Even Silence Has an End (17 page)

THIRTEEN

LEARNING TO WEAVE

In my boredom I read the Bible and wove. I had been given a Bible, a very large one with maps and illustrations at the back. Could I have discovered the riches of the Bible in any other way? I don’t think so. The world in which I’d lived had no place for meditation, or for silence. But given the absence of distractions, my brain kneaded the words back into shape, as if they were clay being molded to create something new. And so I would reread passages, and I would discover why they had stayed with me. It was like finding chinks, secret passages, links to other thoughts, and different interpretations of the texts. The Bible became a fascinating world of codes, insinuations, and hidden meanings.

Perhaps that was also why it was easy for me to devote so much time to weaving. Thanks to manual activity, my mind entered a state of meditation, and I could reflect on what I had read while my hands were moving.

It all began one day when I was on my way back from talking to the commander.

Ferney was sitting on his mat, repairing the straps of his backpack. Beto, the boy who shared a tent with him, was standing in front of one of the supporting poles, focused intently on weaving a belt with nylon thread. I had often seen them do this. It was fascinating. They had acquired such dexterity and moved their hands so quickly that they looked like machines. At each knot a new shape appeared. They could make belts with their own name written across them. They would then dye them at the
rancha
by boiling them in large cauldrons of fluorescent water.

I stopped for a moment to admire his work. Beto’s lettering was the most attractive of any I’d seen so far.

“He’s the best of all of us!” said Ferney unreservedly. “The time it takes me to make one, Beto can make three.”

“Really?”

I had trouble seeing why it was an advantage to go fast in a world where there was so much time to kill. That night during my nocturnal musings, I began to think that I would like to learn to weave belts, too. The idea excited me. But how would I go about it? Ask Andres for permission? Ask one of the guards? I had learned that in the jungle there is nothing to be gained by acting impulsively. The world where I was a prisoner was an arbitrary one. It was an empire of whims, ruled by those who had the ability to say no.

One day there was a terrible storm. The downpour lasted from morning to night. I was sitting on the floor watching the spectacle of nature unleashed. Sheets of rain formed a screen so dense you could see only the
caletas
nearest to you; the rest of the camp seemed to have disappeared. The guards remained at their posts without moving, like lost souls, covered from head to toe with black plastic sheets. They looked like they were floating on a lake. Unable to absorb all the rain, the ground was under several inches of brown water as far as the eye could see. Whoever ventured outside returned covered in mud. The camp came to a standstill. Only Beto kept on weaving his belt, oblivious to the storm. I couldn’t take my eyes off him.

The following day Beto and Ferney came over together, smiling. “We thought you might like to learn to weave,” said Beto. “We asked for permission, and Andres agreed. Ferney will get you nylon thread, and I’ll show you how to do it.”

Beto spent several days with me. First he taught me how to prepare the warp. They had a small hook to secure the warp. Ferney made me a pretty one, and I felt set up like a pro. Beto came by in the evening to review what I had done during the day. “You have to stretch the thread more tightly over the hooks,” he told me. And then, “The knots need to be tighter” and “You have to pull on it twice—otherwise it will run.” I put all my energy into learning the proper technique, correcting my mistakes, and following his instructions to the letter. I had to wrap my fingers in pieces of fabric so that the nylon thread wouldn’t cut into my flesh when I pulled it. With my work in front of me, I no longer felt the burden of time. The hours passed quickly.
Just like monks,
I thought, who, when practicing meditation, dedicated themselves to crafting precious objects. I felt that reading the Bible and the meditations that arose from my hours of weaving were doing me good. I was more peaceful, less defensive.

Beto came to tell me one day that I was ready to make a real belt. Ferney turned up with a full reel of thread, and we cut it into the appropriate lengths. The measurements were jungle measurements. Two “armfuls” of thread were needed to obtain one “quarter” of a belt. An armful was the distance between a hand and the opposite shoulder, and a quarter was the distance between the thumb and the small finger with the hand open wide.

I wanted to make a belt with Melanie’s name woven into it with hearts at the beginning and end of it. I asked around, and no one knew how to do it. So I improvised and found a way, which started a new fashion in the camp, because all the girls wanted to have hearts on their own belts.

The opportunity to be active, creative, and inventive brought respite. There were only two weeks left until Melanie’s birthday. I decided that the belt would be ready before then, even if I had to spend entire days on it. The exercise sent me into a trance. I felt as if I were communicating with my daughter—and therefore in touch with the best part of myself.

Beto came to see me again. He wanted to show me another belt with different colors he had made using a new technique. He promised to teach me how to do it. Then, for some reason, during the course of the conversation he said, “You must be ready to run when we tell you to. The
chulos
are close by. If they get here, they will kill you. They want to be able to say that the guerrillas did it, and that way they won’t have to negotiate your release. If I’m here, I’ll run. I’m not going to get killed for your sake. No one will.”

On hearing his words, a strange sensation came over me. I felt sorry for him, as if, by admitting that he would think only of himself at the moment of great danger, he was condemning himself to receiving no help from others when he would most need it.

He left the camp the following day “on an assignment,” which meant he was probably in charge of our provisions for the coming months. One evening as the guards were talking among themselves, convinced we were sound asleep, I learned that he had been killed in an ambush by the Colombian army—the same operation in which El Mocho had lost his life. It was a terrible shock. Not just because the echo of his final words and, with them, his fierce desire to live came back to me, but all the more so because I could not understand how his companions, his comrades, could speak of his death without a shadow of regret, as if they were talking about the latest belt he was finishing.

I could not rid my thoughts of that macabre wink from destiny, that fateful connection, understanding that in a way he did get killed “for me” after all, because of this particular chain of events that had brought us together in spite of ourselves: He as my keeper, I as his prisoner. As I was finishing the belt he’d helped me to start, lost in my meditation, I thanked him in the silence of my mind more for the time he’d spent talking to me than for passing on his art. For I was discovering that the most precious gift someone can give us is time, because what gives time its value is death.

FOURTEEN

MELANIE’S SEVENTEENTH BIRTHDAY

The days were all alike and seemed to last forever. I had trouble remembering what I’d done on the previous day. Everything seemed to be happening in a thick fog, and all I could remember were the camp transfers, because I found them so difficult. Nearly seven months had gone by since I was kidnapped, and I could feel the changes. My center of interest shifted; the future no longer interested me, nor did the outside world. They were simply inaccessible to me. I was living the present moment as in an eternity of relentless pain, without the hope it would ever end.

And yet before I knew it, it was my daughter’s birthday, as if time had accelerated capriciously just to annoy me. For two weeks I’d been weaving a belt for her. I was proud of it. The guerrillas would file past the shack to come and inspect my work. “The old girl is learning!” they said, with a hint of surprise, as a compliment. Calling me the
cucha
in their particular slang had no pejorative connotation. They used the same word to speak to their commander, in a tone meant to be familiar and respectful at the same time. However, I was having trouble getting used to it. I felt as if I’d been shoved irrevocably into a closet of relics. But the fact remained, my daughter was turning seventeen: I was old enough to be their mother.

So I went on weaving, lost in the hundreds of thoughts that laced themselves together like the knots I patiently added to my handiwork. For the first time since I’d been captured, I was in haste to finish something. The day before Melanie’s birthday, at six o’clock in the evening, just before they locked us up, I completed the last knot of her belt. I was proud.

Melanie’s birthday had to be a day of joy. I told myself it was the only way to honor her, my little girl, who had shed light on my life, even in the depths of this green hole. All night long I’d gone through her life in my mind—the day of her birth, her first steps, the terrible fright she got from a windup doll that walked better than she did. I saw her again as she was on the first day of school, with her pigtails and her white toddler boots, and I watched her gradually grow up, following her until the last time I’d held her in my arms. I cried. But my tears now were of a different kind altogether. I was thankful, thankful that I had been there, that I had known so many moments I could now draw on in my thirst for happiness. To be sure, it was a sad happiness, because I felt so acutely my children’s physical absence, but it was the only happiness I could reach.

I got up long before they unlocked the door. I was sitting on the edge of the bed, singing “Happy Birthday” in my head, hoping the vibrations would reach my daughter, traveling mentally from the wooden house, above the trees, above the jungle, above the Caribbean, and all the way to her room on the island of Santo Domingo, where she lived with her father. I could picture her sleeping just as I’d left her. I imagined waking her up with a kiss on her cool cheek. I firmly believed that she could sense my presence.

The day before, I’d asked for permission to make a cake, and Andres had granted it. Jessica came to help me, and we prepared the batter with flour, powdered milk, sugar, and black chocolate (extraordinary concessions) that we melted in a separate saucepan. Because we had no oven, we fried it. Jessica took care of the icing. She had used a packet of the powder for making strawberry-flavored drinks, mixing it with powdered milk and a little bit of water. The thick paste that resulted transformed the black cake into a candy-pink disk, and on it she wrote : FROM FARC-EP.

Andres allowed us to borrow his cassette player, and Jessica came back into the house with it, the cake, and El Mico, under whose nose we had escaped. He was there as a dancing partner, because Jessica was determined to make the most of the occasion. As for me, I had also gotten ready. I had dressed up, wearing the jeans I’d had on when I was kidnapped—jeans that Melanie had given me for Christmas—and the belt I’d made for her, because I had lost a lot of weight and my pants were sliding down.

For a few hours, these young people changed as if by magic. They were no longer guards, or terrorists, or killers. They were young people, my daughter’s age, having fun. They danced divinely, as if they’d never done anything else their entire life. They were perfectly synchronized with one another, dancing in that shack as if it were a ballroom, whirling around with elegant self-awareness. You couldn’t help but watch. Jessica, with her long, curly black hair, knew that she was beautiful. She moved her hips and shoulders, just enough to reveal the contours of her curves. El Mico was a rather ugly boy, but that night he was transformed. The world was his. I wanted so much to have my children there! It was the first time I thought this. I would have liked for them to know these young people, to discover their strange way of life, so different and yet so close to theirs, because all adolescents in the world are alike. These young people could have been my children. I had known them to be cruel, despotic, humiliating. I could only wonder as I watched them dance whether my children, under the same conditions, would not have acted the same way.

That day I understood that we are all fundamentally the same. I thought back to my tenure in Congress. For a long time, I had singled out people, as a way to unmask corruption in my country. Now I wondered whether that had been right. It was not that I doubted the truth of my accusations, but rather I had grown aware of how complex we human beings are. Because of that, compassion appeared to me under a new light, as an essential value for dealing with my present.
It is the key to forgiveness,
I thought, wanting to set aside any inclinations of vengeance. The day of Melanie’s birthday, I understood that I did not want to miss the opportunity to hold out my hand to my enemy, when the time came.

After that day my relationship with Jessica changed. She came and asked me if I could give her English lessons. Her request surprised me: I wondered what a little
guerrillera
could do with English lessons in the jungle.

Jessica showed up on the first day with a brand-new notebook, a pen, and a black pencil with an eraser. Being the girlfriend of the commander had certain advantages. But it was also true that right from the start she had all the characteristics of a good student—neat handwriting, spatial and mental organization, excellent concentration, very good memory. She was so happy to learn that this in turn pushed me to better prepare my lessons. I was surprised to find myself looking forward to her visits. As time went by, we mingled English lessons with more intimate conversations. She shivered as she shared with me descriptions of her father’s death—he had also been part of the guerrilla movement—and of her own recruitment. She talked about her relationship with Andres. From time to time, she raised the tone and talked about communism, about how glad she was to have taken up arms to defend the people, how women were not discriminated against in FARC, how sexism was strictly forbidden, too. She would lower her voice to talk to me about her dreams, her ambitions, and the problems in her relationship. I realized she was worried that the guards might be listening.

“I have to be careful, because they might misunderstand and ask for an explanation at the
aula.
”

That was how I learned that problems were discussed out in the open. They were all under scrutiny and were obliged to inform the commander in the event of any suspicious behavior on the part of a comrade. Informing was an intrinsic part of their regime. They were all subject to it, and they all practiced it, indiscriminately.

Once she came with the words to a song in Spanish that she loved. She wanted me to translate it into English so that she could sing it herself. She wanted to sing like an American. She worked hard perfecting her accent.

“You are so gifted, you should ask Joaquín Gómez to have the FARC send you abroad to train. I know that a lot of the sons of members of the Secretariado are in the best universities in Europe and elsewhere. They might be interested in having someone like you who speaks good English. . . .”

I saw her eyes light up for a moment. Then she quickly took hold of herself and raised her voice to be heard, saying, “We are here to give our lives to the revolution, not to go to some bourgeois university.”

She never came back to her English lessons. I was sorry. One morning when she was on guard, I went up to her to ask her why she had dropped the English classes when she was learning so well.

She glanced around her and said in a hushed voice, “I had an argument with Andres. He forbade me from continuing the English lessons. He burned my notebook.”