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.
