Even Silence Has an End (16 page)

“It needs a window The room is very small and dark. We’ll suffocate!”

He threw me a highly suspicious look, and I let it drop. But the following day a team was sent over with a chain saw to open one up. With a window we might have a chance.

Our life changed. Paradoxically, although this space was definitely an improvement compared to our previous living conditions and enabled us to dictate our own schedule and create our own routine, the tension between Clara and me became unbearable.

I fixed a daily schedule that allowed me to remain active while staying out of her way. Her reactions were unpredictable. If I swept, she would follow me around and snatch the broom from my hands. If I sat at the table, she would want my seat. If I paced to get some exercise, she would block my path. If I closed the door to rest, she would demand I leave. If I didn’t, she would pounce on me like a cat with its claws out. I no longer knew what to do. Another morning, on discovering a hive in a corner of the kitchen, she began to scream. Snatching the broom and swinging it wildy, she sent everything on the shelves along the wall crashing to the ground. Then she ran off toward the jungle. The guards brought her back, shoving her with their rifles.

When Ferney came to fix our radio, he brought a brand-new broom he had made especially for us.

“Keep it. It’s better that you don’t ask to borrow things. It annoys people.”

He spent time explaining which broadcasts we could pick up and what times they came on. Before six-thirty in the morning, there was nothing. In the evening we were spoiled for choice with all the national stations. However, he forgot to tell us the most essential thing: We did not know that a special program existed for hostages, and it aired messages every weekend from our families.

Tension mounted one morning at dawn when I was disturbed by a terrible crackling sound. Clara was sitting against the wall with the radio between her legs, turning the knobs back and forth, oblivious to the noise she was making. The padlock to our door was not removed until six. I sat there waiting, my increasingly black mood filling the room. I reminded her as calmly as I could that there was no reception before six-thirty in the morning, hoping that she would turn off the set. Yet she dismissed me. She wanted nothing more than to make the set crackle. I stood up, sat back down, paced in circles between the bed and the door, showing how irritated I was. Just before they removed the padlock, she finally agreed to silence the “brick.”

The following day the scene played out exactly the same way, except that this time I could not get her to switch it off. I watched her listen intently to the crackling noise and thought,
She’s going mad.

One morning after I had already gone outside to clean my teeth in a bucket of water that a guerrilla usually dropped off at the other end of the house, I heard a crash in the bedroom. Dreading what I might find, I ran back to see Clara, arms hanging at her sides, with the radio broken at her feet. She explained that it had slipped out of her hands. “Never mind. We’ll see if someone can fix it,” I said, doing my best not to hold this against her.

TWELVE

FERNEY

Every evening at six, while it was still daylight, the guard would come by to put the padlock on our door. He would walk around behind the house to lock the solitary window with another large padlock before moving to the front of the house to take up his post for the night. I followed his movements with intense interest, trying to find a flaw in the system that would enable us to break out.

We would have to execute our escape in two stages. Before six, Clara would jump down from the window and run into the bushes behind the house, taking the bag containing our supplies. The guard would come by at six on the dot to lock the door. He would see me and a decoy beside me in the bed. He would put on the padlock and go to lock the window at the back, giving me just enough time to jump out the window myself and climb up onto the roof to hide. After padlocking the window, he would assume his position at the front of the house, leaving me free to join Clara at the back. We would then veer to the right to get away from the camp and make a ninety-degree turn to the left, which would take us to the river. We would have to swim and let the current carry us as far as possible. We would hide during the day, as they would be on our tail, combing the entire area. But after two nights of searching, without knowing which way we had gone, they would not be able to trace us. We would run into a peasant dwelling and risk asking for help.

I was anxious about swimming in the dark waters of this jungle in the night, having seen the shining eyes of the caimans, camouflaged on the riverbanks, scoping out their prey. We would need a rope to tie ourselves together so we wouldn’t get separated by the current and lose each other in the darkness. If one of us was attacked by a caiman, the other could come to the rescue—and, fortunately, we had the machete. We had to make a sheath for it so we could carry it on our belts without being hindered while we swam. We would take turns carrying the backpack. The contents would have to be wrapped meticulously in plastic bags and sealed tightly with rubber bands. Surviving in the water was a major challenge. We needed to make flotation devices so we could swim for hours.

I solved this problem by using a Styrofoam cooler in which the nurse had received some medicine. When I asked if I could keep it, Patricia laughed. She obviously found my request odd and handed me the box as if handing a child a broken button to play with. Proud of my acquisition, I returned to the room, and with the door tightly shut Clara and I used the machete to saw it into pieces, loudly talking and laughing to mask the squeaking noise of the blade on the Styrofoam. We took the entire side panels of the box and made them into devices large enough to rest our bodies on and small enough to fit in our knapsacks.

The rest of our preparations were easier to take care of. One evening, just before they shut us in for the night, I discovered an enormous scorpion, a female with all her offspring attached to her abdomen, more than five inches long on the strut of the door. The guard killed it with a blow of his machete and put it in a jar with some formalin. It would yield an antidote, which, he said, would perform miracles. I emphasized the danger of having no light inside the room and stressed the fact that the creature could easily have landed on the back of my neck when I closed the door. Andres sent us the flashlight I was dreaming of for our escape.

However, although we were ready to leave, our plan kept getting delayed. First came a week of extremely low temperatures, especially at dawn. “It’s the freeze from Brazil,” the guard told me knowingly. I was thankful we had not yet left. Then we were held up by my catching a cold. As they refused to give us medicine, the fever and cough had persisted. But the greatest obstacle to our escape was Clara’s manic-depressive behavior. One day she explained that she was not going to escape because she wanted to have children, and the effort of escaping could disrupt her capacity to conceive.

Another afternoon, seeking refuge in the bedroom, I overheard an astonishing conversation. Clara was telling the girl on guard about an episode in my life that I had revealed to her, describing it with exactly the same words I’d used. I recognized my expressions, my pauses, the intonation of my voice. It was all there. What was disturbing was that my companion had substituted herself for me in her narration.
It will only get worse,
I said to myself.

I felt we needed to talk. “You know, they could switch our camp at any moment,” I said one evening before she fell asleep. “At least here we already know their routine. We know how they operate. And now that we’re in this house, they’re less watchful. This is a good time. Of course it will be hard, but it’s still possible. There are dwellings two or three days’ swim from here—it’s not the other end of the world.” For the first time in weeks, she was the person I used to know. Her comments were sensible and her questions constructive. I felt a genuine sense of relief at being able to share my thoughts with her. We set our departure date for the following week.

When that day came around, we washed our bath towels and hung them on a line strategically placed to block the guard’s view. I checked that from where he was standing; our guard would not be able to see our feet under the house between the stilts when we jumped out the back window. We followed our regular routine exactly. But we ate more than usual, perhaps, which raised the eyebrow of our receptionist. It was a beautiful sunny afternoon. We waited until the last possible moment.

When the time came, Clara climbed up to the window as planned but got stuck, one part of her body outside and the other inside. I pushed her with all my might. She landed off balance but quickly recovered. I threw the bag out the window, and just as she was running toward the bushes, I heard a voice calling me. It was Ferney. He was coming from the direction of the
chontos.
Had he seen her?

“What are you doing?”

“I’m trying to see the first stars,” I replied, as if I were Juliet gazing out from her balcony.

I gaped at the sky, hoping he’d leave. Darkness was falling rapidly. The guard was about to padlock the door. I had to cut the conversation short. Furtively I glanced over to where Clara was. There was no sign of her.

Ferney continued, “I know you are very upset about your father. I wanted to say something earlier, but I didn’t find the right moment.”

I felt like an actor in a bad play. If anyone had been watching us, they would have found the scene comical. There I was, leaning against my window, looking up at the stars, attempting to trick a guerrilla in order to escape, with him at my feet, or rather below my window, as if he were about to serenade me. I stayed there silently, imploring providence to come to my rescue.

Ferney took my silence and my anxiety for emotion.

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t make you think of sad things. But have faith—one day you will get out of here, and you will be a lot happier than before. You know, I never say so because we’re communists, but I am praying for you.”

He said good night and walked away. I turned around at once. The guard was already there, inspecting the room. I had no time to make a suitable decoy.

“Where is the other prisoner?”

“I don’t know. At the
chontos,
probably.”

Our attempt had failed miserably. I prayed that Clara would realize that and return as quickly as possible. But what would she do if they found her with the bag? And in the bag the machete, the ropes, the flashlight, our food. I broke out in a cold sweat.

I decided to go to the
chontos
myself without asking the guard’s permission, hoping to distract his attention so that my companion could get back into the room.

The guard ran after me screaming and struck me with the butt of his rifle to force me to turn around. Clara was already back in the room when we got there. The guard swore at her and locked the door.

“Do you have the bag?”

“No, I had to hide it beside a tree.”

“Where?”

“Near the
chontos.
”

“Dear God! We have to think. . . . How can we get it back before they discover it?”

I couldn’t sleep the whole night. Dawn was breaking. I heard voices and shouts from near the
chontos.
People were running toward the house, they had discovered our bag. Once this conclusion turned into certainty, all the anguish that had been building up in me during the night vanished. I instantly found absolute peace and serenity. They would punish us. Of course. It didn’t matter. They would be cruel, humiliating, maybe even violent. That no longer frightened me. I would never give up.

The door opened before six in the morning. It was Andres, surrounded by a large portion of the troop. In an imperious voice, he ordered, “Search them from top to bottom.” The girls took over, combing through all our belongings. They had found our bag and emptied it out. I was numb. The search complete—they had taken everything from us—they dispersed. Only Andres remained.

“Go ahead,” he said to someone behind me. I turned around.

Ferney was standing there with a large hammer and an enormous box of old, rusty nails. He strode into the room and in a frenzy began hammering nails into every board. After two hours he had not yet covered the entire room. From the start he had wrapped himself in absolute silence and carried out his task with unhealthy zeal, as if he wanted to pin me to the boards. Then he climbed up onto the roof and continued his job, sitting astride a beam, angrily nailing areas where it was clearly unnecessary, until his complete stock of nails ran out.

I knew exactly what he must be feeling. He had found his machete and felt duped. He was remembering the conversation we’d had at the window. In the beginning I was embarrassed, feeling terrible for having deceived him. But as the hours passed, I found him grotesque, with his hammer and nails, his obsession, and this room he had transformed into a bunker in fury.

He brushed past me, enraged.

“You are ridiculous!” I yelled, unable to stop myself.

He did an about-face, slammed both hands on the table as if he would like nothing better than to jump on me, and hissed, “Repeat what you just said.”

“I said I find you ridiculous.”

“You steal my machete, you make fun of me, you try to escape, and
I
am ridiculous.”

“Yes, you are ridiculous! You have no reason to be angry with me.”

“I’m angry with you because you betrayed me.”

“
I
did not betray
you.
You abducted me, you are keeping me prisoner. I have every right to escape.”

“Yes, but I offered you my friendship. I trusted you,” he retorted.

“And the day your leader tells you to put a bullet in my head, will I still have your friendship?”

He did not reply. I did not see him again for some time. Then one evening he arrived for guard duty once again. Before putting on the padlock, he produced a fistful of candles from his jacket pocket and handed them to me.

He closed the door before I had time to thank him. These forbidden candles were his answer. I stood there with a lump in my throat.