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DESPERATE MEASURES

‘I love you, my brother,’ I said to Roberto, holding him close to me and squeezing his shoulder. It was an important moment for me because I knew we really had to stick together if we were going to quit.

‘Me, too,’ he said, hugging me back stiffly, slightly embarrassed by my sudden display of feeling.

Following the lista, we went back up to my room. We still hadn’t finished the entire five grams. I couldn’t have eaten breakfast anyway, so we kept sniffing until the whole bag was finished at around eleven o’clock. Immediately following the last lines, I kicked Roberto out of my room, drank two litres of water, smoked a joint and went downstairs to have a cold shower. When I came back, I cleaned my room, put on some nice clothes, smoked another joint, and then went to see the prison doctor. There was no point in lying to him, so I just came out with it.

‘Doctor, I need you to help me. I want to stop taking cocaine.’ He looked at me coolly, not at all surprised by what I had said.

‘For how long have you been consuming?’

I counted back the time in my head. It had been almost four-and-a-half years since that first occasion on la Noche de San Juan – which was a long time, when I thought about it. I had never thought of myself as being an addict, but I realised that in all that time, I had never been without cocaine for more than two weeks, not even in La Grulla. The doctor informed me that there was no medicine that could cure me. I had to stop by myself and that would only happen if I really wanted to. However, he did offer to put me on a saline solution drip that was designed to flush the drug out of my blood system.

The doctor came to my room each day and put me on the drip for an hour or so. With the drip and keeping myself busy, I managed to stay away from coke. But Roberto didn’t. He broke the pact. He made it through the first three nights OK, but on the fourth morning I saw him down in the courtyard and he waved to me to signal that we would talk later. But he didn’t come to my room afterwards and when I saw him again that evening, he pretended he hadn’t seen me and snuck off to his room. I knew that he’d had something to sniff. He must have been too afraid to say anything or too ashamed of his weakness. I wasn’t angry, but I was waiting for him to come and tell me.