Even Silence Has an End (40 page)

During the march I had seen Javier rushing past like a crazy man to be the first to arrive at the camp. He’d thrown down his
equipo
and gone straight back to get Rosita’s. He put it on his back, took Rosita by the hand, and they ran off laughing toward camp.

The following morning they had divided the groups of prisoners. Javier went off with his unit in one direction, and Obdulio got Rosita back. He wanted to force her to return to him.

“That’s the way it is in the FARC! I belong to a different front. I’ll never see Javier again,” said Rosita in tears.

“Run away with him. Leave the FARC, both of you.”

“We don’t have the right to leave the FARC. If we do, they’ll go and kill our families.”

The bearers had come up, and we hadn’t noticed. They were standing in front of us, scowling.

“Get out of there,” one of them barked at Rosita.

“Come on, get in the hammock. We don’t have all day!” said the other one to me, with venom in his voice.

I looked at Rosita. She was already on her feet, her Galil rifle on her shoulder.

“Get the hell over to the camp. And don’t drag your feet if you don’t want to end up with a bullet in your head.” Then, turning to me, “And you, too, just watch it. I’m in a foul mood, and I would love to put a bullet between your eyes.”

I cried throughout the rest of the day. Because of Rosita. She was my daughter’s age. I wanted to comfort her, to give her tenderness and hope. Instead I’d left her in fear of reprisal.

I often think about her. One thing she said stayed with me, a dagger in my heart: “You know, for me the most horrible thing of all is knowing that he will forget me.”

I lacked the presence of mind to tell her that it was impossible; she was simply unforgettable.

FIFTY-FOUR

THE ENDLESS MARCH

On October 28, 2004, we were the last to leave and the first to arrive at the campsite, ahead of Lucho and the rest of my new companions. I was told they had gotten lost, but as I listened to conversations, or at least what I could gather from their whispering, I learned that my companions had narrowly avoided disaster. They’d been a few hundred yards from an army squadron.

It was still raining, a stubborn little rain that never let up. It was cold. Just enough to chasten me but not enough to make me get up and walk around. Here time stretched to infinity; ahead of me there was nothing.

I heard a commotion above my head. A group of fifty or more monkeys were making their way through the foliage. It was a well-populated colony, with the big males leading and the mothers with their babies clinging to them bringing up the rear. They had seen me from above and were looking down at me with curiosity. Some of the males became aggressive, shouting and dropping down just above me, hanging from their tails, making faces at me. I smiled. These rare moments when I came into contact with animals restored my desire to live. I knew it was a privilege to be there among them, to be able to look at them as equals, their behavior unaffected by the barbarity of men. The moment the guerrillas got out their guns, the enchantment would vanish. It would be the story of little Cristina all over again. The monkeys pissed on me, bombarded me with broken branches, in the innocence of their ignorance.

The guards had seen them, too. Through the bushes I watched as they grew excited and gave the order to load their guns. I couldn’t see anything anymore, I could only hear their voices and the monkeys’ cries. And then a first detonation, and a second, and yet another, the sharp sound of branches cracking and the thuds on the carpet of leaves. I counted three. Had they killed the mothers to capture the babies? Their perverse satisfaction in killing disgusted me. They always had good excuses to give themselves a clean conscience. We were hungry, we hadn’t eaten a real meal for weeks. All that was true, but it wasn’t a good enough reason. I found hunting difficult to tolerate. Had I always felt like this? I was no longer sure. I’d been profoundly upset by the business with the guacamaya that Andres had killed for pleasure, and by the death of Cristina’s mother. She had fallen from her tree, and the bullet had gone through her stomach. She’d put her finger in her wound and looked at the blood coming out. “She was crying, I’m sure she was crying,” William had said to me with a laugh. “She showed me the blood on her finger, as if she wanted me to do something about it, and then she put her fingers back in the wound and showed me again. She did that a few times, and then she died. Those animals are just like humans,” he concluded. How could you kill a creature that has looked you in the eye, with whom you’ve established contact, for whom you exist, who has identified you? Of course, none of that mattered anymore when you had already killed a human being. Could I kill? Oh, yes, I could! I had every reason to think I had the right. I was filled with hatred for those who humiliated me and took so much pleasure in my pain. With every word, every order, every affront, I stabbed them with my silence. Oh, yes—I, too, could kill! And I would feel pleasure in seeing them put their fingers in their wounds and look at their blood as they became aware of their imminent death, waiting for me to do something. And I wouldn’t move. I would watch them die.

That afternoon, under that wretched rain, curled around my unhappiness, I understood that I could be like them.

My companions arrived, exhausted. They’d made a long detour that had obliged them to go through a mosquito-infested swamp, and they’d had to cross over a steep pass in order to reach us. They could hear crossfire not far away. There had been fire contact with the army. The guerrillas had managed to “save” them.

We began to look for a place to set up our tents.

“Don’t trouble yourself with that,
Doctora,
” said one of the soldiers. “Between Flórez and me, we’ll have those tents up for you in no time.”

This was Miguel Arteaga, a young corporal with a pleasing smile. “We’ve perfected our own technique. Flórez cuts the stakes, and I drive them in,” he explained.

And they were indeed very nimble at the job and made it look very easy. I couldn’t help admiring them, both for their skills and for their heart. They always offered to help me set up my tent during the following four years we were together.

The trees opened in circles above our heads, revealing a heavenly vault full of constellations I was by now familiar with. We all sat on the ground on our plastic sheets to wait for them to bring us some food. Our conversation quickly focused on our shared anxiety. Some were whispering, not to be overheard by the guards—one of us had received information alleging that we would be handed over to another front.

The guard arrived, lugging two huge stewpots.

“Bring your bowls!” he shouted. “Today you’re spoiled—you’ve got
mico
and rice!”

“Stop lying,” said Arteaga. “You’ll have to come up with something better. You really expect us to believe your story about monkey meat?”

I leaned over the stewpot. It was indeed monkey meat. They might have skinned it and cut it into pieces, but you could identify it—the arms, forearms, thighs. The meat had been cooked so thoroughly, probably on charcoal, that the muscles were charred.

I could not eat a bite. It felt like partaking in some sort of experiment in cannibalism.

I said I wouldn’t eat any, and this gave rise to a general outcry.

“You’re pissing us off with your Greenpeace behavior!” said Lucho, mocking me. “Before you start showing so much concern about endangered species, you’d do better to show some concern about
us.
We’re the ones on the verge of extinction.”

“I don’t think it’s monkey meat,” said someone else. “It’s too scrawny. I think it must be one of us.” And he began counting heads.

Meat was one of those rare things we dreamed about the most. Nobody wanted to know where it came from, still less to ask existential questions about whether it was appropriate to eat it or not.

For me the situation was different. I’d been shaken by my own murderous impulses. If I was capable of acting like them, then I was in danger of becoming like them. The worst would not be to die; the worst would be to become something I abhorred. I wanted my freedom, I clung to my life, but I was determined not to become a murderer. I would not kill, even to escape. Nor would I eat monkey meat. I don’t know why the two seemed to go together in my mind, but it made sense.

It was our first day of rest since we’d left Sombra’s prison on October 1, and the men spent the day sewing and repairing their
equipos.
I spent mine sleeping. Guillermo came. I was not glad to see him, although he brought me some more boxes of medicine. I’d made the inventory of my possessions. He had taken everything for himself. All he left me was my Bible.

I found it easier to let go of the objects that were precious to me than of my grudge against him. I had hoped that he would be staying with the other group and that I’d never have to see him again. He could sense the unpleasant effect his presence had on me, and his pride was wounded. Oddly enough, he did not react with his usual scorn and insolence. On the contrary, he suddenly became friendly and charming, and he sat at the foot of my hammock to tell me his life story. For many years he had worked for the mafia, in charge of finances for a drug trafficker operating somewhere in the Colombian Llanos region. He described the luxury he’d lived in, the women and money he once had at his disposal.

I listened, in silence. He went on to explain that he had lost an important sum of money and his boss had put a price on his head. He had joined the FARC to escape from that, becoming a nurse out of necessity, to meet the FARC’s requirements for study. He had taken some training courses and the rest he’d learned on his own, reading and doing research on the Internet.

Nothing he told me made me feel sorry for him. For me he was a barbarian. I knew he was capable of putting a gun to my head and pulling the trigger without hesitating. What irrepressible pleasure I took in bombarding him with a detailed list of all the things he’d pocketed! I saw him shrinking by the second, surprised that I was able to account for everything so quickly.

“Keep it all,” I said, “because clearly you don’t know how to make people obey you.”

He was irritated when he left, and for the first time in many months I didn’t care. In Sombra’s prison the group pressure had been so strong that I’d slipped into a cautiousness that sometimes turned into obsequiousness. I didn’t like to see it in other people, even less in myself. I had often been afraid of Guillermo, of his ability to detect my needs, my desires, and my weaknesses and to use his power to hurt me. When I had to confront him, my voice trembled, and I was angry with myself for my lack of self-control. Sometimes I would spend an entire day preparing how to ask him for a certain medication or for some absorbent cotton. My attitude would trigger in Guillermo reactions of impatience, abuse, and domination.

The wheel of life had turned: I was reminded of María, a secretary who had worked with me for years. She was greatly intimidated by me, and her voice broke when she wanted to speak to me. I felt myself becoming like María, disturbed by power, paralyzed by the awareness I had of the need to please the other in order to obtain whatever, at a given moment, might seem vital. How many times had I been Guillermo? Had I also answered impatiently, annoyed by the other person’s fear? Had I believed I was truly superior because someone else needed me?

I hardened my heart while listening to Guillermo, because I was condemning everything in him that I did not like in myself. I was beginning to understand that humility, wherever one might be on the wheel of fortune, was the key. I’d had to go to the bottom of that wheel to understand.

The next day, Sombra came over. He seemed to want to talk, and he had time. He sat down on a tree trunk and signaled me to sit next to him.

“I was a little boy when your mother was a beauty queen. I remember her well. She was magnificent. That was another era, when queens were truly queens.”

“Yes, Mom was very beautiful. She still is,” I answered, more out of politeness than because I felt like talking.

“Your mother is from the Tolima region, like me.”

“Oh?”

“Yes, that’s why she has such a strong character. I listen to her every morning on the radio. She’s right, what she says to you. The government isn’t doing anything to obtain your release. In fact, for Uribe it would be better if you don’t get out.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“Is she still looking after the orphans?”

“Yes, of course she is. It’s her life.”

“I was an orphan, too. My parents were massacred during the
violencia.
I was well on my way to becoming a crook. At the age of eight, I had already killed a man. Marulanda took me in, I followed him everywhere, up to now.”

I was silent.

“I’ve always been Marulanda’s right-hand man. For a long time, I was the one who was in charge of the FARC’s treasure. It’s hidden in a cave, in the Tolima region. There’s only one way in, and I’m the only one who knows it. You can’t see it from outside—it overlooks a ravine. You have to climb up the rocks. The FARC has accumulated mountains of gold; it’s fabulous.”

I wondered if he’d gone mad, or whether the story he was telling me was a yarn he’d made up for my benefit. He grew very animated, and there was an unusual gleam to his eyes.

“There’s a castle nearby. It’s a very well-known place—I’m sure your mother has been there. The land belonged to a very rich man. He was killed, so they say. It’s all abandoned nowadays. Nobody goes there anymore.”

He believed his story. Maybe he’d made it up a long time ago and repeated it so often that he could no longer distinguish truth from make-believe. I was also under the impression that the story derived from his childhood memories. Maybe he’d heard it as a child and made it his own story now. I was fascinated to see him lost in this mystical world that belonged to him alone. I had learned at a very young age that in Colombia anything could happen. Reality was never circumscribed by what was possible. The barriers of the imagination were impermeable, and everything could live together in the most natural way.

Sombra’s tale, with his mountains of gold, his secret passages, the curse he maintained would fall on anyone who tried to remove any of the treasure took me back to the imaginary world of Colombian folklore. I asked him outlandish questions, and he replied, delighted that I was interested, and for a moment we both forgot that he was my jailer and I was his victim.

I would have liked to despise Sombra. I knew he was capable of the worst things, that he could be cruel and cynical, and the prisoners loathed him.

But in certain situations I also glimpsed, as if through the cracks in his personality, a sensitivity that touched me. I found out, for example, in the jumble of gossip that went around the prison, that La Boyaca was pregnant. When he came back from his little trip, with the letters from my mother, I congratulated him, thinking he must be happy to become a father. It was as if my words had stabbed him, and I quickly apologized, dismayed at the pain they seemed to cause him. “It’s just that ...” He hesitated. “The commanders decided it wasn’t a good time for La Boyaca to be pregnant. The army is everywhere. . . . She had to have an abortion.”

“That’s terrible,” I replied. He nodded in silence.

Clara’s child was born a few months later. I would often see Sombra playing with the baby, walking around the camp with him in his arms, happy to be pampering a little one.

I had accumulated countless grievances against him, but when he was there next to me, I found it hard to hold them against him. I had to confess I had a liking for this vulgar, despotic, brigand of a man. I sensed he must feel similarly conflicted about me. I must represent everything he’d always hated, everything he’d fought against his entire life, and the guards had supplied him with every possible and imaginary piece of gossip, so he must mistrust me as much as I mistrusted him. And yet every time we spoke together again, our compass showed us a different north.