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

by Ingrid Betancourt

  Sounds were muffled. The roar of the river had given way to the muted sound of quiet waters. A bird flew along the surface and just missed us. My gestures had lost, instinctively, some of their expansiveness, as if I feared bumping into something. And yet nothing I could see was any different from what I’d already seen thousands of times. We were swimming among the branches of the trees like the bongo thrusting its way, opening a course. The sound of water lapping told us we were near the riverbank.

  “Over there!” whispered Lucho.

  I followed with my gaze. To my left, a bed of leaves and, farther along, the roots of a majestic ceiba tree. My feet had just found the land. I came out of the water, heavy with emotion, shivering, so glad to be standing on solid ground. I was exhausted. I needed to find a place to collapse. Lucho climbed the gentle slope at the same time, and he pulled me over to the roots of the tree.

  “We have to hide. They could show up at any moment.”

  He opened the black plastic sheet he kept in his belongings and helped me off with my backpack.

  “Hand me your clothes one piece at a time. We have to wring them out.”

  I did as he said, only to be immediately attacked by jejenes, tiny little midges that are particularly voracious and move around in dense clouds. I had to do a war dance to keep them away.

  It was nearly six o’clock in the morning. The forest was so dense where we were that daylight was taking its time to reach us. We decided to wait, because we couldn’t see what was around us. My God, today is my sister’s birthday! I thought, happy to have remembered. The light reached the undergrowth at that very moment and spread like wildfire.

  We were not in a good spot; the roots of the huge ceiba tree—the “tree of life” as the aborigines called it—were the only dry place in the surrounding swamp. A few yards away, a round ball of dry earth hanging from the branch of a young tree reminded me of the time we’d been pursued by a swarm of hornets. It was a beehive.

  “We have to get away at once and go inland,” declared Lucho. “Besides, when it rains, everything will be covered with stagnant water.”

  Someone on high must have heard him, because it began to rain that very second. We cautiously took our leave of the nest and headed deeper into the forest. It was raining harder. We stayed on our feet, carrying our things, with plastic sheets over us as umbrellas, too tired to think of anything better. When finally a pause in the rain gave us a truce, I spread the plastic sheet on the ground and collapsed on it. I awoke with a start. Around us there were men shouting. Lucho was already crouched down, on the lookout.

  “They’re here,” he murmured, his eyes popping out of his head.

  We were in a clearing, easily visible, with very few trees around us. It was the only dry spot in the swampland. We had to find a place to huddle behind, if there was still time. I looked desperately for a hiding place. The best thing was to lie flat on the ground and cover ourselves with leaves. Lucho and I thought of the same thing at the same time. It seemed to me that we were making as much noise pulling the leaves over us as the men who were shouting.

  The voices came nearer. We could hear their conversation distinctly. It was Angel and Tiger, and a third man, Oswald. They were laughing. I had goose bumps. I remembered the time the guerrillas had recaptured Clara and me, after the attack of the African wasps. Edinson had let off a volley of bullets into the air, roaring with laughter. For that’s what it was, a manhunt. Surely they had seen us.

  Lucho lay motionless beside me, camouflaged beneath his carpet of dead leaves. I would have liked to laugh if I weren’t so frightened. And to cry, too. I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of getting their hands on us again.

  The guerrillas were still laughing. Where were they? Over by the river to our left. But the vegetation there was very dense. Then the noise of an engine, more voices, and the metallic echo of men boarding a boat, the clicking of rifles, the motor again, going away this time, and the silence of the trees. I closed my eyes to give thanks.

  Night fell very quickly. I was surprised to feel at ease in my wet clothes, which trapped the heat of my body. My fingers hurt, but I had managed to keep my fingernails clean, and the cuticle that gave me problems so often was not irritated. I had woven my hair into a tight braid, and I had no intention of touching it for a long time. We had decided that we would always eat something before going back to the river, and for this first day we had one cookie each and a piece of panela.72 They would start their hunt again at dawn, just when we left the river to hide among the trees. We had to leave at two o’clock in the morning, to have three hours on the river before daybreak. We wanted to be on shore with the first light of dawn, because we dreaded the thought of plunging blindly into the vegetation. We agreed on all of that, crouching among the roots of our old tree, as we waited for the rain to stop so we could curl up on our plastic sheets and get some sleep.

  The rain didn’t stop. We dozed off all the same, curled up against each other, incapable of struggling against sleep any longer.

  I was awakened by a resounding noise. Then nothing. Once again the sound of something twisting in the swamp, striking the water violently. All I could see was darkness. Lucho searched for the flashlight and switched it on for a second.

  “It’s a cachirri!”73 I cried, horrified.

  “No, it’s a guío,” said Lucho. “He’s taking his prey down into the depths to drown it.” He was probably right. I remember a guío killing the rooster in Andres’s camp. I heard it from my wooden house splashing into the river, taking its squirming prey down with it. It made the same sound.

  We remained silent. In a few minutes, we would have to go back into that black water. It was already two o’clock in the morning.

  We waited. A deadly calm reigned.

  “Right, it’s time to go,” said Lucho, tying the ropes around his boots.

  We went into the river apprehensively. I bumped against the trees as I moved forward. Once again the current took hold of us abruptly, grabbing us from beneath the dome of vegetation to project us out under the open sky in the middle of the river. It was even stronger than the day before, and we were swept ahead, whirling on ourselves uncontrollably.

  “We’re going to drown!” cried Lucho.

  “No, we’re not going to drown. It’s normal, it’s been raining all night. Let yourself go.”

  We were moving so fast I felt as if I were spiraling downward. The river was winding, and it seemed narrower to me. The riverbanks were higher, and sometimes the line of trees gave way to a sudden steep embankment, as if a bite had been taken out of the shore. The bare, bloody earth opened like a gaping wound in the middle of the curling darkness of foliage.

  When I felt my first shivers and the thought of leaving the river became urgent, the flow was less powerful and we were able to swim to the opposite shore, to the side where the vegetation seemed less dense. We hadn’t even reached the riverbank, and already it was broad daylight. Desperate, I struggled to go faster. We were easy prey for any posse out looking for us.

  With relief we plunged into the greenery, sheltered in the gloom.

  At the top of the incline, the terrain was very dry and dead leaves crackled under our feet.

  I collapsed on a plastic sheet, my teeth chattering, and fell sound asleep.

  I opened my eyes and wondered where I was. There were no guards. No tents, no hammocks. Carnival-colored birds squabbled on a branch above my head. When I managed to make my way through a labyrinth of scattered memories to place myself back in reality, I was overwhelmed by the happiness of a time gone by. I didn’t want to move anymore.

  Lucho wasn’t there. I waited, tranquil, till he returned. He had gone to inspect the surroundings.

  “Do you think there’s any civilian transportation on this river?” he asked.

  “I’m sure there is. Remember the boat we saw just after we left the Maloka camp?”

  “Should we try to intercept one?”

  “Don’t even
think about it! Odds are two to one that we’ll come upon the guerrillas.”

  I knew the dangers of our escape. But the one I dreaded most was our own weakness. The surge of adrenaline at the time of our escape subsided once we felt we were out of danger, and we were letting our guard down. It was at times when we relaxed that the dark thoughts arose, and we could lose the prospect of the sacrifice we’d made. Hunger, cold, and fatigue started to become more insistent than freedom itself, because now that we’d regained our freedom, it seemed less important in the light of our urgent needs.

  “Come on, let’s eat something. Let’s treat ourselves.”

  “How much longer will our supplies last?”

  “We’ll see. But we have our fishhooks. Don’t worry. With every passing day, we’re getting closer to our families!”

  The sun had come out. Our clothes had dried, and that boosted our spirits. We spent the afternoon envisaging what we must do if the guerrillas came anywhere near.

  We left earlier that day, in the hope of making better progress. We were nurturing the illusion that on our way we would find signs of human presence.

  “If we could find a boat, we could sail all night without getting wet,” said Lucho.

  We found a spot to shelter that seemed promising, because the riverbank was visible through the foliage and stretched along a beach for thirty yards or more. We had arrived at dawn, and we chose it because one of the trees that reached far out into the water had branches that grew horizontally, which would enable us, we thought, to take turns keeping watch on the river.

  The sun from the day before had put us back on our feet, and it looked like today would be hot again. We decided to try to do some fishing, to boost our morale. We would have to last for a long time—weeks, perhaps months.

  While Lucho was looking for a good branch to make a fishing rod, I focused on finding some bait. I had noticed a tree trunk that was rotting, halfway in the water. I gave it a good kick, the way I’d seen the guerrillas do, and split it open. Inside, a colony of purple, sticky worms was writhing. A bit farther along, there were bird-of-paradise plants in abundance. With the smooth, fresh leaf from one of them, I fashioned a cone that I filled with the unfortunate creatures. I attached the nylon thread and a hook to Lucho’s fishing rod and conscientiously hooked the bait, telling myself that what I was doing was very cruel, to be pinning this poor creature, still alive, to a hook before tossing it into the water. Lucho looked on, disgusted and fascinated at the same time, as if the ritual I was performing made me the keeper of occult powers.

  I hadn’t had time to take a step, and already I was pulling from the water a fine caribe—which is a more reassuring name for a piranha. I found a branch to use as a stake and planted it next to me, then impaled my catch on it, confident that after such good fortune luck would continue to smile on me. Beyond all my expectations, the fishing was miraculous. Lucho was laughing wholeheartedly. We had three stakes of fish in no time. All our anxiety vanished. We could eat our fill every day until we managed to find our way out.

  We were unaware that we’d begun talking loudly. We heard the engine only after it had already gone by. A heavily laden boat, sitting low on the water, with ten people or more crowded in a row—women, one of them with a baby, men, young people, all of them civilians wearing colorful clothes. My heart leaped. I cried for help when the boat had already gone by, and I realized they could no longer see us, or even hear us. For a few seconds, they had been so close to us. We saw them motor by before our eyes; paralyzed by fear and surprise, I remembered every detail of this apparition. Our best opportunity to find our way out of the jungle had just eluded us.

  Lucho looked at me, his face like that of a whipped dog. His eyes welled with tears.

  “We should have been watching the river,” he said bitterly.

  “Yes, we’re going to have to be more vigilant.”

  “They were civilians,” he said.

  “Yes, they were civilians.”

  I no longer felt like fishing. I took my nylon line and the hook to put them away.

  “Let’s make a fire and try to cook the fish,” I said, looking for something to do to hide our disappointment.

  The sky had changed. Clouds were piling up overhead. Sooner or later it would rain. We had to hurry.

  Lucho gathered a few branches. We had a lighter.

  ““Do you know how to make a fire?” asked Lucho.

  “No, but I don’t think it is very difficult. We need to find a bizcocho,74 that’s the tree they use in the rancha.”

  We spent two hours trying to get it started. I remembered hearing the guards say it was best to peel the wood when it was damp. We had scissors, but despite all our efforts it was impossible to remove the bark even from a small branch. I felt ridiculous: With my lighter and all this wood around us, and yet we could not kindle the tiniest flame. We didn’t talk about it, but we were in a race against time.

  Sooner or later Lucho’s sickness would recur. I kept a close watch for any of the warning signs. So far I hadn’t seen anything alarming, other than his expression of sadness when the boat went by, because sometimes before a diabetic crisis he would lapse into a similar state of affliction. In those cases his morose mood had no specific cause; it came on as a symptom of the deregulation of his metabolism, whereas the dejection I had just noticed had an obvious cause. I wondered if the disappointment that had overcome him could be enough to trigger his illness, and the thought of it tortured me more than hunger or fatigue.

  “Right, listen, it’s not a problem. If we can’t light the fire, we’ll eat our fish raw.”

  “No, never!” cried Lucho. “I’d rather starve to death.”

  His reaction made me laugh. He went off at a run as if he thought I’d be in hot pursuit, to force him to swallow the caribes raw, with their sharp little teeth and their staring, gleaming eyes.

  I took the scissors, and on a leaf from the bird-of-paradise plant I cut little fillets of translucent caribe flesh and meticulously lined them up. I was careful to toss the scraps into the water, and they were instantaneously fought over in a splashing of voracious fish.

  Lucho came back, wary, but he watched me, bemused.

  “Mmm. It’s absolutely delicious,” I said without looking at him, my mouth full. “You’re wrong not to try it. This is the best sushi I’ve ever had!”

  On the leaf there were no more dead fish, just finely sliced strips of fresh meat. The sight of it reassured Lucho, and, driven by hunger, he ate a first one, then a second, and finally a third.

  “I’m going to throw up,” he said in the end.

  I was already reassured. I knew that next time we would eat it without a problem.

  This was our first real meal since we’d run away from the camp. The psychological effect was instantaneous. We immediately started to get ready for the next leg of our journey, gathering all our little things, making the inventory of our treasures and our supplies. The day ended on a positive note. We had saved two cookies, and we felt good.

  Lucho cut some palm leaves and wove them together at the foot of the tree, spread the plastic sheets, and put our bags and the oilcans down on them. We were about to stretch out when suddenly the storm was upon us without warning. We barely had time to take up our things and cover ourselves with the plastic sheets, only to watch with resignation as all our efforts to stay dry were foiled by a pitiless lateral wind. Defeated by the gusts, we sat on what was left of the rotten trunk, waiting for the rain to stop. It was three o’clock in the morning when the storm finally subsided. We were exhausted.

  “We can’t go into the river in this state. It would be dangerous. Let’s try to get some sleep, and we’ll leave tomorrow on foot.”

  A few hours of sleep restored us. Lucho set off ahead of me with a determined stride.

  We came upon a path that went along the riverbank and that visibly had been cleared years before. The shrubs that had been cut on either side of the path were already dry. I tho
ught there might well have been a guerrilla camp somewhere nearby, and this worried me, because I could not be sure that it had been abandoned for good. We were walking like robots, and with every step I said to myself we were taking too many risks. And yet we kept on going, because our desire to get somewhere prevented us from being reasonable.

  On our way, I recognized a type of tree that Tiger had shown me once. The Indians would say that if you brushed past it, you should go back and swear three times to avoid the tree cursing you. Lucho and I didn’t respect the ritual, we felt it did not apply to us.

  At the end of the day, we stopped on a tiny beach of fine sand. I cast my lines and pulled in enough fish for a decent meal. Lucho ate the raw fish with some effort, but eventually admitted that it wasn’t bad.

  The moon came back out and gave enough light for us to react when an ant farm suddenly began to attack us.

  That night another plague lay in wait: the manta blanca. It covered us like snow, spreading over our clothes and into our skin, inflicting painful bites that we could not avoid. La manta blanca was a compact cloud of microscopic pearl-colored midges with diaphanous wings. It was hard to believe that these fragile things, so clumsy in flight, could inflict such painful bites. I tried to kill them with my hands, but they were insensitive to my efforts, because they were so tiny and light that it was impossible to crush them against my skin. We had to retreat and take the path to the river earlier than planned. We plunged with relief into its warm water, scratching our faces with our nails to try to free ourselves from the last relentless insects chasing us.

  Once again the current sucked us out to the middle of the river, just in time. Behind Lucho I saw the round eyes of a caiman that had just surfaced. Had he decided we were too big to be prey for him? Had he decided not to leave the riverbank behind? I saw him swing his tail, then turn around. Lucho was uncomfortable, trying to adjust his floating plastic bottles to find better balance; the waves in the current were constantly pushing him over. I didn’t say anything. But I decided that next time I would leave the shore equipped with a stick.