Return to the Dark Valley

by Santiago Gamboa

  I chose a Thursday, preparing myself physically and mentally for the task. I got up early and exercised. I went out, had some fruit, at noon ate a balanced lunch. Midafternoon, I hired a van from a semi-clandestine Turkish business, using the ID I’d stolen, and started loading and installing the surgical material I needed for my task. Nobody asked any questions, they didn’t even look at the photograph. At about six I took a nap and got ready for the night. At around eleven, I set off and parked the van beside an old school, in the northern area of Lichtenberg. Two of the men often passed that way, although never together.

  Here I have to stop my story for a moment, Consul, because you might think that what follows isn’t really mine. A story in the style of Rambo or . . . what’s the other guy’s name? Schwarzenegger. You may think that, but remember, I come from a hard world and was always able to deal with villains.

  Anyway, let me continue.

  When I saw the first one coming, I felt my blood boiling in my veins. I remembered a sentence I’d heard in a movie: “The silence that comes before disaster.” But only I could hear it, not my victims. When the guy walked past the van, I got out very quickly and in no time at all had loaded him half-conscious in the back, which didn’t have windows. I tied his arms with wire and struck a wedge of newspaper in his mouth, down to his throat. He opened his eyes anxiously when he saw that the floor of the van was covered in plastic, and who could blame him, it must have given him a very bad premonition. Then I put a rag soaked in ether over his face, Gute Nacht . . . He fell asleep like a baby.

  I was forty-nine seconds behind schedule.

  Soon afterwards the other one arrived and I got out. The son of a bitch must have sensed something because he hesitated, but I grabbed his arm and twisted it behind his back until it went crack. With the other hand I put a wad of newspaper down his throat. It’s incredible how useful the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung can be. I stuffed him in the van, bound him and gagged him, and gave him a good dose of ether.

  With them on board I drove off, saying to myself, shall I go for more? This is easy. The original plan had been to grab two, at most three of the group of seven candidates. I felt like continuing and looked up, into the German night, but didn’t receive any answer. Believing that you’re strong is bad when you’re going to carry out a mission, because adrenaline is a drug, did you know that?

  I felt like an expert and went to another of the places circled on the map. One of them lived on the third floor of a run-down apartment block, but the entrance was on the other side, along an avenue. I knew that he always went in the back way. So that was where I parked the van.

  My target was a Serb, the same one who had been fucking Saskia when I went to the warehouse that night, I was going to enjoy this one more than the others, and I thought, with a special dispensation from Odin, who was the master who calmed my muscles that night: he’s going to get special treatment.

  I heard a noise and looked in the rearview mirror. The bastard was coming, but he wasn’t alone. He was with someone else who wasn’t on my list. I tried to see if I could recognize him, but there wasn’t much light. What to do? It would be too much of a hassle for everything to go belly up now, so I said to myself, what if I grab the two of them? The Serb was big but the other guy wasn’t. I reckoned I could do it.

  I got out of the van with a map in my hand. I played dumb and asked them for help with an address in the area. The guys turned to look at me, I’d caught them off guard and they were a bit annoyed at my intrusion. When I landed the first punch they practically didn’t see it. The Serb fell against the wall, with something broken. I grabbed the thin guy by the neck and just as I was pulling his head up into the light from a streetlamp I saw that he had a wristwatch with a flame on the minute hand. That’s when I recognized him. He was one of them! So I said to him out loud, I wasn’t expecting you, but welcome to the party, willkommen.

  I quickly loaded them in the van and left as cautiously as I could, I didn’t want the police to stop me for an inspection or anything like that. I felt pleased with myself: I was a true professional. In less than an hour I had four of these bags of germs tied up and ready to go. My thoughts made me laugh as I took the S-Bahn. I already had a point marked, twenty-eight miles from there, where I could stop and work on them without being disturbed. I turned and looked at them, lying there one on top of the other like sacks of flour.

  Now, as I drove through the night, I searched for a little inspiration. Should I give them the full treatment or just strike a blow so decisive as to transform them, through pain, into agents of change? I analyzed the situation from various points of view and came to the conclusion that the second of these options was the more appropriate: the knockout blow. Something told me that letting them go back to their germ-ridden community, but marked by their punishment, was an educational gesture that would prove interesting.

  I knew that option would be more demanding physically. But when it came down to it, it was what I wanted to do, what I’d prepared for, and in addition I had all the necessary surgical equipment.

  The truth is that I was dying to operate.

  When I got to parking lot 49-E, near the exit from the Autobahn, I took a very narrow path through trees that led to a wood, a kind of Schwarzwald, as they say there. There was absolutely nothing for at least half a mile around, so I could work in peace.

  I decided to call this session Theory of Mutilated Bodies.

  I put on a white coat, latex gloves, and a surgical mask, and got ready, invoking my masters. I again gave them strong anesthetics intravenously and dedicated myself to the hard task of tying arteries and veins, sawing through bones, smoothly cutting muscles and nerves, making knots that would later allow me to assemble the stumps. I did it as best I could, although at the time, tired as I was, I couldn’t be sure of the results. Last but not least, I attached drip bags filled with antibiotics and a little morphine to them, pulled them down off the van, laid them out on the plastic, and covered them with a thick sheet of asbestos. I washed the inside of the van. I put the amputated limbs in a bag for medical waste, and set off back to Berlin.

  Before I left, I called emergency services from the cell phone of one of them and gave them directions. Then I sped off, leaving their cell phones on.

  I was exhausted.

  I drove about twenty-five miles along side roads to avoid the security cameras. My plan involved passing by an artificial lake that was part of a fish farm, because I thought it would be a good fate for the bag of amputated limbs, in which, of course, there were a number of things: four right legs, four complete arms, and sixteen fingers. A penis and a scrotum, too, guess whose? When I saw the news in the press, describing it as a “massacre carried out with macabre coolness,” I felt proud of my surgical knowledge, since all of them, even the Serb whose cock I’d cut off, managed to survive. The event caused a bit of a stir, although not as much as I’d expected. The police favored the hypothesis that it had been a settling of scores between neo-Nazi groups, which wasn’t completely unfounded, and thought that it wasn’t worth alarming the public too much, who during that time were on their vacations.

  17

  It’s strange to wake up in a hospital and find yourself handcuffed to a bed. Where could I go in that state? Everything hurts and I’m afraid to sleep, because then the body relaxes and makes movements that revive the pain. At least there’s nobody else in the room, although for how much longer I don’t know. It’s almost three in the morning, the grimmest hour in hospitals, churches, and prisons. The hour of pain, the hour of the devil, they say, because it is the transposed figure of the death of Christ. Its nighttime equivalent.

  Three in the morning.

  It’s also the hour of memory, so I started remembering other prison experiences, all insignificant compared with this one. In the first I was barely seventeen and was in a small town in Colombia called Pacho, near Bogotá, where I had gone wi
th some friends from the neighborhood to a house in the country. We were young and wanted to swallow the world, of course, and that led us to frequent all the dives in the town. In addition, we were crazy about pool, and so it was that one night, in one of those bars, the police came in and stood us up against the wall, asking for our identity cards. I didn’t yet have one because I was still a minor, so they arrested me. A curious legal principle: for their protection, minors aren’t allowed in pool halls, but if they’re caught they’re put in a cell with robbers and thugs of all descriptions.

  So there I was, in a hot, unventilated room. There were fifteen of us and there was nowhere to sit. A guy who had been there for a few days was asleep on the floor on a mat. At five in the morning, a group announced that they had an escape plan and asked me if I was ready. I stalled. Just before dawn a guard came and shone his torch in our faces.

  “Let’s see now, my fellow townsman, you can come out . . . ”

  Nobody moved, because we didn’t know where he was from. Until he said again:

  “The young guy from Bogotá, you can come out . . . ”

  They took my details. A clerk filled out a form on an old typewriter. My brother and another of my friends were there, with the sergeant, waving to me.

  The second time was in Madrid.

  During my time at Complutense University, I was active for a while in a left-wing collective called KAI. In 1986 there was a strike against the statute for university reform promoted by the rector Gustavo Villapalos, and someone in the upper echelons of my group decided that we had to take over the headquarters of the Council of Universities, which was on the same campus. And so we did. I went in with the first group. We blocked the elevators and doors of the building and managed to get as far as the offices on the upper floors. We built barricades and took the director hostage. The police preferred not to use force, but surrounded the building and stopped us from having food sent in. Their strategy was to tire us out, but the striking students mounted a permanent demonstration outside the building and every now and again threw us bags with sandwiches, fruit, and bottles of water.

  By the fourth day, the pain from my ulcer was becoming unbearable, since I had left my pills at home, and it was decided that I should go out with a female comrade and read a press release. When we passed the barricade on the second floor, a legion of uniformed arms lifted me in the air. The police nevertheless allowed us to read the press release into the microphones, then loaded us in a van and took us to the police station. On the way, I remembered that I had a scholarship from the Spanish government through the Institute for Latin American Cooperation, but it was the Spain of Felipe González, so they simply took my details and sent me home, where I was able to fill my stomach with antacid pills and doses of Mylanta.

  My third imprisonment was in 1994, in Sarajevo, during the Bosnian war.

  I had gone there as correspondent for the newspaper El Tiempo, of Bogotá, and one night I had to stay in the former headquarters of Bosnian television a little later than usual. That was where we broadcast from when the lines from the hotel weren’t working. When I came out, I couldn’t see any transportation that would take me to the Holiday Inn, which was the hotel where the journalists stayed, so I set off on foot, which was a pretty crazy thing to do given the situation in the city, especially as there was a strict curfew after ten at night. And so, as I was walking in the dark toward Marshal Tito Avenue—which had been renamed Sniper’s Alley—a Bosnian police patrol car stopped me. I was taken to a barracks in the center of the city and the officers, who were as young as I was, put me in a cell, behind bars, but without closing the door. That night I explained to the three guards that I was Colombian and a friend to their cause, I told them I could have covered the war from Pale, on the Serbian side, but that I had decided to be in Sarajevo, with them.

  “I prefer to work where the bombs fall,” I said, “not where they’re launched from.”

  They offered me a Sarajevan beer, I seem to remember it was called Sarajevo Pivo, and then an endless series of glasses of slivovitz, a spirit made from grapes and herbs that must have been about sixty proof, which came in very handy that winter night. The most dangerous moment occurred at six in the morning, when they freed me and insisted on taking me in their jeep to the hotel. A vehicle prowling through the cold, snow-covered streets of Sarajevo was an excellent target for the Serb snipers, the chetniks, who would have just gotten up and might be feeling like getting a few shots in before breakfast. Fortunately, that didn’t happen.

  But let me get back to my current desperate and uncomfortable situation.

  Once again, I slept a couple of hours. Outside—in that distant and already nostalgic outside—day had already broken. Soon afterwards Pedro Ndongo arrived to check the tubes and the level of the drip. One of the bags was empty and he replaced it. As he was checking the catheter on my wrist, he noticed me moving and said:

  “Good morning, my esteemed intellectual. I have a surprise for you.”

  “Don’t tell me, Mr. Reading has woken up.”

  “No, not yet,” Pedro said. “Yesterday I dropped by the registration office and asked for your belongings. The notebook you told me about was there, but as is only natural, they didn’t let me take it out, because it’s been registered. That’s where Pedro Ndongo Ndeme’s great ability to argue came into play and I told the woman: could you do me a favor and lend it to me so that I can make a copy? Then the original can stay here and I’ll take that wretched fellow the copy and make him very happy, what do you think? The woman smiled and said she would let me do it but that I would have to take care of it myself.”

  He took an envelope from his jacket and there, in loose sheets, was everything I had written.

  He put it by the side of the bed and added:

  “I also read it.”

  He made a theatrical pause.

  “And . . . ?” I exclaimed.

  “It made me feel nostalgic for my student days, first in the National University of Guinea and then in the Complutense. Although I was studying medicine, I spent my evenings reading poetry.”

  “You studied at the Complutense?” I said. “So did I.”

  “Really? What year?

  “I graduated in philology in ’90.”

  “Ah, no,” he said, “I arrived a bit later. I started my course in 1996.”

  Before leaving, Pedro said to me, pointing at the photocopied sheets:

  “It’s good, finish it.”

  “Impossible,” I said, “I don’t have anything to write with.”

  “Ah, I can’t help you with that. A pen is a sharp instrument, but I have a suggestion: memorize. Think and memorize, it’ll be an excellent exercise. It prevents Alzheimer’s. Many people have done it and good things have come out: Cervantes, Voltaire, Solzhenitsyn. They all memorized. Think of them and you won’t feel alone.”

  Pedro came a little closer and lowered his voice.

  “There’s more news, which is that you’re going to have company. I don’t know when they’re bringing him because right now he’s in the operating room, I saw it on the form, he’s coming here.”

  I spent the day reading my notes about Rimbaud. I tried to memorize some new paragraphs and corrections. During the night, they did bring in another prisoner, putting up the curtain separating the room into two spaces. I couldn’t see him. The combination of the sedatives and the medication for my wounds was quite strong and that’s why I barely registered his arrival.

  This morning I saw him. He’s a priest. He has a broken arm and a very swollen eye, as well as a deep cut on his back. He was praying and I didn’t want to disturb him, I barely nodded to him. Then Pedro Ndongo came to take me for a treatment and another blood test, so I didn’t see him again until the afternoon.

  While we were going to one of the therapy sessions, Pedro said:

  “I see your body is working
well, my friend, in spite of your age: your melanocytes are responding, the Langerhans and Merkel cells . . . The treatment is working. I don’t feel revulsion anymore when I look at you.”

  “Is it also dermatological, Pedro?”

  “I’m just an intellectual of the fibers and glands.”

  I asked him what he knew about my cellmate.

  “I can’t give you much information, friend, but I do have a surprise for you: he’s a compatriot of yours, a priest, are you a believer?”

  “No. I already told you I’m not.”

  “You should consider it, not everyone has the chance to cohabit with a minister of the Church.”

  Images from that morning came back to me.

  “And why is he so badly injured?”

  “I heard he was about to be lynched. A group of demonstrators from your country. The police stepped in and saved him, but he’s been arrested because he has a criminal record, there’s a warrant out for him from Interpol. A priest. And it’s not because he’s a pedophile! Your country is very strange, my friend.”

  “Do you know what he’s charged with?”

  “Being a member of an armed criminal group.”

  “The paramilitaries,” I said.

  “The same guys who beat up blacks and Arabs here, you mean?”

  “More or less, although here it’s racial and there it’s political.”

  Pedro stroked his cheeks. “The racial is always political, friend, remember Martin Luther King. Or Malcolm X, who said: ‘Be obedient, be peaceful, law-abiding, but if someone attacks you send him to the cemetery.’ That’s more or less what you did to that poor literature teacher, isn’t it?”

  I grew worried again.

  “Do you know anything about his condition?”

  “He’s still the same. He’s on the third floor in the assisted prisoners’ section, in a coma.”