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MARCHING POWDER

whole life up until that moment. You get thrown in with the rest of them. So, if you’re ever thinking of doing a drug run, before making your final decision you should visit the local prison where you’ll be living if you get caught. And if you’re in La Paz, you can even do a guided tour or stay the night as practice.

Roberto was one of those stupid tourists. The police caught him at the airport with a kilo of cocaine hidden in shampoo bottles. It must have been a tip-off; when cocaine is dissolved in liquid it’s a lot harder to detect, so the cops have to be very certain in order to detain you just for carrying two extra bottles of hair conditioner.

Since tourists no longer stayed to party with me at night, I had almost stopped taking cocaine completely. However, once I was friends with Roberto, I started up again. Roberto wasn’t a professional trafficker, but it was obvious that he had been taking cocaine for some time. He wasn’t at all surprised to discover that you could buy drugs in San Pedro. He had started sniffing heavily within a week, long before he knew the outcome of his trial.

We began doing coke almost every night of the week, always staying up until daylight. I wanted to completely forget about my upcoming trial. With Ricardo no longer there to watch over me, we would sometimes keep sniffing even after the morning lista. Roberto wasn’t at all what you would expect of an Italian. He spoke very quietly, sometimes in broken English and other times in Spanish, but his voice never varied and he never got excited about anything. The scary thing was that when Roberto took cocaine, it didn’t seem to have any effect on him. His mood didn’t change at all. He didn’t get high or nervous. He didn’t need to drink anything. He didn’t talk too much. He just sat there at my table, doing more and more coke and smoking the occasional joint. I tried to cheer him up, but if anything, he seemed to become more depressed.

Roberto got five years and four months from the judge, but the news took a while to sink in. On the day he came back from sentencing, he didn’t seem that sad. He told me how he had been thinking of getting back together with his ex-girlfriend. The way he talked about her, it was as if she was in the next room, not back in Italy, and that sorting out their problems was something that might happen quite soon. With Extra Muro, he’d be out after three years. But even that is a long time for a university student, even a philosophical one like Roberto. When you think about it, that’s a whole degree.