Getting Settled

The following days were more dull than anything. There was nothing to do except ride the bike and watch the television. Though I guess that I should have been glad for something to watch, the television only had two channels—one was a weather channel that covered all of Mexico, not even giving me an idea of where I was being held, and the other was what could generously be described as trash-TV, airing low-budget soap operas during the day and equally cheap reality TV at night, which was basically just a bunch of young beautiful people screwing around while trapped in some mansion. Though my little room was far from the mansion on television, the reality TV struck me as being a little too much like my current situation.

So, long story short, I spent my days watching soap operas, thankful for the option to read the subtitles and rode hundreds of kilometers on the stationary bike. The rest of my day was spent waiting for the two times each day that a plate would appear in the slot in the wall. Upon it was usually just a scoop of beans and a piece of fruit or vegetable. I recognized the fact that they were deliberately giving me a large plate with a small amount of food at the center as a tactic to make it appear that they were starving me more than they actually were. Though my mind recognized the tactic, it didn’t stop my stomach from being wracked by hunger pangs those first days.

The days passed that way for a while. I don’t know how long, since I tried to track the passing of time by the shows on TV, only to realize that none of it was live and that my captors would pause or advance the programming while I slept—again, in an attempt to disorient me. The fact that they were taking such steps was interesting and clearly indicated that someone amongst my captors had experience manipulating prisoners.

“How long did they keep you there?”

“At the time, I had no way of knowing. It was only afterward, when I read the reports filed by the others, that I learned. Now, hush.”

So, anyway, there I was, sitting around with nothing to do, but ride the bike and watch bad soaps. Day in and day out, I did the same boring thing. I figured it must have been at least two weeks of mind-numbing boredom when the day came that I first noticed a change—not in the surroundings, nothing had changed there—the change was in me.

I was sitting on the futon, painting my toenails for what must have been the tenth or twentieth time, when the television switched over to “Ahora Hasta Siempre”, the best of the ridiculous soaps that came on every day. Without thinking about it, I began singing, “Y a medida que pasan estos días, el amor que compartimos…”.

It wasn’t until I finished painting my nails and grabbed the remote to turn up the volume, to better hear the dialogue, that I realized I wasn’t reading the subtitles. Now, I’ve got to admit that the plot of soap operas is far from intense scholarly material, but the fact was: I had been picking up on what they were saying and understood a good portion of the dialogue without needing to read the captions.