Even Silence Has an End (34 page)

FORTY-TWO

THE DICTIONARY

One morning Guillermo the nurse arrived with the big illustrated Larousse encyclopedic dictionary that I’d been dreaming about. He called me over, put it in my hands, and said, “This is from Sombra.”

He turned on his heel and went away.

I was dumbfounded. I’d asked for it incessantly. My best argument had always been that Mono Jojoy had promised it to me. But I didn’t believe he would send it. I imagined that we were hidden in the far reaches of the jungle and that to get it here was unthinkable. So I could hardly contain my joy and excitement when at last I was holding it in my hands. The arrival of this dictionary transformed my life: It would alleviate boredom and allow me to make productive use of all the time I had on my hands and didn’t know what to do with.

I’d kept my notebooks from Andres’s camp, and I wanted to finish my research and track down lost information and learn. If I could learn, then I wasn’t wasting my time. It was this that frightened me the most about my detention: The loss of my time was the cruelest of punishments. I could hear my papa’s voice pursuing me: “Our life capital is measured in seconds. Once those seconds are gone, we never get them back!”

During my presidential campaign, he sat down one evening to help me do some planning and make an outline of the transformations I hoped to bring about. He got out his notebook, scribbled something, and declared, “You will have only one hundred and twenty-six million one hundred and forty-four thousand seconds during your mandate. Think carefully—you won’t have a single second more!”

I was haunted by his remark. Once I was deprived of my freedom, I was also deprived of the right to dispose of my time. It was an irreparable crime. It would be impossible for me to ever get back the millions of seconds that had been lost forever. The encyclopedia was therefore my best antidote. It became my university in a box. I would wander around inside it following my whims and finding the answers to all sorts of questions that had been on a waiting list my whole life. This book was vital to me, because it enabled me to have a short-term goal and cleared me of the underlying guilt inherent in my condition, that of squandering the best years of my life.

But my contentment made some of my companions jealous. No sooner did I have the dictionary than one of my fellow inmates came to inform me that since it was the guerrillas who’d brought it, it didn’t belong to me. I agreed with it in principle. When we were all waiting for the stewpot, I invited the rest of my comrades to use it.

“It will be available during the morning. I’ll use it in the afternoon. Just help yourself, then put it back in its place.”

Lucho warned me, “Be prepared that they’ll do whatever it takes to get it away from you.”

However, in the days that followed, there was less tension. Orlando offered to help me make a waterproof cover for the dictionary. Gloria provided the waterproof canvas from an old backpack she was getting ready to recycle, and everyone took turns using the dictionary. Just then Guillermo showed up again.

“Give me the dictionary. I need it.”

His tone left me puzzled.

“Yes, of course, how long did you need it for?”

“A week.”

“Listen, I’m working with it. Have it over the weekend if you like.”

He looked me up and down, then eventually gave in. He brought the book back the following Monday and said, “Don’t let it get ruined. I’ll come and get it again next Friday.”

The following week he tried a new strategy.

“The soldiers need the dictionary.”

“Sure, no problem. Take it and ask them to send it back to me with the receptionist, please.”

But this time he didn’t bring it back.

There was a new commander in the camp. He was an older man, over forty, with graying hair and a hard gaze. His name was Alfredo. Everybody thought that Sombra was going to be dismissed, but in the end they settled into a power sharing that seemed to function, despite obvious tension between them.

Commander Alfredo summoned the prisoners. I met with him, together with Sombra, for a whole afternoon, in what Sombra referred to as his “office.” I immediately broached the subject of the dictionary.

“I want to know if I can use the dictionary as I please. Guillermo seems to think not. In fact, he has it now, and he hasn’t given it back.”

Sombra seemed embarrassed. Alfredo was staring at him harshly, like a raptor circling its prey.

“This dictionary is yours,” declared Sombra, to make matters absolutely clear. I deduced he didn’t want to give any reason to Alfredo to report back to Mono Jojoy.

That was enough for me. The next morning Guillermo brought me the dictionary. He smiled as he handed it to me.

“Él que ríe de últimas ríe mejor.”
⁴⁴

His warning did not manage to spoil my satisfaction. I immersed myself once again in hours of spellbinding reading, seeking to find, to know, to understand, as if solving a puzzle.

FORTY-THREE

MY FRIEND LUCHO

AUGUST 2004

Lucho and I became inseparable. The more I got to know him, the more I loved him. He was a sensitive soul, very wise, with a sense of humor that could withstand anything. His intelligence and wit were, for me, as vital as oxygen. Moreover, he was the most generous person on earth, which made him a rare pearl in Sombra’s prison. I placed all my trust in him, and together we tried incessantly to think up ways to escape.

Orlando asked us about it one evening. He suggested we try to escape together. Lucho and I knew that this was impossible. We were convinced that Orlando would never dare, and we were not even sure that we ourselves would. Moreover, he was a big, heavyset man. We could not picture him making his way unnoticed through the chain-link fence and the barbed wire.

However, because we talked about it so much, we began to study the various options and to make plans. We concluded that it would take us months or even years to get out of this jungle, and that we would have to learn to live in it with no resources other than our ingenuity.

So we set to work making
equipos,
like the one Lucho had. Sombra had set up a leather workshop in the camp for making and repairing backpacks and the troops’ equipment. When we presented our request, we were fortunate that the timing was right—not only was the material available but also, if we were to be evacuated, we would need something in which to carry our belongings.

Our plan was to make two each: one regular size, to be able to carry everything in case of an evacuation, and then a much smaller one, which Orlando called a
“mini-crusero,”
for our escape. Orlando, who had done some leatherworking before, guided us through the basic techniques. Very quickly everyone in the prison joined in. Not only because we all sensed that sooner or later we would have to leave this camp (military planes were flying overhead on an almost-daily basis) but also because the opportunity to make a good backpack seemed to please everyone.

In the evening, Orlando would come and sit in my hut with a piece of wire that he’d taken from a corner of the fence and a big file that I’d lifted from a distracted receptionist. He wanted to make some fishhooks.

“This way we won’t die of hunger!” he said proudly, brandishing a sort of crooked, handmade hook.

“With that thing you’ll only be catching whales,” said Lucho, gently mocking.

I had managed to get a reserve of sugar from Sombra in case Lucho had a fit. We were also counting on this reserve for our escape. I worried about the shortage of sugar because we really had only very little, and I was obliged to use it because Lucho often seemed on the verge of another diabetic coma.

I had learned to recognize the symptoms long before he felt he was in danger of a relapse. It began in the afternoon. His face suddenly became gaunt, and his skin would go gray. I would tell him it was time to take some sugar. As a rule he would reply mildly that he wanted to go lie down and that it would pass. But when he reacted badly, shouting at me that I was bothering him and no, he would not take any sugar, I knew that any minute now he would drop to the floor in a seizure. It was a real struggle. I had to use all sorts of tricks to get him to swallow his dose of sugar. Inevitably, at some point he would swing from aggression to apathy. By then he was completely at a loss, and I could get the sugar into his mouth. He would sit there dazed for minutes on end, then finally he became Lucho again and apologize for not having listened to me.

We were dependent upon each other, and this was both our strength and our vulnerability. Because of it we suffered twice as much—first of all from our own sorrow and then, just as intensely, from the other’s afflictions.

It happened one morning. But I’m not so sure; it could have been at dawn, because sadness came upon us like an eclipse, and what I remember is a long day full of darkness.

We were sitting side by side, in silence, listening to the little radio together. It should have been a day like any other, but it wasn’t. We were waiting for my mother’s message; no messages for him, because his wife called him every Wednesday on Caracol, and this wasn’t Wednesday. When he heard his sister’s voice, his face lit up. He adored his sister, Estela. He was wriggling with happiness on his chair, as if to sit more comfortably, while his sister, in an infinitely tender, soft voice, said to him, “Lucho, be strong. Our little mother has passed away.” I had a sudden violent memory of the asphyxia I’d felt on discovering my father’s death in that old newspaper. Lucho was there beside me in the same overwhelming suspension of time, his breathing halted. His suffering reactivated my own, and I curled up on myself. I could not help him. He wanted to weep, as if to get his breath back, to get rid of his sadness and let it drain from his body, expel it. But he was weeping with dry eyes, and that was even more terrible. There was nothing to be done, nothing to say.

This eclipse of emotions lasted for days, until the prison gate opened and Arnoldo shouted, “Take just what is absolutely necessary—hammock, mosquito net, toothbrush! We’re out of here. You have two minutes.”

They told us to line up one behind the other, and out we went. I took my dictionary. I wasn’t nervous. I was slowly recovering from that long sadness, from that silence without thoughts. I wanted to go outside, I needed words.

“It will be good for us.”

“Yes, it will be good for us.”

“She was already dead.”

“Yes, she was already gone. She had forgotten that I was no longer there.” Then he added, “I was expecting it.”

“You expect it, but you’re never prepared.”

We went slowly through the outside fence of the prison. Ahead of us the military prisoners walked, in chains, two by two. They had seen us, and now they waved, with big smiles across their hollow faces.

“Do you think we look like that?”

“I think we look worse.”

We filed out of the camp, walking past the trenches for twenty minutes along the little path we’d taken with Shirley on the night of the raid.

We sat down among the trees, on our black plastic sheeting, far from the military prisoners, whom we couldn’t see but whom we could still hear through the trees.

“Orlando, did you take the radio?”

“Yes, I’ve got it, don’t worry.”

Gloria went to set up her hammock, since it looked like we would be waiting a long time. She stretched out in it, then fell to the ground like a ripe fruit. This time it didn’t make her laugh, although we did. We needed such moments to be lighthearted and silly. I went to give her a hug.

“Leave me alone, I’m in a bad mood.”

“Oh, come on!”

“Leave me alone. I don’t like it when you make fun of me. I’m sure it was Tom who untied the knots so I’d fall down.”

“Not at all! Don’t be silly! He didn’t do anything to you, poor Tom.”

They gave the order to set up tents. We would sleep three per tent. We were about to set ours up—Lucho, Orlando, and I.

“I warn you, I’m a terrible snorer,” said Orlando.

Just then an increasingly loud roar made us raise our heads. We stopped everything.

“Helicopters.”

“There are at least three of them.”

“They’re flying right over us—they’re on top of us.”

The forest began to shiver. We were all looking up. I could feel the sound of the engines in my breast.

“They’re right nearby!”

The sky went dark. The metal birds seemed immense as they passed above us.

Orlando, Lucho, and I all thought the same thing at the same time. We had just put our
mini-cruseros
on our backs. I took Lucho’s hand. With him, I could face anything.

FORTY-FOUR

TE CHILD

The guards loaded their rifles and came closer. We were surrounded. I was praying for a miracle, some unexpected event. A bombardment that would create panic and allow us to slip away. A troop landing, even if it meant death. I knew that there was a standing order to kill me. Before any maneuver or change of location, a guerrilla was assigned to this mission. He had orders either to save me and pull me out of the way if there was crossfire or to execute me if there was a chance I might end up in the hands of the
chulos.

Some years later, during one of the long marches that became our martyrdom in the hands of the FARC, a young guerrilla woman bluntly explained the situation to me.

She was called “Fluff,” and she deserved the nickname: She was petite and very cute. I liked her. She had a big heart. On this occasion I was having trouble walking and keeping up with the others. She’d been assigned as my guard, which was a relief to me. That day when we stopped somewhere to drink water, we heard a movement in the underbrush, and she loaded her revolver and aimed it at me. Her expression changed; I could hardly recognize her, she was so ugly and cold.

“What’s going on?”

“You do what I say, or I’ll shoot you.”

I was speechless.

“Walk ahead of me. Start running straight ahead, and don’t stop until I tell you to.”

I began trotting ahead of her, weighed down by a backpack that was too heavy.

“Hurry up!” she shouted, annoyed.

She pushed me abruptly behind some rocks and we stayed hidden like that for a few minutes. A
cajuche
⁴⁵
ran straight ahead, a few yards from us, head down. Then came the entire herd, twenty animals or more, much bigger than the first one. Fluff took aim, fired, and hit one of the wild boars. The animal collapsed in front of us, steaming black blood running from the back of its skull.

“We were lucky it was only
cajuches
! But it could’ve been the army, and if it had been, I would have had to execute you. Those are the orders.” She explained that the
chulos
would not be able to tell the difference between us, and they would shoot me. Therefore, I had to learn to run fast, or else she would be the one shooting me. “So you’ve got no choice—or, better still, your best choice is me!”

I hovered behind Lucho. The helicopters shaved the treetops, went away, came back again, circled, and then went right over our heads again, without seeing us. They disappeared in the distance.

The day was nearly over, and there were a few minutes of light left. We had just enough time to put up our tent, spread out our plastic sheets, hang up our mosquito nets, and lie down for the night.

Orlando handed me the radio.

“Listen to the news tonight. Be careful, they’re right nearby. Lucho and I will talk loudly to cover the sound.”

The next morning at dawn, I handed him the radio after Mom’s message and the one from Angela, Lucho’s wife. I got up to go clean my teeth and stretch my legs while waiting for breakfast. Orlando was last to come out of the tent, long after us. All the blood had drained from his face. He looked like a walking corpse.

Lucho took me by the arm. “My God, something’s happened!”

Orlando looked at us without seeing us and walked like a robot down to the river to get some water. He came back with his eyes red and swollen, his face empty of any expression.

“Orlando? What’s going on?” After a long silence, he opened his mouth.

“My mother has died,” he said with a sigh, looking away.

“Shit! Shit!” shouted Lucho, stamping his foot on the ground. “I hate this jungle, I hate the FARC! How much longer is the Lord going to hound us like this?” he cried, looking up at the sky.

At the beginning of December, it was Jorge’s mother who had passed away, then Lucho’s, and now Orlando’s. Death was pursuing us. Without their mothers my companions felt adrift, dispossessed of the women who safeguarded the memory of their lives. Now they were projected into a space where to be forgotten by others was to enter the worst of prisons. I shuddered at the idea that I might be the next victim of this curse.

As if fate wanted to make fun of us, life, like death, was also present in this makeshift camp. At least, I thought so. During the night, in the silence of the trees, I’d heard the cries of a small baby. Clara had given birth, I concluded. On waking, I spoke of it to my companions, but they hadn’t heard anything.

Lucho made fun of me. “That’s no baby you heard—those are cats. The soldiers have a few. I saw them carrying them when they went ahead of us.”

The helicopters didn’t come back. We returned to Sombra’s prison and to our belongings, which had been colonized by ants and termites while we were tramping around the forest, and as if to confirm Lucho’s comment, some cats had shown up.

There was a big tomcat with the coat of a jaguar and fiery yellow eyes that drew everyone’s gaze, no doubt a cross between a cat and a jaguar. He was the king of the gang, surrounded by females all as extraordinary as he was, but more belligerent. He was immediately adopted by our group, and we all did what we could to contribute to his well-being. He was a magnificent animal, with a white chest and white paws that made him look as if he were wearing elegant gloves.

“I’m gonna take him home with me,” said one of my companions. “Can you imagine if I sold the kittens? I’d make a fortune!”

But Tiger—that was his name—was a free creature. He had no master, and he treated us all with indifference, disappearing for days and returning when we least expected him to. One of the females in his harem, just as fierce, had decided to come and stay with us. Right from the start, it was Lucho who conquered her affections. She jumped up on his lap and settled down, purring, mercilessly scratching anyone who tried to come near. Lucho was intimidated and thought it wiser not to get up off his chair until she condescended to leave. From then on, every day she did exactly the same thing. The cat had tamed Lucho, and not the other way around. She was an unloved, unnamed cat with a defect in one eye. She would show up in the evening, meowing, looking for him, and he opened his cans of tuna, not to feed himself or to share with us but to feed his kitty, whom we finally baptized Sabba. Sabba meowed like a crying baby, so for a while I thought that I’d been mistaken and that the baby’s cry I thought I heard must have been hers. But one evening while the cat was sleeping nearby, I again heard the cries. I no longer had any doubt. When Arnoldo showed up the next morning with the stewpot, I bombarded him with questions. Clara hadn’t given birth yet, he said, and she was no longer in the camp.

I knew that he was lying, and my imagination ran away with me. In an awful dream that night, she was dead and her child lost.

In the morning I shared the dream with my comrades, insisting that she must be in danger. We all questioned the guards, each on our own, but they told us nothing. Then Sombra and Alfredo came one afternoon. They talked to us from behind the fence, as if we had the plague. The discussion turned sour, because Alfredo called our American companions mercenaries and CIA agents, and we didn’t like it.

Before leaving, Alfredo declared, “By the way, your friend had her baby. It’s a boy and his name is Emmanuel. She’ll be back in a few days.”

I was relieved, but my companions weren’t. “It’s going to be awful with a baby in the prison, screaming all night long!” said the very same person who had lectured me when our American captives arrived.

“I’ll answer you with your own words: We have to welcome everybody here.”

A few days later, Guillermo told us about Clara’s labor. He had prepared for the operation by reading about the procedure on the computer. He said he’d saved the child’s life, because it was almost dead when he’d intervened, and he had reanimated it. He then explained that Clara was already up and about.

Clara did indeed make an appearance one morning, with her little baby swaddled in her arms. We all greeted her with emotion, touched by this tiny being that had been born here in the jungle, in our prison, in our misfortune. He slept with his eyes wrinkled up, blind to the dreadful world in which he’d landed.

Clara put the baby down on my mattress, and we sat together looking at him. She told me in detail what her life had been like since we’d last seen each other in the chicken run, then added, “I was very sick, for days after the birth. The guerrillas took care of the baby. I never breast-fed him, and I only saw him once a day. I couldn’t look after him. I’ve never given him a bath.”

“Well, that’s all right. We’ll do it together, you’ll see. It’s a wonderful moment.”

I took the baby in my hands to unwrap him, and I discovered that his left arm was bandaged.

“What happened?”

“When they took him out, they pulled a bit hard on his arm, and they broke it.”

“My God, it must hurt him terribly!”

“He hardly cries at all. He must not feel it.”

I was deeply moved.

The weather was fine, the air was warm. We filled a basin that Lucho had found when we were at the pig pond. While I undressed the infant, I relived the moment Mom had taught me to give Melanie her bath. I copied Mom’s gestures one by one, placing the baby on my forearm, holding his head in my hand, dipping his small body gently into the water, speaking to him, looking into his eyes, humming a happy little tune so that his first contact with water would become a sign of a pleasure, the way I’d seen her do. I scooped some water up with the palm of my other hand.

“You see, like this. Then you splash the water on his head, taking care not to let it get into his eyes, because that might frighten him. And you talk to him and caress his body, because it’s a special moment, and each time it has to be a moment of harmony between the two of you.”

Mom’s words came back to me. Crouching above the basin with Clara’s baby in my arms I understood all their significance. I was experiencing with Clara what I knew her mother would have liked to have had the chance to share with her. Clara was fascinated, as I probably had been myself when I watched my mother’s sure and experienced gestures. In fact, the point was not to transmit anything. My role was to liberate her from her fear and apprehension, so that she could discover in herself her own particular way of being together with her child.