Even Silence Has an End (48 page)

SIXTY-SIX

THE RETREAT

NOVEMBER 2005

While we were walking in single file, silently, bent, I prayed, with my rosary in my hands. No one had told us anything, but I imagined that we must be in the same part of the country as our former companions, Orlando, Gloria, Jorge, Consuelo, and Clara. I prayed that the bombing had not caught any of them in the line of fire.

We went through changing forests, and every step entailed risk. Those at the front of the line had their faces deformed by brambles and bee stings. “They’re Chinese,” said the others, making fun of them. I would march with a hat pulled down over my head, a mosquito net covering my face and gloves that I had made from old camouflage uniforms.
I am an astronaut
, I told myself, feeling like an alien landed on another planet. I was absent, lost in my prayers, concentrating on the effort, and I did not see the mountain coming. I looked up, and the wall of vegetation disappeared into the clouds. The climb was very hard, I could not keep the pace. My companions were far ahead of me, excited by the physical effort—who would go fastest, carry the most, complain the least.

“I’ll never make it,” I said quietly.

Angel was getting impatient. “Hurry up!” he shouted, pushing me.

“Hand me your
equipo
,” said someone behind us with false resignation.

It was Efrén, a tall, muscular black man who never spoke. He had just caught up with us at a slow jog. He was meant to come last. We were the last ones in the group, and he didn’t want to get left behind because of me.

He took my
equipo
and wedged it behind his neck above his own backpack.

“Go ahead,” he said with a smile.

I looked one last time toward the top and began to climb, clinging to everything I could get my hands on. Three hours later, after crossing waterfalls, rock faces, and an astonishing esplanade of stones piled in pyramids like the ruins of an ancient Inca temple, I reached the top.

Sitting in a row on the slope, my companions were eating rice. Lucho sat against a tree, his cheeks hollow with fatigue, unable to lift his food to his mouth. I moved toward him.

Angel called out in a nasty voice, “Come back here! You will sit where I tell you to.”

Enrique gave the order to start marching again. We didn’t even have time to rest for a moment. Efrén, exhausted, protested against Enrique’s decision. He took off my
equipo
to give it back to me. He was called up front, then came back, tail between his legs. Enrique had not appreciated his complaint; he would have to go on carrying my
equipo
as a punishment. Angel, too, protested. He was fed up with being last because of me and losing his chance to eat. He was relieved from his mission and replaced by Katerina, the black girl who’d looked after me when we left Sombra. I did my best to hide that I was overjoyed.

“Let’s not let them get ahead,” she said, mingling authority with complicity.

We crossed a high, desertlike plateau, where the clay ground baked beneath the sun. The open horizon revealed the expanse of the jungle. A green line carved through the blue sky around the 360 degrees of our field of vision. To the left a huge river stretched lazily, in traceries of India ink.
That must be the Río Negro,
I thought.

At the far side of the plateau, we entered a cloister of scraggly dry trees with neither leaves nor shade, growing in a tangle. They tore at my hat with their clawed branches, held me back by the straps of my pack, blocked my way whenever I could squeeze my
equipo
between them, and finally sliced through my boot with a branch as sharp as a blade that was sticking up from the ground. “I’ll have water in my socks,” I muttered, cursing. We had a dizzying descent, down a slope built in terraces, which we could hurry down, jumping, at the risk of missing our landing and rolling the rest of the way in freefall. The last part of the descent gave onto an expanse of rainwater captured in the moss and bushes, and I had to jump from one tree root to the other to avoid water getting into my damaged boots. The next morning the terrain was flat and dry. Out of nowhere came a huge dirt road. “We’ve found our way out,” said Katerina. We’d made good time, not letting the others get ahead.

“Let’s stop here,” she said. “I’m tired.”

I put my pack on the ground.

“What do you like to eat?” she asked, lighting a cigarette.

“I like pasta,” I answered.

Katerina pouted. “Normally I’m pretty good at pasta. But here, with nothing, it’s hard. Do you like pizza?”

“I love pizza.”

“When I was little, my mother sent me to live with my aunt in Venezuela. She worked for a very rich lady who liked me a lot. She would take me to eat pizza with her children.”

“Were they the same age?”

“No, they were older. The boy said that when he grew up, he would marry me. I would have liked to marry him.”

“Why didn’t you stay there?”

“My mother wanted me with her. She lives in Calamar with her new husband. But I didn’t want to come back. And when I did, there were problems. We didn’t have any money, and I couldn’t leave again.”

“Did you like it in Calamar?”

“No, I wanted to go back to my aunt, in that nice house. They had a swimming pool. We ate hamburgers. Here they don’t know what that is.”

“Were you studying in Calamar?”

“I was in school at the beginning. I was good in school. I liked drawing a lot, and I had nice handwriting. Later on I needed money, so I had to work.”

“Work where?”

She hesitated for a moment, then said, “In a bar.”

I didn’t say anything. Most of the girls had worked in a bar, and I knew what that meant.

“That’s why I enlisted. Here at least, if you have a boyfriend, you don’t have to wash his laundry for him. We women and men are equal.”

I listened to her, thinking that it wasn’t quite true.

What was true, on the other hand, was that the girls had to work like men. I can still see Katerina in her tank top and camouflage pants, an ax in her hand, swinging her arms back with a spectacular twist of her waist to land a precise blow at the base of a fine tree she chopped down without any difficulty. It was a vision that had left my companions breathless, this black Venus displaying a physical prowess that emphasized every muscle on her body. How could a girl like her stay in a place like this?

“I would have liked to be a beauty queen,” she confessed. “Or a model,” she added dreamily.

Her words stabbed my heart. She was carrying her AK-47 the way others carry a book and a pencil.

The march went on, every day more trying. “We won’t be there in time for New Year’s,” said Gira’s boyfriend. I didn’t want to believe him. I thought he was just saying that to make us go faster. I had no intention of walking faster. This blind effort, with no idea where we were headed, was sapping my energy.

One particularly rough day, with
cansaperros
one after the other, like pearls strung together by an invisible hand, a storm broke. The only order we had was to keep going. Angel took pleasure in forbidding me from covering myself. I kept going, dripping with rainwater.

I caught up with Lucho, who was leaning against a tree in the middle of a climb, his gaze adrift. “I can’t take it anymore, I can’t take it anymore,” he said, looking up at the sky as it raged against us.

I went up to him to give him a hug, to take his hand.

“Keep moving!” shouted Angel. “Don’t try to trick us with your stories. We know the game you two play to slow up the march.”

I didn’t listen to him. I was fed up with his insults, his fits, his threats. I stopped, tossed my backpack on the ground, and took out the sugar I always carried on me.

“Here you are, my Lucho, take this. Let’s carry on together, gently.”

Angel cocked his M-16 rifle and poked the barrel into my ribs.

“Never mind,” said a voice that I recognized. “We’re already there. The troops are resting fifty yards from here.”

Efrén picked up Lucho’s pack and said, “Come on, sir, just a little more effort.”

He took out the black plastic sheet on the side of his equipment and handed it to him. Lucho wrapped himself in it and held my arm, and he was still saying, “I can’t take it anymore, Ingrid, I can’t take it anymore.” He couldn’t tell that I was crying along with him, because it was pouring so hard that my face was streaming with rain.

My God, this is enough!
I screamed in the silence of my heart.

When I got to the top of one hill, I was ready to pass out. I had forgotten to fill the little plastic bottle I used for water. Angel was drinking from his, water dripping down his neck.

“I’m thirsty,” I said, my mouth all furry.

“There’s no water for you, you old hag,” he brayed.

He was looking at me with the cold eye of a reptile. He raised his canteen to his mouth and drank for a long time, never taking his eyes from me. Then he turned it over, and two drops fell out. He screwed the top back on. Enrique was doing his rounds. He walked the length of the column, frowning. He went right by me. I kept silent.

“Prepare the water!” he shouted when the last of us had arrived.

A sound of pots banging cheered the silence of the mountain. Two guys struggling to carry a cauldron filled with water stopped a few feet from us. They tossed in two packs of sugar and some sachets of the strawberry-flavored powder. They stirred it all up with a branch they broke off a tree.

“Who wants water? Come on up!” shouted one of them like a street vendor.

Everybody rushed up.

“Not you!” screamed Angel, in a foul mood.

I squatted down, my head between my knees. “I’m not as thirsty as before. Pretty soon I won’t be thirsty at all.”

The water left in the cauldron was poured out on the ground. We went on marching. Efrén came running up to me.

“Lucho sent this for you!” He tossed me a bottle filled with red water, which landed at my feet.

SIXTY-SEVEN

THE EGGS

On December 17, 2005, the march stopped at ten o’clock in the morning. We had just jumped two small streams, with a bed of little pink and white pebbles. The rumor immediately spread that we’d be camping at the top of a hill a few yards high.

“We made it before Christmas,” I said, relieved.

In a few hours, the camp was built. I was chained to my tree at the far end and Lucho to his at the other. I was allowed to build some parallel bars for exercise. They wanted me to be in better shape for marching, I thought. They opened the padlock that attached me to the tree, and I had to keep the whole chain wrapped around my neck when I climbed on the bars. I did my spins while the guards looked on, amused.
I’ll fall, and the chain will stay caught on the bar, and I’ll die, strangled,
I thought wryly.

I had one hour for my exercises and my bath. “You have to get some muscles in your arms,” said the young guy who had replaced Gira as nurse. I found it very difficult to do pull-ups, and I tried to raise the weight of my entire body, hanging from one of the bars, to no avail.
I’ll do it every day, and I’ll make it,
I promised myself.

My companions watched and felt sorry for me. Arteaga was the first one to break the silence imposed on me. He spoke without looking at me, continuing to work on sewing caps, advising me on which exercises to do and how many, right in front of the guards. There were no comments, no reprimands. One by one, my companions began speaking to me again, more and more openly, except for Lucho.

One afternoon on my way back from the bath, I could see that Lucho wasn’t feeling well. He needed sugar. I hurried to find it in my things, my hands trembling because I knew it was urgent. I gave Lucho the sugar and stayed with him for a while to be sure that he felt better. From behind, Angel pulled my chain violently.

“Who do you think you are?” he screamed. “Either you are stupid, a mental retard, or you’re taking us for fools! Don’t you get it? You’re not allowed to talk to anyone. Has your old donkey’s brain stopped working? I’ll get it to work, all right, with a bullet between your eyes, you’ll see!”

I listened to him without batting an eyelid. He dragged me like a dog to my tree and chained me up, relishing every second. I knew I’d done the right thing, maintaining my self-control. But the rage I felt against Angel distracted me from my good resolutions. I was almost angry with myself. During the night I replayed all the possible versions of the same scene, above all the imagined slap I delivered to his face, and I delighted in picturing Angel’s defeat when I put him in his place. Nonetheless, I knew the best thing had been to keep quiet, despite the white-hot burn of his insults.

Angel made a point of not allowing me to forgive him for degrading me. He persecuted me with his spite and shared it with the guerrillas like Pipiolo or Tiger, who got off on the self-aggrandizing pleasure of attacking me. The slightest pretext for abuse was a delight. They knew that I waited impatiently for my morning drink. They insisted on serving me last, and when I held out my bowl, they hardly filled it at all or threw out the rest in front of me.

They knew I liked bath time. I was the last one to go to bathe, but they would hurry me from the water faster than anyone else. I was not allowed to sit in the stream to wash; I had to do it standing up, because they said I got the water dirty. My companions had set up a plastic curtain so that I could have some privacy when bathing. Everyone could use it except me.

One morning when I was washing, I noticed some movement over by the forest. Soaping myself, my eyes on the trees, I saw Mono Liso, his pants around his ankles, masturbating.

When the guard came to lock my chain around the tree, I demanded he call Enrique. Enrique didn’t come. But “the Dwarf,” his new second in command, answered my request.

The Dwarf was a strange man, first of all because he was well over six feet tall and then because he looked like an intellectual lost in the bush. I had never been able to decide whether I liked him or not. I believed he was weak and a hypocrite, but perhaps he was simply disciplined and cautious.

“I wanted to let you know that if the FARC is not capable of educating that brat, I’ll do it myself.”

“The next time it happens, let us know.”

“There won’t be a next time. If it happens again, I’m going to give him a thrashing he’ll blush about all his life.”

The next morning no one came to unchain me, so I couldn’t do my exercises at the bars outside my
caleta
. I was reduced to doing push-ups below my hammock.

Many months passed by when I saw the hen. She had just jumped onto Lucho’s
caleta
and had settled onto the mosquito net he left rolled up at the end of his bed during the day. It must have been a more pleasant nest. She stayed for hours, motionless, unbeknownst to anybody, with one eye closed, sitting straight up as if she were sleeping. She was speckled gray, with a lovely bloodred crest, well aware of the strong impression she made.
What a looker,
I thought as I observed her. She got up, clucking, then cackled energetically, ruffling her feathers, before going off without further ado.

Every day at the same time, Lucho’s hen came to visit. She regularly laid an egg for him on the sly. At twilight we observed the guards.

“She was in the camp this afternoon.”

“She must have laid an egg here somewhere, among the trees.”

The egg was already in our bellies. It had come to me in a roundabout way, so that I could cook it. I had perfected a technique for heating my bowl by burning the plastic handle of the disposable razors delivered to the camp. I kept all of them. With a single razor handle, I could cook an egg, which Lucho then shared out to our comrades in spoonfuls, taking turns.

When it rained, I could cook continuously—the rain hid the smoke, the smells, and the sound. And we would eat all the eggs we’d saved one by one.

We had just discovered a new one in the folds of Lucho’s mosquito net. The hen had made a great fuss, to Pinchao and me, to tell us about her egg. We were really happy, because it was Mother’s Day, and it would allow us to celebrate.

We could not have imagined that the date would be marked in a very different way. They hadn’t made a sound; by the time we heard them, they were already on top of us.