“Pinchao’s not there anymore,” he whispered, not looking at me.
“Oh! My God, that’s fantastic!”
“Yes, but now we’re the ones who are going to pay.”
“If it is so that one of us can get free, I don’t care.”
SEVENTY-ONE
THE DEATH OF PINCHAO
APRIL 29, 2007
Soon there was talk of nothing else. Everyone speculated on how Pinchao must have escaped, and no one was willing to bet that he would succeed. The weather is good. He’s making headway, I thought, reassured.
Rumors went around that the guerrillas had found him. One of the guards leaked the information to a prisoner he trusted. As long as I don’t see him, I won’t believe it, I said to myself. But the order was given to pack our things, because we were leaving. I was released from my tree, and I wrapped my yards of chain around my neck and put away all my gear without hurrying. Please let him escape from them.
They made us wait with our tents folded up by our beds all morning long. Then they gave the order to get ready to have our bath, and we had to unpack everything again. We stood in single file between the guards, who drove us like cattle, and as on every day we went along the little path down toward the swamps.
We passed five bare-chested men on their way through our enclosure with shovels over their shoulders. Massimo was one of them. He was walking energetically, careful not to lift his eyes from the ground so they would not meet mine.
Once we were in the water, with our soap in our hands, Lucho whispered, “Did you see?”
“The men with the shovels?”
“Yes, they’re going to dig a grave.”
“A grave?”
“Yes, for Pinchao’s body.”
“Stop it with your bullshit!”
“They executed him, so the guards told some of our men. They say it was our fault.”
“What do you mean, our fault?”
“Yes, they say we dragged Pinchao into it.”
“Lucho!”
“And they also say that if he is dead, it’s our fault!”
“What did you tell them?”
“Nothing . . . But what if he is dead and it is our fault?”
“Listen, Lucho dear, stop right there. Pinchao left because he wanted to. He made his decision as a grown man, the way you and I did. Don’t worry about it. You’re not to blame, and I’m very proud of what he did!”
“And if they killed him?”
“They can’t possibly have found him.”
“But they did find him. Can’t you see? We’re leaving, for Christ’s sake!”
Our return from the bath was like a funeral march. We met the same guards, on their way back again, soaked in sweat, their shovels dirty. “They dug holes to bury the garbage,” I said, increasingly unsure.
Once we were dressed again, we had to go closer to the shore, onto a sporting ground they had made for themselves. The guards didn’t react when I sat down next to Lucho to talk. The hours went by, an endless wait.
There was some movement among the troops at the back of what was left of our enclosure. I could hear voices, distorted by the echo of the vegetation. I could see shadows moving behind the rows of trees.
“They’ve brought Pinchao back,” said Armando. “They’re going to rough him up for a while. Then we’ll all leave. The bongo is already waiting.”
I turned around. Sure enough, where we had taken our bath a few hours earlier, there was a big bongo, like an iron monster. The thought that Pinchao had been taken made me sick. “Why don’t they bring him here?” asked Armando, tired of waiting.
I looked at patches of sky through the dome of foliage above us. The blue sky has changed to purple, I thought, increasingly worried as I felt the coolness of twilight draw over us. Lucho was silent, answering only in grunts when someone spoke to him.
Suddenly the agitation at the back of the camp started up again. Shadows, voices. There was the sharp report of a gun being fired, piercing through the muffled latticework of vegetation. A murder of blackbirds flew up above the trees, soaring straight to the sky above our heads. Those birds are a bad omen, I thought. Another shot, a third, another, and yet another.
“I counted seven,” I whispered to Lucho.
“They just executed him,” replied Lucho, drained, his lips dry and trembling.
I took his hand and squeezed it tight. “No, Lucho, no! It’s not true!”
Everybody thought the same thing. Enrique didn’t come. Nor did Monster. Another guerrilla whom we’d seen a few times showed up; we didn’t know his name. I called him “El Tuerto” because he was one-eyed. He came over to us, and in a loud voice to intimidate us, his hands on his hips and his legs spread, he laughed. “Well this ought to discourage you from wanting to run away, right?” He felt the weight of our gazes upon him, holding our breath, hanging on to his every word. “I’ve come to inform you that that son of a bitch is dead. He was trying to swim across the swamps. A guío got him. We saw him when the snake was already twisted around him, and he was squealing for help like some little woman. I ordered them to let him get off that shit on his own, and the creature dragged him down to the bottom. That’s what you get when you want to play the hero. Take it as a warning.”
His story didn’t make sense. They killed him, they’re the ones who killed him! I thought, horrified.
“I want to see Pinchao’s body. I don’t believe you,” I said, breaking our silence.
“But didn’t you hear what the commander just said? An anaconda got him! How do you want them to go and get his body?” shouted Armando, beside himself.
I was angry with him for interrupting. I wanted to know what the commander had to say. His body is in the grave they just dug, with seven bullets in his skull, I thought, aghast.
“Put your equipos on your backs and follow me in silence,” he ordered, ending the discussion. “Ingrid, you’ll board last.”
Above the river the sky seemed to be smeared with blood. I looked at my companions as they climbed on board the bongo. Some of them were cracking jokes. In the space reserved for the guerrillas, the young girls were doing their hair, busy making pretty braids for one another. “El Tuerto” was flirting with them like a sultan in his harem. How can they go on living, so carefree? I didn’t want to look at the spectacular sunset, or the pretty girls, or the bongo sailing through the tranquil velvet waters of the river. Soon a dome full of stars covered our world and my silence. I sat hidden behind Lucho and wept hot tears as if from a hole in my heart. I put my hands on my cheeks to catch them before anyone could see I was crying. My Pinchao, I hope you can’t hear me and that you’re not up there yet.
For days we sailed on the bongo. I didn’t want to think. Immersed in my pain, and in Lucho’s, I tried not to listen to what they were saying.
“It serves him right,” said one of our companions.
“With his rabbit teeth and smile, who did he think he was? Did he think that he was better than us?”
My companions were speaking loudly so that the guerrillas would understand that they weren’t involved in any way.
I hated them for that.
“He died because he had it coming to him. He shouldn’t have listened to such bad advice,” said someone else, sitting next to Lucho.
Lucho was tormented and I wasn’t much help to him with my weeping.
The bongo went farther into the jungle, crushing its way through nature like an icebreaker with its reinforced hull; it opened a passage into the bowels of hell, heading up channels that had been virgin until then. We were protected under the tarpaulin, while the world crumbled around us and the steel monster moved stubbornly and slowly forward. He must be rotting on the ground. They probably threw him there like a piece of meat. I could not stop tormenting myself.
When Mother’s Day came that year, we ourselves were rotting in the bowels of the bongo. Glued to my radio, at four o’clock in the morning I listened to a message from Pinchao’s mother,
as well as the clear, wise voices of his sisters. Who’s going to tell them? How will they find out? I felt terrible, knowing he was dead and listening to their message for him.
We finally stopped at the mouth of a channel, on a small beach of fine sand. We disembarked and stretched our bodies from the forced immobility of recent weeks in front of a little house all of wood, surrounded by a garden of fruit trees. We were sent to the back of the house, where a roof of corrugated metal supported by twenty or so beams covered an expanse of earth. We all hurried to take possession of a beam to hang up our hammocks. A big pot of chocolate in boiling water was brought in. Everyone hurried to stand in line, lost in thought. I stood up, shaken and aching, and looked around me at our new reality.
“Companions!” I shouted, in a voice that I wished were louder. “Pinchao is dead. I would like to ask you to observe a minute of silence in his honor.”
Lucho nodded. The guard narrowed his eyes. I concentrated on my watch. Our companion who was in thick with the guerrillas brushed past me and went up to the guard, talking in a loud voice. The others hurried to do the same when they saw Enrique coming. Everyone found their own way of breaking the silence; with some it was more premeditated than with others. Only Lucho and Marc went to sit to one side and refused to open their mouths. The minute seemed to last forever. When I looked at my watch and saw it was over, I thought, My poor Pinchillo, I’m glad you’re not here to see this.
We went on walking toward nowhere, fleeing from an invisible enemy that was breathing down our necks. Marches alternated with journeys on the bongo, and I did not know which was worse, because in both cases the guards made it their duty to harangue me with their spite.
“She’s the one who helped him to escape,” they muttered behind my back, to justify their vile behavior. In the evening, sitting all around us, they would speak loudly to be sure we heard. “I can still see Pinchao with the holes in his head and blood everywhere. I’m sure his ghost is coming after us,” one of them said. “Where he is now, he can’t hurt us anymore,” scoffed another.
One evening when we had just set up camp on a terrain infested with majiñas84 and we were suffering from the burns they had inflicted, I was stretched out in my hammock and could not even reach out for the radio to listen to the news, when I suddenly heard Lucho roaring, “Ingrid, listen to Caracol!”
I jumped.
“What? What is it?” I stammered, trying to emerge from my torpor.
“He made it! Pinchao is free! Pinchao is alive!”
“Shut up, you bunch of idiots!” shouted a guard. “I’ll shoot the first person who opens their mouth.”
Too late. I myself was shouting, I couldn’t keep it in.
“Bravo, Pinchao, you’re our hero! Hurray!”
We all switched on our radios at the same time. The voice of the reporter announced the news, and it echoed around the camp. “After seventeen days of walking, police subintendent Jhon Frank Pinchao has found his freedom and his family once again. Here are his first words.”
Then I heard Pinchao’s voice, full of light on our starless night:
“I would like to send a message to Ingrid. I know she’s listening to me at this moment. I want her to know I owe her the greatest gift of all. Thanks to her, I have found my faith again. My little Ingrid, your Virgin Mary was there for me when I called to her. She put a police patrol on my path.”
SEVENTY-TWO
MY FRIEND MARC
MAY 2007
Now that their lies had been exposed, the commanders merely became more aggressive. Their rage against Pinchao’s exploit increased their hatred toward me. It was enhanced by all the little things that made me different in their eyes. They nicknamed me “the Heron.” I was too thin and too pale. They made fun of me, irritated me in every little way that could cross their mind. They wouldn’t let me sit where I wanted and obliged me to sit where it was wet or dirty. They found me precious and ridiculous, because I wanted to keep my face and nails clean.
I had always had an image of myself as self-assured and well balanced. After years of captivity, that image had become blurred, and I no longer knew whether it corresponded to me in any way. For the better part of my life, I had learned to live between two worlds. I had grown up in France, discovering myself through contrast. I had eagerly sought to understand my country in order to explain it to my friends at school. Back in Colombia, as a teenager, I’d thought of myself as a tree with branches in Colombia and my roots in France. Before long I knew it would be my fate to try to keep my balance between my two worlds.
When I was in France, I dreamed of pandeyucas,85 ajiaco,86 and arequipe.87 I missed my family, my vacations spent with cousins, full of music. When I came back to Colombia, I missed everything about France—the order, the perfumes, the beauty, the rhythm of the seasons, the reassuring sound of cafés.
When I fell into the FARC’s hands and lost my freedom, I also lost my identity. My jailers did not think of me as Colombian. I didn’t know their music, I didn’t eat what they ate, I didn’t speak like they did. So I was French. That idea alone sufficed to justify their bitterness. It allowed them to channel all the resentment they’d accumulated in their lives.
“You must have been able to wear a lot of designer clothes,” said Angel, with a fake smile.
Or to make conjectures about my future. “You’ll go and live in another country, won’t you? You’re not from here!” said Lili, Enrique’s companion, bitterly, referring to the improbable day when I would regain my freedom.
My companions in misfortune shared this resentment to some degree. We followed the World Cup soccer tournament with a passion. We all would turn on our radios and tune in, so we listened to the games in stereo, the sound coming from every caleta. The final between France and Italy divided the camp in two. Initially the guerrillas sided with Italy, because France, to them, meant me. My companions had done the same. The ones who had a bone to pick with me for having the support of France expressed their aversion in a very aggressive way with every goal. Those who felt close to me celebrated, screaming and dancing every time France scored a goal, right up to the final. We were still in the stingray camp then. I was chained to my tree and almost choked when Zidane was expelled during the final game. And I understood that the more they resented me for being French, the more French I became.
France had opened its arms to me with the generosity of a mother. For Colombia, however, I had become a burden. Rumors justified the need to forget me.
“It’s her fault. She went looking for it,” a voice said on the radio.
“She’s in love with one of the FARC leaders.”
“She’s got a kid with the guerrillas.”
“She doesn’t want to come back—she’s living with them.”
All this nasty gossip was circulating in the hope that France would stop showing concern over us. It hurt me deeply, because I felt it created doubts, and those who were struggling so self-effacingly for our release might begin to doubt. I felt as French as I did Colombian. But without the recognition of my love for Colombia, I no longer knew who I was, or why I had fought, or why I was in captivity.
We docked at three o’clock in the morning in the middle of nowhere, ramming our way into the mangrove to get to land. It was the height of the rainy season. We waited for the order to disembark so we could set up our tents before the storm that raged every day at dawn.
Monster came over once the troops had already disembarked to inform us that we would be sleeping inside the bongo. The tarpaulin had already been removed in order to cover the rancha; I’d overheard them making the decision.
“What are we going to cover ourselves with?” I asked, perfectly aware we couldn’t put up our tents on the bongo.
“It won’t rain tonight,” hissed Monster, turning on his heel.
Lucho and I started getting our things ready, thinking we might be able to set up our hammocks next to each other. But Monster, as if he had read our thoughts, turned around and
came back over, pointing his finger at us. He barked, “You two! You know you don’t have the right to speak to each other. Lucho, go set up your hammock at the stern. Ingrid, follow me. You’re going to set yours up here in the prow between Marc and Tom.”
And he went away again with a caustic laugh, revealing once again his hatred of me.
Ever since I’d been forbidden to speak to my American companions, I sensed that they had been doing whatever they could to avoid me, to stay out of trouble. It was as if I had the plague.
Monster knew only too well which way the wind was blowing. He’d put me where I would be the least welcome. The hammocks had been hung up in a row from starboard to port, using the hooks that were for the tarpaulin. Marc and I were the last ones to set ours up. There were only three hooks left. Our two hammocks would have to share one of the hooks. I was already dreading this first negotiation. I knew that it was very hard to agree on anything among prisoners, and I must have looked confused. I didn’t want to set mine up and leave my companion with a fait accompli.
Marc anticipated the problem.
“We can hang both our hammocks from this one,” he suggested kindly.
I was surprised. Courtesy had become a rare thing.
I hung up my hammock, stretching it as taut as I could so the weight of my body wouldn’t make me touch the wet deck of the bongo once I was inside. If it rains, this will be one huge puddle, I predicted. Anyway, it’s bound to rain, I concluded, taking out my biggest plastic sheet to hang it over me as a makeshift roof. It was big enough to drape over either side but too short to cover me from head to foot. I’ll get soaked, I thought, resigned. So I settled into my hammock, with my plastic sheet above my head and my feet exposed, falling into a deep sleep heavy with fatigue.
It was a terrible tropical storm, as if the sky had broken. I waited apprehensively for the water to soak into my socks and up my legs until all of me ended up drenched in my hammock. And yet, after a few minutes had gone by, I didn’t feel a thing. I wiggled my toes in case my feet had gone to sleep, but all I could feel was the dry warmth of my body in my plastic wrapping. The plastic must have slipped farther down. The water would get in through my neck, I figured, groping about cautiously with my hand to see where the edge of the plastic sheet was. But everything was where it should be. I must have shrunk, I concluded, and went back to sleep, relieved.
Even Silence Has an End: My Six Years of Captivity in the Colombian Jungle Page 53
