Even Silence Has an End (32 page)

THIRTY-NINE

RADIO ROUNDUP

APRIL 2004

Our arrangement delighted me. I programmed my days so that I could devote every afternoon to reading, and I was particularly careful to leave the book at six o’clock sharp on his shelf. I had learned that we judged one another on these tiny details and, what’s more, that it was on such a basis that friendships were built or conflicts ignited. The lack of privacy exposed us to other people’s constant scrutiny. To be sure, we were watched over by the guards, but above all we were subject to our fellow captives’ merciless surveillance.

If I’d been even one minute late, I knew that Marc would have sought me out with his gaze in the courtyard to find out why I was late. If the reason was trivial, he would have been offended and things would have gotten tense between us. We all worked this way. On the dot of noon, I would look up. I’d had time to do my gymnastics and wash up, and I waited impatiently for him to come out of the barracks with the book. This was a truly gratifying moment: For a few hours, I would plunge myself into the world of Hogwarts and I could escape, far from this enclosure and its barbed wire, its watchtowers, and its mud; I could return to the lightheartedness of my childhood. But my escape was making people jealous. I sensed that some of them would have liked to grab the book from my hands. I knew I could afford no false move.

One afternoon the guards arrived with the television that Shirley had brought to us in the chicken run. We were all very eager to see a film. But there was nothing at all relaxing about what they showed us—it was our three American companions’ proof of life, recorded months before their arrival in our prison. The audience was moved on hearing their messages and the ones that their families had recorded in response, now part of a television program that had been shown in the United States a few months earlier. To begin with, our companions were glued to the screen, as if it might have allowed them to climb into the picture and touch the people they loved. Gradually they sat farther back in their chairs, as if so much closeness were burning them. We stood behind them, painfully observing the families on television who, like our own, were racked with pain and anxiety. But above all I examined my companions, the way they reacted, as if they were being flayed alive on a public square.

There was something distressing about being there, watching the nakedness of their distress. But I was unable to tear myself away, fascinated by a spectacle of collective hara-kiri that reminded me of what I myself was going through.

I had at last put faces to the names of these strangers, who by now had become familiar, since I’d heard about them so often. I tracked their expressions on television, their gazes as they looked away from the camera, the trembling of their lips, their words—which were always revealing. I had been floored by the power of the image and the idea that we are all so predictable. I saw them for only two seconds, yet I felt as if I knew them intimately. They had all betrayed themselves; in front of the camera, none of us can mask the good and bad in our emotions. I was embarrassed, but there it was; we no longer had any right to privacy.

I observed my companions. The three of them behaved and reacted in ways that were utterly different from one another. One gave a running commentary on each image and would turn around to make sure the group had followed his explanations. He did say one thing that no one could fail to hear, while talking about his fiancée: “I know, she’s not very pretty, but she’s intelligent.” Everyone stared at him. He blushed, and I could sense it wasn’t because he was sorry about what he’d said. Sure enough, he went on to say, “I gave her a ring that cost ten thousand dollars.”

Another was crouching off to one side, compulsively rubbing the stubble on his chin. His huge blue eyes filled with tears, and he said over and over in a low voice, “God, how could I have been such a jerk!” He aged a hundred years in a second. It was unbearable to witness his pain; his words were the same I heard in myself, because, like him, I bore a cross made of regrets. I thought to go and hug him. But I couldn’t. For a long time now, we hadn’t been speaking.

Marc was standing next to me. I didn’t dare look over at him because I thought it wouldn’t be very tactful. I sensed he was motionless. And yet when the broadcast was over and I turned around to go out of the barracks, his expression stopped me in my tracks. He appeared in the grip of an inner anguish. He was staring into space, his head slumped forward, his breathing ragged, and he couldn’t move, as if he’d had the sudden onset of a disease so powerful that it had swollen his joints and crushed his heart. I took no time to think, to debate with myself whether my gesture would be appropriate or not. I saw myself taking him in my arms, as if I might be able to break the curse under which he’d been placed. He burst into tears and tried to stem them by pinching the bridge of his nose and saying, over and over, hiding his face against me, “I’m okay, I’m okay.”

He had to be okay. We had no choice.

A few hours later, he came to thank me. This was surprising, because I had taken him for a cold man, perhaps even insensitive. He had a great deal of self-control and often gave the impression of being elsewhere. Now that I saw him in a new light, I was intrigued and wanted to understand who he was.

From time to time, he came at dusk to talk with Lucho, Orlando, and me, and he made us laugh with his Spanish, which was getting better by the day but not necessarily with the most appropriate of words. He asked little favors of me, and I asked some of him. He had begun to embroider the names of his wife and children on his camouflage jacket. He was obsessed by his work and spent all day filling with black thread the letters he had carefully outlined on the canvas. It looked as if he was not making much headway. I wanted to see what he was doing, and I was surprised at how perfect his work was.

One morning when I was trying to wear my body out by going up and down the stepladder, I heard his American companions congratulate him on his birthday. I thought that everyone else had heard, too, like me. But no one else greeted him. We had grown hard, probably in our efforts to isolate ourselves from everything so that living would be less painful. I decided to go up to him anyway. My initiative surprised and pleased him, and I thought we’d become friends.

Until the day Sombra ordered a raid on our radios. We were all caught unawares, except for Orlando, who had gotten wind of what was being said in the soldiers’ barracks. He had stood with his ear up against the boards opposite their hut and heard that there was a general confiscation under way. He went around to all our fellow inmates and warned us one by one what to expect.

My blood drained away. Lucho was as pale as I was. If we gave them our radios, we would be cut off from our families for good.

“You give them yours, and I’ll hide mine.”

“Ingrid, you’re out of your mind. They will realize.”

“No. They’ve never seen mine. We always use yours, because it broke. That’s the one they remember.”

“But they know you have one.”

“I’ll tell them I threw it away a long time ago because it wasn’t working anymore.”

Arnoldo came charging into the enclosure with four of his acolytes. I just managed to throw my little radio, the one that Joaquín Gómez had given to me, under the floor of the washroom and to sit back down, looking as natural as possible. I was trembling. Lucho was green, beads of sweat forming on his brow. There was no going back.

“They’ll catch us,” he said again, anxiously.

Arnoldo stopped in the middle of the courtyard, while the four other guards sealed the premises.

There was nothing more important to a prisoner than his or her radio set. It was everything—the voice of family, the window on the world, the evening entertainment, a remedy for insomnia, something to fill our solitude. I watched as my companions put their radios in Arnoldo’s hands. Lucho put his little black Sony down and grumbled, “It’s out of batteries.” Moments like this alone were reason to adore him. He restored my strength.

Arnoldo counted the radios and declared, “There’s one missing.” Then, looking at me, he barked, “Yours.”

“I don’t have one.”

“Yes you do.”

“I don’t have it anymore.”

“What do you mean?”

“It wasn’t working.”

He stared at me.

“I threw it out.”

Arnoldo raised an eyebrow and looked closely at me. It felt as if he were counting every fold in my intestines. “Are you sure?”

Mom had always said that she was incapable of lying and that you could read it on her face. I had believed it was a sort of providential flaw that obliged us, genetically, to be honest. At times it was so extreme that I blushed when telling the truth, just at the idea that anyone might think I was lying, and consequently it was not infrequent that I would think I had to practice lying to be able to tell the truth without turning red. In my civilian life, I could get away with it. But here I knew I was going to have to look him in the eye. I must not look away. The time had come when I had to learn to lie for a good cause. And that was what saved me. I was the only one who had hidden my radio. I did not have the right to lose my nerve.

“Yes, I’m sure,” I said, holding his gaze.

He said no more about it. He picked up his pile of radios and batteries and went away satisfied.

I stood there petrified, unable to take a step, leaning on the table, within an inch of collapsing on the ground, soaked in a sickly outbreak of sweat.

“Lucho, could you tell I was lying?”

“No, nobody saw a thing. Please, talk normally, they’re all looking at you from the watchtowers. Let’s go sit at the little round table.”

He held me by the waist and helped me take the few steps over to the little chairs, as if we were having a chat.

“Lucho?”

“What?”

“I feel like my heart is going to leap out of my body.”

“Yes, and I’ll run after it!” He burst out laughing and added, “Okay, now we’re in a fine fix. You have to be prepared that one of these dog lovers might let the cat out of the bag. They’ll make mincemeat of us if one of them betrays us.”

It felt as if death were stroking my spine. At any moment the guards could come to search my hut. I changed the radio’s hiding place a thousand times. Orlando, who was on the lookout, blocked me at the entrance to the barracks.

“You kept your radio, didn’t you?”

“No, I didn’t keep a thing.”

I had answered instinctively. Alan Jara’s words were resonating in my head:
Don’t trust anyone.

Lucho came to see me. “Jorge and Gloria have been wondering if we kept the radio.”

“What did you tell them?”

“I didn’t answer, I left.”

“Orlando asked me the same thing. I said no.”

“If we’re going to listen to it, we’ll have to wait a few days. Everyone is on the lookout, it’s too risky.”

Just then Gloria and Jorge came over.

“We have to talk to you. There’s a terrible atmosphere in the barracks. The others have realized that you didn’t hand in one of the radios, and they’re going to denounce you.”

The next morning Marc called out to Lucho. I could easily imagine the subject of their conversation, simply by the solemn manner they suddenly adopted. When Lucho returned, he was as nervous as I’d ever seen him.

“Listen, we have to get rid of the radio. They’ve found a monstrous way to blackmail us: Either we give them the radio or they turn us in. We have to meet in the barracks in ten minutes.”

When we arrived at the barracks, the chairs had already been set out in a semicircle and I really felt as if I were in the dock. I knew I was going to have a hard time, but I was determined not to give in to their blackmail.

Orlando opened the discussion. I was surprised by his calm and kindly tone.

“Ingrid, we believe that you kept a radio. If that is so, we would like to have the possibility to listen to the news, too, especially the messages from our families.”

This changed everything! It became clear that this would be the ideal solution. If there were no threats, no blackmail, if we could trust each other . . . I was thinking on my feet: It could also be a trap. Once I agreed to say that I had indeed hidden the radio, they could go and squeal on me. “Orlando, I wish I could answer you. But I can’t talk openly. We all know that in our midst there are companions who are informers in the service of the guerrillas.”

I looked at my companions’ faces, one by one. Some of them looked down. Lucho, Gloria, and Jorge were nodding. I continued.

“Every time we have tried to do something as a group, one of us has gone to alert the guerrillas, like the day we wanted to write a letter to the commanders or the time we talked about going on a hunger strike. In our midst there are some
sapos.
⁴²
What guarantee do we have that anything said in this meeting won’t be relayed to Sombra in the next half hour?”

My companions were staring at the ground, theirs jaws clenched. I went on.

“Let’s just suppose one of us did keep a radio. What guarantee do we have that there won’t be another search and that someone won’t snitch?”

Consuelo was stirring on her chair. She said, “That may be true—there are surely some
sapos
here, but I would like to insist right away that it’s not me.”

I turned to look at her.

“You handed in your radio, you gave it to Arnoldo, you have nothing to worry about. But if ever one of us had a radio that you could use to get messages from your daughters and there was a search, would you be prepared to take responsibility, collectively, for the hidden radio?”

“No! Why should I have to take responsibility! I didn’t hide it!”

“Let’s suppose that during this hypothetical search the radio was confiscated for good. Would you be prepared to give yours, if they give it back to you, in replacement for the one that was taken away?”

“Why me? No, it’s out of the question! Why should I have to pay for other people’s stupidity?”