News of a Kidnapping (25 page)

“You see, when they killed the other Priscos, the same thing happened,” he said. “A black butterfly stayed on the bathroom door for three days.”

Maruja recalled Marina’s dark presentiments, but pretended not to understand.

“And what does that mean?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” replied the owner, “but it must be a very bad omen because that’s when they
killed doña Marina.”

“The one now, is it black or tan?” Maruja asked.

“Tan,” said the owner.

“Then it’s a good omen,” said Maruja. “It’s the black ones that are unlucky.”

His attempt to frighten her did not succeed. Maruja knew her husband, the way he thought and acted, and did not believe he would do anything rash enough to rob a butterfly of its sleep. She knew, above all, that neither he
nor Beatriz would let slip any detail that could be of use in an armed rescue attempt. And yet, accustomed to interpreting changes in her inner state as reflections of the external world, she did not discount the fact that five deaths in the same family in one month might have terrible consequences for the last two hostages.

On the other hand, the rumor that the Constituent Assembly had certain
doubts regarding extradition must have been some consolation to the Extraditables. On February 28, on an official visit to the United States, President Gaviria declared his firm commitment to maintaining it at all costs, but this caused no alarm: By now non-extradition had deep-rooted support throughout the country and required neither bribes nor intimidation to be enacted.

Maruja followed these
events with close attention, in a routine that seemed to be the same day repeated over and over again. Then, without warning, while she was playing dominoes with the
guards, the Top ended the game and picked up the tiles for the last time.

“We’re leaving tomorrow,” he said.

Maruja refused to believe him, but the schoolteacher’s son confirmed the news.

“Really,” he said. “Barrabás’s crew is
coming tomorrow.”

This was the beginning of what Maruja would remember as her black March. Just as the guards who were leaving seemed to have been instructed to make her imprisonment a little easier, the ones who arrived had no doubt been told to make it unbearable again. They burst into the room like an earthquake: the Monk, tall, thin, more somber and introverted than last time; the others,
the same ones, as if they had never left. Barrabás acted like a movie gangster, barking military orders at them to find the hiding place of something that did not exist, or pretending to search for it himself in order to terrorize his victim. They turned the room inside out with methodical brutality. They pulled the bed apart, emptied the mattress, and restuffed it so badly the lumps made it difficult
to sleep on.

Daily life returned to the old style of keeping weapons at the ready if orders were not obeyed instantly. Barrabás never spoke to Maruja without aiming his submachine gun at her head. She, as always, responded by threatening to denounce him to his superiors.

“I’m not going to die just because you fire a bullet by mistake,” she said. “You take it easy or I’ll complain.”

This time
the strategy did not work. It seemed clear, however, that the disorder was not deliberate or meant to intimidate, but was the result of a system corroded from within by profound demoralization. Even the frequent, colorful arguments between the majordomo and Damaris became frightening. He would come home at all hours—if he came home at all—stupefied by drink, and have to confront his wife’s obscene
recriminations. Their screams and shouts, and the crying of their young daughters wakened from sleep, could be heard all over the house. The guards made fun of
them with theatrical imitations that added to the noise. It seemed inconceivable that with all the uproar, no one was curious enough to come to the house.

The majordomo and his wife each came to Maruja for advice: Damaris, because of a
plausible jealousy that gave her no peace, and he, to find some way to calm her down without giving up his escapades. But Maruja’s good offices did not last beyond the majordomo’s next fling.

During one of their many fights, Damaris clawed at her husband’s face like a cat, and it was a long time before the marks disappeared. He hit her so hard she went through the window. It was a miracle he
did not kill her, but she managed to hold on at the last minute and was left dangling from the balcony over the courtyard. It was the end. Damaris packed her bags and left with the girls for Medellín.

The house was now in the sole care of the majordomo, who sometimes stayed away until nightfall, when he showed up with yogurt and bags of potato chips. Every once in a while he would bring back
a chicken. The guards, tired of waiting, would ransack the kitchen and come back to the room with stale crackers and some raw sausage for Maruja. Boredom made them touchy, and more dangerous. They railed against their parents, the police, society in general. They told about their gratuitous crimes and deliberate sacrileges to prove to one another that God did not exist, and went to insane lengths
in recounting their sexual exploits. One of them described the aberrations he had inflicted on one of his girlfriends as revenge for her mocking and humiliating him. Resentful and out of control, they took to smoking marijuana and crack until the dense air in the room became unbreathable. They played the radio at ear-splitting volume, slammed the door when they went in or out, shouted, sang, danced,
cavorted in the courtyard. One of them looked like a professional acrobat in a traveling circus. Maruja warned them that the noise would attract the attention of the police.

“Let them come and kill us,” they shouted in chorus.

Maruja felt ready to snap, above all because of the crazed Barrabás, who liked to wake her by pressing the barrel of his machine gun against her temple. Her hair began
to fall out. The pillow covered with strands of hair depressed her from the moment she opened her eyes at dawn.

She knew that each of the guards was different, but they all were susceptible to insecurity and mutual distrust. Maruja’s fear exacerbated these feelings. “How can you live like this?” she would demand without warning. “What do you believe in? Do you have any idea of what friendship
means?” Before they could respond she cornered them: “Does the word loyalty mean anything to you?” They did not reply, but the answers they gave themselves must have been disquieting, because instead of becoming defiant they deferred to Maruja. Only Barrabás stood up to her. “You rich motherfuckers!” he once shouted. “Did you really think you’d run things forever? Not anymore, damn it: It’s all over!”
Maruja, who had been so afraid of him, met the challenge with the same rage.

“You kill your friends, your friends kill you, you all end up killing each other,” she screamed. “Who can understand you? Find me one person who can say what kind of animals you people are.”

Driven, perhaps, to desperation because he could not kill her, Barrabás smashed his fist into the wall and damaged the bones in
his wrist. He bellowed like a savage and burst into tears of fury. Maruja would not allow herself to be softened by compassion. The majordomo spent the entire afternoon trying to calm her down, and made an unsuccessful effort to improve supper.

Maruja asked herself how, with so much commotion, they could still believe it made sense to talk in whispers, confine her to the room, ration out the
radio and television for reasons of security. Tired of all the madness, she rebelled against the meaningless rules of her captivity, spoke in her natural voice, went to the bathroom whenever she wanted. But her fear of sexual attack intensified,
above all when the majordomo left her alone with the two guards on duty. It culminated one morning when a masked guard burst into the bathroom while she
was in the shower. Maruja managed to cover herself with a towel, and her terrified scream must have been heard for miles around. He froze and stood like a statue, his heart in his mouth for fear of how the neighbors would react. But no one came, not a sound was heard. He backed out of the room on tiptoe, as if he had opened the bathroom door by mistake.

The majordomo showed up one day with another
woman to run the house. But instead of controlling the disorder, they both helped to increase it. The woman joined him in his fierce bouts of drinking that tended to end in blows and smashed bottles. Meals were served at improbable hours. On Sundays they went out carousing and left Maruja and the guards with nothing to eat until the next day. One night, while Maruja was walking alone in the
courtyard, the four guards went to raid the kitchen and left the machine guns in the room. An idea made her shudder. She relished it as she talked to the dog, petted him, whispered to him, and the overjoyed animal licked her hands with complicitous growls. A shout from Barrabás brought her back to reality.

It was the end of an illusion. They replaced the dog with a new one that had the face of
a killer. They prohibited her walks, and Maruja was subjected to a regime of constant surveillance. What she feared most then was that they would shackle her to the bed with a plastic-wrapped chain that Barrabás moved back and forth in his hands like an iron rosary. Maruja tried to anticipate their next move.

“If I had wanted to leave, I would have done it a long time ago,” she said. “I’ve been
left alone lots of times, and if I didn’t run away it’s because I didn’t want to.”

Somebody must have complained, because one morning the majordomo appeared in the room, full of suspect humility and all kinds of excuses: that he could die of shame, that the boys would
behave themselves from now on, that he had sent for his wife and she was coming back. And it was true: Damaris returned, the same
as always, with her two girls, her Scottish bagpiper’s miniskirts, and her endless lentils. Two bosses with masks and the same conciliatory attitude arrived the next day, shoved the four guards out, and imposed order. “They won’t be back again,” one of them said with hair-raising decisiveness. And it was over.

That same afternoon they sent the crew of high school graduates, and it was like a
magical return to the peace of February: unhurried time, entertainment magazines, the music of Guns N’ Roses, and Mel Gibson movies watched with hired gunmen well versed in unrestrained passions. Maruja was moved by the fact that the adolescent killers watched and listened with as much devotion as her children.

Toward the end of March, without any announcement, two strangers appeared, their faces
hidden under hoods lent them by the guards. One, with barely a greeting, began to measure the floor with a tailor’s metric tape, while the other tried to ingratiate himself with Maruja.

“I’m delighted to make your acquaintance, Señora,” he said. “We’re here to carpet the room.”

“Carpet the room!” Maruja shouted in a blind fury. “You can go to hell! What I want is to get out of here! Right now!”

What troubled her was not the carpet but what it could mean: an indefinite postponement of her release. One of the guards would say later that Maruja’s interpretation had been mistaken, since it could have meant she would be leaving soon and they were renovating the room for more important hostages. But at that moment Maruja was sure a carpet could only mean another year of her life.

Pacho Santos
also had to use all his wits to keep his guards occupied, because when they were bored with playing cards, seeing
the same movie ten times in a row, and recounting their sexual exploits, they began to pace the room like caged lions. Through the holes in their hoods he could see their reddened eyes. The only thing they could do then was take a few days off—that is, stupefy themselves with alcohol
and drugs during a week of nonstop parties, and come back worse than before. Drugs were prohibited and their use was punished with great severity, and not only during working hours, but the addicts always found a way around the vigilance of their superiors. The most common drug was marijuana, but their prescription for difficult times were Olympiads of crack that made him fear a calamity. One of
the guards, after a night of carousing in the street, burst into the room and woke Pacho with a shout. He saw the devil’s mask almost touching his face, the bloodshot eyes, the coarse hairs bristling from his ears, and smelled the sulfurous stink of hell. One of his guards wanted to finish up the party with Pacho. “You don’t know how bad I am,” he said while they drank a double
aguardiente
together
at six in the morning. For the next two hours the guard, without being asked, told Pacho the story of his life, driven by the uncontrollable compulsion of his conscience. At last he passed out, and if Pacho did not escape then it was because he lost his courage at the last minute.

His most heartening reading in captivity were the personal notes that
El Tiempo,
on María Victoria’s initiative,
published for him, without concealment or reticence, on its editorial pages. One was accompanied by a recent photograph of his children, and in the heat of the moment he wrote them a letter filled with those thunderous truths that seem ridiculous to anyone who has not lived through them: “I’m sitting here in this room, chained to a bed, my eyes full of tears.” From then on he wrote his wife and children
a series of letters from the heart, which he could never send.

Pacho had lost all hope after the deaths of Marina and Diana, and then the possibility of escape came out to meet him without
his looking for it. By now he was certain he was in one of the neighborhoods near Avenida Boyacá, to the west of the city. He knew these districts because he would make detours through them when traffic was
very heavy on his way home from the newspaper, and he had been driving that route on the night he was abducted. Most of its structures were clusters of residences built in rows, the same house repeated many times over: a large door to the garage, a tiny garden, a second floor overlooking the street, and all the windows protected by wrought-iron gates painted white. And in one week he managed to find
out the exact distance to the pizzeria, and learned that the factory was none other than the Bavaria Brewery. A disorienting detail was the demented rooster that at first crowed at any hour, and as the months passed crowed at the same hour in different places: sometimes far away at three in the afternoon, other times next to his window at two in the morning. It would have been even more disorienting
if he had known that Maruja and Beatriz also heard it in a distant section of the city.