Even Silence Has an End (22 page)

Then I would take my bath, watching the birds fly overhead, and I managed to admire them without envy. When I returned to my house, I sat down with my legs crossed in the lotus position and went into a meditation that had nothing religious about it but invariably led to an awareness of the presence of God. He was there, everywhere, too big, too strong. I did not know what he could expect of me and even less what I was allowed to ask of him. I thought of begging him to get me out of my prison, but I immediately found that my prayer was too trivial, too petty, too focused on my little self, as if thinking of my own well-being or requesting his kindness were a bad thing. Perhaps, too, what he wanted to give me was something I did not want. I remember reading in the Bible, in one chapter in the Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans, that the Holy Ghost helped us in our communication with God, because he knew better than we did how to ask what was right for us. When I read this, at the time I thought I did not want the Holy Ghost to ask for anything other than my freedom. By formulating it in this way, I understood that I was missing the essential point, that there was probably something else, greater than freedom, that he could seek to give me, something that for the time being I did not know how to appreciate.

I had questions. Never any answers. They pursued me during my meditation. And in this circular thinking that went on day after day, I saw events as they unfolded, and I analyzed them with precision. I would stop to examine certain moments. I reflected on the meaning of the words “prudence” and “humility.” Every day, through a glance, the intonation of a voice, a misused word, a silence or a gesture, I realized I could have acted differently and I could have done better. I knew that my situation was an opportunity that life was offering me to take an interest in things I normally didn’t think about. Incapable of acting in “the” world, I displaced my energy to act in “my” world. I was discovering another way of living, a life based less in action and more in introspection. I wanted to build a stronger, more solid self. The tools I had developed up to now were no longer of use to me. I needed another form of intelligence, another sort of courage, and greater endurance. But I did not know how to go about building those: It had taken over a year of captivity for me to just begin to question my own self.

God was surely right, and the Holy Ghost surely knew it, because he was so stubborn in not wanting to intercede in favor of my release. I still had a great deal to learn.

TWENTY-ONE

SECOND PROOF OF LIFE

The last time I saw Joaquín Gómez, it was to record the second proof of life. He came with other guerrillas, including Ferney, whom I was very happy to see again.

I suspected that Ferney must have described to his superior some of the treatment I had been subjected to, and I thanked him for that, because there had indeed been a call to order. Andres granted permission for me to have powdered milk from time to time, and Edinson, the guard who captured us after the hornet attack, secretly brought me eggs that I “cooked” in boiling water brought to me on the pretext of treating a rash. The greatest treat of all, however, was that Andres had once again allowed me to spend time in the
rancha.
I liked to be in the kitchen. I learned the techniques they had developed for creating a bread substitute,
cancharinas,
using a mixture of flour fried in boiling oil. Between two of his recent visits, Joaquín had kindly sent me a black bag full of good things. The militiaman who drove the motorboat received precise instructions not to open the black bag and to hand it to me in person. This was a wink from Joaquín, because on that first day when we went on our peripatetic walk, I’d complained about the way we were being discriminated against at mealtimes. When you have nothing, the most basic possessions take on unbelievable importance.

When Joaquín arrived, we immediately set to work to prepare the video recording. He had given me his word that my family would get the entire text of my message, without changes. I would talk between fifteen and twenty minutes, from the little house with a sheet hung up as a background to hide any indication of where we were. Clara would also be allowed to send a proof of life. I planned to give my opinion on a delicate topic that had generated a debate on how to obtain our freedom. My family was firmly opposed to a military rescue operation. A few months earlier, a dozen prisoners, including the governor of the Antioquia region, Guillermo Gaviria, and his peace adviser Gilberto Echeverri, had been assassinated in the region of Urrao
²⁷
during an attempted rescue mission. That had been a terrible shock to me. I did not know Guillermo personally, but I had found his commitment to peace in the Antioquia region courageous, and I was filled with admiration for his perseverance.

One afternoon at around four o’clock, as I was fiddling with a radio that Joaquín had brought me as a gift on one of his previous visits, I tuned in by chance to the news from Radio Canada, on shortwave. It was a little metal radio, not very powerful, that the guards made fun of because it had reception only very early in the morning or once night had fallen. It needed an antenna system to boost reception, and it was the guards themselves who helped me rig one up, using the aluminum wire from the scrub pads used to clean the casseroles. I had to hang it from the highest branches of the trees, sending one end up to the treetop with the help of a sling and wrapping the other end around the end of the radio antenna. The system worked fairly well, and I managed to listen to the news, particularly in the evening. It was a window onto the world. I would listen, and with the help of my imagination I could see everything. I had not yet found the frequency for Radio France Internationale, to which I would grow extremely attached later on, to the point of memorizing the names and voices of the journalists as if they were long-lost friends, or for the BBC, to which I would later listen religiously every day, a pleasure equal to the one I would have felt in civilian life of going to the cinema. For the time being, I was overjoyed just to have found Radio Canada and to hear French spoken.

But my pleasure turned to fright when I heard them say my name while explaining that Colombian hostages had been massacred by the FARC. I didn’t know what they were talking about, but I sat there petrified, the radio up against my ear, trying to understand, afraid that at any moment I might lose the weak reception. Above all I did not want to miss the rest of the news bulletin. Several minutes later the entire story was repeated, and I discovered to my horror that Gaviria and Echeverri had just been assassinated. There was no other information, no further details. Then the subject changed, leaving me trembling. I went to sit on my bed, as I imagined with terror everything that must have happened for them to have been executed. And then I remembered FARC’s threat. After a year had gone by, they would begin to kill us, one after the other. And it was indeed just over a year since we had been taken hostage. That was it: FARC had begun to carry out its plan. I ran from my house as if struck by lightning. I was breaking one of my own self-imposed rules about never going to speak with Clara without warning her ahead of time of my visit. But now I was charging down the path, followed closely by the guard who’d given me permission. Clara was sweeping her house.

“Listen, it’s really serious. FARC has just assassinated Gilberto and Guillermo.”

“Oh, really?”

“It was on the radio. They just—”

“Right. Thanks for the information.”

“I . . . I—”

“What do you want? There’s nothing we can do. There it is, so what? What do you want me to say?”

I didn’t insist and went back, devastated. I shut myself in my bedroom. I prayed, without knowing what to ask God. I imagined their families, their wives, their children, and my suffering was visceral, physical, I was bent over in pain, only too aware that such a fate might await my own family.

After nightfall my radio had powerful reception of the Colombian radio stations. Every ten minutes the voice of Yolanda Pinto, Guillermo’s wife, was rebroadcast. She explained in detail the procedure required for recovering the corpses and the difficulties she faced, because access to the site of the massacre was under military control and forbidden to the families. The guard who was on duty called out to me. He wanted to know what was going on, too. I told him they had begun to execute the hostages and that I knew our turn would be next.

Andres came shortly afterward.

“Ingrid, I just found out about the death of Guillermo and Gilberto. I want to assure you—the FARC is not going to assassinate you. It was an accident, the FARC was responding to a military attack.”

I didn’t believe him. After all these months, I knew that for the FARC, lying was merely a tactic of war.

And yet as the hours went by, the news seemed to be proving him right. The army had attempted a rescue operation. Only two of the hostages had survived the massacre. The broadcasts described how, when the commander had understood that they were surrounded by military helicopters, the prisoners had been brought together to be shot. Gilberto had gone down on his knees to beg for mercy. He’d been shot in cold blood by the commander himself. The survivors said that Gilberto had thought they were friends and reminded the commander of the fact, imploring him not to shoot.

I imagined the scene of the assassination down to the smallest details, convinced that it could happen to us, too, at any time.

That is why when Joaquín came for the proof of life, I insisted on expressing my support for a rescue operation by the Colombian army, knowing that many were against it after the bloodshed of Urrao. I understood that I could speak only for myself. But I wanted to stress the fact that freedom was a right and any effort to recover that freedom was a duty.

I also wanted the country to begin a deep reflection on what defending that right implied. The decision to undertake a military rescue had to be made at the highest level, and the president of the republic himself must bear total responsibility for the failure or success of the operation. I feared that in the labyrinth of political interests, our lives might no longer be worth anything; there might be greater interest in organizing some bloody fiasco and blaming the FARC for our deaths than in mounting any genuine rescue attempt.

Once the proof of life had been recorded, we waited for its broadcast on Colombian radio and television. The months in between were long. I had followed closely the story of a French airplane sent to the heart of the Brazilian Amazon, in the hope that the pressure to obtain the proof of survival might have some connection with it. A few days before the press released the information, a physician for the FARC had come to see us. He had studied medicine in Bogotá for a few years without obtaining his diploma and had been recruited as an instructor for nurses, as well as to head a bush hospital that I suspected must be close to our camp. To me his visit foretold liberation. It was in the best interests of the FARC to free its hostages in a condition that would enable the group to regain prestige in the eyes of the world. Perhaps the proof of life that the FARC had insisted upon so vehemently might be one of the conditions required by France to enter into negotiations, which, obviously, had to be kept secret. When the plane flew off again without us, I imagined that leaks in the media had probably caused the mission to fail. But there had been a moment of hope. France had taken a real risk to try to get me out of there. Dominique was searching for a way to snatch us from the FARC’s claws. There would be further contact, other envoys would come, and new negotiations would take place.

When, a few weeks later, the militiaman who normally came with the supplies arrived with the order to take us away, for me this could only mean that the negotiations had succeeded. We were to depart the following dawn, so we had to pack up our things. I took only what was needed for the few days to reach the meeting place with the European envoys. I gave all the rest to the girls, including the dictionary and a full-color map of the world that I had just finished making.

Andres organized a little get-together to say good-bye. The guerrillas shook my hand and congratulated me on the success of the negotiations and my imminent freedom. I didn’t sleep all night, in a state of bliss. The nightmare was over. I was going home.

I was sitting on my belongings, ready to leave. The moon was still casting its silver reflection on to the lazy water of the river. At around five o’clock in the morning, they brought us a cup of hot chocolate and a
cancharina
. My companion was ready, too, sitting on the steps of her hut, with two large bags. She had no intention of leaving anything behind. I was filled with a strange happiness. It wasn’t the euphoria I’d thought I would feel, just a quiet happiness. I was thinking about what this year of captivity had meant for me. I saw myself as some strange creature, an entity totally distinct from my present self. This person who had lived in the jungle all these months would stay behind. I would become myself again. A wave of doubt crossed my mind. Become myself again? What did that mean? Had I learned what I was meant to learn? I quickly let go of these silly notions. What did they matter now!

TWENTY-TWO

THE FORTUNE-TELLER

AUGUST 22, 2003

An immaculate sky drew sharply above our heads, like a long blue snake between the trees on either side of the river. We were moving slowly. The river wound through the jungle at its own pace; we had to avoid dead logs in the hairpin turns. I was impatient. Despite my expectation of imminent release, my stomach was painfully tied up in knots. The smell of the engine, the bittersweet aroma of this chlorophyll world, the absence of any certainty forced me blindly back to the precise moment when I had felt the trap closing over me.

It had happened one week after we were kidnapped. They had moved us from camp to camp to a place on the top of a hill, where for the first time I had discovered the green ocean of the Amazon filling the horizon as far as the eye could see. El Mocho Cesar was standing next to me. He already knew that they intended to lose me in this impenetrable vastness.

They had set up a makeshift camp on the nearly vertical slope of a hill. We bathed in a transparent stream that hummed as it flowed over a bed of translucent pebbles. I saw my first monkeys. They gathered above us, entertaining themselves by tossing sticks at us from high on their perches to frighten us.

The forest was very thick, and it was impossible to see the sky. Clara stretched out like a cat, filled her lungs with all the air they could contain, and said, “I love this place!” It shocked me. I was so obsessed by the idea of escaping that I didn’t even allow myself to appreciate the beauty around us, for fear it might decrease my sense of urgency. I was suffocating, and I would have felt just the same if I’d found myself imprisoned on an ice floe. Freedom was my only oxygen.

I was just waiting for nightfall to put our plan into action. I was counting on the full moon to make our escape easier.

A red truck appeared from behind a bend. Like ants, in less than two minutes the guerrillas loaded the truck. They had already dismantled the camp, and we hadn’t realized.

We took the winding path down the hill. Two little houses with smoking chimneys stood sadly in the middle of a cemetery of trees. A child was running after a ball that was split open. A pregnant woman watched him from the door-step, her hands on her hips, clearly in pain from her back. She disappeared quickly inside the house when she saw us. Then nothing more. Immense trees one after the other, identical, for hours. At one point the vegetation changed. The trees gave way to shrubbery. The truck left the dirt road and set off down a path that was scarcely visible among the ferns. Suddenly, straight ahead, as if put there by mistake, was a sturdy ironwork bridge, wide enough to allow the red truck to cross over easily. The driver stepped on the brakes and squealed to a halt. No one moved. On the far side of the bridge, emerging from the dark forest, were two individuals in camouflage uniform with big backpacks on their shoulders, walking resolutely toward us. I assumed they would climb onto the truck and we would cross the bridge. I hadn’t noticed the river flowing beneath. Nor the large boat that was waiting for us, its engine already throbbing, ready to leave.

It was then that the memory came back to me. In November 2001, during my presidential campaign, in a pretty little colonial village in the region of Santander, I’d been approached by a woman who had urgently insisted on talking to me. The captain of the monoplane had agreed to delay our departure by half an hour so that I could meet with her. She was a beguiling young woman, serious, simply dressed, and she came up holding by the hand her little girl, who was no more than five. After she had asked the child to sit farther away, she explained nervously that she had visions and that her visions always came true.

“I don’t want to upset you, and you will think I’m crazy, but I’ll have no peace until I can tell you what I know.”

“What do you know?”

She stopped looking me in the eyes, and her gaze was lost somewhere. I felt that she could no longer see me.

“There’s scaffolding, something falling. Don’t go under it. Stay away. There’s a boat, a small craft on the water. It isn’t the sea. Don’t get on. Above all—listen to me, this is the most important—don’t get on that boat.”

I tried to understand her. This woman was not pretending. But what she was saying seemed totally incoherent. Still, I played along. “Why mustn’t I get on the boat?”

“Because you won’t come back.”

“I might die?”

“No, you won’t die . . . but it will take you many years to come back.”

“How long?”

“Three years. No, it will be more. More than three years. A long time, a complete cycle.”

“And then, when I come back . . . ?”

“Afterward?”

“Yes, afterward. What will happen afterward?”

The captain came to get me. The airport closed before sunset, at six o’clock sharp. We had to take off immediately.

I boarded the plane and forgot what the woman had told me.

Until the instant I saw the
canoa
²⁸
beneath the bridge. Sitting at the front of the red truck, I was transfixed as I gazed at the launch waiting for us by the riverbank.
I mustn’t board. I mustn’t.
I looked around me: It was impossible to escape; they were all armed. My hands were damp, and an irrational fear had taken hold of me. I didn’t want to go there. One of the men grabbed me by the arm, thinking I was hesitant to go down the steep slope because I was afraid of slipping. The young men were skipping down breezily, proud of their training. They pushed me, dragged me. I put one foot in the small boat, then the other. I had no choice. I was caught in the trap. For a long time, she had said. A complete cycle.

We sailed from twilight to dawn. It was the end of the dry season, so the river was at its lowest level; we had to keep the boat right in the middle of the stream to prevent it from running aground. From time to time, one of the guerrillas jumped into the water, fully dressed, submerged up to his waist, to push the boat and set it free. I was afraid. How could I get back? With every hour my feeling of claustrophobia grew.

In the beginning our convoy went past several small houses that watched us blindly. The enormous trees all around filtered the last rays of twilight, as if to show that just behind, the forest had been cut down to leave room for land that was ready to be cleared. But very quickly the density of the forest stifled any light, and we entered a tunnel of shadowy vegetation. There were no more signs of human life, not a trace of civilization. The sounds of the forest had become sinister and reached us in lugubrious echoes, despite the throbbing of the engine. I found myself sitting with my arms curled around my stomach as if to keep my guts in place. Dead trees, their branches bleached by the sun, lay like corpses in the water. As if they were still waiting for help from providence, their arms stiff, held out toward a speechless sky.

The captain had lit a powerful beam to see ahead. On the riverbanks little red lights shone as we went by—they were the eyes of crocodiles, hunting in the warm waters of the river.
Someday I will have to swim in this river to go home,
I thought.

With the night, the world we were entering was transformed into a phantasmagorical space. I was shivering. How would I ever get out of here?

After that the fear never left me. Every time I got into one of their
canoas,
I was inexorably thrust back into the sensations of that first descent into hell, on that black Caguán River that had swallowed me up.

Now, however, I could let myself go, to contemplate the marvels of luxuriant nature, celebrating life this beautiful morning of August 2003. But instead I had butterflies of fear in my stomach. Freedom. Was it too good to be true?