by James Siegel
To run away. Was such a thing possible?
She heard some more slapping, yelling, what sounded like someone being slammed into a wall. Joanna shut her eyes, tried not to picture what was going on in that room. Rolando was tied to the bed, Maruja said.
She imagined what running away would be like instead—how it would feel. She pictured the wind at her back, the scent of earth and flowers, the dizzying sense that every footstep was putting distance between her and them. It was such a delightful dream she almost forgot whom she’d be leaving behind.
Joelle.
They had her baby.
The fantasy dissipated—poof. She was left with an empty ache in her chest, the hole that’s left when hope takes off for parts unknown.
Eventually, the slapping subsided—a door slammed shut.
She had trouble getting back to sleep. Maruja and Beatriz were slumbering away, but she remained obstinately awake. In a few more hours it would be morning and Galina would bring Joelle to her, and together they would feed and change her.
It was something worth holding on to. Even in this place. Sleeping three to a bed, and in the next room a man tied up like a barnyard animal.
She dozed off but was awakened what seemed like minutes later by the crazy rooster who seemed to crow all hours of the day and night.
JOELLE HAD A COUGH.
When Galina placed her in Joanna’s arms, her little body shook with each tiny eruption.
“It’s just a cold,” Galina said.
But when Joanna tried to feed her, Joelle refused the rubber nipple. Joanna waited a few minutes, tried again, Joelle still wouldn’t eat. She kept coughing with increasing and violent regularity. Each cough caused her deep black eyes to go wide, as if she were surprised and affronted by it. Joanna pressed her lips to Joelle’s forehead—something she’d seen friends do with their own children.
“It’s hot, Galina.”
Galina slipped a hand under Joelle’s T-shirt to feel her chest, then laid her cheek against her forehead.
“She has a fever,” Galina confirmed.
Joanna felt her stomach tighten. So this is what it’s like, she thought. Being terrified not for yourself, but for your child.
“What do we do?”
They were in the small room Galina always took her to for feedings. Four white walls with the faint impression of a crucifix that must’ve once hung over the door. They walked her there maskless now, something that had both comforted and terrified her the first time. It had seemed to make an astonishing statement to her: You’re in for the long haul. There was no need to play hide-and-seek with her anymore.
When Galina put her hand on Joelle’s forehead, she pulled it away as if it were singed.
“Wait,” she said, and left the room.
She came back waving something. A magic wand?
No. The thermometer she’d purchased for them in Bogotá. Joanna numbly let Galina remove Joelle’s diaper—her thighs were chafed and red. Galina placed her stomach-down on Joanna’s lap and told her to hold her still.
She gently eased the thermometer in.
When Joanna saw the mercury climbing, she said, “Oh.” An involuntary response to naked fear. When Galina took it out and held it up to the light, it was nudging 104.
“She’s sick,” Joanna said. This wasn’t the little fever babies get from time to time. This was for real.
Galina said, “We need to sponge her down.”
“Aspirin?” Joanna said. “Do you have baby aspirin here?”
Galina looked at her as if she’d asked for a DVD player or a facial. They were obviously somewhere rural—a place where the guards were relaxed enough to watch TV at night and not really bother to stop Maruja, Beatriz, and Joanna from talking to each other. A place as far away from a stocked pharmacy as it was from the USDF patrols looking for them.
Her daughter’s fever was sky-high. It didn’t matter. They were on their own.
“Please.” Joanna heard the pleading in her own voice, but this time it didn’t surprise or disgust her. She would beg on hands and knees for her baby. She’d offer to give her right arm or her left arm, or her life.
“If we sponge her, it’ll bring her fever down,” Galina said, but she didn’t sound very convincing. The worry lines in her face had taken on an aspect of true fear. Joanna found that far more terrifying than the sight of the soaring thermometer.
Galina left in search of a wet rag.
How strange, Joanna thought. That Galina seemed able to effortlessly change back and forth between kidnapper and nurse, first one, then the other.
She came back carrying a pewter bowl filled with sloshing water. Somewhere she’d found a small hand towel, which she liberally soaked while sneaking worried peeks at a still-screaming Joelle. She wrung it out and began gently sponging her down. Joelle didn’t cooperate—she twisted and turned on Joanna’s lap as if the touch of the rag were physically painful.
She was screaming in anguished, heartbreaking bursts. Her tiny body quivered.
Joanna grabbed Galina’s hand. “It’s not helping. It’s making it worse.” The wet rag hung down limply, drops of water softly hitting the rough wooden floor.
Pat, pat, pat.
“Look at her, for God’s sakes. Look at her.”
“It’ll bring the fever down,” Galina said. “Please.” But she didn’t attempt to yank her arm away. What would the guards think if they saw Joanna with her hand wrapped around Galina’s bony wrist?
Joanna let go.
When Galina finished, she felt Joelle’s forehead again. “A little cooler, yes?”
But when Joanna felt it, it was like touching fire.
Galina diapered Joelle, lifting her off Joanna’s lap, rewrapped her in a rough wool blanket. Joelle was still wailing away—her red face clenched like a fist—as Joanna rocked her against her breasts and shuffled back and forth in the small space allotted to them. She sang to her, barely above a whisper.
Hush, little baby, don’t say a word,
Mommy’s gonna buy you a mockingbird.
If that mockingbird don’t sing . . .
Her mother used to sing that to her. She’d play the James Taylor, Carly Simon duet on the living room stereo and dance around the Castro Convertible with Joanna in her arms. It had always made Joanna feel safe and adored.
It wasn’t working with Joelle.
She’d stopped screaming, but only because she’d cried herself out. When she opened her mouth, there didn’t seem to be enough energy left to emit a human sound.
Galina said, “I have to take her now.”
“No.”
“They’ll get angry if I don’t.”
Joanna was too scared to notice, but later she’d turn Galina’s words over and over in her mind.
They’ll get angry if I don’t.
The first tiny admission that in the us-versus-them dynamic of the household—Maruja, Beatriz, and Joanna versus their guards—there might be another them too.
Galina and her.
Galina would’ve left Joelle with her, only she couldn’t because they’d get angry.
In a world devoid of tangible hope, you grasped at verbal straws.
She gave Joelle back to Galina. She was led back to her prison, otherwise known as their room, where Maruja and Beatriz saw the expression on her face and asked what was wrong.
WHEN EVENING FEEDING CAME AROUND, GALINA SHOWED UP AT the door looking ghostly pale. That wasn’t the alarming part.
She was Joelle-less—that was the alarming part.
“What happened? Where is she?” Joanna asked.
“In her crib. She finally cried herself to sleep. I didn’t want to wake her.”
She took Joanna to the feeding room anyway, past two mestizo guards playing cards—one of them a girl with chestnut skin and shimmering black hair that fell to the small of her back. After Galina shut the door, she said, “She has pneumonia.”
“Pneumonia?” The word resounded like a slap. “How do you kn
ow? You’re not a doctor. Why would you say that?”
“Her chest. I can hear it.”
“It could be a virus? Just the flu?”
“No. Her lungs—they’re filled with flúido.”
Fear gripped Joanna and refused to let go.
“You’ve got to get her to a hospital, Galina. You have to. Now.”
Galina stared at her with an expression that under different circumstances Joanna might’ve termed tender.
It was the tenderness shown toward the hopelessly brain-addled.
“There are no hospitals,” Galina said. “Not here.”
THAT NIGHT JOANNA COULD HEAR HER DAUGHTER SCREECHING.
It made the guards unhappy. It got on their nerves. In the middle of the night one of them pulled her off the bed, where she’d been holding Beatriz’ hand to keep from running to the door and screaming at them.
“Vamos,” he said, shoving her toward the open doorway.
Beatriz got up to protest.
“Para eso—”
The guard, who was called Puento and was usually docile and amiable, shoved Beatriz against the wall.
A crying baby can test a new parent’s patience, according to Mother & Baby magazine.
Where was Puento taking her?
After he’d locked the door behind them, another guard walked up to them carrying Joelle at arm’s length. Later Maruja would tell her that FARC guerrilleros were particularly nervous about getting sick, since there were no doctors around to treat them.
The jittery boy literally dumped Joelle into her arms, then motioned her toward the feeding room. He ushered her in at a safe distance, giving Joanna a small shove in the back with the rifle butt. He slammed the door behind them.
Joelle was swimming in sweat.
Every breath produced a strangled, raspy gurgle. When Joanna put her ear to Joelle’s chest, it sounded like someone dying of emphysema.
Where was Galina?
Joanna pounded on the door—once, twice, three times. Eventually, Puento opened it, looking intent on pounding something back.
Joanna asked him to get Galina to come immediately, right now, this very second.
No response.
She asked for a rag instead, nervously pantomiming the act of wringing one out. She couldn’t tell whether Puento understood her, and if he did, whether he cared.
She’d say no. He slammed the door in her face.
Minutes later, though, he returned with a piece of filthy cloth. He threw it in her general direction.
She’d neglected to ask for agua—fortunately, the rag seemed damp enough without it. Joanna went through the now familiar ritual of unwrapping and undiapering her baby, trying not to notice her nearly blue skin and hummingbird shiver. She wiped her down the way Galina would have.
“It’s going to be okay,” she whispered to her daughter. “We’re going to get home and see Daddy. You’re going to like New York. There’s a merry-go-round, and in the winter we can ice-skate. There’s a zoo with polar bears and monkeys and penguins. You’ll love the penguins. They walk kind of funny.”
She held her baby the entire night. Most of the time Joelle screamed and moaned and gurgled. Those were the good moments. The terrifying ones were when Joelle slipped into sleep and her breathing seemed to stop altogether.
Once, when Joelle was clearly and demonstrably alive, basically screaming her lungs out, Puento opened the door and looked in with a nearly murderous expression. He raised his ever-present Kalashnikov—that’s what Paul said they were called, Russian-made rifles, ancient and unreliable—and pointed it straight at Joelle’s head.
“I’ll make her stop. She’s sick. I’ll get her to stop. I promise.”
He lowered the rifle and shut the door.
Joanna must’ve nodded off.
She woke up when someone shook her by the shoulder.
It was Galina.
The first thing Joanna noticed was the utter lack of crying, the absolute and shocking quiet. The second thing she noticed was that there was no Joelle in her arms. Gone. For one heart-stopping moment she thought her daughter hadn’t made it through the night. That Galina had come to tell her that Joelle’s body had been taken away, buried in some field.
She was about to start screaming when she saw her.
She was lying peacefully in Galina’s arms.
She was breathing better, not normally, no—but absolutely, unequivocably better.
“I got her medicine,” Galina said. “Liquid drops. Antibióticos. She’s going to make it, I think.”
Galina had traveled over one hundred miles, Joanna would learn later. She’d called a doctor she knew—she’d gotten a farmacia to open up and give her the drops.
She’s going to make it, I think.
Joanna’s new mantra.
Joelle had grown noticeably cooler, her cough had quieted to manageable, she’d mostly stopped shaking.
Galina watched Joanna feed her. Galina seemed oddly transfixed, even mesmerized. Maybe it was lack of sleep, Joanna thought.
No, this was different, as if she were borne away by memory.
Joanna remembered.
I had a daughter.
“Galina?”
It seemed to take a minute for Galina to come out of her reverie and actually answer her.
“Yes?”
“Your daughter. What happened to her?”
Galina turned, cocked her head at an awkward angle, as if she were trying to hear something from the next room. Or maybe it was from somewhere further away.
“She was killed,” Galina said.
“Killed?” Joanna wasn’t prepared for that word. Dead, yes, but killed? “I’m so sorry—that’s horrible. How, Galina? What happened?”
Galina sighed. She looked away, up at the shadow of the crucifix still visible on the wall. She made the sign of the cross with a slightly trembling hand.
“Riojas,” she whispered. “Have you heard of Manuel Riojas?”
TWENTY-FIVE
Galina was staring at mother and child.
She was thinking:
Holy Mary, Mother of God.
For just a moment it was like that picture on my bureau. Faded almost to black and white after so many years, but suddenly come to life. Yes.
It was me. And her. My child.
She was back in my arms. She was that young again.
Just a niña. My niña.
Was she ever that small?
Was she?
You can remember, can’t you?
CLAUDIA.
Clau-di-a.
Her name was like a song. Scream it down the streets of Chapinero around suppertime, or down the stairs of their apartamento after school, and it was hard to keep its singsong rhythm out of your voice—even when you were good and mad. Even when you were pretending to be mad, because Claudia hadn’t done her homework yet, or she was late to dinner.
It was impossible to really be mad at her. She was that kind of child. The gift from God. She always got around to doing her homework eventually, and she always did it well enough to get As.
She might be late for supper too, but when she arrived, out of breath and suitably contrite, she’d barrage them with a dizzying recounting of the day’s events.
Turn down the radio and eat, Galina would say.
But the truth was, she enjoyed listening to the radio more than she enjoyed seeing her scrawny daughter eat.
Claudia was one of those oddly aware children. Precociously sensitive to the world and to most of its inhabitants. An unrepentant toy-sharer, even after her favorite doll—Manolo the bullfighter—had his leg torn off by the bratty girl down the hall.
She was the kind of child who wore out the word why.
Why this, why that, why them?
In a country like Colombia, Galina always believed why was a word best avoided.
Maybe it was destined, then, that when Claudia got to La Nacional University—with honors, of course—she’d fall in with a certain cr
owd. That when she started getting answers to those persistently indignant questions—like why do one percent of Colombians control ninety-eight percent of the wealth, why has every program to alleviate poverty and hunger failed miserably, why were the same people saying the same things in the same positions of power, why, why, why—she’d align herself with those who might do something about it.
Or, at least, talk about doing something.
Simple political clubs at first. Harmless debating societies.
Don’t worry, Mama, she’d tell Galina and her father. We drink coffee and argue over who’s going to pay the bill. Then we talk about changing the world.
Galina did worry.
She had a reasonably developed social conscience herself; it had never done her much good. She could still remember the rallies for Gaitán—the half-mestizo leader determined to democratize Colombia—and recall with poignant fondness the feeling that had wafted through the streets like a spring breeze in the dead of winter. I am not a man, I am a people. She could remember his riddled body on the front page of her father’s newspaper. After that, a kind of fatalism had set in—like hardening of the arteries, it came progressively with age. The young were inoculated against that particular disease; it took years of wear and tear before idealism crumbled like so much bric-a-brac.
Claudia began spending more time out of the house.
More late nights, which she’d attribute to one boyfriend or another.
Galina knew better.
Claudia was flush with love, yes. But not for a boy. That nervous agitation and those shining eyes were for a cause. She had a monstrous crush on a conviction.
Now when Galina warned her about becoming involved in la política, she was invariably met with stony silence or, worse, an exasperated shake of the head, as if Galina could have no concept of such things. Of what was wrong and needed fixing. As if she were an imbecile, blind and deaf to the world.
It was precisely the opposite. It was her very knowledge of the world—of how things worked in Colombia, or didn’t, because in truth nothing worked in their country, nothing at all—it was that painfully accrued understanding that made her so frightened for her daughter.
