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BUYING A CELL OF MY OWN

Sometimes it was best to wait as long as possible, sometimes you should buy straight away. People behaved rationally according to graphs carved on wooden tables, but sometimes they were stupid and sold their televisions very cheaply. You could make money on property, but then the government might take everything away from you. Oh well, I never liked economics, anyway. I think that's why I dropped out of school early and became a drug trafficker.

'So, how do I know if it's the right time to buy, then?' I asked, trying to get back to the original topic, being when I was going to buy a room.

'You don't. No one does, really. You can make a guess, but it's impossible to predict a market perfectly. And it's irrelevant, anyway.'

'Why is it irrelevant?'

'Because you've got no choice. You have to buy a room right now or you'll have nowhere to sleep,' he laughed and pointed to the door, grabbing my arm and pushing me towards it as though he were evicting me. 'It gets quite cold out there at night, you know.'

I knew he was only joking, so I laughed too.

'So, that means this whole conversation was also irrelevant?'

'No. Not at all, my friend. You learned something. You're intelligent and I enjoy talking with you,' he complimented me, even though I had hardly said a word and was clearly not as intelligent as he was. Ricardo then put his joint out and concluded his university seminar.

'So, you see, Thomas, San Pedro prison, apart from being a social microcosm, is also a microeconomy that operates under basic capitalist principles. In fact, it's probably more efficient than the whole Bolivian national economy. And more democratic, too, but I'll explain the prison election system to you another day. I'm tired now. You ask a lot of questions, inglés - you know that?'

I was glad we stopped there, too; I needed a joint to help my brain recover from Ricardo's economics lecture.

///

The room I liked most was in Pinos on the second storey. It had a window overlooking the courtyard and it was only a minute's walk from Ricardo's apartment. The owner was an old Bolivian prisoner who was shortly due for release. He wanted twenty-five hundred dollars, but Ricardo managed to bargain him down to eighteen