Lucho understood me, and he knew that I was sensitive because I was the target of all sorts of comments. On the radio my name was mentioned often, and that only fueled the acrimony of some of my companions. If I remained aloof, it was because I looked down on them. If I joined in, it was because I was trying to dominate. Their irritation with me went so far that they would lower the volume of the radio at the mention of my name.
One evening when there was talk of some efforts on the part of the Quai d’Orsay35 to obtain our release, someone groused about it. “We’re fed up with your goddamn France!” he said. He went up to the panela36 that Sombra had given us as a community radio, dangling from a nail in the middle of the barracks, and switched it off. Everyone laughed, except me.
Gloria came over and kissed me, saying, “They’re jealous. You should just laugh.” But I didn’t think it was funny at all. I was too wounded to see that we were all going through a serious identity crisis. We had lost our bearings and did not know who we were or what our place was in the world anymore. I should have realized how devastating it was for my companions to not be mentioned on the radio, because it made them feel they did not exist. I had always fought against the FARC’s strategy of dividing us. In Sombra’s prison my reflexes remained the same. One morning a few days after the Americans arrived, there was a delivery of foam mattresses—we could hardly believe such luxury! They were all different colors, and each of us could choose the one we wanted. Except Clara. The guard assigned her a dirty gray mattress that he stuffed through the gap in the metal gate. Lucho and I followed the scene. I went up to the gate and tried to reason with the guerrilla on Clara’s behalf. He was about to go back on his decision when Rogelio showed up. He thought I was asking a favor for myself, so out came his usual line whenever I was around: “You’re not the queen here. You do as you’re told.” And the matter was settled, with no further discussion.
Clara picked up the gray mattress without even looking at me and tried to exchange it with one of our comrades. Lucho took me by the arm and said, “You shouldn’t have gotten involved. You have enough problems with the guerrillas as it is. And no one will thank you for it!”
And indeed Orlando, who had reluctantly agreed to exchange his mattress with Clara, turned on me, saying, “If you wanted to help, why didn’t you just give her your mattress?”
Lucho smiled at me, knowingly. “You see, I told you so!”
Learning to keep quiet took time, and I was weary. Resigning myself to injustice was painful. Yet there was wisdom in not trying to resolve other people’s problems, as I discovered one morning.
Sombra was beside himself with rage. The soldiers next door were sending messages to one of our companions, in violation of the rules. Consuelo received paper scrunched into balls from the barracks behind ours. We all joined in to pick up the letters, because they might fall anywhere, even on our heads when we were outside lying in our hammocks. So we were all willing accomplices, careful to pick up the bits of paper without alerting the guards standing in the watchtowers.
Sombra called out to Consuelo.
Seeing that she was in a tight spot, I asked Sombra to relax the rules he’d established, because we all wanted to speak to our soldier comrades in the other barracks.
I was completely thrown by the way he reacted. “They all told me you were the one stirring up the shit in here!” He said that if he caught me passing messages with my friends next door again, he’d lock me up in a hole, and then we’d see if I wanted to go on playing the smart aleck.
No one came to my defense. This episode gave rise to a passionate debate during the French lessons. “Don’t try anymore! You’ll only make the situation worse,” said Jorge, who shared Lucho’s opinion. “It’s every man for himself here,” added Gloria. “Every time you try to get involved, you make more enemies.”
They were right, but I hated what we were being forced to become. I felt as if we were about to lose the best part of us and were being deluged in pettiness and baseness. This only increased my need for silence.
Beneath the dreary skies of our everyday life, the guerrillas had sown the grains of a deep ill will. The guards spread the rumor that the three newcomers were infected with venereal disease. The guerrillas then told the Americans that we were saying malicious things about them, as if the rumor came from us. The guards pretended we were accusing them of being mercenaries and secret agents of the CIA, claiming that microscopic transmitters had been found in the soles of their shoes and localization chips camouflaged in their teeth. Finally they spread another story in which our three companions were negotiating their release with Sombra in exchange for the delivery of a certain number of cocaine shipments to the United States using American government planes. It took no more than this to breed a general mistrust.
One evening all hell broke loose. A misplaced word, and suddenly accusations were flying everywhere. Some were accused of being spies, others of being traitors. Lucho asked that the women in the camp be respected. Keith, in response, accused Lucho of plotting to attack him with the knives sent by Mono Jojoy! During the night there were discussions with the receptionist over by the fence.
They came to search us the next morning. Those who were behind this intervention murmured in satisfaction. It wasn’t the knives that worried me—we’d obtained those “legally.” It was the machete we had hidden in the mud under the floor of the barracks.
“You’ll have to move the machete today, no later,” Lucho said once the search was over. “If our companions find out where it is, they’ll denounce us immediately.”
THIRTY-FOUR
LUCHO’S ILLNESS
EARLY DECEMBER 2003
My second Christmas in captivity was drawing near. I had not lost hope in a miracle. The courtyard in our prison, which in the beginning had been nothing but a huge puddle of mud, was drying. Along with the sadness and frustration of being far from home, December brought an immaculate blue sky and a warm breeze redolent of vacation, which merely increased our melancholy. It was a time for regret.
Gloria had managed to get hold of a pack of cards, and we got into the habit of settling down after our morning wash to play bridge in a corner of the barracks. We had all understood from our first sessions that it was imperative to let Gloria and me win to maintain the good humor of the group. So there was an unwritten, unspoken rule stipulating that they would play to our advantage without our finding out. We were divided into two teams, the women and the men. Gloria and I did all we could to win our games, and Lucho and Jorge did what they could to lose theirs. This incongruous situation brought out the best in each of us, and any number of times I thought I would die laughing at the sight of the ingenious moves that our adversaries came up with to make us win. Lucho was becoming a past master of comedy and derision, going so far as to pretend he had fainted on the carpet, in order to mix up the cards and thus be able to ask for a new deal that would be in our favor. In the logic of this upside-down game of ours, where losing and trying to get the others to win had become the aim, we managed to make fun of our ravaged egos, to put aside our controlling reflexes, and in the long run to accept our fate with more tolerance. Jorge excelled at accumulating subtle errors, and we wouldn’t notice the effect until a few turns later. Once we did, both Gloria and I would dance and give out wild Indian victory whoops.
Since my kidnapping, laughter had been absent from my life, and oh, how I had missed it! At the end of our games, my face would ache from laughing. This was a most effective treatment against dejection.
I gazed at myself for hours in a compact mirror that had survived all the times we’d been searched. It was so small that I could see only a bit of myself at a time. I had noticed a first wrinkle of bitterness at the corner of my mouth—a discovery that frightened me, along with finding that my teeth were turning yellow, even though I couldn’t remember their original color. I did not like this surreptitious metamorphosis at all. I did not want to emerge from the jungle a shriveled old wo
man, ravaged by acrimony and hate. I had to change—not to adapt, which would have seemed like a betrayal to me—but to rise above this morass of petty, base behavior in which we had begun to wallow. I needed wings, I needed to fly far away above this fiendish jungle that sought to transform us into cockroaches. I didn’t know how to go about it. I knew of no instruction manual for reaching a higher level of humanity and a greater wisdom. But I felt intuitively that laughter was the beginning of wisdom, as it was indispensable for survival.
So we settled into our hammocks, no longer fighting over our places, and we indulgently listened to one another. We were patient when one of our comrades repeated a story for the twentieth time. Sharing slices of our lives with the others let us see our memories as if we were staring at a movie screen.
That afternoon, on the radio, Christmas carols mingled with the traditional tropical music that was always played at parties in December. These familiar seasonal tunes conjured up for each of us specific memories. I was in Cartagena, age fifteen. The moon shone lazily on the ocean bay, and the crests of the waves shimmered as they lapped against the shore. My sister and I were invited to a New Year’s party. But we had fled when a handsome young man blessed with a godly tan and green cat’s eyes had made indecent proposals to us. We left as fast as possible, running across the city through the festivities as if chased by the devil incarnate, and we nestled in Papa’s arms until the strike of midnight, laughing and out of breath.
“You shouldn’t have left,” declared Lucho. “Nadie le quita a uno ni lo comido, ni lo bailado!”37 Then he started to dance, followed by the rest of us, as we did not want him to have fun on his own, until the guards told us to lower the volume and we returned to our hammocks.
After a while, Lucho got up to go to the toilet; he came back covered in sweat. He was tired and wanted to go back into the barracks to lie down, he said. I couldn’t see his face because it was dark, but something in his voice alarmed me.
“Do you feel all right, Lucho?”
“Yes, I’m fine,” he groaned.
Then, changing his mind, he added, “Stand in front of me. I’m going to hold you by the shoulders, and you’ll guide me into the barracks. I’m having trouble walking.”
The moment we crossed the threshold, Lucho collapsed onto a plastic chair in the entrance. He was green, his eyes were glassy, and his face was gaunt, soaked in sweat. He could no longer articulate very clearly, and he had trouble holding his head straight. Just as he had warned, this was the onset of a diabetic crisis.
Lucho kept a supply of candy, and I hurried to go through his equipo38 to find it. Lucho, meanwhile, was slumping, dangerously slipping from his chair, at risk of falling any moment, headfirst, on the floor.
“Help me!” I cried, without knowing whether it was better to hold him, to lay him on the floor, or to give him the candies I’d just found.
Orlando came over at once. He was tall and muscular. He took Lucho in his arms and sat him on the floor while I tried to get him to suck on one of the candies I had in my hands. But Lucho was no longer there. He had fainted, and you could see the whites of his eyes. I chewed on the candy myself and put it into his mouth ground up. “Lucho, Lucho, can you hear me?”
His head was rolling in every direction, but he was grunting, making sounds to indicate that somewhere in his head he could still hear my voice.
Gloria and Jorge dragged a mattress across the floor so that we could put Lucho on it. Tom came in, too, with a piece of cardboard that he had found God knows where, and he started to fan Lucho’s face vigorously to ease his breathing.
“I need sugar, quick! The candy isn’t working!” I shouted, feeling Lucho’s weak pulse.
“Call the nurse! We’re losing him!” cried Orlando, who had just checked his heartbeat.
Someone brought a small plastic packet that held ten grams or so of sugar. It was a treasure—it could save his life! I put a bit of sugar on his tongue, then mixed the rest of the sachet with a tiny bit of water and made him drink it in little swallows, half of which dribbled down the sides of his lips. He did not react.
The nurse, Guillermo, yelled to us from behind the fence. “What’s all the fuss about?”
“Lucho is having a diabetic crisis. He’s in a coma. You have to come and help us!”
“I can’t come in!”
“What do you mean, you can’t come in?”
“I need permission.”
“Go get it! Can’t you see he might be dying? Shit!” Orlando was practically shouting.
The man went off in no particular hurry, calling in a blasé voice from a distance, “Stop making all that noise. You’ll get the chulos on our ass!”
Holding Lucho’s head on my lap, I was terrified and filled with rage. How could that “nurse” go off without trying to help us, without lifting a finger?
My companions had gathered around Lucho, trying to help in one way or another. Some had taken off his boots; others were massaging the soles of his feet energetically; a third group was taking turns fanning him.
There was only one candy left of the twenty Lucho had in reserve. I’d made him swallow the rest. And yet he had told me that two or three ought to be more than enough to bring him back.
I shook him hard.
“Lucho, please, wake up! You don’t have the right to leave! You can’t leave me here all alone, Lucho!”
A terrible silence had fallen all around us. Lucho was lying like a corpse in my arms, and my companions had slowed down their efforts to reanimate him.
Orlando was shaking his head with dismay. “What swine! They didn’t do a thing to save him.”
Jorge came up and put his hand on Lucho’s chest. He nodded and said, “Courage, madame chérie. As long as his heart is still beating, there’s hope!”
I looked at the one remaining piece of candy. Never mind, it was our last chance. I crushed it with my teeth and inserted the little pieces into his mouth.
I could tell that Lucho had swallowed.
“Lucho, Lucho, can you hear me? If you can hear me, move your hands, please.”
His eyes were closed, his mouth open. I could no longer hear his breathing. And yet after a few seconds he moved a finger.
Gloria gave out a shout. “He answered! He moved! Lucho, Lucho, speak to us! Say something!”
Lucho was making a superhuman effort to react. I forced him to drink a little bit of sweetened water. He closed his mouth and swallowed without difficulty.
“Lucho, can you hear me?”
In a hoarse voice that signaled he was back from the shores of death, he replied, “Yes.”
I was going to give him some more water. He stopped me with a movement of his hand. “Wait.”
Preparing me to deal with the possibility of a diabetic coma, Lucho had warned that the greatest danger was the damage to the brain that could follow.
“Don’t let me go into a coma, because I won’t come back,” he’d instructed me then. “And if I pass out, it’s vital you wake me up and keep me awake for the twelve hours that follow. Those are the most important hours for my recovery. You have to get me to talk by asking me all sorts of questions so you can make sure I haven’t completely lost my memory.”
I began right away, following the instructions he’d given me. “How do you feel?”
He nodded.
“How do you feel? Answer me.”
“Fine.”
He was finding it hard to respond.
“What’s your daughter’s name?”
He didn’t say anything.
“What is your daughter’s name?”
Still no answer.
“What is your daughter’s name, Lucho? Make an effort!”
“Carope.”
“Where are we?”
No answer.
“Where are we?”
“At home.”
“Do you know who I am?”
“Yes.”
“What’s my name?”
No response.
“Are you hungry?”
“No.”
“Open your eyes, Lucho. Can you see us?”
He opened his eyes and smiled. Our companions leaned over to take his hand, to welcome him back, to ask him how he felt. He replied slowly, but his gaze was still elsewhere, as if he didn’t recognize us. Lucho was coming back from another world, and he looked a hundred years older.
All night long my companions took turns carrying on one-sided artificial conversations with Lucho to keep him actively conscious. Orlando got him to explain everything there was to know about exporting shrimp and kept him talking until midnight.
I took over from then until dawn. During those hours, I discovered that Lucho had regained his memory of relatively recent events. He knew we were being held captive. But he had no recollection of the events of his childhood or of the immediate present. The day before his coma had been completely erased. As for the dish his mother used to prepare religiously, the tamal, it no longer existed. When I asked him about it, clearly sensing that something was wrong, he looked at me with the eyes of a child who is afraid of being scolded and made up answers to keep me happy.
This hurt more than anything, because my Lucho, the one I had known, who told me stories to make me laugh, my friend and my confidant—that Lucho was gone, and I missed him terribly.
For months we had been dreaming about a political project that we planned to start work on as soon as we were released. After his diabetic crisis, he no longer had a clue what I was talking about. But what was possibly the most atrocious thing of all was that Lucho immediately forgot anything you’d just told him. Worse yet, he forgot what he’d just done. When he’d already had his lunch ration, he would start to complain because he thought he hadn’t eaten all day and all of a sudden he was hungry.
Christmas was coming. We were all waiting for messages from our families, because more than ever it was a torment to be apart. Yet Lucho continued to be absent.
Even Silence Has an End: My Six Years of Captivity in the Colombian Jungle Page 28
