Even Silence Has an End (9 page)

“And what if someone shows up unannounced?” I asked hesitatingly.

“Everyone is made the same,” retorted Ana. “What does it matter if someone sees?”

“No one will come, don’t worry,” said Isabel, as if she had not heard her comrade’s remark. Then she added softly, “Use the
timbo.
”

I had no idea what a
timbo
might be. I looked around and saw nothing. Except that yes, in the water there was an oil drum cut in half so that the handle and base formed a scoop. The
timbo
became indispensable. Clara and I took turns using it.

Ana was getting impatient, shuffling around in the bushes, grumbling. She had decided to restart the water pump.

“There, are you happy? Now, hurry up.”

The final shower lasted only a few seconds. Two minutes later we were dressed and ready to receive Commander Cesar.

Cesar’s truck was parked in the clearing. He was talking to Sonia. We walked up to him, escorted by two female guerrillas. Sonia dispatched them immediately.

Smiling, Cesar held his hand out to me. “How are you?”

“Not good. I don’t know what happened to my friends. You told me that—”

Cesar cut me off. “I told you nothing.”

“You told me that you were going to check their identity—”

“You told me they were foreign journalists.”

“No, I told you that the older one was a photographer with a foreign magazine; the young one is a cameraman employed by my campaign and the other, the one who was driving, is my logistics manager.”

“If you’re telling me the truth, I’ll spare them. I confiscated all their video equipment and viewed the footage last night. The military is not too fond of you! Nice discussion you had on the tarmac with the general. That cost him his job! And they are already hot on your heels. There’s fighting near Unión-Penilla. You will have to get out of here fairly quickly. Did they bring you your things?”

I nodded mechanically. Everything he said was worrying. I wanted assurance that my companions were safe and would be freed shortly. The fighting at Unión-Penilla was a source of hope. But if there were confrontations, we risked being killed. How did he know that the general had been dismissed? That general was the one in the best position to mount a successful rescue operation. He was the man who knew the area, he was in the field, and he was the last one to have seen us.

Cesar took his leave. There was nothing to do but wait, without knowing what we were waiting for. The minutes stretched into an oppressive eternity, and to fill them required a determination I didn’t have. I could do nothing but ruminate. We noticed a game of chess on the corner of what was meant to be a table. That such a thing could exist in the middle of this self-contained world was both unexpected and surprising. But once I sat in front of the chessboard, I was overcome with panic. We were the pawns. Our existence was being defined according to a logic that my abductors were concealing from us. I pushed away the game, incapable of continuing. How long was this going to last? Three months? Six months? I observed the people around me. The blithe attitude to life, the gentle rhythm of routine—it all sickened me. How could they sleep, eat, and smile while keeping us away from our loved ones?

Isabel had finished her guard duty and had come to have lunch. She looked with manifest longing at the red and black-lace underwear still in its packaging. I offered it to her. She turned it over in her hands with childlike delight, then put it back where it was, as if pushing away too great a temptation. Finally she stood up, driven by a sudden fervor, and said in a loud voice for her comrades to hear, “I am going to make a request.”

As I later learned, “requests” were a fundamental part of FARC life. Everything was controlled and monitored. No one could take the slightest initiative or give or receive a gift without asking permission. You could be refused the right to stand up or sit down, to eat or to drink, to sleep or to go to the
chontos.

Isabel came running back, her cheeks flushed. She had obtained permission to accept my gift. I watched her walk away, trying to imagine what life must be like for a woman in the camp. The commander was a woman, but I counted just five girls among about thirty men. What could they hope for here that would be better than elsewhere? Their femininity did not cease to amaze me, even though they were never without their guns and had masculine reflexes that did not appear to be feigned. Just as with this new vocabulary, these peculiar songs, this peculiar habitat, I looked with surprise at these young women who all seemed to be cast in the same mold and to have sacrificed their individuality.

Being a prisoner was bad enough. But being a female prisoner in the hands of the FARC was another matter entirely. It was difficult to put it into words. Intuitively I felt that the FARC was exploiting these women with their consent. The organization worked subtly, words were chosen deliberately, appearances were carefully cultivated, and there was more to everything than met the eye. . . . I had just lost my freedom, but I was not willing to surrender my identity.

When night fell, Sonia came to fetch us to watch the news on TV. The camp was convened in the hut that boasted the small screen. She assigned us our places, then left to switch on the generator. A solitary lightbulb swayed from the ceiling like a hanged man. It came on, and the group went into raptures. I had trouble understanding their excitement. I sat there waiting in the middle of a band of armed men, their rifles propped up between their legs. Sonia switched on the television and left again; the picture was fuzzy and the sound full of static. No one moved, all eyes glued to the screen. Sonia finally came back, turned a couple of knobs, and a blurred picture appeared. But the sound was clear. The news had started. I saw Adair, my logistics manager, on the screen. He and the other members of our group had just been released. They were speaking emotionally about their final moments with us. I leaped up with joy. My commotion irritated some of the guerrillas, and they called gruffly for silence. I slumped back down on the bench, my eyes moist.

That night I didn’t feel like sleeping. It was a bright, huge moon again, and the temperature outside was pleasant. I wanted to walk to clear my mind. Isabel was on guard. She had no problem agreeing to my request. I set off across the clearing to the
chontos,
passing in front of Sonia’s hut and alongside the shelter. Some of the convalescents had switched on their radios, and echoes of tropical music drifted toward me. I imagined the world without me, this Sunday that had brought sorrow and anxiety to those I loved. My children, Melanie, Lorenzo, and Sebastian, my stepson, had already heard the news. I expected them to be strong. We had often talked about the possibility that I might be abducted. I had always been more afraid of being taken hostage than of being assassinated. I had told them that they must never give in to blackmail and that it was better to die than to submit. Now I was not so sure. I no longer knew what to think. What was most intolerable to me was the pain they had to be feeling. I wanted to live. I did not want them to become orphans, and I was determined to restore to them their carefree spirit. I imagined them talking to each other, bound by mutual torment, trying to reconstruct the events leading up to my abduction, trying to understand. I was in pain.

I understood only too well the significance of the press release issued by the Secretariado. It confirmed that I had been taken hostage and that I was part of the group of “
interchangeables
.”
⁹
My captors threatened to kill me one year to the day after my capture if there was no agreement to release the guerrillas detained in Colombian prisons. To spend one year in captivity and then be assassinated— that was my possible fate. Would they carry out their threat? It was hard to believe, but I did not want to be around to find out. We had to escape.

The thought of preparing our escape calmed me. I created a mental map of our environment and tried to reconstruct from memory the road we had taken to get here. I was certain that we had traveled in what was almost a straight line, southward. It would mean a lot of walking, but it was feasible.

I finally got into bed, fully clothed, but I still couldn’t close my eyes. It must have been around nine in the evening when I heard them in the distance. Helicopters, several of them, were rapidly approaching. Suddenly the camp went into a frenzy. The sick jumped from their beds, pulled on their backpacks, and started running. Orders were shouted in the darkness as the commotion reached its peak. “Turn out the lights, goddamn it!” yelled Sonia, her voice like a man’s. Ana and Isabel rushed toward us, grabbing the mosquito net and pushing us out of bed. “Bring what you can, we’re leaving immediately! It’s the air force!”

My mind went blank. I heard hysterical voices around me and went into a trance: put on shoes, roll up clothes, put them in the bag, take bag, check that nothing is left behind, walk. My heart was beating slowly, as it did when I went diving. The echo of the outside world reached me in the same way, as if filtered by an enormous wall of water. Ana continued to yell and push me. The guerrillas were already advancing in single file. I turned around. Ana had rolled up the mattress and was carrying it under her arm. Wedged under the other arm was the mosquito net, twisted into a roll. She was also carrying her huge backpack, so heavy that it forced her to lean forward. “Talk about a dog’s life!” I muttered, more irritated than anything else. I was not afraid. Their hastiness was none of my concern.

About a hundred yards from camp, we were ordered to stop. The moon was sufficiently bright through the trees so that I could distinguish the people around me. The guerrillas were sitting on the ground, leaning against their backpacks. Some had taken out their black plastic sheets and were covering themselves with them.

“How long are we going to stay here?” I whispered to Isabel. We could still hear the sound of the helicopters, but it seemed that they were no longer close.

“I don’t know. We have to wait for instructions from Sonia. We could be in for days of walking.”

“Days of walking?”

Isabel didn’t respond.

“Our boots are still at the camp,” I said, hoping to have a reason to retrace our steps.

“No, I have them.” She showed them to me. They were folded in a bag she was using as a cushion. “You should put them on. You won’t be able to walk in the mountains otherwise.”

“The mountains? We’re going to the mountains?”

That threw me. I had thought we’d be going south, toward the inmost depths of the Llanos, the tropical plains to the east of the Andes. Beyond that was the Amazon. Mountains meant turning back on ourselves toward Bogotá. The Andes formed a natural barrier that was almost impossible to cross on foot. Simón Bolívar had done it with his army but it was considered an exploit!

My question struck her as suspicious, as if I were trying to trap her into divulging secret information. Isabel looked at me warily.

“Yes, the mountains,
al monte,
¹⁰
the
selva
¹¹
!”

For them,
monte
meant the forest and any land covered by vegetation untouched by man. Curiously, that was indeed the ancient meaning of the word
monte
. They had assimilated it into the word
montaña
and used it without making a distinction. Their dialect tended to be confusing. I started learning it as if it were a foreign language, and I tried to memorize the false friends between my Spanish and theirs. Once I understood that we were headed toward the Llanos, my mind started to race.

The helicopters were returning, the sounds rapidly getting louder. They were hedgehopping above the trees. I could see three overhead, lined up in formation, and guessed there must be more. They passed right over us, and the sight of them moved me to joy: They were looking for us! The guerrillas were visibly anxious. Their faces were turned toward the sky, their jaws clenched in defiance, hatred, and fear. I knew Ana was watching me. I avoided letting my feelings show. Now the helicopters were moving away. They would not be returning. Those around me had been aware of my moment of hope. They were animals trained to sniff out other people’s happiness. I had done the same. I had gotten a whiff of their fear, and I had delighted in it. Now I could smell their satisfaction at my disappointment. I belonged to them. Their sense of victory excited them. They nudged one another, whispering and looking me straight in the eye. I lowered my gaze. I was powerless.

The line loosened up; they all went back to preparing their little spaces for the night. I walked over to Clara. We held hands in silence, sitting next to each other on our travel bags, stiff and formal. We were used to the city. The night was closing in, and large clouds were gathering above us, filling the sky. The moon became blurred. There was a flurry of activity. The guerrillas were kneeling before their backpacks, undoing the thousands of straps, buckles, and knots that secured them.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“It’s going to rain,” replied Isabel as she, too, worked on her backpack.

“And what about us? What are we supposed to do?”

Her response was to hand me a black plastic sheet. “Cover yourselves with this!”

The first drops of rain began to fall. We heard them tapping on the leaves of the forest canopy, not yet penetrating the vegetation. Someone threw us another plastic sheet, which landed at our feet. It came just in time. The storm unfurled like a biblical deluge.

At four-thirty in the morning, we filed back into the camp. Radios were switched on, and familiar voices announced the news. The smell of black coffee marked the start of another day. I collapsed onto the planks before I even had a chance to unpack.

María brought over a large plate of rice and lentils plus two spoons.

“Do you have any forks?” I asked.

“You’ll have to put in a request with the commander,” she said.