Even Silence Has an End (25 page)

TWENTY-SEVEN

THE BARBED WIRE

The activity in the camp worried me. Every morning at dawn, eighteen or twenty or so big fellows went off by boat upstream and came back just before twilight. Another group disappeared into the forest behind our
caletas,
above the slope. I heard them working with chain saws and hammers. On my way to the
chontos,
I could see permanent dwellings that were beginning to take shape through the trees, rising from the ground fifty yards or so behind the camp
.
I didn’t want to ask any questions; I was too afraid of the answers.

Sombra came to see us shortly after the serenade, followed by his tall brunette, La Boyaca, and a jolly, fat girl named Martha. They were dragging huge oilcloth bags behind them, which they threw into our
caletas:
“This is from Mono Jojoy! Take out your checklist. If anything is missing, tell me.”

Everything we had asked for was there. Lucho could not believe his eyes. The day when we’d drawn up our lists, when he saw that I was including items that had hitherto been forbidden, such as flashlights, forks, and knives, or plastic buckets, he’d ventured to ask for shaving cream and aftershave lotion. He was laughing like a kid when he discovered that his boldness had paid off. As for me, I was in raptures on discovering a little Bible, bound in leather and closed with a zipper. As a bonus Mono Jojoy had sent us sugary treats, which we shared among ourselves with reluctance, as well as T-shirts in gaudy colors that none of us fought over.

I was surprised at the amount of supplies that were being delivered to the camp. I commented on this one day to Sombra, who wised me up. “The
chulos
can spend all they like on airplanes and radar to look for you. But as long as they have corrupt officers, we will always be stronger! Look, the zone where we are now is under military control. Everything that comes in has to be accounted for. We have to indicate who it’s destined for, the number of people per family, their names, ages, everything. But all it takes is for one of them to want to supplement his income and their entire plan falls apart.”

And then he added, maliciously, “And it’s not just the lower-level officers who do it! It’s not just the little guys. . . .”

His comment puzzled me. If the army was trying to find us, it was true that the existence of corruption could mean additional months or even years of captivity.

That was the crux of Mono Jojoy’s message, in supplying us the way he did: We had to be prepared to hold out for a long time. The FARC deemed that there was no way to negotiate with Uribe. Since his election a year earlier, he had waged an aggressive campaign against the guerrillas. Every day he inflamed people’s minds with incendiary speeches against them, and his approval rating soared. Colombians felt they had been tricked by the FARC. The peace negotiations that the Pastrana government had begun were seen as proof that the Colombian state was weak and that the FARC had taken advantage of this to strengthen their position. Colombians were disgusted by the arrogance of the Secretariado, and they wanted to be finished once and for all with an insurrection they repudiated, because it attacked indiscriminately the rich and the poor and spread terror throughout the country. Uribe had a good grasp of the nation’s mood, and he would not budge. There would be no negotiating for our release.

In the evening I went to speak with Lucho in his
caleta.
He put the radio on loud enough to cover our voices, and we settled in to play chess on a folding magnetic chessboard that Sombra had lent us.

“What do you think they’re going to do with us?”

“They’re building some huge thing back there!”

“Maybe it’s going to be their barracks.”

“Whatever it is, it’s too big for the three of us.”

We were listening to
The Bolero Hour,
a program that broadcast music from the 1950s. I liked this program. I knew by heart all the words to the songs they broadcast, because Mom had sung all of them all day long from the moment I was born. It was also the hour of depression, bleak breakdowns, and the sorrowful stocktaking of time lost forever. Lucho and I took turns in unveiling the fathomless depths of our sadness.

“I am afraid of dying here,” he repeated.

“You’re not going to die here, Lucho.”

“You know, I’m very sick.”

“Not at all. You’re in terrific shape.”

“Stop making fun of me, I’m not joking. I’m diabetic. It’s serious. I can go into a coma at any moment.”

“Okay. Explain, what do you mean exactly?”

“It’s like fainting, but it’s much more serious. You can burn your brain and become a vegetable.”

“Stop! You’re frightening me!”

“I want you to know, because I might need you. If ever you see me go pale or pass out, you must give me sugar immediately. If I have a seizure, you have to hold my tongue—”

“Nobody can hold your tongue, dear Lucho!” I replied, laughing.

“No, I’m being serious, listen to me. You have to be careful that I don’t choke on my own tongue.”

I listened intently.

“When I regain consciousness, you have to keep me from sleeping. You have to talk to me all day and all night, until you are absolutely sure that I have my memory back. In general, after a hypoglycemic crisis, you want to sleep, but you must not, because you might never wake up again.”

I listened carefully. He was dependent on insulin. For two years he had not had a shot of insulin. He wondered what miracle was keeping him alive. I knew. I could see it in his eyes. He was clinging to life with a fierce determination. He wasn’t alive because he feared death. He was alive because he loved life.

He was in the middle of explaining to me that the candies we had received could save his life, when the guard called out to us. “Hey! Stop listening to music, you’re missing the news!”

“So what?” we replied in unison.

“So what! They’re broadcasting your proofs of life.”

We jumped out of our chairs as if we had been given an electric shock. Lucho was hurriedly fiddling with the dial to tune in Radio Caracol. The voice of Darío Arizmendi, the station’s star journalist, came through loud and clear. He was giving a recap of our messages that had just been broadcast on television. I managed to hear only certain snippets of my speech, and I couldn’t check whether my recording had been edited. But I could hear my mother’s voice, and Melanie’s statement. Their exultation surprised me. In a way it hurt me, and I was almost angry with them for being happy about so little. There was something monstrous about the relief granted to them by my kidnappers, relief that was nothing more than a ruse to prolong our separation. I was filled with pain at the idea that we had fallen into their trap: This proof of life was not a condition for our liberation. There were no negotiations with France. It was a cruel way to inform us that our captivity was to be prolonged. They had managed to exert pressure without any intention of freeing us. We were trophies in the hands of the guerrillas.

As if to echo my thoughts, Fat Martha, who was on duty, came over to me.

“Ingrid . . . they’re building a prison.”

“Who is building a prison?”

“The
muchachos.
”

“What for?”

“They’re going to lock you all up.”

I had refused to face the truth. I felt dizzy, as if I were standing on the edge of a precipice, moving ever closer to the edge. “Who do you mean by ‘all’?”

“All the prisoners who are in the camp half an hour from here and the three of you. There are political prisoners, three men and two women, and the rest are soldiers and policemen. They’re the ones who are part of the ‘humanitarian exchange. ’ They’re going to put you all together there.”

“When?”

“Very soon. Probably next week. The barbed wire goes up tomorrow.”

I went pale.

“
Mamita,
³¹
It’s going to be very hard for you,” said Martha with compassion. “You’ll have to be very strong and prepare yourself.”

I sat down on my
caleta,
drained. Like Alice in Wonderland, I was falling, falling into a bottomless well. There was nothing to hold me back. This was my black hole. I was being sucked down, dragged down into the bowels of the earth. I was alive only so that I could witness myself dying. Was this my fate? I hated God for having abandoned me. A prison? Barbed wire? With each breath I suffered, I could not go on. But I had to go on—there were the others, all the others, my children, Mom. Furious with myself and with God, I clenched my fists against my knees, and I heard myself say to him, “Don’t ever let me stray from you, Lord! Ever!”

My head was empty, and I stood up like a robot to share the terrible news with my companions.

Every time we went to the
chontos,
we would look to see how the construction was coming along. Just as Fat Martha had said, they put up a chain-link fence, topped with barbs all around, a fence that was twelve feet high. In one corner of the construction site, overlooking everything, they had built a watchtower, with stairs to climb up it. Through the trees you could make out three more identical turrets. It was a concentration compound in the middle of the jungle. I had nightmares and would awake with a start, covered in sweat. I must have been shouting out, because Lucho woke me up one night with his hand on my mouth. He was afraid there might be reprisals. I began to lose sleep, seeking refuge in insomnia so that I wouldn’t be caught unawares. Lucho could not sleep either. We would sit on our
caletas
and talk, in the hope of banishing the ghosts of the night.

He would tell me about his childhood, when his mother cooked
tamales
³²
for Christmas, a typical dish from the Tolima region where she was born. The recipe included hard-boiled eggs, and as a child Lucho would steal a few. The next morning, there his mother would be in her bathrobe, counting her eggs and wondering why there were always some missing! He laughed so hard he cried as he remembered it all.

As for me, I went back to the Seychelles and to the happy memories of my daughter’s birth. I returned to what mattered most to me: being a mother.

The building of the prison shook me deeply. I repeated to myself that I was not a prisoner, that I was being held illegally. I had done nothing wrong, I was not paying for some crime. Those who had dispossessed me of my freedom had no rights over me. I needed this constant reminder. To help me not to give in, not to forget that it was my duty to rebel. They called it a “prison.” As if, through some magic trick, I had become a criminal and they were the authority. No, I would not submit.

Despite my efforts our daily life became gloomy. I noticed my companions’ morose mood; we were all depressed. Lucho had gotten into the habit of taking his morning meal with Clara on a wooden platform that must once have served to store supplies and which seemed like a floating island in the pig pond now that the swamp water surrounded it. Lucho went there every morning, taking some of the cookies that he had received. He shared them with no concern for keeping any for later. Then one day he no longer went to the platform and instead ate his meal sitting on his
caleta.

“What happened, Lucho?”

“Nothing.”

“Go on, tell me. I can see that something is bothering you.”

“Nothing.”

“All right, if you don’t want to tell me, it can’t be that important.”

As I was coming back from the river after my bath, I saw that Lucho was arguing with Clara over by the plastic buckets the guerrillas had given to us. He had volunteered to fill the buckets in the river to have fresh water for brushing our teeth, washing our hands, and cleaning our bowls after meals. It was a difficult chore, because you had to carry the two full buckets up along a muddy, slippery slope.

It was late afternoon, and night was about to fall. He had already completed his task for the day and taken his bath, and he was clean and ready for the night. But Clara had used the water in the buckets to soak her dirty laundry. There was no more water to wash the bowls or to brush our teeth on waking. Lucho was exasperated.

These minor incidents were poisoning our life, probably because our world had become so small.

I looked at Lucho in his anger and understood him only too well. I, too, had lost my temper dozens of times. I, too, had had bad reactions and bad attitudes. Sometimes I shocked myself with how little I knew about the inner workings of my own personality. For example, food did not interest me. And yet one morning I was angry because the largest piece in the rations they had brought us was not for me. It was ridiculous. That had never happened to me before. But in captivity I discovered that my ego suffered the moment I was deprived of something I wanted. It was over food that prisoners, urged on by hunger, waged silent battles. I observed a transformation in myself that I did not like. I could see how ugly the same behavior was in other people. Deprived of everything—our lives, our pleasures, our loved ones—we had the misguided reflex to cling to what little was left: a tiny amount of space, a piece of cookie, an extra minute in the sun.

TWENTY-EIGHT

THE SATELLITE ANTENNA

OCTOBER 2003

It looked as if the prison was finished. We were counting the days left to us on our slope, like borrowed time on death row. Sombra came to see me one morning. He was planning to put up a satellite dish. There was a television in the camp. Some of the instructions were in English, and he needed my help.

I told him I didn’t know anything about satellite dishes. He insisted nevertheless that I go with him to check the equipment. Two enormous wooden barracks had been built. There was a third building, smaller than the two previous barracks, with benches and dozens of plastic chairs piled up along the side. They were well supplied, there was no doubt about that. Boxes full of electronic equipment were stacked in the middle of the room, with the instruction booklets neatly placed on top. I went closer. And then I saw the prison, all of it, behind the heap of chairs. It was a sinister sight, with spikes of barbed wire everywhere and mud all around.

I acted as if I were reading the instruction manuals, fiddling with a few knobs, and then I declared, defeated, “I don’t understand a thing, I’m sorry.” I was unable to focus on anything else besides the living hell they had built for us. I returned to tell my companions about it, my heart sinking.

Sombra, however, would not accept defeat. The next morning just before noon, one of the boats that went up and down the river came back with a prisoner from the camp upstream.

He was a thin little man, his hair cut very short, his eyes sunk deep, his face deathly pale. All three of us were standing on our slope, curious to see the person whom Sombra had brought to install his antenna. He went right by us, probably unaware that there were other prisoners in Sombra’s camp. Did he sense our gazes fixed upon him? He turned around and stopped short. For a few seconds, we looked at one another. We were going through the same mental process. Our expressions reflected surprise and horror, followed by pity. Each of us was staring at a human wreck.

Lucho was the first to react. “Alan? Alan Jara?
¿Eres tú Alan?
”

“Of course! Of course! Excuse me, I wouldn’t have recognized you. You are all so different in photographs!”

Everybody greeted one another. “How are you?” I asked after some silence.

“Fine, fine.”

“And the others?”

“They are fine, too.”

Poked by the guard, Alan gave a sad smile, waved good-bye, and started walking toward the barracks.

The three of us, devastated, exchanged looks. Alan was a walking corpse. He was wearing a T-shirt that was little more than a rag, and a filthy pair of shorts. His legs were extremely thin, floating in rubber boots that were too big for him. It was as if a blindfold had been taken from our eyes. We were used to seeing one another like this, but we were in no better shape than Alan. Except that we had just received supplies. Without hesitating we went to get what was left of our supply of treats, to send them to the prisoners in the other camp.

There was some of the cake left that I had just made to celebrate the birthdays of Lorenzo and Lucho’s son.

“We should send it to them,” Lucho said. “It’s the birthday of Gloria Polanco and Jorge Géchem.”

“Wait, how do you know it’s their birthday?”

“In the messages on the radio, their families congratulated them for their birthday, it’s the fifteenth or seventeenth of October, I can’t remember. But it’s in a few days.”

“What messages on the radio?”

“My God, how is it possible? It can’t be! Don’t you know that every day there is a broadcast on RCN radio,
La Carrillera,
presented by Nelson Moreno, which transmits messages from all our families to each of us!”

“What?”

“Yes! Your family doesn’t call in to that program. But your mother sends you messages every Saturday on Caracol’s
Las Voces del Secuestro
! The journalist Herbin Hoyos came up with the idea to set up radio contact for the hostages. Your mother calls in, and she speaks to you. I hear her every weekend!”

“I don’t believe it! And only
now
you tell me?!”

“Look, I’m sorry, I thought you knew. I was sure you were listening to the program, like me.”

“Luchini, this is marvelous! I can listen to Mom the day after tomorrow!” I threw my arms around him. He had just given me the best present imaginable, and he wanted me to forgive him!

We prepared a package of candy and cookies along with the piece of cake we had put aside for Gloria and Jorge Eduardo. I asked the guard to pass on our request to Sombra. His reply came quickly: We had ten minutes to talk to Alan and give him our package.

I didn’t need to be asked twice. I followed the guerrilla into the room with the stacks of chairs. Alan was waiting for me. We hugged as if we had known each other forever.

“Have you seen the prison?” I asked him.

“Yes . . . I think I’m going to be in your group.”

“What do you mean?”

Alan had found out by bribing his guards with cigarettes that there were four civilian prisoners, two men and two women. Alan would rather be with the soldiers. “Still, if I’m with you, we’ll get organized. I want to learn French.”

“You can count on it.”

“Listen, Ingrid, we don’t know what’s going to happen—you never know with them. But whatever happens, be strong. And be careful. The guerrillas have their informers everywhere.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you have to be careful, even among prisoners. Some of them are prepared to snitch on their comrades for a lighter or a packet of powdered milk. Don’t trust anyone. That’s my best advice.”

“Okay. Thank you.”

“And thank you for the treats. Everyone will be happy.”

They gave us exactly thirty minutes. Not a minute more. Alan’s words had made a strong impression on me. I felt that I should indeed steel myself for a difficult time ahead. I could see the enclosure, the barbed wire, the watchtowers. But what I couldn’t yet see was the world inside the prison—the lack of privacy, the crowding, the violence, the informing.