I hadn’t thought of it like that
before but I had to agree with him.
‘It’s true’ I said,’ otherwise
what would be the punishment’
‘Now’ he said, ‘at least you
understand how things are. The others don’t and they either find other things
to do or it kills them before their time.’ Then he left.
‘You’ll be all right now’ he
called out from behind the door.
There was also the issue of
cigarettes. When I first went to prison, they took away my belt, my shoelaces,
my necklace and everything in my pockets including my smokes.
Once inside my cell I asked for
them back but I was told it wasn’t allowed until I had been processed. The
first days were really rough. That got to me the most. All day long I kept
feeling nauseous and I couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t let me have
something that would do no harm to anyone else. I kept seeing the faces of
those two white kids who in truth were not much younger than me but bigger with
better clothes and white socks , the way Europeans generally dress.
As time went on their picture
faded and I didn’t feel the weight of the slap anymore. It had melted within
the other images of my ‘room’. It was around then I started to suck on pieces
of wood I pulled off the boards of my bed. Later on I understood that the
withdrawal of my cigarettes was also given to me when I had accepted part of
the punishment but I had my tactics in place by then and I was used to smoking
no more.
I used to take hours to shape a
splinter from the board until it looked like a matchstick and then I used to
pop it in my mouth and hold it there like it was the way I used to smoke my
cigarettes and sometimes then I would remember what the sky looked like when I
smoked, or the smell of an oleander tree when sheltering from the rain. Straggly
or thin, fat or lumpy pieces of splinter they were all the same to me.
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