News of a Kidnapping

by Gabriel García Márquez

  The system proved very useful when the president tried to parry the Supreme Court's blow against extradition with the argument that it was a question of law, not a constitutional issue. At first the government minister, Humberto de la Calle, succeeded in convincing the majority. But in the end, the things that interest individuals become more important than the things that interest governments, and people had been correct in identifying extradition as a contributing factor to social unrest, and in particular to the savagery of terrorism. And so, after much twisting and turning, it was at last included on the agenda of the Commission on Rights.

  In the meantime, the Ochoas still feared that Escobar, pursued by his own demons, would decide to immolate himself in a catastrophe of apocalyptic proportions. Their fear was prophetic. Early in March, Villamizar received an urgent message from them: "Come immediately. Something very serious is going to happen." They had received a letter from Pablo Escobar threatening to set off fifty tons of dynamite in the historic district of Cartagena de Indias if there were no sanctions against the police who were devastating the slums of Medellin: 100 kilos for each boy killed outside of combat.

  The Extraditables had considered Cartagena an untouchable sanctuary until September 28, 1989, when an explosion shook the foundations of the Hotel Hilton, blowing out windows and killing two physicians at a convention in session on another floor. From then on, it was clear that not even this historical treasure was safe from the war. The new threat did not permit a moment's hesitation.

  Villamizar informed Gaviria a few days before the deadline. "Now we're not fighting for Maruja but to save Cartagena," he said, to provide the president with an argument. Gaviria's response was that he thanked him for the information, said the government would take steps to prevent the disaster, but under no circumstances would he give in to blackmail. And so Villamizar traveled to Medellin one more time, and with the help of the Ochoas succeeded in dissuading Escobar. It was not easy. Days before the deadline, Escobar guaranteed in a hurried note that for the moment nothing would happen to the captive journalists, and postponed the detonation of bombs in large cities. But he was also categorical: If police operations in Medellin continued past April, no stone would be left standing in the very ancient and noble city of Cartagena de Indias.

  9

  Alone in the room, Maruja knew she was in the hands of the same men who may have killed Marina and Beatriz, and were refusing to return the radio and television to keep her from finding that out. She moved from earnest pleading to enraged demands; she confronted her guards, shouting loud enough for the neighbors to hear; she refused to walk and threatened to stop eating. The majordomo and the guards, surprised by the unthinkable, did not know what to do. They conferred in whispers, went out to make phone calls, and came back even more indecisive. They tried to reassure Maruja with illusory promises, or intimidate her with threats, but they could not break her resolve not to eat.

  She had never felt more self-possessed. It was clear that her guards had instructions not to mistreat her, and she gambled on their needing her alive at any cost. Her calculations were correct: Three days after Beatriz's release, the door opened very early in the morning and the majordomo came in carrying the radio and the television. "You'll learn something now," he said. And in an unemotional voice he announced:

  "Dona Marina Montoya is dead."

  In contrast to what she herself had expected, Maruja heard the news as if she had always known it. The astonishing thing for her would have been if Marina were alive. When the truth reached her heart, however, she realized how much she had loved her, how much she would have given to have it not be true.

  "Murderers!" she screamed at the majordomo. "That's all you are: murderers!"

  At that moment the "Doctor" appeared in the doorway and tried to calm Maruja with the news that Beatriz was safe at home, but she would not believe him until she saw it with her own eyes on television or heard it on the radio. Yet he seemed to have been sent to allow her to give vent to her feelings.

  "You haven't been back," she said. "And I can understand that: You must be very ashamed of what you did to Marina."

  He needed a moment to recover from his surprise.

  "What happened?" Maruja provoked him. "Was she condemned to death?"

  Then he said it had been a question of taking revenge for a double betrayal. "Your case is different," he said. And repeated what he had said earlier: "It's political." Maruja listened to him with the strange fascination that the idea of death holds for those who believe they are going to die.

  "At least tell me how it happened," she said. "Did Marina know?"

  "I swear to you she didn't," he said.

  "How could that be?" Maruja insisted. "How could she not know?"

  "They told her they were taking her to another house," he said with the urgency of someone who wants to be believed. "They told her to get out of the car, and she kept walking and they shot her in the back of the head. She couldn't have known anything."

  The image of Marina with her hood on backward stumbling blindly toward an imaginary house would pursue Maruja through many sleepless nights. More than death itself, she feared the lucidity of the final moment. The only thing that gave her some consolation was the box of sleeping pills that she had saved as if they were precious pearls, and would swallow by the handful before allowing herself to be dragged off to the slaughter.

  At last, on the midday news, she saw Beatriz surrounded by her family in a flower-filled apartment that she recognized in spite of all the changes: It was her own. But her joy at seeing it was ruined by her dislike for the new decoration. She thought the library was well done and just in the place she wanted it, but the colors of the walls and carpets were awful, and the Tang Dynasty horse was placed precisely where it would most be in the way. "How stupid they are!" she shouted. "It's just the opposite of what I said!" Her longing to be free was reduced for a moment to wanting to scold them for the poor job they had done.

  In this whirlwind of contrary sensations and feelings, the days became intolerable, the nights interminable. Sleeping in Marina's bed unnerved her: Covered by her blanket, tormented by her odor, as she began to fall asleep she could hear in the darkness, beside her in the bed, the buzz of Marina's whispering. One night it was not a hallucination but miraculous and real. Marina grasped her arm with her warm, gentle, living hand, and breathed into her ear in her natural voice: "Maruja."

  She did not consider it a hallucination because in Jakarta she had also had what seemed to be a fantastic experience. At an antiques fair she had bought the life-size sculpture of a beautiful youth who had one foot resting on the head of a conquered boy. Like the statues of Catholic saints, the figure had a halo, but this one was tin, and the style and material made it look like a shoddy afterthought. Only after keeping it for some time in the best spot in her house did she learn it was the God of Death.

  One night Maruja dreamed she was trying to pull the halo off the statue because it seemed so ugly, but could not. It was soldered onto the bronze. She woke feeling troubled by the bad memory, hurried to look at the statue in the living room, and found the god uncrowned and the halo on the floor, as if this were the conclusion of her dream. Maruja--who is a rationalist and an agnostic--accepted the idea that she herself, in an episode of sleepwalking she could not recall, had torn the halo off the God of Death.

  At the beginning of her captivity, she had been sustained by the rage she felt at Marina's submissiveness. Later it became compassion for her bitter fate and a desire to give her the will to live. She was sustained by having to pretend to a strength she did not have when Beatriz began to lose control, and the need to maintain her own equilibrium when adversity overwhelmed them. Someone had to take command to keep them from going under, and she had been the one to do it, in a grim, foul-smelling space that measured three meters by two and a half meters, where she slept on the floor, ate kitchen scraps, and never knew if she would live to see the next minute. But when no one else
was left in the room, she no longer had any reason to pretend: She was alone with herself.

  The certainty that Beatriz had told her family how to communicate with her on radio and television kept her alert. In fact, Villamizar appeared several times with his words of encouragement, and her children comforted her with their imagination and wit. Then, with no warning, that contact had been broken off for two weeks. This was when a sense of abandonment paralyzed her. She caved in. She stopped walking. She lay with her face to the wall, removed from everything, eating and drinking only enough to keep from dying. She experienced the same distress she had felt in December, the same cramps and shooting pains in her legs that had made the doctor's visit necessary. But this time she did not even complain.

  The guards, involved in their personal conflicts and internecine quarrels, paid no attention to her. Her food grew cold on the plate, and both the majordomo and his wife seemed oblivious. The days became longer and emptier, so much so that she sometimes missed the worst moments of the early days. She lost interest in life. She cried. One morning she woke to discover in horror that her right arm had lifted by itself.

  The change of guards in February was providential. As replacements for Barrabas's crew, they sent four new boys who were serious, well disciplined, and talkative. They had good manners and an ease of expression that were a relief to Maruja. As soon as they came in they invited her to play Nintendo and other video games. The games brought them together. From the start she knew they shared a common language, and that facilitated communication. They had, no doubt, been instructed to overcome her resistance and raise her morale with a different kind of treatment, for they tried to persuade her to follow the doctor's orders and walk in the courtyard, to think of her husband and children and not disappoint them when they were hoping to see her soon, and in good condition.

  The atmosphere lent itself to confidences. Aware that they too were prisoners, and perhaps needed her as well, Maruja told them stories about her three sons, who had already gone through adolescence. She recounted the significant events in their lives as they were growing up and going to school, and talked about their habits and tastes. And the guards, feeling more confident, told her about themselves.

  They had all finished secondary school, and one had completed at least a semester of college. In contrast to the previous guards, they said they were from middle-class families, but in one way or another had been marked by the culture of the Medellin slums. The oldest, a twenty-four-year-old whom they called Ant, was tall, good-looking, and rather reserved. His university studies had been interrupted when his parents died in a car accident, and his only recourse had been to join a gang of killers. Another, called Shark, recounted with amusement that he had passed half his courses in secondary school by threatening his teachers with a toy revolver. The most cheerful of this team, and of all the guards who had worked there, was called Top, and that, in effect, was what he resembled. He was very fat, with short, thin legs, and his love of dancing bordered on the maniacal. Once, after breakfast, he put a salsa tape in the cassette player and danced without a break, and with frenetic energy, until the end of his shift. The quietest one, whose mother was a schoolteacher, read books and newspapers and was well informed on current events. He had only one explanation for being in that life: "Because it's so cool."

  Just as Maruja had first suspected, however, they were not insensible to human relationships. This, in turn, not only gave her back the will to live, but also the wit to gain advantages that the guards themselves may not have foreseen.

  "Don't think I'm going to try anything stupid with you," she told them. "Believe me, I won't do any of the things I'm not allowed to, because I know this business will be over soon and turn out fine. So it doesn't make sense to put so many restrictions on me."

  With an autonomy that none of the earlier guards--not even their bosses--had shown, the new guards dared to relax the rules much more than even Maruja had hoped. They let her move around the room, speak in a more natural voice, go to the bathroom without following a fixed schedule. The new regime gave her back the desire to take care of herself, which she attributed to her experience with the statue in Jakarta. She made good use of classes on Alexandra's program that had been prepared for her by a gymnastics teacher and were called, with her in mind, exercises in confined spaces. Her enthusiasm was so great that one of the guards asked with a suspicious look: "Is that program sending you some message?" Maruja had a hard time convincing him that it was not.

  During this time she was also moved by the unexpected appearance of "Colombia Wants Them Back," which seemed not only well conceived and well produced, but also the best way to keep up the morale of the last two hostages. She felt more in touch with her family and friends. She thought about how she would have done the program, as a campaign, as a remedy, as a means of swaying public opinion, and began to make bets with the guards about who would appear on the screen the next day. Once she wagered it would be Vicky Hernandez, the great actress and her close friend, and she won. The greater prize, in any case, was that just seeing Vicky and listening to her message produced one of the few happy moments of her captivity.

  Her walks in the courtyard also began to bear fruit. The German shepherd, overjoyed at seeing her again, tried to squeeze under the gate to play with Maruja, but she calmed him down, petting and talking to him, afraid the guards would become suspicious. Marina had told her that the gate led to a quiet yard with sheep and chickens. Maruja confirmed this with a rapid glance in the moonlight. But she also saw a man with a rifle standing guard outside the enclosure. The hope of escaping with the complicity of the dog had been canceled.

  On February 20, when life seemed to have reestablished its rhythm, the radio reported that the body of Dr. Conrado Prisco Lopera--a cousin of the gang's bosses, who had disappeared two days earlier--had been found in a field in Medellin. Another cousin, Edgar de Jesus Botero Prisco, was murdered four days later. Neither man had a criminal record. Dr. Prisco Lopera was the physician who had tended to Juan Vitta without concealing his name or his face, and Maruja wondered if he was the same masked doctor who had examined her earlier.

  Like the death of the Prisco brothers in January, these killings had a serious effect on the guards and increased the anxiety of the majordomo and his family. The idea that the cartel would exact the life of a hostage as payment for their deaths, as it had with Marina Montoya, moved through the room like an ominous shadow. The majordomo came in the next day for no apparent reason, and at an unusual hour.

  "I'm not trying to scare you," he told Maruja, "but something very serious has happened: A butterfly's been on the courtyard gate since last night."

  Maruja, a skeptic regarding invisible forces, did not understand what he meant. The majordomo explained with calculated theatricality.

  "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 dona 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 extrad
ition 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. "Barrabas'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. Barrabas 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.