Silvio walked by carrying his tobo.
‘What’s the story here?’ I said.
‘Visit day. Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays.’
‘Who’s going to visit me here?’ I laughed.
‘Like me, nobody. Our place is over there.’ He nodded over to the corner. There was a guy taking down a plastic washing line that hung from one side of the yard to the other. There were clothes hanging on it yesterday – now it had another purpose. The guy lifted one side of the line down off a hook on the wall and started threading it through the hoops of a plastic curtain. He hung it back up and it stretched across a small area in the yard. A floral pattern in full bloom on a white background.
‘Verde. Verde,’ shouted a lookout man at the wing door, peeping through a spyhole into the passageway outside.
‘That’s the troops,’ said Eddy. ‘Time for the “número”.’ The verde (green) was the nickname they gave the National Guard soldiers in their olive-green uniforms. The prisoners then scurried about taking a seat around the entire perimeter of the yard wall, sitting down on any free tobo they could get. A little black and white dog was also scampering around, a mongrel of a sheepdog that seemed to belong to one of the inmates. By the time I copped on to what to do there weren’t any buckets left to sit on. I quickly walked over to Eddy and sat down on my hunkers next to him.
Five National Guard troops marched in through the wing door. They fanned out across the yard, cradling pump-action shotguns. The barrels pointed toward the ground but not so low that they couldn’t be lifted in an instant to blast out a few rounds.
I looked at the other inmates. Some were half sleeping, slouched over, dozing; a few looked like they’d topple over. It was only about 6 a.m. I looked over at the wing boss and his henchmen. There were none of the inmates’ guns in sight, probably hidden now.
But the troops were on guard, edgy. Eyes darted back and forth at us. Two of them faced the wall where myself and Eddy sat; the other two faced the other wall on the other side of the yard, keeping guard on the inmates there. All angles covered. I was starting to get the idea of who was afraid of who around here.
‘They’re going to call our numbers,’ Eddy said to me. ‘If you fuck up the number, they’ll fuck you up.’ I knew the score from Macuto and from the headcount the evening before but still couldn’t say my number.
‘I don’t speak Spanish.’
Eddy came to the rescue. ‘I’ll shout you. Piece of piss.’
‘What’ll I do?’
‘Nothing. As I said, keep quiet and leave it to me.’
A prison cop started the headcount. He didn’t waste a second, beginning at one end of the line of inmates, pointing his finger at the first prisoner.
‘Uno,’ said the first prisoner. A National Guard, an old guy, ticked off a sheet attached to a clipboard he held.
‘Dos,’ said the second inmate. And so on down the line. The cop was getting closer to me. I was getting edgy. ‘Treinta-cinco,’ (‘35’) said Eddy. He then put his hand on my head and said to the guard ‘treinta-seis’ (‘36’). It went around the yard till the last man. I didn’t understand the numbers, but it looked like there were easily more than a hundred inmates in the count. I wondered where they’d all come from. There hadn’t seemed to be more than about 50 the night before. The wing didn’t look like it could hold more than that.
With the headcount over the troops then pulled out, walking backwards nervously towards the wing door, shotgun barrels dangling in mid-air.
The door slammed. ‘Luz, luz,’ shouted one of the luceros, swinging around a knife tied to his wrist.
‘That means a “light”,’ said Silvio. ‘Stand still, face the back wall and don’t move. I’ll tell you about it all later.’
I stood there along with all the other inmates, staring down at the back wall of the yard. A door behind us leading into the cells slammed shut. Silence fell over the yard. A second ago it was full of life: people joking and laughing. Now everyone was still, like when you freeze-frame a video and see the characters stop moving. I could hear other sounds more clearly now: bongos being drummed in a wing above the yard, over our hallway area – doom-da-da-doom – along with a hypnotic chant the prisoners there were singing. It sounded like a prayer, followed by loud applause. I felt like I was in a gospel church in Harlem. The sounds from that wing were quickly drowned out. A stereo in our wing started up. Salsa music kicked off. Trumpets and other brass instruments tooting away. It was deafening. The whole thing was weird. I felt like I’d walked into the Copacabana in full swing, only to have a doorman walk up to me with a knife and tell me to ‘shut up and stand still’.
‘Normal,’ shouted a lucero after about 15 minutes, hollering over the din of the music. Everyone was at ease after playing statues. I turned around and the luceros stood there with knives. The highlites were the second in command to the boss and were standing alongside him, all tooled up for a small war. Revolvers. Shotguns. Automatic weapons. Pistols and DIY guns that looked like they were made out of pipes. They were all done up to the nines, too, in trousers, nice shirts and polished shoes.
Silvio must have read the puzzled look on my face. ‘The luz, it means light in Spanish. It means something has come to light, to the bosses’ attention. And that means we have to go to the yard, stand still or sit down and face the back wall.’
‘For what?’
‘So they can get their guns and ammo out of their hiding places. Holes in the ground, all over the place.’
Plastic chairs that had been stacked three or four high were then taken down and spread out across the yard area, a row each against the two longer walls in the rectangular yard; two rows were also set up in the middle. All in all there were enough chairs to seat about 40 or 50. I could now see why some of them called the yard the ‘patio’.
‘Let’s go, behind the curtain,’ said Silvio. ‘That’s our place for the day.’
I walked in and sat down on a paint bucket. Eddy and Silvio sat next to me, and Ricardo a couple of buckets down next to a few Venezuelans. Grown men forced to sit on paint buckets behind a flowery curtain. It was mad. ‘Nice day for a sit-in,’ I laughed.
‘Yes, and all day to do it, Paul,’ said Silvio.
‘How long does it last for?’
‘Seven, seven and a half hours. Till about 3.30.’
I guessed it was about 10 am. ‘How do we fill the time?’
‘Sit and stare into space,’ laughed Eddy. ‘If you’ve no visitors you’re not allowed out to the yard. Not unless someone with a visit invites you, and then you have to be dressed right. Jeans or trousers, no shorts, and a long-sleeved top.’
‘It’s the familia, Paul,’ said Silvio. ‘The family, it is sacred in Venezuela. It is held in the utmost respect. That’s why the prisoners dress up and clean up the wing.’
Ricardo was sitting on a paint tin, flexing his muscles. He seemed to keep to himself.
‘And don’t ever stare at anyone’s bird, mate. Don’t even make eye contact,’ said Eddy. ‘Do and you’re dead.’ He made a gun sign with two fingers pointed at his head.
‘What?’
‘It’s considered a lack of respect. Men have been shot for doing it.’ I made a mental note not to eye anyone’s bird. ‘At the very least you’ll get a luz. You’ll get called into the boss’s cell for a beating.’
I changed the subject. I was full of questions. Nothing here made sense to me. ‘The guns, I don’t get it. How do they have guns?’
‘Most are courtesy of the National Guard,’ said Silvio. ‘Most of the home-made ones are called pipe guns and made by Vampy, one of the prisoners. He’s a dab hand with a metal file and a solder.’ Los Teques was getting more bizarre by the moment.
‘Without them and their guns it’d be worse,’ said Eddy. ‘Other wings would storm in and shoot us up. Some of them hate gringos. Here in Maxima they don’t care what you are as long as you pay the causa. Queers. Paedos. Rapists. They’re all here, mate, take you
r pick.’
‘And the causa?’
‘The causa, cash so they can tool themselves up. They smuggle in coke and sell it to us at extortionate prices.’ He laughed. ‘They even use the money to buy paint and give the walls a makeover.’
Behind the curtain I could hear the shuffle of chairs and the smell of food wafting in, like chicken and what I thought was beef stew, that the visitors had brought in. I craved good food. I hadn’t eaten a proper bite since the boyos in Macuto had fed me well, hoping to win the lottery off me down a Western Union cable.
The music was still blaring. I wanted to know why. ‘That’s to drown out the wails of them all shagging in the cells,’ said Eddy.
‘You’re joking me?’
‘No. In the cells. They hang sheets up around the beds. Bit of privacy. You bring your girl in and wey-hey. They take turns with the beds. The chicas can scream away in orgasmic excitement. No one can hear.’ This place was getting more off the wall.
My thoughts suddenly darkened and I went quiet. The memories of that night in the drug-police building flowed back. The bugger squad. Would it be the same here?
I returned to staring at the wall, shifting left to right on the paint bucket when one side of my arse went numb. Other than that the only relief from the boredom was a trip to the toilet to our right. I heard some of the Venezuelan lads in there, snorting and giggling. Others sat snoring on their buckets, blankets over their heads. Exhausted from no sleep, like me. As usual I started wondering how I was going to stick this place for eight years, and the madness of it – inmates walking around with guns and orgies in the cells with their girlfriends and wives. Lunacy. A circus behind bars.
* * *
The boys in green marched into the yard for the evening headcount, looking more vigilant this time – probably worried one of the inmates had sneaked out the gate with the missus. There was a woman with them. A bottle blonde. She had long, wavy hair, tied up and with yellow curls dangling around her forehead. She wore tight jeans and had a pair of high black boots up to her knees. To me, she looked more like a bird out on the pull than a prison director.
‘Who’s that?’ I whispered to Eddy.
‘Director, mate. Top dog.’
The cop started the count. At my turn, Eddy clapped me on the shoulder and shouted out my number, which changed depending on where I was sitting in the row of inmates. Nelson Mandela may have been prisoner number 46664 in all his years in jail, but in Los Teques your number was one higher than the lag on your left. Prison order Venezuelan-style.
* * *
The next morning it was time for Spanish classes. I didn’t have to go, but it was a chance to get out of the wing. And I knew knowing more than hola and cerveza would be useful. Not that I cared to talk with Venezuelans. I hated them, for what the bugger squad had done to me. I hadn’t really met a good Venezuelan yet. But I knew the lingo would come in handy.
The classroom was on the second floor. It was my first time anywhere outside Maxima and the canteen. Most of the administration offices were here. Prison workers such as secretaries were typing away, hunched over keyboards. Silvio had told us we had to scrub up a bit for this part of the jail. He usually looked like a tramp himself in a vest and shorts, but he had now smartened up into a shirt, jacket and shoes. Roberto, the other Italian, wore pressed trousers and a shirt – and I even got a whiff of cologne. Who he was trying to impress I didn’t know. I reckoned he was getting good money in from the outside, a couple of Western Unions a month. I was still wearing my shoes that I’d worn when I was caught at the airport, as well as the blue Ralph Lauren shirt and a pair of jeans.
I sat down at one of the little hard chairs with an arm rest and a little ledge to put a copybook on. It was like the desks I used in school when I was a kid. Forty-five years of age and I was back in them.
The class were a mixed bunch, including a Canadian, two yanks and a German.
‘Hey, Irish. Hey, Eye-Ar-Ay. How’s it going?’ said one Yank to me.
‘I’m not in the IRA.’ I shrugged.
‘Don’t let them know that. They all think you’re a terrorist.’ We both laughed.
There were about a dozen others in the classroom: Italians such as Roberto and gringos like me learning Spanish and Venezuelans learning English – all taught by Silvio. This should be fun. Silvio was a master of many tongues. His father was Italian and his mother French. He lived in London, where he worked as a cinema-screen projectionist.
Silvio took up his post at the front of the classroom. The first lesson wasn’t about learning a new lingo – it was about how to escape Venezuela. He stood next to a giant map of South America on the wall and pointed at Caracas, just in from Venezuela’s northern Caribbean coast. The capital was about halfway between the Colombian border to the west and Venezuela’s eastern coast.
‘Here is Caracas here,’ said Silvio, pointing at the capital on the map. He was all serious, as if he was teaching us Spanish grammar. ‘And here is San Cristóbal here,’ he said, pointing at a provincial city way down south, close to Venezuela’s western border with Colombia. He nodded back at Caracas. ‘You can get a coach from here to San Cristóbal, which takes about 18 hours. Lots of army checkpoints. And from San Cristóbal you can get across the border, which is only a few kilometres away. When there, you are free.’ We all sat there giggling. In a way it was a language lesson, because he went around the class explaining it in Spanish, Italian and English.
But how would we get out of Los Teques to get there, I wondered. Silvio explained that after 18 months you were eligible for parole: to get a job on the outside approved by the prison. All you had to do was pass a psychological assessment in Spanish, have work lined up and go to live with a family, and have it all approved by a judge. So when you got parole you boarded a long-distance bus in Caracas and disappeared into the wilderness, then emerged later in Colombia, all going well.
‘Yes, is good plan,’ said Roberto. Yeah, sounded good to me too, but at this stage I thought learning Spanish would be a bigger challenge.
Going to the Spanish classes helped speed up getting parole and was looked upon favourably by the prison chiefs. Silvio explained that the language classes took place twice a week, were scheduled to last three hours, from 9 a.m. to midday, and counted as a full day of your sentence. He said more than a year of two classes a week would be equivalent to about a hundred days off our sentence. I could see myself going to a lot of Spanish lessons.
* * *
Most gringo inmates had been through the same rigmarole as me after they were caught at the airport: they were processed and held in remand in Macuto before being moved to Los Teques. McKenzie’s reputation there was infamous in most of the jails.
‘That bastard,’ said Hanz, a thin guy from Switzerland with shaggy dark hair and a beard. ‘He robbed me of everything: cash, clothes – even my sandals. I had nothing. Kept threatening me with this bloody machete. “Te mato, gringo,” [“I kill you”] he kept shouting. I had pains in my ribs for weeks after that place. He kept jabbing me.’
‘I’d believe it,’ I said, ‘I was told about him, but he never bothered me.’
‘Never bothered you?’ he said, louder than before. ‘He make everybody’s life hell.’
‘I stayed in the nice wing with ex-cops,’ I laughed. ‘Good food and treatment.’
‘That is unbelievable,’ he said, ‘I know that place, but it is only for the dirty police. How’d you get to stay there?’
‘I arrived in a suit and fancy shoes. Think they thought I’d money. Tried to get me to pay a 2,000-euro bribe to them through Western Union from home.’
‘And you paid?’ His eyebrows lifted up and seemed to knot together.
‘No way. Gave them the runaround.’ Looking at Hanz, I could see why the ex-cops didn’t want him in the wing. He was skinny as a rake. Looked like a typical backpacker tramp. He’d been travelling around Colombia for about a year before getting to Venezuela, where he ran out of cash. Taki
ng a case back to Switzerland seemed like ‘easy money’ on his way home. Instead he ended up in this dump.
* * *
About five weeks had passed since I got caught. I hadn’t spoken to my family since the quick phone call to my ma from Macuto. I also hadn’t heard another word from the consul since his brief visit to me there. Now that I was in Los Teques, which in theory would be home for up to eight years, I genuinely needed a Western Union transfer this time. I wanted to phone home and get a money wire sent over. The jefe wanted his weekly causa money, and the 200-euro ‘entry fee’ to stay in the wing. I also needed cash on top of that sum to live here. I had nothing – no cup, no saucer, no knife and fork, no colchoneta. Nothing was ‘on the house’.
New Yawk Mike was my middleman for dealing with the jefe, since I had no Spanish. We were standing in the yard and I went over to him. ‘Mike, what’s the story with making a call home?’
‘Hey man, don’t worry, I’ll get you a phone. All cool.’ He was a chilled-out ‘dude’. Minutes later he was back with a mobile phone. I hadn’t thought it’d be that easy. I rang the number for my sister, which I had in my head. It was about 5 p.m. in Los Teques and about 10 p.m. in Dublin.
The phone started ringing. I got a bit anxious. The usual thoughts went through my head. What had I done to my family? Would they think I was drug vermin?
‘Hallo.’ It was my sister’s voice.
‘Hi, Sharon, it’s Paul,’ I said.
‘Ah, how are ya?’ she said, sounding excited to hear from me.
‘I’m OK, Gal,’ I said, using the name I’d called her since we were kids.
‘It’s great to hear from you,’ she said in a sad voice. Then she put on her big-sister hat. ‘How’s your health? How’s your weight? Are you eating OK?’ You’d know she was a nurse; she always asked about my well-being.
‘I’m doing OK,’ I said. Everything she asked I just said, ‘Sound, not a bother, all good.’ I didn’t want anyone at home to worry any more than they already were.
‘Look, I need a few quid sent over. It’s to pay to get into this place.’
The Cocaine Diaries: A Venezuelan Prison Nightmare Page 9