Even Silence Has an End: My Six Years of Captivity in the Colombian Jungle

by Ingrid Betancourt

  One morning Arnoldo came and took them all. It was a few days before the deadline. One of our companions, on a whim, had wanted to send them all back beforehand, without telling the others. I was particularly frustrated and felt betrayed by this fellow inmate.

  I talked about it with Orlando, who had gotten into the habit of coming to chat with Lucho and me in the evening after lights-out. Orlando was very good at wheedling information from the guards. He was, in fact, the best informed among us. He noticed what the rest of us missed.

  I had begun to feel affection for him because I’d realized that beneath his oafish manner he had a big heart, something he showed only at certain moments, as if he were embarrassed to. But it was above all his sense of humor that we enjoyed. When he sat down at the little round table to listen to the radio with us, Lucho and I knew that we were in for some serious banter, and we waited, enchanted, for him to shoot his first arrows.

  He never indulged us, but he gave such a bald description of our situation, of our attitudes and failings, that we could only laugh and concede that he was right.

  Some of our fellow inmates were skeptical about our friendship with Orlando. They didn’t trust him and were ready to accuse him of every flaw on earth. Some came to warn me and put me on my guard against Orlando.

  But I didn’t want to listen to those kinds of remarks anymore. We each had our own views. I wanted to give everyone the benefit of the doubt and reach my own conclusions.

  Our return to the prison had obliged me to take stock. I looked at myself in the mirror of other people and saw there all the defects of humanity—hatred, jealousy, greed, envy, selfishness. But it was in myself that I observed them. I’d been shocked to realize this, and I did not like who I had become.

  When I listened to remarks and criticism attacking others, I kept quiet. I, too, had run up to the stewpot in the hope of having a better piece. I, too, had waited on purpose for the others to help themselves in order to land right on the biggest cancharina. I, too, had envied a nicer pair of socks or a bigger bowl. And I, too, had stockpiled supplies of food to assuage my greed.

  One day Gloria’s supplies of canned food exploded. The cans were too old, and the temperature had risen too high. Everyone made fun of her. Most of the others were delighted that she had lost what they had already eaten while she patiently put her ration to one side. We were all alike, entangled in our ugly little pettiness.

  I decided to monitor myself, to avoid doing the same. It was an ordeal. Sometimes my reason would pull one way, my guts the other. I was hungry. I ended up doing just the opposite of what my good resolutions dictated. My only solace was that I’d become aware of it.

  I observed with consternation our behavior toward our own families, in particular the scathing criticism and nasty comments that some of my companions made about their family members. In our prisoner psychology, there was a masochistic tendency to imagine that those who were struggling to have us released were doing it for opportunistic reasons. We could not believe that we were still worthy of their love.

  I refused to accept that our life partners had turned our dramatic situation into a means of subsistence. The men suffered to think that their wives were spending their salaries. We women lived in fear that upon our return we might not find our home. My husband’s prolonged silence prompted painful gibes. “He only calls you when there are journalists around,” they would tell me. Orlando’s attitude changed as well. He became gentler, tried harder to make himself useful. He was very good at finding rapid solutions to little problems.

  When I told Orlando how frustrated I had been because they took the books away so quickly, he reassured me, “I have friends in the other camp. I’ll ask them to send us some more books. I think they have the whole Harry Potter series.”

  The books arrived while I was in the washroom. They had all been handed out and the Harry Potter books were the first to go. Marc was reading Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. I couldn’t resist the temptation to go look at the cover of the book. He smiled when he saw how excited I was. I was ashamed, and I tried not to linger too long with the book in my hands.

  “Don’t worry, I’m impatient to read it, too.”

  “I find it moving, because these were the first books Lorenzo, my son, ever read! I think it makes me feel closer to him,” I said, to excuse myself. “And it’s true I did devour volume one,” I finally confessed.

  “Well, for me it’s my first book in Spanish! There are a lot of hard words, but already I can’t put it down . . . Listen, if you want, we can read it at the same time: I’ll read it in the morning, I’ll hand it to you at noon, and you give it back to me in the evening.”

  “Really, would you do that?”

  “Of course, but there’s one condition.”

  I waited silently.

  “You put it on my shelf at six o’clock sharp. I don’t want to have to ask you for it every day.”

  “You’re on.”

  THIRTY-NINE

  RADIO ROUNDUP

  APRIL 2004

  Our arrangement delighted me. I programmed my days so that I could devote every afternoon to reading, and I was particularly careful to leave the book at six o’clock sharp on his shelf. I had learned that we judged one another on these tiny details and, what’s more, that it was on such a basis that friendships were built or conflicts ignited. The lack of privacy exposed us to other people’s constant scrutiny. To be sure, we were watched over by the guards, but above all we were subject to our fellow captives’ merciless surveillance.

  If I’d been even one minute late, I knew that Marc would have sought me out with his gaze in the courtyard to find out why I was late. If the reason was trivial, he would have been offended and things would have gotten tense between us. We all worked this way. On the dot of noon, I would look up. I’d had time to do my gymnastics and wash up, and I waited impatiently for him to come out of the barracks with the book. This was a truly gratifying moment: For a few hours, I would plunge myself into the world of Hogwarts and I could escape, far from this enclosure and its barbed wire, its watchtowers, and its mud; I could return to the lightheartedness of my childhood. But my escape was making people jealous. I sensed that some of them would have liked to grab the book from my hands. I knew I could afford no false move.

  One afternoon the guards arrived with the television that Shirley had brought to us in the chicken run. We were all very eager to see a film. But there was nothing at all relaxing about what they showed us—it was our three American companions’ proof of life, recorded months before their arrival in our prison. The audience was moved on hearing their messages and the ones that their families had recorded in response, now part of a television program that had been shown in the United States a few months earlier. To begin with, our companions were glued to the screen, as if it might have allowed them to climb into the picture and touch the people they loved. Gradually they sat farther back in their chairs, as if so much closeness were burning them. We stood behind them, painfully observing the families on television who, like our own, were racked with pain and anxiety. But above all I examined my companions, the way they reacted, as if they were being flayed alive on a public square.

  There was something distressing about being there, watching the nakedness of their distress. But I was unable to tear myself away, fascinated by a spectacle of collective hara-kiri that reminded me of what I myself was going through.

  I had at last put faces to the names of these strangers, who by now had become familiar, since I’d heard about them so often. I tracked their expressions on television, their gazes as they looked away from the camera, the trembling of their lips, their words—which were always revealing. I had been floored by the power of the image and the idea that we are all so predictable. I saw them for only two seconds, yet I felt as if I knew them intimately. They had all betrayed themselves; in front of the camera, none of us can mask the good and bad in our emotions. I was embarrassed, but there it was; we no longe
r had any right to privacy.

  I observed my companions. The three of them behaved and reacted in ways that were utterly different from one another. One gave a running commentary on each image and would turn around to make sure the group had followed his explanations. He did say one thing that no one could fail to hear, while talking about his fiancée: “I know, she’s not very pretty, but she’s intelligent.” Everyone stared at him. He blushed, and I could sense it wasn’t because he was sorry about what he’d said. Sure enough, he went on to say, “I gave her a ring that cost ten thousand dollars.”

  Another was crouching off to one side, compulsively rubbing the stubble on his chin. His huge blue eyes filled with tears, and he said over and over in a low voice, “God, how could I have been such a jerk!” He aged a hundred years in a second. It was unbearable to witness his pain; his words were the same I heard in myself, because, like him, I bore a cross made of regrets. I thought to go and hug him. But I couldn’t. For a long time now, we hadn’t been speaking.

  Marc was standing next to me. I didn’t dare look over at him because I thought it wouldn’t be very tactful. I sensed he was motionless. And yet when the broadcast was over and I turned around to go out of the barracks, his expression stopped me in my tracks. He appeared in the grip of an inner anguish. He was staring into space, his head slumped forward, his breathing ragged, and he couldn’t move, as if he’d had the sudden onset of a disease so powerful that it had swollen his joints and crushed his heart. I took no time to think, to debate with myself whether my gesture would be appropriate or not. I saw myself taking him in my arms, as if I might be able to break the curse under which he’d been placed. He burst into tears and tried to stem them by pinching the bridge of his nose and saying, over and over, hiding his face against me, “I’m okay, I’m okay.”

  He had to be okay. We had no choice.

  A few hours later, he came to thank me. This was surprising, because I had taken him for a cold man, perhaps even insensitive. He had a great deal of self-control and often gave the impression of being elsewhere. Now that I saw him in a new light, I was intrigued and wanted to understand who he was.

  From time to time, he came at dusk to talk with Lucho, Orlando, and me, and he made us laugh with his Spanish, which was getting better by the day but not necessarily with the most appropriate of words. He asked little favors of me, and I asked some of him. He had begun to embroider the names of his wife and children on his camouflage jacket. He was obsessed by his work and spent all day filling with black thread the letters he had carefully outlined on the canvas. It looked as if he was not making much headway. I wanted to see what he was doing, and I was surprised at how perfect his work was.

  One morning when I was trying to wear my body out by going up and down the stepladder, I heard his American companions congratulate him on his birthday. I thought that everyone else had heard, too, like me. But no one else greeted him. We had grown hard, probably in our efforts to isolate ourselves from everything so that living would be less painful. I decided to go up to him anyway. My initiative surprised and pleased him, and I thought we’d become friends.

  Until the day Sombra ordered a raid on our radios. We were all caught unawares, except for Orlando, who had gotten wind of what was being said in the soldiers’ barracks. He had stood with his ear up against the boards opposite their hut and heard that there was a general confiscation under way. He went around to all our fellow inmates and warned us one by one what to expect.

  My blood drained away. Lucho was as pale as I was. If we gave them our radios, we would be cut off from our families for good.

  “You give them yours, and I’ll hide mine.”

  “Ingrid, you’re out of your mind. They will realize.”

  “No. They’ve never seen mine. We always use yours, because it broke. That’s the one they remember.”

  “But they know you have one.”

  “I’ll tell them I threw it away a long time ago because it wasn’t working anymore.”

  Arnoldo came charging into the enclosure with four of his acolytes. I just managed to throw my little radio, the one that Joaquín Gómez had given to me, under the floor of the washroom and to sit back down, looking as natural as possible. I was trembling. Lucho was green, beads of sweat forming on his brow. There was no going back.

  “They’ll catch us,” he said again, anxiously.

  Arnoldo stopped in the middle of the courtyard, while the four other guards sealed the premises.

  There was nothing more important to a prisoner than his or her radio set. It was everything—the voice of family, the window on the world, the evening entertainment, a remedy for insomnia, something to fill our solitude. I watched as my companions put their radios in Arnoldo’s hands. Lucho put his little black Sony down and grumbled, “It’s out of batteries.” Moments like this alone were reason to adore him. He restored my strength.

  Arnoldo counted the radios and declared, “There’s one missing.” Then, looking at me, he barked, “Yours.”

  “I don’t have one.”

  “Yes you do.”

  “I don’t have it anymore.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It wasn’t working.”

  He stared at me.

  “I threw it out.”

  Arnoldo raised an eyebrow and looked closely at me. It felt as if he were counting every fold in my intestines. “Are you sure?”

  Mom had always said that she was incapable of lying and that you could read it on her face. I had believed it was a sort of providential flaw that obliged us, genetically, to be honest. At times it was so extreme that I blushed when telling the truth, just at the idea that anyone might think I was lying, and consequently it was not infrequent that I would think I had to practice lying to be able to tell the truth without turning red. In my civilian life, I could get away with it. But here I knew I was going to have to look him in the eye. I must not look away. The time had come when I had to learn to lie for a good cause. And that was what saved me. I was the only one who had hidden my radio. I did not have the right to lose my nerve.

  “Yes, I’m sure,” I said, holding his gaze.

  He said no more about it. He picked up his pile of radios and batteries and went away satisfied.

  I stood there petrified, unable to take a step, leaning on the table, within an inch of collapsing on the ground, soaked in a sickly outbreak of sweat.

  “Lucho, could you tell I was lying?”

  “No, nobody saw a thing. Please, talk normally, they’re all looking at you from the watchtowers. Let’s go sit at the little round table.”

  He held me by the waist and helped me take the few steps over to the little chairs, as if we were having a chat.

  “Lucho?”

  “What?”

  “I feel like my heart is going to leap out of my body.”

  “Yes, and I’ll run after it!” He burst out laughing and added, “Okay, now we’re in a fine fix. You have to be prepared that one of these dog lovers might let the cat out of the bag. They’ll make mincemeat of us if one of them betrays us.”

  It felt as if death were stroking my spine. At any moment the guards could come to search my hut. I changed the radio’s hiding place a thousand times. Orlando, who was on the lookout, blocked me at the entrance to the barracks.

  “You kept your radio, didn’t you?”

  “No, I didn’t keep a thing.”

  I had answered instinctively. Alan Jara’s words were resonating in my head: Don’t trust anyone.

  Lucho came to see me. “Jorge and Gloria have been wondering if we kept the radio.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “I didn’t answer, I left.”

  “Orlando asked me the same thing. I said no.”

  “If we’re going to listen to it, we’ll have to wait a few days. Everyone is on the lookout, it’s too risky.”

  Just then Gloria and Jorge came over.

  “We have to talk to you. There’s a terribl
e atmosphere in the barracks. The others have realized that you didn’t hand in one of the radios, and they’re going to denounce you.”

  The next morning Marc called out to Lucho. I could easily imagine the subject of their conversation, simply by the solemn manner they suddenly adopted. When Lucho returned, he was as nervous as I’d ever seen him.

  “Listen, we have to get rid of the radio. They’ve found a monstrous way to blackmail us: Either we give them the radio or they turn us in. We have to meet in the barracks in ten minutes.”

  When we arrived at the barracks, the chairs had already been set out in a semicircle and I really felt as if I were in the dock. I knew I was going to have a hard time, but I was determined not to give in to their blackmail.

  Orlando opened the discussion. I was surprised by his calm and kindly tone.

  “Ingrid, we believe that you kept a radio. If that is so, we would like to have the possibility to listen to the news, too, especially the messages from our families.”

  This changed everything! It became clear that this would be the ideal solution. If there were no threats, no blackmail, if we could trust each other . . . I was thinking on my feet: It could also be a trap. Once I agreed to say that I had indeed hidden the radio, they could go and squeal on me. “Orlando, I wish I could answer you. But I can’t talk openly. We all know that in our midst there are companions who are informers in the service of the guerrillas.”

  I looked at my companions’ faces, one by one. Some of them looked down. Lucho, Gloria, and Jorge were nodding. I continued.

  “Every time we have tried to do something as a group, one of us has gone to alert the guerrillas, like the day we wanted to write a letter to the commanders or the time we talked about going on a hunger strike. In our midst there are some sapos.42 What guarantee do we have that anything said in this meeting won’t be relayed to Sombra in the next half hour?”

  My companions were staring at the ground, theirs jaws clenched. I went on.

  “Let’s just suppose one of us did keep a radio. What guarantee do we have that there won’t be another search and that someone won’t snitch?”