It’s strange to wake up in a hospital and find yourself handcuffed to a bed. Where could I go in that state? Everything hurts and I’m afraid to sleep, because then the body relaxes and makes movements that revive the pain. At least there’s nobody else in the room, although for how much longer I don’t know. It’s almost three in the morning, the grimmest hour in hospitals, churches, and prisons. The hour of pain, the hour of the devil, they say, because it is the transposed figure of the death of Christ. Its nighttime equivalent.
Three in the morning.
It’s also the hour of memory, so I started remembering other prison experiences, all insignificant compared with this one. In the first I was barely seventeen and was in a small town in Colombia called Pacho, near Bogotá, where I had gone with some friends from the neighborhood to a house in the country. We were young and wanted to swallow the world, of course, and that led us to frequent all the dives in the town. In addition, we were crazy about pool, and so it was that one night, in one of those bars, the police came in and stood us up against the wall, asking for our identity cards. I didn’t yet have one because I was still a minor, so they arrested me. A curious legal principle: for their protection, minors aren’t allowed in pool halls, but if they’re caught they’re put in a cell with robbers and thugs of all descriptions.
So there I was, in a hot, unventilated room. There were fifteen of us and there was nowhere to sit. A guy who had been there for a few days was asleep on the floor on a mat. At five in the morning, a group announced that they had an escape plan and asked me if I was ready. I stalled. Just before dawn a guard came and shone his torch in our faces.
“Let’s see now, my fellow townsman, you can come out . . . ”
Nobody moved, because we didn’t know where he was from. Until he said again:
“The young guy from Bogotá, you can come out . . . ”
They took my details. A clerk filled out a form on an old typewriter. My brother and another of my friends were there, with the sergeant, waving to me.
The second time was in Madrid.
During my time at Complutense University, I was active for a while in a left-wing collective called KAI. In 1986 there was a strike against the statute for university reform promoted by the rector Gustavo Villapalos, and someone in the upper echelons of my group decided that we had to take over the headquarters of the Council of Universities, which was on the same campus. And so we did. I went in with the first group. We blocked the elevators and doors of the building and managed to get as far as the offices on the upper floors. We built barricades and took the director hostage. The police preferred not to use force, but surrounded the building and stopped us from having food sent in. Their strategy was to tire us out, but the striking students mounted a permanent demonstration outside the building and every now and again threw us bags with sandwiches, fruit, and bottles of water.
By the fourth day, the pain from my ulcer was becoming unbearable, since I had left my pills at home, and it was decided that I should go out with a female comrade and read a press release. When we passed the barricade on the second floor, a legion of uniformed arms lifted me in the air. The police nevertheless allowed us to read the press release into the microphones, then loaded us in a van and took us to the police station. On the way, I remembered that I had a scholarship from the Spanish government through the Institute for Latin American Cooperation, but it was the Spain of Felipe González, so they simply took my details and sent me home, where I was able to fill my stomach with antacid pills and doses of Mylanta.
My third imprisonment was in 1994, in Sarajevo, during the Bosnian war.
I had gone there as correspondent for the newspaper El Tiempo, of Bogotá, and one night I had to stay in the former headquarters of Bosnian television a little later than usual. That was where we broadcast from when the lines from the hotel weren’t working. When I came out, I couldn’t see any transportation that would take me to the Holiday Inn, which was the hotel where the journalists stayed, so I set off on foot, which was a pretty crazy thing to do given the situation in the city, especially as there was a strict curfew after ten at night. And so, as I was walking in the dark toward Marshal Tito Avenue—which had been renamed Sniper’s Alley—a Bosnian police patrol car stopped me. I was taken to a barracks in the center of the city and the officers, who were as young as I was, put me in a cell, behind bars, but without closing the door. That night I explained to the three guards that I was Colombian and a friend to their cause, I told them I could have covered the war from Pale, on the Serbian side, but that I had decided to be in Sarajevo, with them.
“I prefer to work where the bombs fall,” I said, “not where they’re launched from.”
They offered me a Sarajevan beer, I seem to remember it was called Sarajevo Pivo, and then an endless series of glasses of slivovitz, a spirit made from grapes and herbs that must have been about sixty proof, which came in very handy that winter night. The most dangerous moment occurred at six in the morning, when they freed me and insisted on taking me in their jeep to the hotel. A vehicle prowling through the cold, snow-covered streets of Sarajevo was an excellent target for the Serb snipers, the chetniks, who would have just gotten up and might be feeling like getting a few shots in before breakfast. Fortunately, that didn’t happen.
But let me get back to my current desperate and uncomfortable situation.
Once again, I slept a couple of hours. Outside—in that distant and already nostalgic outside—day had already broken. Soon afterwards Pedro Ndongo arrived to check the tubes and the level of the drip. One of the bags was empty and he replaced it. As he was checking the catheter on my wrist, he noticed me moving and said:
“Good morning, my esteemed intellectual. I have a surprise for you.”
“Don’t tell me, Mr. Reading has woken up.”
“No, not yet,” Pedro said. “Yesterday I dropped by the registration office and asked for your belongings. The notebook you told me about was there, but as is only natural, they didn’t let me take it out, because it’s been registered. That’s where Pedro Ndongo Ndeme’s great ability to argue came into play and I told the woman: could you do me a favor and lend it to me so that I can make a copy? Then the original can stay here and I’ll take that wretched fellow the copy and make him very happy, what do you think? The woman smiled and said she would let me do it but that I would have to take care of it myself.”
He took an envelope from his jacket and there, in loose sheets, was everything I had written.
He put it by the side of the bed and added:
“I also read it.”
He made a theatrical pause.
“And . . . ?” I exclaimed.
“It made me feel nostalgic for my student days, first in the National University of Guinea and then in the Complutense. Although I was studying medicine, I spent my evenings reading poetry.”
“You studied at the Complutense?” I said. “So did I.”
“Really? What year?
“I graduated in philology in ’90.”
“Ah, no,” he said, “I arrived a bit later. I started my course in 1996.”
Before leaving, Pedro said to me, pointing at the photocopied sheets:
“It’s good, finish it.”
“Impossible,” I said, “I don’t have anything to write with.”
“Ah, I can’t help you with that. A pen is a sharp instrument, but I have a suggestion: memorize. Think and memorize, it’ll be an excellent exercise. It prevents Alzheimer’s. Many people have done it and good things have come out: Cervantes, Voltaire, Solzhenitsyn. They all memorized. Think of them and you won’t feel alone.”
Pedro came a little closer and lowered his voice.
“There’s more news, which is that you’re going to have company. I don’t know when they’re bringing him because right now he’s in the operating room, I saw it on the form, he’s coming here.”
I spent the day reading my notes about Rimbaud. I tried to memorize some new paragraphs and corrections. During the night, they did bring in another prisoner, putting up the curtain separating the room into two spaces. I couldn’t see him. The combination of the sedatives and the medication for my wounds was quite strong and that’s why I barely registered his arrival.
This morning I saw him. He’s a priest. He has a broken arm and a very swollen eye, as well as a deep cut on his back. He was praying and I didn’t want to disturb him, I barely nodded to him. Then Pedro Ndongo came to take me for a treatment and another blood test, so I didn’t see him again until the afternoon.
While we were going to one of the therapy sessions, Pedro said:
“I see your body is working well, my friend, in spite of your age: your melanocytes are responding, the Langerhans and Merkel cells . . . The treatment is working. I don’t feel revulsion anymore when I look at you.”
“Is it also dermatological, Pedro?”
“I’m just an intellectual of the fibers and glands.”
I asked him what he knew about my cellmate.
“I can’t give you much information, friend, but I do have a surprise for you: he’s a compatriot of yours, a priest, are you a believer?”
“No. I already told you I’m not.”
“You should consider it, not everyone has the chance to cohabit with a minister of the Church.”
Images from that morning came back to me.
“And why is he so badly injured?”
“I heard he was about to be lynched. A group of demonstrators from your country. The police stepped in and saved him, but he’s been arrested because he has a criminal record, there’s a warrant out for him from Interpol. A priest. And it’s not because he’s a pedophile! Your country is very strange, my friend.”
“Do you know what he’s charged with?”
“Being a member of an armed criminal group.”
“The paramilitaries,” I said.
“The same guys who beat up blacks and Arabs here, you mean?”
“More or less, although here it’s racial and there it’s political.”
Pedro stroked his cheeks. “The racial is always political, friend, remember Martin Luther King. Or Malcolm X, who said: ‘Be obedient, be peaceful, law-abiding, but if someone attacks you send him to the cemetery.’ That’s more or less what you did to that poor literature teacher, isn’t it?”
I grew worried again.
“Do you know anything about his condition?”
“He’s still the same. He’s on the third floor in the assisted prisoners’ section, in a coma.”
It was strange: the two of us, both accused and both victims. Both deprived of freedom.
“It would be quite stupid if we both ended up in prison.”
“More stupid still if you’d both ended up dead, which is how these fights usually end up, isn’t it? Don’t worry, you still have an advantage over him. He can’t claim victory yet. The prisons of the world are full of people who, basically, didn’t want to do it. Chance and bad luck are the limits of free will. I exclude that other percentage of bastards who on the other hand did what they did in full knowledge. For them it’s the opposite: prison is a way to postpone their natural death, with half a dozen bullets between their chest and their back, when ninety-three percent of their internal juices spill out onto the asphalt and happily flow into the sewers, where they’ll be able to mix with the shit of the city.”
I thought again about my cellmate.
“Did they put him with me because he’s Colombian?”
Pedro slapped one of the sides of the bed.
“What questions you ask, friend. How should I know? Maybe some little genius said: hey, what a coincidence, these two sons of bitches are from the same country, right? Let’s put them in the same room and see what happens. I’m sorry, I’m imitating, I don’t know anyone who speaks like that.”
“I know, Pedro. I know your style.”
We got to the cell and the priest was sitting beside the bed, reading the Bible. His face really was very inflamed. His right eyelid was a purple mass and it wasn’t very clear if a black, bloody thing in the middle was the eye.
Seeing me he contracted the muscles of his face, as if saying, ouch, what a thrashing they gave this one.
“I heard you’re Colombian.”
The priest looked up, surprised.
“Yes, and what else were you told?”
“That you were brought here because they were going to lynch you.”
“Forgive me for not standing, and were you told why they wanted to lynch me?”
“Yes.”
He showed me his arm, which was in a suspensory bandage.
“You see how far the hand of the devil reaches. And what happened to you?”
“I had a fight in a bar, the other person was badly hurt. It wasn’t my fault.”
His left eye moved up and down, examining me.
“From Bogotá?” he said.
“Yes, but I’ve been living outside Colombia for years.”
“Almost better, although I confess something, I couldn’t. My country is the most beautiful there is in this world and if the Lord put me there, it was for a reason.”
I tried not to contradict him.
“Do you know any other countries?”
“Not many, apart from this shithole here, forgive my language. But I don’t need to know any others, what for if I live in the best? I went to the United States and look at it: in the hands of the Jews, and with a black man as president who’s a friend to the Muslims.”
Just then his male nurse came to take him away. They had to take a statement from him.
As he went out he said to me:
“Father Ferdinand Palacios, at your service.”
Soon afterwards Pedro came to take me out to the exercise yard. Apparently my treatment required a little sun and wind.
“What do you think of your cellmate?”
“He’s friendly, but strange.”
“I advise you not to judge him. If you’re going to have to share a room with him the best thing is to look for his good side. Everyone has a good side.”
“He seems to be in a pretty bad condition,” I said.
“He’s hurt, that’s why he’s here. If they agree to extradite him, he’ll serve his sentence in Colombia.”
“I’d rather be in a different cell, or alone.”
“That’s a privilege, but don’t be alarmed. This hotel has very good security. Nothing will happen to you. Your case is going through the normal channels, and while that teacher’s still breathing, there won’t be any changes. Ask the priest to pray for him, it might help.”