Even Silence Has an End

by Ingrid Betancourt

  Joaquín came back to see me at the end of the afternoon. He was worried about the proof of life. I could tell he was under pressure. His organization must have a plan that required other people to know I was alive.

  “If you can guarantee that my entire message will be transmitted to my family, that you’re not going to cut anything, then we can discuss it again.”

  “Right now I can’t promise anything. What I can tell you at this point is that there are some rules. You won’t be able to mention any places, you won’t be able to give the names of those who are guarding you, you won’t be able to make any references to your conditions of detention, because the army’s intelligence could find out where you are.”

  “I’m a prisoner, but I can still say no.”

  I saw something devilish in his eyes. Of course they could film me without my consent. I immediately understood what had occurred to him, and I added, “You wouldn’t do that. It would be in very poor taste . . . and it would end up backfiring sooner or later!”

  He embraced me affectionately and said, “Don’t worry. I’m watching over you. As long as I’m here, there are things that won’t happen.”

  I smiled sadly. He was too distant and too high up in the hierarchy to really be able to protect me. He was as inaccessible to me as I was to him because of both the distance and the stubbornness of his subordinates. He knew this. He was already heading out again, the way he had come, his back bent. He was about to disappear from view when suddenly he returned. “In fact, I think what would be best is if I have them build a little house for each of you,” he said. “What do you think?”

  I sighed, because this meant that our release was not coming anytime soon. He read my thoughts, and before I replied, he said gently, “Go on. As Ferney would say, ‘At least you’ll have some peace!’”

  Dear Lord, I was happy to have news of Ferney. My face lit up. “Please say hello to him for me.”

  “I will do, promise!”

  “He’s with you?”

  “Yes.”

  As Joaquín had promised, he had two separate houses built, a reasonable distance apart, not facing each other. The model was identical to the previous wooden house but smaller. I had a room with a wooden door that I could close and that was never locked. I could go there in privacy and not feel like I was in prison. Clara and I shared a porcelain toilet, set up in a shed covered with palm leaves and closed with canvas from a rice sack. There was also a large plastic tank that they filled with water from the river, thanks to a motorized pump, which allowed us to wash privately, away from indiscreet gazes and whenever we felt like it.

  At last I had some peace. Joaquín came to see the house once it was finished, and he said to the guards there before me, “This is Ingrid’s home here. None of you has the right to set foot in this house without her permission. It’s like an embassy—she’s protected by extraterritoriality.”

  My life changed. I found it hard to grasp how the guards could be kind and then nasty, as if to order. And yet that is what I was witnessing. The transformation applied to every detail of our daily life, and even if I was well aware that their attitude toward me was far from spontaneous, I could rest and use this lull to advantage. I endeavored to regain my emotional stability. Gradually I began to sleep again, several hours a night, and above all to take longer naps that did me a world of good.

  I was seized with the idea of asking for an encyclopedic dictionary. I had no idea how much of a luxury this was. Very quickly I was hooked on it. I spent my mornings sitting at my worktable with my impregnable view of the river, and I would travel through time and space as I turned each page. In the beginning I did this more or less in a whimsical fashion. But gradually I established a methodology that allowed me to do research into a predefined topic, following the logic of a treasure hunt. I could not believe my good fortune. Time no longer dragged. When they brought me my plate of rice and beans, I ate everything, still lost in my scholarly deductions as I finalized the next stage of my exploration. Art, religion, medicine, philosophy, history, aircraft, war heroes, women in history, actors, statesmen, monuments, countries—I was interested in everything. And since all the information was by definition distilled, my curiosity was all the keener to go and look elsewhere for the missing details.

  My solitude became a sort of liberation. Not only because I was no longer exposed to the whims and mood swings of my companion but also and most of all because I could be myself again, I could order my life according to the needs of my heart. After my intense reading in the morning, in the afternoon I subjected myself to a grueling physical workout. I closed the door to my bedroom, raised the real bed that Joaquín had gotten them to make for me against the wall, and I transformed the free space into a gym. I practiced the acrobatics I had learned as a child but abandoned as an adult. One after another, as the memories of the movements returned to me, I overcame my fear of risk and learned once again to push back my limits ever further.

  Then I would take my bath, watching the birds fly overhead, and I managed to admire them without envy. When I returned to my house, I sat down with my legs crossed in the lotus position and went into a meditation that had nothing religious about it but invariably led to an awareness of the presence of God. He was there, everywhere, too big, too strong. I did not know what he could expect of me and even less what I was allowed to ask of him. I thought of begging him to get me out of my prison, but I immediately found that my prayer was too trivial, too petty, too focused on my little self, as if thinking of my own well-being or requesting his kindness were a bad thing. Perhaps, too, what he wanted to give me was something I did not want. I remember reading in the Bible, in one chapter in the Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans, that the Holy Ghost helped us in our communication with God, because he knew better than we did how to ask what was right for us. When I read this, at the time I thought I did not want the Holy Ghost to ask for anything other than my freedom. By formulating it in this way, I understood that I was missing the essential point, that there was probably something else, greater than freedom, that he could seek to give me, something that for the time being I did not know how to appreciate.

  I had questions. Never any answers. They pursued me during my meditation. And in this circular thinking that went on day after day, I saw events as they unfolded, and I analyzed them with precision. I would stop to examine certain moments. I reflected on the meaning of the words “prudence” and “humility.” Every day, through a glance, the intonation of a voice, a misused word, a silence or a gesture, I realized I could have acted differently and I could have done better. I knew that my situation was an opportunity that life was offering me to take an interest in things I normally didn’t think about. Incapable of acting in “the” world, I displaced my energy to act in “my” world. I was discovering another way of living, a life based less in action and more in introspection. I wanted to build a stronger, more solid self. The tools I had developed up to now were no longer of use to me. I needed another form of intelligence, another sort of courage, and greater endurance. But I did not know how to go about building those: It had taken over a year of captivity for me to just begin to question my own self.

  God was surely right, and the Holy Ghost surely knew it, because he was so stubborn in not wanting to intercede in favor of my release. I still had a great deal to learn.

  TWENTY-ONE

  SECOND PROOF OF LIFE

  The last time I saw Joaquín Gómez, it was to record the second proof of life. He came with other guerrillas, including Ferney, whom I was very happy to see again.

  I suspected that Ferney must have described to his superior some of the treatment I had been subjected to, and I thanked him for that, because there had indeed been a call to order. Andres granted permission for me to have powdered milk from time to time, and Edinson, the guard who captured us after the hornet attack, secretly brought me eggs that I “cooked” in boiling water brought to me on the pretext of treating a rash. The greatest treat of
all, however, was that Andres had once again allowed me to spend time in the rancha. I liked to be in the kitchen. I learned the techniques they had developed for creating a bread substitute, cancharinas, using a mixture of flour fried in boiling oil. Between two of his recent visits, Joaquín had kindly sent me a black bag full of good things. The militiaman who drove the motorboat received precise instructions not to open the black bag and to hand it to me in person. This was a wink from Joaquín, because on that first day when we went on our peripatetic walk, I’d complained about the way we were being discriminated against at mealtimes. When you have nothing, the most basic possessions take on unbelievable importance.

  When Joaquín arrived, we immediately set to work to prepare the video recording. He had given me his word that my family would get the entire text of my message, without changes. I would talk between fifteen and twenty minutes, from the little house with a sheet hung up as a background to hide any indication of where we were. Clara would also be allowed to send a proof of life. I planned to give my opinion on a delicate topic that had generated a debate on how to obtain our freedom. My family was firmly opposed to a military rescue operation. A few months earlier, a dozen prisoners, including the governor of the Antioquia region, Guillermo Gaviria, and his peace adviser Gilberto Echeverri, had been assassinated in the region of Urrao27 during an attempted rescue mission. That had been a terrible shock to me. I did not know Guillermo personally, but I had found his commitment to peace in the Antioquia region courageous, and I was filled with admiration for his perseverance.

  One afternoon at around four o’clock, as I was fiddling with a radio that Joaquín had brought me as a gift on one of his previous visits, I tuned in by chance to the news from Radio Canada, on shortwave. It was a little metal radio, not very powerful, that the guards made fun of because it had reception only very early in the morning or once night had fallen. It needed an antenna system to boost reception, and it was the guards themselves who helped me rig one up, using the aluminum wire from the scrub pads used to clean the casseroles. I had to hang it from the highest branches of the trees, sending one end up to the treetop with the help of a sling and wrapping the other end around the end of the radio antenna. The system worked fairly well, and I managed to listen to the news, particularly in the evening. It was a window onto the world. I would listen, and with the help of my imagination I could see everything. I had not yet found the frequency for Radio France Internationale, to which I would grow extremely attached later on, to the point of memorizing the names and voices of the journalists as if they were long-lost friends, or for the BBC, to which I would later listen religiously every day, a pleasure equal to the one I would have felt in civilian life of going to the cinema. For the time being, I was overjoyed just to have found Radio Canada and to hear French spoken.

  But my pleasure turned to fright when I heard them say my name while explaining that Colombian hostages had been massacred by the FARC. I didn’t know what they were talking about, but I sat there petrified, the radio up against my ear, trying to understand, afraid that at any moment I might lose the weak reception. Above all I did not want to miss the rest of the news bulletin. Several minutes later the entire story was repeated, and I discovered to my horror that Gaviria and Echeverri had just been assassinated. There was no other information, no further details. Then the subject changed, leaving me trembling. I went to sit on my bed, as I imagined with terror everything that must have happened for them to have been executed. And then I remembered FARC’s threat. After a year had gone by, they would begin to kill us, one after the other. And it was indeed just over a year since we had been taken hostage. That was it: FARC had begun to carry out its plan. I ran from my house as if struck by lightning. I was breaking one of my own self-imposed rules about never going to speak with Clara without warning her ahead of time of my visit. But now I was charging down the path, followed closely by the guard who’d given me permission. Clara was sweeping her house.

  “Listen, it’s really serious. FARC has just assassinated Gilberto and Guillermo.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “It was on the radio. They just—”

  “Right. Thanks for the information.”

  “I . . . I—”

  “What do you want? There’s nothing we can do. There it is, so what? What do you want me to say?”

  I didn’t insist and went back, devastated. I shut myself in my bedroom. I prayed, without knowing what to ask God. I imagined their families, their wives, their children, and my suffering was visceral, physical, I was bent over in pain, only too aware that such a fate might await my own family.

  After nightfall my radio had powerful reception of the Colombian radio stations. Every ten minutes the voice of Yolanda Pinto, Guillermo’s wife, was rebroadcast. She explained in detail the procedure required for recovering the corpses and the difficulties she faced, because access to the site of the massacre was under military control and forbidden to the families. The guard who was on duty called out to me. He wanted to know what was going on, too. I told him they had begun to execute the hostages and that I knew our turn would be next.

  Andres came shortly afterward.

  “Ingrid, I just found out about the death of Guillermo and Gilberto. I want to assure you—the FARC is not going to assassinate you. It was an accident, the FARC was responding to a military attack.”

  I didn’t believe him. After all these months, I knew that for the FARC, lying was merely a tactic of war.

  And yet as the hours went by, the news seemed to be proving him right. The army had attempted a rescue operation. Only two of the hostages had survived the massacre. The broadcasts described how, when the commander had understood that they were surrounded by military helicopters, the prisoners had been brought together to be shot. Gilberto had gone down on his knees to beg for mercy. He’d been shot in cold blood by the commander himself. The survivors said that Gilberto had thought they were friends and reminded the commander of the fact, imploring him not to shoot.

  I imagined the scene of the assassination down to the smallest details, convinced that it could happen to us, too, at any time.

  That is why when Joaquín came for the proof of life, I insisted on expressing my support for a rescue operation by the Colombian army, knowing that many were against it after the bloodshed of Urrao. I understood that I could speak only for myself. But I wanted to stress the fact that freedom was a right and any effort to recover that freedom was a duty.

  I also wanted the country to begin a deep reflection on what defending that right implied. The decision to undertake a military rescue had to be made at the highest level, and the president of the republic himself must bear total responsibility for the failure or success of the operation. I feared that in the labyrinth of political interests, our lives might no longer be worth anything; there might be greater interest in organizing some bloody fiasco and blaming the FARC for our deaths than in mounting any genuine rescue attempt.

  Once the proof of life had been recorded, we waited for its broadcast on Colombian radio and television. The months in between were long. I had followed closely the story of a French airplane sent to the heart of the Brazilian Amazon, in the hope that the pressure to obtain the proof of survival might have some connection with it. A few days before the press released the information, a physician for the FARC had come to see us. He had studied medicine in Bogotá for a few years without obtaining his diploma and had been recruited as an instructor for nurses, as well as to head a bush hospital that I suspected must be close to our camp. To me his visit foretold liberation. It was in the best interests of the FARC to free its hostages in a condition that would enable the group to regain prestige in the eyes of the world. Perhaps the proof of life that the FARC had insisted upon so vehemently might be one of the conditions required by France to enter into negotiations, which, obviously, had to be kept secret. When the plane flew off again without us, I imagined that leaks in the media had probably caused the mission to fail. B
ut there had been a moment of hope. France had taken a real risk to try to get me out of there. Dominique was searching for a way to snatch us from the FARC’s claws. There would be further contact, other envoys would come, and new negotiations would take place.

  When, a few weeks later, the militiaman who normally came with the supplies arrived with the order to take us away, for me this could only mean that the negotiations had succeeded. We were to depart the following dawn, so we had to pack up our things. I took only what was needed for the few days to reach the meeting place with the European envoys. I gave all the rest to the girls, including the dictionary and a full-color map of the world that I had just finished making.

  Andres organized a little get-together to say good-bye. The guerrillas shook my hand and congratulated me on the success of the negotiations and my imminent freedom. I didn’t sleep all night, in a state of bliss. The nightmare was over. I was going home.

  I was sitting on my belongings, ready to leave. The moon was still casting its silver reflection on to the lazy water of the river. At around five o’clock in the morning, they brought us a cup of hot chocolate and a cancharina. My companion was ready, too, sitting on the steps of her hut, with two large bags. She had no intention of leaving anything behind. I was filled with a strange happiness. It wasn’t the euphoria I’d thought I would feel, just a quiet happiness. I was thinking about what this year of captivity had meant for me. I saw myself as some strange creature, an entity totally distinct from my present self. This person who had lived in the jungle all these months would stay behind. I would become myself again. A wave of doubt crossed my mind. Become myself again? What did that mean? Had I learned what I was meant to learn? I quickly let go of these silly notions. What did they matter now!