TWENTY-TWO
THE FORTUNE-TELLER
AUGUST 22, 2003
An immaculate sky drew sharply above our heads, like a long blue snake between the trees on either side of the river. We were moving slowly. The river wound through the jungle at its own pace; we had to avoid dead logs in the hairpin turns. I was impatient. Despite my expectation of imminent release, my stomach was painfully tied up in knots. The smell of the engine, the bittersweet aroma of this chlorophyll world, the absence of any certainty forced me blindly back to the precise moment when I had felt the trap closing over me.
It had happened one week after we were kidnapped. They had moved us from camp to camp to a place on the top of a hill, where for the first time I had discovered the green ocean of the Amazon filling the horizon as far as the eye could see. El Mocho Cesar was standing next to me. He already knew that they intended to lose me in this impenetrable vastness.
They had set up a makeshift camp on the nearly vertical slope of a hill. We bathed in a transparent stream that hummed as it flowed over a bed of translucent pebbles. I saw my first monkeys. They gathered above us, entertaining themselves by tossing sticks at us from high on their perches to frighten us.
The forest was very thick, and it was impossible to see the sky. Clara stretched out like a cat, filled her lungs with all the air they could contain, and said, “I love this place!” It shocked me. I was so obsessed by the idea of escaping that I didn’t even allow myself to appreciate the beauty around us, for fear it might decrease my sense of urgency. I was suffocating, and I would have felt just the same if I’d found myself imprisoned on an ice floe. Freedom was my only oxygen.
I was just waiting for nightfall to put our plan into action. I was counting on the full moon to make our escape easier.
A red truck appeared from behind a bend. Like ants, in less than two minutes the guerrillas loaded the truck. They had already dismantled the camp, and we hadn’t realized.
We took the winding path down the hill. Two little houses with smoking chimneys stood sadly in the middle of a cemetery of trees. A child was running after a ball that was split open. A pregnant woman watched him from the door-step, her hands on her hips, clearly in pain from her back. She disappeared quickly inside the house when she saw us. Then nothing more. Immense trees one after the other, identical, for hours. At one point the vegetation changed. The trees gave way to shrubbery. The truck left the dirt road and set off down a path that was scarcely visible among the ferns. Suddenly, straight ahead, as if put there by mistake, was a sturdy ironwork bridge, wide enough to allow the red truck to cross over easily. The driver stepped on the brakes and squealed to a halt. No one moved. On the far side of the bridge, emerging from the dark forest, were two individuals in camouflage uniform with big backpacks on their shoulders, walking resolutely toward us. I assumed they would climb onto the truck and we would cross the bridge. I hadn’t noticed the river flowing beneath. Nor the large boat that was waiting for us, its engine already throbbing, ready to leave.
It was then that the memory came back to me. In November 2001, during my presidential campaign, in a pretty little colonial village in the region of Santander, I’d been approached by a woman who had urgently insisted on talking to me. The captain of the monoplane had agreed to delay our departure by half an hour so that I could meet with her. She was a beguiling young woman, serious, simply dressed, and she came up holding by the hand her little girl, who was no more than five. After she had asked the child to sit farther away, she explained nervously that she had visions and that her visions always came true.
“I don’t want to upset you, and you will think I’m crazy, but I’ll have no peace until I can tell you what I know.”
“What do you know?”
She stopped looking me in the eyes, and her gaze was lost somewhere. I felt that she could no longer see me.
“There’s scaffolding, something falling. Don’t go under it. Stay away. There’s a boat, a small craft on the water. It isn’t the sea. Don’t get on. Above all—listen to me, this is the most important—don’t get on that boat.”
I tried to understand her. This woman was not pretending. But what she was saying seemed totally incoherent. Still, I played along. “Why mustn’t I get on the boat?”
“Because you won’t come back.”
“I might die?”
“No, you won’t die . . . but it will take you many years to come back.”
“How long?”
“Three years. No, it will be more. More than three years. A long time, a complete cycle.”
“And then, when I come back . . . ?”
“Afterward?”
“Yes, afterward. What will happen afterward?”
The captain came to get me. The airport closed before sunset, at six o’clock sharp. We had to take off immediately.
I boarded the plane and forgot what the woman had told me.
Until the instant I saw the canoa28 beneath the bridge. Sitting at the front of the red truck, I was transfixed as I gazed at the launch waiting for us by the riverbank. I mustn’t board. I mustn’t. I looked around me: It was impossible to escape; they were all armed. My hands were damp, and an irrational fear had taken hold of me. I didn’t want to go there. One of the men grabbed me by the arm, thinking I was hesitant to go down the steep slope because I was afraid of slipping. The young men were skipping down breezily, proud of their training. They pushed me, dragged me. I put one foot in the small boat, then the other. I had no choice. I was caught in the trap. For a long time, she had said. A complete cycle.
We sailed from twilight to dawn. It was the end of the dry season, so the river was at its lowest level; we had to keep the boat right in the middle of the stream to prevent it from running aground. From time to time, one of the guerrillas jumped into the water, fully dressed, submerged up to his waist, to push the boat and set it free. I was afraid. How could I get back? With every hour my feeling of claustrophobia grew.
In the beginning our convoy went past several small houses that watched us blindly. The enormous trees all around filtered the last rays of twilight, as if to show that just behind, the forest had been cut down to leave room for land that was ready to be cleared. But very quickly the density of the forest stifled any light, and we entered a tunnel of shadowy vegetation. There were no more signs of human life, not a trace of civilization. The sounds of the forest had become sinister and reached us in lugubrious echoes, despite the throbbing of the engine. I found myself sitting with my arms curled around my stomach as if to keep my guts in place. Dead trees, their branches bleached by the sun, lay like corpses in the water. As if they were still waiting for help from providence, their arms stiff, held out toward a speechless sky.
The captain had lit a powerful beam to see ahead. On the riverbanks little red lights shone as we went by—they were the eyes of crocodiles, hunting in the warm waters of the river. Someday I will have to swim in this river to go home, I thought.
With the night, the world we were entering was transformed into a phantasmagorical space. I was shivering. How would I ever get out of here?
After that the fear never left me. Every time I got into one of their canoas, I was inexorably thrust back into the sensations of that first descent into hell, on that black Caguán River that had swallowed me up.
Now, however, I could let myself go, to contemplate the marvels of luxuriant nature, celebrating life this beautiful morning of August 2003. But instead I had butterflies of fear in my stomach. Freedom. Was it too good to be true?
TWENTY-THREE
AN UNEXPECTED ENCOUNTER
AUGUST 2003
The motorboat left behind the labyrinth of narrow, winding water to emerge onto the great river Yari. We headed against the current toward the opposite bank and dropped anchor among trees that were disappearing beneath the rising waters. They told us to disembark. I thought we must be alone, in the middle of nowhere. To my great surprise, hidden between the trees a group of guerri
llas were striking their tents and packing up their personal belongings. Our captain unfolded a large plastic sheet in the shadow of a tall ceiba, for us to settle down on. We were used to waiting without asking questions. A young girl came up to us and asked if we wanted some eggs. Eggs! They reinforced the idea that they were giving us special treatment to prepare us for our imminent release. I had not noticed that a bit farther along they had made a rancha with a bonfire and there were stewpots hanging over the flame.
On our right, a man was sitting like us against a tree, observing me from a distance; he got up and started pacing back and forth. Eventually he gathered momentum and came over.
He was an elderly man, with a beard more salt than pepper covering his cheeks, and his eyes were swollen with black shadows and moist as if he were about to shed tears. His emotion upset me. Who was this guerrilla? Had I already seen him somewhere?
“Soy Luis Eladio, Luis Eladio Pérez. Fuimos senadores al mismo tiempo—”29
Before he finished his sentence, I understood. The man I had taken for an old guerrilla was none other than my former colleague, Luis Eladio Pérez, captured by the guerrillas six months before I was. I’d been in Congress the day his abduction was announced. The senators used it as a pretext to interrupt the session in a sign of protest, and we all went home, glad to have the afternoon off. Everyone spoke highly of Luis Eladio, but I could not remember who he was. There were a hundred of us. I should have recognized his face on the photographs. But no, nothing. It was not as if I’d never seen him before. I asked around to refresh my memory. “Yes, of course you remember him, he sits just behind us, just there.” . . . “You’ve seen him a thousand times—he always says hello when you come in.”
I was very angry with myself. I was drawing a total blank! And what was worse, I had spoken to him!
When I understood that it was Luis Eladio, I flung my arms around him and embraced him, holding back my tears. Dear Lord, it pained me so much to see him in such bad shape. He looked a hundred years old. I took his head between my hands. Those eyes, that gaze—where had I buried what I was searching for in vain? It was frustrating: I still could not recognize him, nor superimpose an image from the past on his face. And yet I had just found a brother. There was no distance between this stranger and myself. I took his hand and caressed his hair as if we’d known each other all our lives. We were weeping together, not knowing if it was from the joy of being together or from pity at seeing on each other’s face the ravages of our time as hostages.
With similar emotion Luis Eladio hurried to embrace Clara.
“¿Tú eres Clarita?”30
She held out a hand and, not moving, replied, “Call me Clara, please.”
Luis Eladio sat down with us on the black plastic sheet, slightly disconcerted. His eyes questioned me. I answered with a smile. He began to speak to me for hours and hours, without stopping, hours that turned into days, then weeks, an unending monologue. He wanted to tell me everything: The horror of two years in mandatory solitary confinement. (The commander did not like him and had forbidden the troops to speak to him or answer him.) The man’s cruelty—with his machete he had killed a little dog that Luis Eladio had adopted. The fear that haunted him, that he would end his life here in the jungle, far from his daughter, Carope, whom he adored and whose birthday was that very day, August 22, the day we met on the banks of the Yari. His illness—he was diabetic and dependent on insulin injections, which since his abduction he had not been receiving—and the fear that at any moment he might fall into a hypoglycemic coma that would kill him in no time at all or, worse, leave him a vegetable for the rest of his days. His anxiety about his family, for with his disappearance they had lost all their financial support. His dismay at not being there to guide his young son, Sergio, in his studies and career choice. His sorrow that he could not be by his elderly mother’s bedside, for he feared more than anything that she would die in his absence. His regret that he had not spent more time at home with his wife, whom he loved deeply, but he had been too absorbed in his work and his political life. The feeling of weakness that haunted him, for having fallen into a trap and been captured by the FARC. He told me everything in one long go, with all the urgency of the solitude that he had so loathed.
We motored downstream under a pitiless noonday sun, until nightfall. During all the hours we traveled, I had not said a word. We sat side by side, and I listened, aware of his vital need to unburden himself to me. We grasped each other’s hands, instinctively, for he wanted to convey the intensity of his emotion, and I wanted to give him the courage to continue. I wept when he wept, I fumed with indignation when he described the cruelty he had been subjected to, and I laughed with him to tears, because Luis Eladio could make a joke out of even the most tragic events. We instantaneously became inseparable. That first evening we shared together, we went on talking until the guards told us to shut up. The next morning we were delighted we could embrace again, and we went off hand in hand to sit in the motorboat. It mattered little where we were going. Quickly he became “Lucho” for me, then “my Lucho,” and finally “my Luchini.” I had adopted him for good, because his presence soothed me and gave me a powerful reason for living; better still, it gave a goal in my unchosen destiny.
After several days of traveling on the river, we came to a beach, where a well-maintained gravel road began. A truck that was closed at the back with a canvas sheet was waiting for us. To get us to climb on board, they did not need to insist. We were happy to be together so we could go on talking.
“Look,” he said, “I know you’re going to say no, because you must think I’m the kind of politician you don’t like, but if someday we get out of here, I would really like to be able to work with you.”
This touched me more than anything. I felt dirty, smelly. Dressed in my filthy rags, I was ashamed to be seen like this; I felt I’d aged and grown ugly. Yet Lucho still thought of me as the woman I’d been before. I tried to smile in order to give myself the time to respond.
To help me out of my confusion, he added, “But I warn you, we will have to change the name of your party—Green Oxygen, that’s asking too much of me! After this I don’t want to see any more green in my life!”
Everyone burst out laughing. The guerrillas, who had heard, applauded. Clara, too, was laughing wholeheartedly. I was bent over double. It felt so good to laugh. I looked at him. And for the first time, behind his white beard, behind his little shining eyes, I recognized him. I saw him sitting behind me in the semicircle of the Senate, greeting me with a mischievous air after throwing bits of paper at the neck of a colleague who sat opposite him and who turned around, exasperated. He had always made me laugh, even if invariably I strove to remain serious out of respect for our office. Behind his prisoner’s mask, I had just placed him.
TWENTY-FOUR
GIOVANNI’S CAMP
END OF AUGUST 2003
The truck stopped hours later, in the middle of the road that went through the rain forest. On our left, among the trees, we could just make out another FARC camp. They ordered us to get down. Clara and I carried potato sacks filled with our personal belongings. Lucho sported a FARC backpack made of waterproof green canvas, a rectangular shape, with straps on all sides from which he could hang everything, including his black plastic bowl, his tent rolled up like a sausage, and all the rest. He was fitted out like a guerrilla.
A surly-looking man was waiting by the side of the road, his legs spread, tapping impatiently against the top of his muscular thigh with a knife blade. He had very black shining hair, beady eyes, a little mustache, and three-day stubble. He was perspiring all over, probably having just finished some intense physical task.
He spoke to us in a gruff voice. “Hey, you! Come over here! I’m your new commander. You are now under the responsibility of the Eastern Bloc. Go in there and wait.”
A barrier of trees partially concealed the camp. It was a beehive of activity. There must have been a lot of people, because wherever
I looked, I could see caletas and men and women busy setting up their tents, no doubt hurrying so they would be ready before nightfall.
Lucho and I instinctively joined hands. “Our commander looks like a nasty piece of work.”
“A regular murdering highwayman,” whispered Lucho in reply.
“Yes. Our very own Norman Bates with his special knife,” I added. “Don’t worry. Around here it’s the ones who look nice that you have to beware of! Not the others.”
The commander came back for us, and we followed him cautiously. Ten yards farther, three caletas in a row had just been built. The wood, carefully stripped of its bark, was still oozing. Some of the men were busy finishing a big table with a bench on each side.
“Here, you’re going to settle in here. The chontos are just behind you. It’s too late now to take a bath, but tomorrow morning I’ll send the receptionist to escort you to the bathhouse. I’ll have some food brought to you. If you need anything, just call me. My name is Giovanni. Good night.”
He disappeared, leaving two guards on either side of the imaginary rectangle within which we could move.
“Guard? To go to the chontos?” I asked.
Even Silence Has an End: My Six Years of Captivity in the Colombian Jungle Page 22
