Thailand 12
The first punch stunned me. The second knocked me to the ground. I got kicked for a couple of minutes. I tried to curl into a ball and cover my head as much as I could. One of them shouted laughing:
“You really know how to take a beating.”
When they got tired, they left the same way they came, walking calm and laughing. The crowd dissolved immediately and when I opened my eyes everything seemed normal around me, as if nothing had happened. Each inmate minding his own business. The silence law.
This wasn't the first time. They hit me over the marks of all previous beatings, bruises of a full range of colours and all stages of evolution. One of the beatings, a blow to the eye, left me with blurred vision for a couple of days but I ended up recovering. For two days I was convinced that I would be blind for the rest of my life. The thought was more frightening than the injury itself. In another one I got hit in the ear, I was dizzy for a week. My ribs were also damaged, I did not know if broken, and I had pain of all kinds in every part of the body. It reminded me of my young days when I was doing silly things and ended up in some sort of fight every day. I learnt that protecting my head was fundamental. The rest would heal; better or worse, but it healed. The scariest thing in all of this, the most humiliating thing was to see how the prison guards were spectators of the many beatings from a distance. They even laughed and made bets. On what, I did not know, because I could only focus on wishing they finish the beating fast. Perhaps on whether that was the beating that would kill me.
I tried to get up, but a sharp pain in the chest stopped me. There, on the floor of the corridor, kneeling, I tried to open my mouth as wide as possible to get the maximum amount of air to ease the feeling of distress, of asphyxiation. I focused on breathing slowly and deeply, but I couldn’t. It took me a while to lower my heart rate and for my breath to return to a relative normal. With a tremendous effort I got up and wobbling, leaning on the walls and dodging other prisoners who ignored me, I got to my cell. Mine and of forty more inmates.
Once there I sat on the mat and I stayed there quiet for some time, trying to clear my mind and isolate myself from everything around me, including the pain that was running through my entire body. A body that screamed to lie down and not get up for hours, but I knew I could not do that. I knew it. My survival depended on it. I did what needed to be done. What was necessary. I got up and started my workout routine. Stretches, push-ups, sit ups ... Working every part of the body independently as well as together. The pain was almost unbearable, but I certainly did not stop; although I wept silently, wetting the floor with my tears. I could never show weakness. If I wanted to survive, if I wanted to someday get out of there without it being in the sad cardboard coffin they used, I had to continue. I finished the training with both movements I had learnt from my former boxing coach as well as imitating the prisoners who trained in Muay Thai in the courtyard, learning to fight like them, with the difference that they were doing it in front of everyone, in broad day light, and I just trained when nobody saw me. Away from curious eyes. Preparing in the shadows.
Someday, which I hoped it would be soon, I will feel prepared and I would not limit myself to trying to minimize the damage of the blows, but I would respond in a brutal manner, accurate and without compassion. Killing if it was necessary. Yes, I would kill without hesitation. That day I would earn their respect and this nightmare I was living would end. Yes, I had to be sure to win, because if I stood up against them and did not succeed, they would kill me without a doubt. That much was certain. Meanwhile, I had to be patient and try to keep myself alive and without any irreparable damage.
I had visualized that moment in my head thousands of times. With a thousand variants, with different endings, in all kinds of scenarios, trying to anticipate every possibility. Soon, very soon, my time would come. Or die.
But how did I end up in this situation if a few weeks ago I was David, an uninspired computer geek in the offices of a financial institution in Madrid? What circumstances had pushed me into this unthinkable situation not long ago?
While fighting against suffering, as I continued with the ordeal of training, I was reflecting on the dire circumstances experienced. The ones which pushed me from a quiet life in the IT department of a bank to preparing to kill the garbage that abused me constantly in the dreaded prison of Bang Kwang, seven kilometres north of Bangkok, Thailand. One of the most dangerous prisons in the world. The pit of damnation in which I found myself. My end if I was not able to invent a way to save myself.
Singapore 1
A few weeks prior...
It took me a few tries to turn off the alarm. On the second try I almost knocked it off the nightstand. I sat on the edge of the bed and stretched my arms as I took a long yawn. Another day of work. Like a robot, driven by the routine, I ate breakfast, showered, and dressed. Forty minutes later I was starting the car.
On the way to work I reflected on my last months. Marked by the breakup from my long-time girlfriend, I had not managed to recover yet. After seven years it seems she got tired of me and left me for a supposed friend to whom I introduced her myself and with whom she was actually having an affair for a long time. I was blind all this time without seeing what others had warned me. Ever since I walked around like a lost soul, always blue and sad. Devastated. I had taken refuge in boxing, practising it several times a week. I was hitting the boxing bag as if that adrenaline were able to give me back my life. In addition, I did not like at all the project I was working on at the bank. I was doing testing all day, with a boring tool and noting down the results in a standardized document. Result correct, result incorrect, incidence. Sometimes I looked out the window of the fourth floor, where my desk was, and I felt like throwing myself from it. Figuratively, of course. I have never thought of something as drastic as suicide. I was sad, not destroyed. Result correct, result incorrect, incidence.
What I did not know was that that day my life would change forever. So much so like I had never imagined.
After half an hour's drive and a round to find where to park, I arrived at my desk. I turned on the computer and went to greet a co-worker. Once back I quickly reviewed, like every morning, my email. Same thing just like all days: tests, tests, test results, questions about the tests, test requests, test reports and forecasting tests. Only one email was different from the rest. It was from my boss, sent the evening prior, asking me to call him to talk to me about something. I had no idea what it could be, but whatever it was, hopefully I could do something different, even if it were for five minutes, I would welcome it. I looked at the time. Half past 9. Perfect. I picked up the work cell phone, I looked for Valentine and called him.
“Yes, tell me.” Said Valentine.
“Hi Valentine. It’s David. I have just read your email and I'm calling to see what it is that you wanted to tell me.”
“Good morning David. How are you?”
“Bored. The project that you gave me is going to kill me. Tell me that you have something for me? I need a change.”
“I might possibly have. What do you know about Singapore?”
“Singapore?” He got my attention. I got up and went to a nearby meeting room that was empty. “Well... I don't know Valentine. A small country in Asia, with a good standard of living, very civilized, they speak Chinese and English ...”
“That’s where I wanted to get!” Yelled Valentine. “They speak English, just like you.”
Yes, I was bilingual. My mother was American. She fell in love with my father and came to live and work in Spain. A few years after I was born, my father disappeared without saying anything and we never heard of him. Everyone thought he had abandoned my mother, but she always believed that something had happened to him because they were madly in love. In any case, I grew up without a father from the age of two, which influenced my childhood and adolescence, and I spoke English since.