Even Silence Has an End

by Ingrid Betancourt

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m trying to see the first stars,” I replied, as if I were Juliet gazing out from her balcony.

  I gaped at the sky, hoping he’d leave. Darkness was falling rapidly. The guard was about to padlock the door. I had to cut the conversation short. Furtively I glanced over to where Clara was. There was no sign of her.

  Ferney continued, “I know you are very upset about your father. I wanted to say something earlier, but I didn’t find the right moment.”

  I felt like an actor in a bad play. If anyone had been watching us, they would have found the scene comical. There I was, leaning against my window, looking up at the stars, attempting to trick a guerrilla in order to escape, with him at my feet, or rather below my window, as if he were about to serenade me. I stayed there silently, imploring providence to come to my rescue.

  Ferney took my silence and my anxiety for emotion.

  “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t make you think of sad things. But have faith—one day you will get out of here, and you will be a lot happier than before. You know, I never say so because we’re communists, but I am praying for you.”

  He said good night and walked away. I turned around at once. The guard was already there, inspecting the room. I had no time to make a suitable decoy.

  “Where is the other prisoner?”

  “I don’t know. At the chontos, probably.”

  Our attempt had failed miserably. I prayed that Clara would realize that and return as quickly as possible. But what would she do if they found her with the bag? And in the bag the machete, the ropes, the flashlight, our food. I broke out in a cold sweat.

  I decided to go to the chontos myself without asking the guard’s permission, hoping to distract his attention so that my companion could get back into the room.

  The guard ran after me screaming and struck me with the butt of his rifle to force me to turn around. Clara was already back in the room when we got there. The guard swore at her and locked the door.

  “Do you have the bag?”

  “No, I had to hide it beside a tree.”

  “Where?”

  “Near the chontos.”

  “Dear God! We have to think. . . . How can we get it back before they discover it?”

  I couldn’t sleep the whole night. Dawn was breaking. I heard voices and shouts from near the chontos. People were running toward the house, they had discovered our bag. Once this conclusion turned into certainty, all the anguish that had been building up in me during the night vanished. I instantly found absolute peace and serenity. They would punish us. Of course. It didn’t matter. They would be cruel, humiliating, maybe even violent. That no longer frightened me. I would never give up.

  The door opened before six in the morning. It was Andres, surrounded by a large portion of the troop. In an imperious voice, he ordered, “Search them from top to bottom.” The girls took over, combing through all our belongings. They had found our bag and emptied it out. I was numb. The search complete—they had taken everything from us—they dispersed. Only Andres remained.

  “Go ahead,” he said to someone behind me. I turned around.

  Ferney was standing there with a large hammer and an enormous box of old, rusty nails. He strode into the room and in a frenzy began hammering nails into every board. After two hours he had not yet covered the entire room. From the start he had wrapped himself in absolute silence and carried out his task with unhealthy zeal, as if he wanted to pin me to the boards. Then he climbed up onto the roof and continued his job, sitting astride a beam, angrily nailing areas where it was clearly unnecessary, until his complete stock of nails ran out.

  I knew exactly what he must be feeling. He had found his machete and felt duped. He was remembering the conversation we’d had at the window. In the beginning I was embarrassed, feeling terrible for having deceived him. But as the hours passed, I found him grotesque, with his hammer and nails, his obsession, and this room he had transformed into a bunker in fury.

  He brushed past me, enraged.

  “You are ridiculous!” I yelled, unable to stop myself.

  He did an about-face, slammed both hands on the table as if he would like nothing better than to jump on me, and hissed, “Repeat what you just said.”

  “I said I find you ridiculous.”

  “You steal my machete, you make fun of me, you try to escape, and I am ridiculous.”

  “Yes, you are ridiculous! You have no reason to be angry with me.”

  “I’m angry with you because you betrayed me.”

  “I did not betray you. You abducted me, you are keeping me prisoner. I have every right to escape.”

  “Yes, but I offered you my friendship. I trusted you,” he retorted.

  “And the day your leader tells you to put a bullet in my head, will I still have your friendship?”

  He did not reply. I did not see him again for some time. Then one evening he arrived for guard duty once again. Before putting on the padlock, he produced a fistful of candles from his jacket pocket and handed them to me.

  He closed the door before I had time to thank him. These forbidden candles were his answer. I stood there with a lump in my throat.

  THIRTEEN

  LEARNING TO WEAVE

  In my boredom I read the Bible and wove. I had been given a Bible, a very large one with maps and illustrations at the back. Could I have discovered the riches of the Bible in any other way? I don’t think so. The world in which I’d lived had no place for meditation, or for silence. But given the absence of distractions, my brain kneaded the words back into shape, as if they were clay being molded to create something new. And so I would reread passages, and I would discover why they had stayed with me. It was like finding chinks, secret passages, links to other thoughts, and different interpretations of the texts. The Bible became a fascinating world of codes, insinuations, and hidden meanings.

  Perhaps that was also why it was easy for me to devote so much time to weaving. Thanks to manual activity, my mind entered a state of meditation, and I could reflect on what I had read while my hands were moving.

  It all began one day when I was on my way back from talking to the commander.

  Ferney was sitting on his mat, repairing the straps of his backpack. Beto, the boy who shared a tent with him, was standing in front of one of the supporting poles, focused intently on weaving a belt with nylon thread. I had often seen them do this. It was fascinating. They had acquired such dexterity and moved their hands so quickly that they looked like machines. At each knot a new shape appeared. They could make belts with their own name written across them. They would then dye them at the rancha by boiling them in large cauldrons of fluorescent water.

  I stopped for a moment to admire his work. Beto’s lettering was the most attractive of any I’d seen so far.

  “He’s the best of all of us!” said Ferney unreservedly. “The time it takes me to make one, Beto can make three.”

  “Really?”

  I had trouble seeing why it was an advantage to go fast in a world where there was so much time to kill. That night during my nocturnal musings, I began to think that I would like to learn to weave belts, too. The idea excited me. But how would I go about it? Ask Andres for permission? Ask one of the guards? I had learned that in the jungle there is nothing to be gained by acting impulsively. The world where I was a prisoner was an arbitrary one. It was an empire of whims, ruled by those who had the ability to say no.

  One day there was a terrible storm. The downpour lasted from morning to night. I was sitting on the floor watching the spectacle of nature unleashed. Sheets of rain formed a screen so dense you could see only the caletas nearest to you; the rest of the camp seemed to have disappeared. The guards remained at their posts without moving, like lost souls, covered from head to toe with black plastic sheets. They looked like they were floating on a lake. Unable to absorb all the rain, the ground was under several inches of brown water as far as the eye could see. Whoever ventured ou
tside returned covered in mud. The camp came to a standstill. Only Beto kept on weaving his belt, oblivious to the storm. I couldn’t take my eyes off him.

  The following day Beto and Ferney came over together, smiling. “We thought you might like to learn to weave,” said Beto. “We asked for permission, and Andres agreed. Ferney will get you nylon thread, and I’ll show you how to do it.”

  Beto spent several days with me. First he taught me how to prepare the warp. They had a small hook to secure the warp. Ferney made me a pretty one, and I felt set up like a pro. Beto came by in the evening to review what I had done during the day. “You have to stretch the thread more tightly over the hooks,” he told me. And then, “The knots need to be tighter” and “You have to pull on it twice—otherwise it will run.” I put all my energy into learning the proper technique, correcting my mistakes, and following his instructions to the letter. I had to wrap my fingers in pieces of fabric so that the nylon thread wouldn’t cut into my flesh when I pulled it. With my work in front of me, I no longer felt the burden of time. The hours passed quickly. Just like monks, I thought, who, when practicing meditation, dedicated themselves to crafting precious objects. I felt that reading the Bible and the meditations that arose from my hours of weaving were doing me good. I was more peaceful, less defensive.

  Beto came to tell me one day that I was ready to make a real belt. Ferney turned up with a full reel of thread, and we cut it into the appropriate lengths. The measurements were jungle measurements. Two “armfuls” of thread were needed to obtain one “quarter” of a belt. An armful was the distance between a hand and the opposite shoulder, and a quarter was the distance between the thumb and the small finger with the hand open wide.

  I wanted to make a belt with Melanie’s name woven into it with hearts at the beginning and end of it. I asked around, and no one knew how to do it. So I improvised and found a way, which started a new fashion in the camp, because all the girls wanted to have hearts on their own belts.

  The opportunity to be active, creative, and inventive brought respite. There were only two weeks left until Melanie’s birthday. I decided that the belt would be ready before then, even if I had to spend entire days on it. The exercise sent me into a trance. I felt as if I were communicating with my daughter—and therefore in touch with the best part of myself.

  Beto came to see me again. He wanted to show me another belt with different colors he had made using a new technique. He promised to teach me how to do it. Then, for some reason, during the course of the conversation he said, “You must be ready to run when we tell you to. The chulos are close by. If they get here, they will kill you. They want to be able to say that the guerrillas did it, and that way they won’t have to negotiate your release. If I’m here, I’ll run. I’m not going to get killed for your sake. No one will.”

  On hearing his words, a strange sensation came over me. I felt sorry for him, as if, by admitting that he would think only of himself at the moment of great danger, he was condemning himself to receiving no help from others when he would most need it.

  He left the camp the following day “on an assignment,” which meant he was probably in charge of our provisions for the coming months. One evening as the guards were talking among themselves, convinced we were sound asleep, I learned that he had been killed in an ambush by the Colombian army—the same operation in which El Mocho had lost his life. It was a terrible shock. Not just because the echo of his final words and, with them, his fierce desire to live came back to me, but all the more so because I could not understand how his companions, his comrades, could speak of his death without a shadow of regret, as if they were talking about the latest belt he was finishing.

  I could not rid my thoughts of that macabre wink from destiny, that fateful connection, understanding that in a way he did get killed “for me” after all, because of this particular chain of events that had brought us together in spite of ourselves: He as my keeper, I as his prisoner. As I was finishing the belt he’d helped me to start, lost in my meditation, I thanked him in the silence of my mind more for the time he’d spent talking to me than for passing on his art. For I was discovering that the most precious gift someone can give us is time, because what gives time its value is death.

  FOURTEEN

  MELANIE’S SEVENTEENTH BIRTHDAY

  The days were all alike and seemed to last forever. I had trouble remembering what I’d done on the previous day. Everything seemed to be happening in a thick fog, and all I could remember were the camp transfers, because I found them so difficult. Nearly seven months had gone by since I was kidnapped, and I could feel the changes. My center of interest shifted; the future no longer interested me, nor did the outside world. They were simply inaccessible to me. I was living the present moment as in an eternity of relentless pain, without the hope it would ever end.

  And yet before I knew it, it was my daughter’s birthday, as if time had accelerated capriciously just to annoy me. For two weeks I’d been weaving a belt for her. I was proud of it. The guerrillas would file past the shack to come and inspect my work. “The old girl is learning!” they said, with a hint of surprise, as a compliment. Calling me the cucha in their particular slang had no pejorative connotation. They used the same word to speak to their commander, in a tone meant to be familiar and respectful at the same time. However, I was having trouble getting used to it. I felt as if I’d been shoved irrevocably into a closet of relics. But the fact remained, my daughter was turning seventeen: I was old enough to be their mother.

  So I went on weaving, lost in the hundreds of thoughts that laced themselves together like the knots I patiently added to my handiwork. For the first time since I’d been captured, I was in haste to finish something. The day before Melanie’s birthday, at six o’clock in the evening, just before they locked us up, I completed the last knot of her belt. I was proud.

  Melanie’s birthday had to be a day of joy. I told myself it was the only way to honor her, my little girl, who had shed light on my life, even in the depths of this green hole. All night long I’d gone through her life in my mind—the day of her birth, her first steps, the terrible fright she got from a windup doll that walked better than she did. I saw her again as she was on the first day of school, with her pigtails and her white toddler boots, and I watched her gradually grow up, following her until the last time I’d held her in my arms. I cried. But my tears now were of a different kind altogether. I was thankful, thankful that I had been there, that I had known so many moments I could now draw on in my thirst for happiness. To be sure, it was a sad happiness, because I felt so acutely my children’s physical absence, but it was the only happiness I could reach.

  I got up long before they unlocked the door. I was sitting on the edge of the bed, singing “Happy Birthday” in my head, hoping the vibrations would reach my daughter, traveling mentally from the wooden house, above the trees, above the jungle, above the Caribbean, and all the way to her room on the island of Santo Domingo, where she lived with her father. I could picture her sleeping just as I’d left her. I imagined waking her up with a kiss on her cool cheek. I firmly believed that she could sense my presence.

  The day before, I’d asked for permission to make a cake, and Andres had granted it. Jessica came to help me, and we prepared the batter with flour, powdered milk, sugar, and black chocolate (extraordinary concessions) that we melted in a separate saucepan. Because we had no oven, we fried it. Jessica took care of the icing. She had used a packet of the powder for making strawberry-flavored drinks, mixing it with powdered milk and a little bit of water. The thick paste that resulted transformed the black cake into a candy-pink disk, and on it she wrote : FROM FARC-EP.

  Andres allowed us to borrow his cassette player, and Jessica came back into the house with it, the cake, and El Mico, under whose nose we had escaped. He was there as a dancing partner, because Jessica was determined to make the most of the occasion. As for me, I had also gotten ready. I had dressed up, wearing the jeans I’d had on w
hen I was kidnapped—jeans that Melanie had given me for Christmas—and the belt I’d made for her, because I had lost a lot of weight and my pants were sliding down.

  For a few hours, these young people changed as if by magic. They were no longer guards, or terrorists, or killers. They were young people, my daughter’s age, having fun. They danced divinely, as if they’d never done anything else their entire life. They were perfectly synchronized with one another, dancing in that shack as if it were a ballroom, whirling around with elegant self-awareness. You couldn’t help but watch. Jessica, with her long, curly black hair, knew that she was beautiful. She moved her hips and shoulders, just enough to reveal the contours of her curves. El Mico was a rather ugly boy, but that night he was transformed. The world was his. I wanted so much to have my children there! It was the first time I thought this. I would have liked for them to know these young people, to discover their strange way of life, so different and yet so close to theirs, because all adolescents in the world are alike. These young people could have been my children. I had known them to be cruel, despotic, humiliating. I could only wonder as I watched them dance whether my children, under the same conditions, would not have acted the same way.

  That day I understood that we are all fundamentally the same. I thought back to my tenure in Congress. For a long time, I had singled out people, as a way to unmask corruption in my country. Now I wondered whether that had been right. It was not that I doubted the truth of my accusations, but rather I had grown aware of how complex we human beings are. Because of that, compassion appeared to me under a new light, as an essential value for dealing with my present. It is the key to forgiveness, I thought, wanting to set aside any inclinations of vengeance. The day of Melanie’s birthday, I understood that I did not want to miss the opportunity to hold out my hand to my enemy, when the time came.