Kathryn Bonella
Snowing In Bali
An excerpt from Kathryn Bonella’s book about surfers and drug smuggling in Bali. It follows the stories of several surfers she interviewed while researching the Bali drug underworld and foreign inmates in the island’s notorious jail, Kerobokan – dubbed Hotel K. Their radical tales cover the crazy highs that come with putting it all on the line and living large in the island of endless parties and perfect waves. Alberto’s story offers a glimpse of the lows.
The Busts
“Bali can be heaven one minute and hell the next.”
Alberto
After being busted selling a small amount to a Balinese snitch, Alberto was blindfolded and driven crouched in the back of a car to a remote house.
Tipping his head back slightly, he glimpsed unpainted walls, raw brick and a bare concrete floor – an unfinished house. He saw five pairs of feet in leather sandals – each slightly different; soon the trait that he would use to distinguish his captors. The air was full of tension; the cops were angry and for Alberto, standing impotently blindfolded, cuffed and vulnerable, every sound and touch was magnified by fear and blindness.
Alberto flinched as the cops grabbed his arms and shoved him into a room, pushing him to sit down on the edge of a bed.
A door slammed shut, then boom, it was on, fists raining brutal blows into his stomach, ribs and back, a hand slapping his face, as someone else used a plank of wood to slam into his head. He was helpless, the handcuffs preventing him from even lifting his arms to shield his face. It was against every human instinct, but he had to just surrender his body to the blows. Even gritting his teeth, he could not stop crying out in pain.
After an hour or so, the cops slammed the door behind them, leaving him slumped on the bed, hurting badly and trembling. He knew that was only round one; that they would be back to hurt him again, until they broke him down into helping them set someone else up. Right now Andre, who owned the pills, and Rafael, whose name the cops had already tossed out, were blissfully unaware of his predicament, oblivious to how close they might be to falling into the same dark hole if their friend broke.
As Alberto sat there, trying to slow his ragged breathing and pounding heart, he was praying that he had the grit to take whatever was coming without capitulating.
The worst thing was the hits on the head with a wooden stick.
“They have this big piece of wood, solid, heavy. They hit like on the side of the ear, on the top of the head, close to my forehead, on the back of my head. One guy hitting and another guy punching on the ribs or slapping the face, together, two guys, at the same time. My hands handcuffed behind my back. They hit me for one hour, two hours, then they go out of the room, and lumps come up on my head, and then they come again two hours later, and hit the lumps. That’s fucking painful...You want to cry; they make you see stars. That was heavy. That’s the real pain, the real pain.”
Whenever they left the room, Alberto slumped on the edge of the bed, feeling fainter and sicker, but his mind was trying to figure a way out. So far offering cash hadn’t worked. They wanted to create a domino effect because it meant far more cash in the end, as well as a bunch of high-profile arrests.
He knew these brutal bashings would eventually end, but if he turned rat he knew his soul would never recover. So he kept stoically denying and absorbing the pain, trying to figure out a way to end the torture as fast as possible.
“All the time I was sitting on the bed, handcuffed and blindfolded, just sitting thinking, ‘How am I going to get out of this?’ I would hear the door opening again, I would go, ‘Here we go again.’ I could see through the bottom of the blindfold the feet arriving, the leather sandals, so I knew if the same guys came back.”
“Then they would start all over again, bang, hit me on the head, bam, slap on the face, bam punch in the ribs, saying, ‘Come on, use your tongue, say some names, help us to help you, come on,’ and just hit hit hit. Sometimes, they put a piece of wood on top of my bare toes, and one guy comes with a real strong kick, bam, and you see stars and always like screaming, ‘Ahhh fuck.’ ‘Come on, talk,’ and just keep on going and going like this.”
“So in the end, after two days, they realised I wasn’t going to talk or set anyone up – I was already a fucking zombie – and they finally came in, saying, ‘Okay, let’s go. You’re not going to help us so you’re going to go to jail for 10, 15 years, is that what you want?’ I was like, ‘Okay, if that’s it, that’s it, but please take me to the police station. I wish I could help you, but I can’t.’ ‘Bullshit.’’
Finally, he was piled into the car, his blindfold removed, and was driven to the police station to start the next phase of hell. He was in a bad state, but said nothing of the torture as he was processed. As he walked into the crowded cell, 30 or so pairs of eyes turned to look at him.
The concrete floor exacerbated his pain, but during the interminable days there was no choice but to sit in the cramped cell, usually playing cards, unable to even stretch out his legs. He nicknamed this hellish hot concrete cage ‘the freezer’ – because here life froze, with nothing to do but wait to learn your fate.