Even Silence Has an End (47 page)

SIXTY-FOUR

THE END OF THE DREAM

They approached, like a snake moving toward its prey, cutting through the water in their boat, staring intently, enjoying the terror they caused. There was an unfamiliar dark purple tinge about their complexions, and they had bags under their red eyes, which only accentuated their mean look. “My God,” I said, frozen, making the sign of the cross. I stiffened. The sight of these men made me clench my teeth. I turned to Lucho. “Don’t worry,” I murmured. “Everything will be fine.”

I knew I could be angry with myself, I could berate the heavens for not having saved us. But there was no room for any of that now. All my attention was focused on observing these men and their hatred. Before my eyes was the physical incarnation of evil. Mom used to say, “People wear the face of their soul.” In that boat, beneath the mask of familiar features, were the glaring faces of pride and anger, as if possessed by the devil.

“Well, the white caps did the trick,” whistled Oswald perfidiously, with his Galil assault rifle on his shoulder, so that I could see it.

“You took long enough!” I said, to save face.

“Shut up, take your things, and get on board!” said Erminson, an old guerrilla who was trying to rise in the hierarchy. Between his teeth he added, “Hurry up, if you don’t want me to drag you by the hair.” And he laughed. He gave me a sidelong look, to see if I was surprised. I didn’t expect this from him. He used to treat me with a certain kindness. How could his heart now be so miserly?

Lucho got our things. I would have preferred to leave them there. With our
timbos
and our backpacks, they would know we had swum down the river, and I didn’t want to give them any information.

When I stepped on board the boat, I remembered the warning from the fortune teller. I sat to the fore, with a mad desire to jump and thwart destiny. Lucho, next to me, was filled with despair, his head between his hands. I heard myself say, “Mother Mary, help me understand.”

Going back, I did not recognize the river we had traveled down. Behind me the guerrillas were swapping jokes, and their laughter hurt. Lost in thought, trying to imagine what was in store for us, I had the impression that the return trip took no time.

“They’re going to kill us,” Lucho said breathlessly.

“Unfortunately, we won’t be that lucky,” I answered, before they told us to shut up.

It began to rain. We took cover under a plastic sheet. There, sheltered from their gaze, Lucho and I agreed. We must not say anything.

On the landing stage, with his arms crossed in front of him, Enrique was waiting, holding his AK-47 with both hands, motionless. He watched us climb out of the boat with his unmoving little eyes and pinched lips, then turned around and went away. The first blow of a rifle butt between my shoulder blades projected me forward on the wooden walkway, but I refused to hurry. The prison rose up among the trees, its wall of barbed wire over ten feet high. There my companions lived their lives.
Like in a zoo,
I thought, observing one of them delousing another’s scalp. A henhouse door opened up before me, and a second blow landed me inside the prison.

Pinchao ran up to hug me.

“I thought you’d be already in Bogotá by now! I’ve been counting the hours since you left. I was so glad you managed to slip away from us!” Then he added reproachfully, “Some of the people here are very happy you got caught.”

I did not want to hear that. I had failed. It was hard enough as it was. The mirror we held up to one another was so immediate, so close, it was difficult to bear. I knew this, and I did not hold it against my companions. The frustration of being a hostage was all the more overwhelming when others managed to carry off the very exploit we all dreamed of. I felt an unspoken affection for these men who had been captives for so many years and who were relieved to see us return, as if our failing could somehow lighten their ordeal. They all wanted to tell us what had happened after the night of our escape, and their words helped us to accept our defeat.

The prison door swept open. A squadron of men in uniform appeared. They threw themselves on Lucho. They tied a huge chain around his neck, closed with a heavy padlock that hung on his chest.

“Marulanda,” one of them called out.

The sergeant stood up, glancing about him warily. They fastened the other end of Lucho’s chain around his neck. Lucho and he looked at each other, resigned.

The guerrillas began to walk toward me in a circle, slowly, to surround me.

I was walking backward, hoping to gain some time to reason with them. Very quickly I was stopped by the barbed-wire fence. The men rushed me, twisting my arms while blind hands pulled me backward by the hair and wound the metal chain around my neck. I struggled wildly. In vain, because I knew in advance that I had lost. But I was not there, in that place and time. I was in another time, elsewhere, with men who had hurt me and who were just like these, and I was struggling against them, struggling to no avail, struggling for everything. Time was no longer linear; it had become impermeable, a system of communicating valves. The past returned to be lived again like a projection of what might come.

The chain was heavy, and it burned me to carry it. It reminded me of how vulnerable I was. And once again, as before when I escaped alone, I found in myself a strength of a different nature. That of submitting, in a confrontation that could only be a moral one, tied to the idea of honor. An invisible strength, rooted in a value that was futile and cumbersome but that changed everything—because it saved me.

We stared at one another: They were inflated by their power, I was holding on to dignity.

They attached me to William, the military nurse. I turned to him and apologized. “I’m the one who’s sorry,” he replied. “I don’t like to see you like this.” Bermeo, too, came up to me. He felt awkward. He was mortified by the scene he’d just witnessed. “Don’t try to resist them anymore. They dream of nothing better, to have the opportunity to humiliate you.”

When I managed to regain some calm, I saw he was right.

Gira, the nurse, came through the prison door. She was doing her rounds among her patients to say that there was no more medication.

“Reprisals,” said Pinchao behind me, almost imperceptibly. “They’re going to begin to tighten the screw.”

She walked right by me, staring at me, her gaze full of reproach.

“Yes, look at me carefully,” I said to her. “Don’t ever forget what you see. As a woman you should be ashamed to be part of this.”

She went pale. I could see she was trembling with rage. But she continued her rounds, without saying a word, and went out.

Of course I should have kept my mouth shut. Humility begins with holding one’s tongue. I had a great deal to learn. If God didn’t want me to be free, I had to accept that I wasn’t ready for freedom. This notion became a life buoy.

It was cruelly distressing to see my Lucho. We were forbidden to be near each other, or even to speak. I would see him sitting there, chained to fat Marulanda, alternately looking at his feet, then at me, and it took an excruciating effort to hold back my tears.

President Uribe had made a proposal that the guerrillas had rejected. The idea was to release fifty guerrillas detained in Colombian prisons, in exchange for the liberation of a few hostages. The FARC attached a condition to any negotiation: the prior evacuation of troops from the municipalities of Florida and Pradera, at the foot of the Andes, where the chain let the Río Cauca through. The government gave the impression that it would accept, then retracted the offer, accusing the FARC of manipulating public opinion with offers that really only sought tactical military advantage to find an escape for its guerrillas who had been cordened off by the Colombian army.

I was tired of listening to the commentary about the government’s offer on the opinion programs. The country was divided in two. Anyone who supported the creation of a secure zone in order to open a dialogue with the government was immediately suspected of collaborating with the FARC. It was no longer a question of trying to put an end to our tragedy. For the government and the guerrillas alike, it was a question of saving face. And our lives had simply become bottle corks bobbing in raging oceans of hatred.

I yearned to hear my mom’s messages again. I wanted for her to tell me about her daily life, what she was eating, what she was wearing, who she was spending time with. I did not want to hear the usual lamentations and the hollow litanies that our loved ones repeated tirelessly.

I sat uncomfortably on the remaining floorboards. The order had been given to gather up everything. The guerrillas were afraid that, with the efforts they’d made in looking for us, the military might have gotten wind of our presence.

The guerrillas had confiscated a large part of my belongings. I had managed to save Mom’s letters, the photograph of my children, and the newspaper clipping where I had read about Papa’s death. I cried without tears.

“Think about something else,” William said, not looking at me.

“I can’t.”

“Why are you scratching?”

I didn’t answer.

William stood up to look more closely at me. “You’re covered in
cuitibas
. After the bath you’ll have to get some treatment.”

There was no bath, not that evening nor any that followed. Enrique put us on a
bongo
that was only a third the size of the ones we’d known before. He squeezed ten of us into a tiny space that was six feet by six, next to the engine, with a drum of gasoline in the middle. It was impossible to sit without having someone’s head or legs in the way. He had arranged the chains so that we were attached to one another and to the metal bars of the boat at the same time. If the boat sank, we sank with it. He covered our hole with a thick tarpaulin, and beneath it our breath mingled with the fumes of the engine. The air was suffocating. He obliged us to stay like that day and night, using the river for a toilet, clinging to the tarpaulin, in front of everybody. We were like worms crawling over one another in a matchbox. Gafas was experienced; he didn’t need to raise the tone of his voice or bring out a whip. He was a torturer who wore gloves.

The stifling, condensed, contaminated air that burned our throats till we coughed, the heat rising under the tarpaulin, the murderous sun, our bodies stewing in sweat—all of this, of course, was the collective price paid for our escape.

Yet not one of my companions ever blamed us.

SIXTY-FIVE

PUNISHMENT

LATE JULY 2005

I couldn’t sleep. How was I supposed to sleep with a chain around my neck that pulled painfully every time William moved? My companions’ legs were tangled around me, and I was obliged to shrink into myself to avoid any inappropriate contact—a foot against my ribs, another one behind my neck. I was crushed in a vise of bodies, where no one had enough room.

I lifted a corner of the tarpaulin cautiously. It was already daylight. I put my nose out to fill my lungs with fresh air. The guard’s foot stomped my fingers to punish me for my boldness. Then he sealed the tarpaulin. I was mortally thirsty, and I badly needed to urinate. I asked for permission to relieve myself. Enrique shouted from the prow, “Tell the
cucha
she can piss in a pot!”

“There’s no room,” said the guard.

“She can make room,” replied Gafas.

“She says she can’t do it in front of the men.”

“Tell her she doesn’t have anything that the men haven’t already seen.”

I blushed in the darkness. I felt a hand reaching for mine. It was Lucho. His gesture brought down the dam inside me. For the first time since we’d been captured, I burst into tears.
What more must I endure, Lord, to earn the right to go home!
Enrique removed the tarpaulin for a few seconds. My companions’ faces were distorted, dry, corpselike. We looked all around us, straining our necks anxiously, not knowing what to think, blinking, our eyes blinded by the harsh midday sun. For a brief moment, we had a vision of the expanse of our misery. We were in a place where four vast rivers met. Water crisscrossing through an endless forest, with us, an infinitesimal spot pitching dangerously in the turbulent eddies where the currents collided.

The
bongo
stopped heavily one morning, on a whim of Enrique’s. The guards disembarked. We didn’t. Lucho swapped places to sit by me.

“Things will get better, you’ll see,” I told him.

“That’s what you think. It can only get worse.”

Finally, after three days, they had us get out in the middle of nowhere. “If it rains,” said Armando, “we’ll all get wet.” It rained. My companions managed to stay dry under their tents. Enrique chained me to a tree, away from the group. I was under the storm for hours. The guards refused to let me use the plastic sheet my companions sent to me.

Drenched and shivering, I was once again chained to William. He asked for permission to go to the
chontos.
The guerrillas had just dug some. They removed his chain. When he came back, I asked to go in turn. Pipiolo, a potbellied little man with chubby fingers, from Jeiner and Pata-Grande’s group, stared at me while he was slowly replacing the padlock around William’s neck. He remained stubbornly silent. And then he went away.

William looked at me, embarrassed. Then he hailed the guard. “Guard! She needs to go to the toilet, didn’t you hear?”

“So what? It’s none of your business! Are you asking for trouble or what?”

He wanted to suck up to Enrique. This meant the end of Pata-Grande’s reign. Pipiolo broke off a twig to use as a toothpick and glared at me.

“Pipiolo, I need to go the
chontos,
” I repeated monotonously.

“You want to take a shit? Do it here, in front of me. Squat here at my feet. The
chontos
are not for you!” he shouted.

Oswald and Angel went by, carrying logs on their shoulders. They burst out laughing and slapped Pipiolo on the back to congratulate him. Pipiolo pretended to catch himself on his Galil 5.56 mm assault rifle, delighted to have an audience.

I would wait for the changing of the guard.

William began to talk with me. As if nothing had happened. He wanted me to pretend to ignore Pipiolo, and I was grateful to him for that. Pipiolo came up to me. He planted himself before me.

“You shut up, get it? Now it’s my turn to have fun. As long as I’m here, you keep your mouth shut.”

Enrique let Pipiolo stay on guard all day long. There was no relief until evening.

The troops were working flat out, building something we could just discern between the trees. In one day the prison was set up—fences, barbed wire, eight
caletas
close together in a row, and two others in the corner on either side. Right up next to one of them, hidden from sight by a screen of palm leaves, they had built a latrine. On the other side, there was a tree. In the middle a reservoir of water. All around the
caletas,
there was a muddy pond.

I was assigned to the
caleta
between the latrine and the tree, to which I was chained. I had enough slack to be able to go from my hammock to the latrine, but if I tried to reach the pool of water, I choked. Lucho was on the far side of the reservoir, also chained. They removed our boots, making us walk barefoot. I was not allowed to communicate with anyone.

Being next to the latrine was a refined form of punishment. I lived in the permanent stench of our sick bodies. The nausea never left me, as I was the unhappy witness to all my companions’ physical afflictions.

I retreated to my bubble, under my mosquito net. I sought refuge from the attacks of
jején, pajarilla, mosca-marrana
,
⁷⁶
and contact with men. I spent twenty-four hours curled up in my cocoon, huddled in my hammock, clinging to a silence with no end.

Eventually I switched on the radio. One day I came upon a preacher who was broadcasting from the West Coast of the United States. He was preaching the Bible as if it were a philosophy class. I encountered his program several times, and I was disdainful. I thought that he was one of those cranks who had made God their milk cow. But then I stopped to listen. He was analyzing a passage in the Bible, dissecting the texts, basing his erudite arguments on the Greek and Latin versions of the text. Every word took on a deeper, more precise meaning, and it was as if he were cutting a diamond there before me. And he said to me, My grace is sufficient for you: for my strength is made perfect in weakness . . . for when I am weak, then am I strong. It was one of the first paragraphs in chapter 12 of the second letter from St. Paul to the Corinthians. And he said to me, My grace is sufficient for you: for my strength is made perfect in weakness . . . for when I am weak, then am I strong. It should be read like a poem, without any preconceived ideas. I thought it was universal and could be used by anyone seeking for a meaning in suffering. I began to hibernate. There was no longer any day or any night, any sun or any rain. Noise, smells, insects, hunger and thirst, everything disappeared. I read, listened, meditated, sifted each episode of my life through my new thoughts. My relationship with God changed. I no longer had to go through others to have access to him, nor did I need rituals. Reading his book, I saw a gaze, a voice, a finger that showed the way and transformed things. The human condition that was revealed in the Bible became a mirror that sent my own reflection back to me.

I liked that God. He spoke, he chose his words, he had a sense of humor. Like the Little Prince charming the rose, he was cautious.

One evening when I was listening to the nighttime rebroadcast of one of the preacher’s lectures, someone called me. It was mink black outside, and it was impossible to see anything. I raised my head and listened, and the voice came closer.

“What’s going on?” I cried, afraid that it might be the alert to strike camp.

“Shh! Stay calm.” I recognized Mono Liso’s childish voice.

“What do you want?” I asked warily.

He had put his hand through the wire fence and was trying to touch me, saying obscene things that sounded ridiculous in his little-boy’s voice.

“Guaaard!” I screamed.

“What!” answered an irritated voice from the other end of the prison.

“Call the
relevante
!
”
⁷⁷

“I’m the
relevante
! What do you want?”

“I have a problem—Mono Liso.”

“We’ll see about it tomorrow,” he said curtly.

“He has to learn respect!” shouted someone from inside the enclosure. “We heard everything. He’s a foul-mouthed brat!”

“Shut up!” the guard shouted back.

The
relevante
circled with his flashlight beam, and it caught Mono Liso, who leaped back from the fence and pretended to be cleaning his AK-47.

The next morning after breakfast, Enrique sent Mono Liso with the keys to the lock hanging from my neck. He sauntered over, proud as a peacock.

“Come here!” he shouted, with the smugness of authority acquired too soon.

He opened the padlock and tightened the chain around my throat. I could hardly breathe. Pleased with his work, he went back out, rolling his shoulders. Once he was outside, he gave some useless instructions to the men on duty. He wanted everyone to know that he had just been promoted to
relevante
.

I went back to my hammock and opened my Bible.

After several days had gone by, Enrique decided to visit the prison. He got the military prisoners together and acted all chummy with them. He pretended to write down everyone’s requests. In the end, when he saw that everything had gone smoothly and no one had any reason to protest, he asked if anyone had any special requests.

Pinchao raised a finger. “I do have one for you, Commander.”

“Tell me, my boy, I’m listening,” Gafas said in a syrupy voice.

“I would like to ask you”—Pinchao paused to clear his throat—“I would like to ask you to remove my companions’ chains. They’ve been chained up for nearly six months and—”

Gafas interrupted him. “They’ll be chained up until they leave here,” he said, a touch too spitefully.

Then, thinking better of it, he got up and smiled and said, “I don’t suppose there’s anything else? Right. Good night,
muchachos
!”

The next morning at around six, planes flew right over the top of the camp. And a few minutes later, there was a series of explosions, about twelve miles away.

“They’re bombing!”

“They’re bombing!”

My companions didn’t know what else to say.

The first thing I put into my
equipo
was my Bible. I anxiously sorted through my belongings. All I wanted to keep were the things that reminded me of my children. They had just turned twenty and seventeen. I had missed all their adolescent years. Did they still remember my face? My hands were trembling. I had to throw out all the rest—recycled pots, patched scraps of clothing, my men’s underwear. Permanent contact with mud, insects, and athlete’s foot had made my feet a frightful mess. My legs had atrophied, and I had lost most of my muscle mass.

When the guard came to announce our imminent departure, I was ready to march.