here for.’

I wanted to say to her, ‘That’s good coming from you,’ but I held back. We had met in a nightclub taking cocaine. She did it every single time I did. In fact, I had never seen her refuse before. Not once. Instead, I said, ‘But we always do it together.’

‘Yes, but I don’t do it every day and I never do it on my own. Cocaine is fun, Tommy, but I just think it’s not good for you to do it while you’re in prison.’

‘Well, I’m stuck here now. I haven’t got any other fucking option, have I?’ I yelled, banging my fist on the table so hard that the coke went everywhere. ‘I’m sorry that I can’t go out dancing and sightseeing like all your other boyfriends.’

‘Yes, you do,’ she said, throwing the remote control on to the blanket and getting up from the bed. ‘You do have an option, Tommy.’ I could see tears starting to form in her eyes. ‘You could not do it at all.’

‘Where are you going?’ I demanded, scraping the pile of coke back onto the CD case.

‘Out,’ she said, glaring at me in a way that dared me to say something or try to stop her. I turned my back on her and started chopping up another line with the same defiance, daring her to say something more.

‘You don’t need it, Tommy. You think you do, but you don’t,’ she whispered softly, closing the door behind her and pushing it from the outside to make sure it had shut properly.

It was dark, but I wasn’t going to chase after her. That was exactly what she wanted. Visiting hours were over and the gates were locked, so I knew that she would have to come back eventually. Half an hour went by, then another half-hour. I changed my mind and went out looking for her. However, she had left the prison on her own. Apparently, she had banged on the main gates and yelled until the guards came and let her out. The lieutenant told me she was crying.

‘What did you do to her, inglés?’ he asked me through the bars. ‘She’s a very pretty girl.’

‘I didn’t hit her,’ I snapped at him, and suddenly kicked at the gate without knowing why, so that he jumped back in surprise. If it had been any other officer, I might have been in trouble, but that guy was my friend and he was also fond of Yasheeda.

‘All right. Tranquilo.’ The lieutenant shook his head and looked at me strangely. ‘I didn’t say you did.’

Two days after our fight, Yasheeda went on another trip, this time to Rurrenabaque to do a tour of the Amazon jungle. After that, she was due to head home to Israel. Even though we had fought, I missed her a lot more than I imagined. She was the first thing on my mind when I woke up and the last thing I thought about before I fell asleep. During the day, I also had plenty of time to think about her. I was expecting a call from her any time and I must have checked that my phone was working at least ten times a day.

To pass the time, I began cleaning my room again; once in the morning, again after lunch and a final time before it got dark, even though it was already spotless. I must have folded my clothes a million times, and the plates and cutlery were always sparkling clean. I wanted everything to be absolutely perfect in case Yasheeda came back to surprise me. It would be just like her to turn up without warning. I waited and waited to hear from her, but she broke her promise. She didn’t call or write to me – not even once.

Whenever I could get hold of him, I sent Alejandro to check my email account for news from her. Alejandro was the son of one of the inmates, Emilio, who was in for trafficking. I don’t know how old the boy was, but he was only small and he didn’t speak much. At first he seemed shy, but you could tell that he was a tough little kid underneath, just like his father, which is exactly what his mother wanted to avoid. She had left Emilio when he was sentenced and taken their child and gone to live with another man in a small apartment. She had never visited her husband in jail and refused to let their son visit him either, but Alejandro used to sneak out from school and come to San Pedro. Whenever he came to the prison, his father sent him outside on errands in order to make a bit of extra money. With such a small and innocent face, he was the perfect mule; the guards let him in and out whenever he wanted and never searched him.

There probably weren’t any Internet cafes in the jungle towns where Yasheeda was, but I kept sending Alejandro to check my email anyway. If he didn’t visit, I would ring him at home. Whenever his mother answered, she told me he wasn’t there. I knew that wasn’t true; when he wasn’t at school, she never let him leave the house. At first, I thought she was the one lying to me, but I later learned that it was Alejandro who was pretending he wasn’t there. He must have felt bad every time he had to tell me that Yasheeda hadn’t written.

I started getting depressed. During the first week, I was worried that something bad had happened to her. I checked the newspapers every day for accidents involving foreigners, like I had the first time she went away. After ten days I knew there had been no accident – she was having a great time and had forgotten all about me. By then, I had forgotten about our argument, but she obviously hadn’t. She might have already returned from the jungle and left the country, or maybe she had met someone else.

Each time I heard a taxista call my name, I prayed it was her and was always disappointed when it was another group of Israeli backpackers from El Lobo wanting to visit me. I was glad to have people to keep me company, but I still missed Yasheeda. Sometimes I couldn’t put my full energy into telling my visitors my stories and, although they found the prison interesting, I got the impression that they had heard incredible things about me and were a bit disappointed when they met me in person.

A few times, I felt so depressed that I asked the taxistas to apologise and say that I was too sick to receive any visitors. I started having nightmares in which I could see Yasheeda kissing someone else, although I couldn’t see his face. I tried not to be jealous, but I wanted to kill him, whoever he was. After these dreams, I even began to hate her.