Even Silence Has an End

by Ingrid Betancourt

  And then there were our messages, the ones for us, for Sombra’s prisoners. Occasionally I fell asleep during the endless hours of the program. Did I doze for a minute or an hour? I had no idea. But I was filled with anxiety and guilt at the thought of missing Mom’s message. She was the only one who called me without fail. My children surprised me sometimes. When I heard their voices, I trembled from the shock.

  Years later, for example, the Christmas just before my release, I heard Melanie, Lorenzo, and Sebastian, all three of them on my birthday, which happens to be on Christmas Day. I had felt particularly fortunate to still be alive, because the prisoners whose messages I used to hear before had died in captivity: the hostages of the Valley of Cauca, the Japanese captain of industry, young Daniela Vanegas, Ramiro Carranza, the Angulos. At that time my children were in France with their father, Fabrice. They had all sung for me, and each one had said a little loving word: Fabrice and Mela first, then Sebastian, and Lorenzo last. Nothing could be a better gift than their voices. They knew that I could hear them. But that was many years later.

  On that Christmas of 2003, they did not know whether I was listening or how to go about it. I had heard Mom’s message; she was stoically awaiting her turn in the ghastly cold in the Plaza de Bolívar. I had heard my sister, Astrid, and her children. There was my best friend, María del Rosario, who had also gone there with her young son, Marcos, who did not complain about the cold and the very late hour, and my friend and faithful Oxígeno party activist Marelby. There was no message from my husband. Had I fallen asleep for a moment without realizing?

  I checked with Lucho, who had stayed awake. My other companions would not have told me. It wasn’t just because it was me. I saw that even among friends they acted this way, pretending they hadn’t heard anything and refusing to inform the person concerned. We were becoming like bugs, and we crawled under the weight of our frustration. I decided to work against this temptation by committing to memory the messages destined for others, making sure the next morning that they had all received them. But sometimes I could see that my attempts to help exasperated the very people they benefited, maybe because they did not want to owe anything to anyone. I didn’t care. I wanted to break the vicious circles of our human stupidity.

  And so one morning I decided to go up to Keith after I had heard a message in Spanish addressed to him. The Americans very rarely received any news from home. They listened to broadcasts on the shortwave from the United States, in particular the Voice of America, which sometimes recorded messages from their families and transmitted them over its Latin American service. This message was something different. I imagined it must have been very important. The woman’s voice announced that Keith was the father of two little boys, Nicholas and Keith. My companion had also heard the message, but many of the words in Spanish were still unfamiliar to him. He seemed very happy and very worried at the same time. Finally he sat down, straddling one of the plastic chairs we had recently received, and confessed, “I feel trapped!”

  Yes, I could understand. I was also trapped in my own obsession: My husband had not called, even for my birthday. In fact, he no longer called at all.

  After the receptionist had left with our breakfast pans, I sought refuge on my bunk. I was going to celebrate one more year in a void. I lay down, trying to chase away any idea of celebration.

  At midnight that Christmas Eve, I awoke with a start. There was a flashlight right in my eyes—I was blinded. I couldn’t see a thing. I heard laughter, someone counted to three, and I saw them all standing there next to my bunk, lined up like a choir. Then they started to sing. It was one of my favorite songs, by Faustino Arias, made famous by Trio Martino, “Noches de Boca Grande.” It described the nights of Boca Grande, under a silvery moon, with the sea embroidering stars on the thread of the shore. They were singing it with all the different voices, silences, and tremolos. “I’ll swear my undying love, As we swing in our hammocks.”

  How could I fail to adore them all, standing there in their shorts and T-shirts, with their hair rumpled and their eyes still full of sleep, nudging one another to call to order anyone singing off key. It was so ridiculous that it was magnificent. They were my new family.

  Then there came a pounding on the wall from the soldiers’ dormitory. “Shut up! Shit! Let us get some sleep around here!”

  A moment later a guard showed up on the other side of the fence. “What the hell is going on? Are you crazy or what?”

  No, we were simply being ourselves.

  THIRTY-SIX

  THE BICKERING

  Clara had managed to turn everyone against her. Her behavior upset those around us far more than it upset me, probably because the presence of others acted as a buffer between us. There was a huge fuss one morning because she had used the toilet and left it in an unspeakable mess. Orlando had summoned everyone to a meeting, to decide on “what action to take.”

  I had shrugged my shoulders. For me there was no “action to take” except that of cleaning it up. I’d lived with her long enough to know that trying to reason with her would be about as effective as banging one’s head against the wall. And indeed, when they went to complain, Clara’s response was to ignore them royally. One evening Clara snatched the communal radio from its nail and carried it over to her corner. Now and again one of us who was interested in a particular program would go off with it for a few minutes. But in this case, succumbing once again to her eccentric behavior, she left the radio untuned, and all you could hear was the crackling of static. In the beginning nobody seemed to notice, and the noise was absorbed by our conversations. But once everyone was lying quietly in bed, this nuisance became unbearable. People gave signs of general unease, then more obvious impatience. Someone asked her to switch off the radio. A few minutes later, that person persisted and got no answer. Then we heard a loud noise, followed by the rough voice of Keith shouting, “The next time I catch you playing this game, I’ll break that radio over your head.”

  He grabbed the radio out of her hands and turned it off. Then he put it back on the hook, and the chirring of the cicadas replaced the crackling sound.

  It never happened again. I was reminded of my French teacher in my second year in high school, who told us that with some children from time to time the most appropriate response was a good smacking, because they were trying to get a reaction from authority that would help them regain control. I thought about it. In our enforced cohabitation, all my own parameters regarding people’s behavior were in a state of crisis. Instinctively I was against it. Nonetheless, I had to admit that the threat of it had worked in this case.

  Lucho had concluded that hell was other people and he was considering asking Sombra if he could be locked up somewhere else on his own, away from the group. He told me that he had suffered a great deal from solitude, spending two years like a madman, talking to a dog, to trees, to ghosts. But that was nothing, he said, compared with the torture of this enforced communal life.

  Each of us reacted unexpectedly toward the others. There was, for instance, the laundry affair. We did our washing by taking turns soaking our things overnight in plastic buckets that Mono Jojoy had sent us. A rumor went around that one of our companions was pissing in them, just to be nasty because he was jealous that he did not have a bucket of his own.

  One day we found the bathroom bench covered in excrement. The indignation was unanimous.

  Each side that formed designated its culprit, chose a whipping boy. It provided an opportunity to vent. “I think it’s So-and-So, who gets up at three o’clock in the morning to eat rotten food,” or “So-and-So’s mattress is full of cockroaches,” or “So-and-So is getting dirtier and dirtier.”

  It was in this tense, defiant atmosphere that we started off the year. Clara came to speak to me one morning. I was stretched out on the ground between two bunk beds doing my abdominal exercises. I’d made a sort of curtain with the blanket Lucho had given me. She moved it aside and stood before me. Then she lifted up
her T-shirt and showed me her belly. “What do you think?”

  It was so obvious that it took me a moment to react. I swallowed my surprise before I replied that it was what she had wanted.

  “Yes, and I’m very happy! How many weeks do you think I am?”

  “I don’t think it’s just weeks, I think it’s months. I think you must be near the fifth month.”

  “Right, I’ll have to go talk to Sombra.”

  “Yes, you have to ask them to take you to a hospital. Ask to see that young doctor we saw in Andres’s camp. He must be around here somewhere. Otherwise you’ll at least need the help of a midwife.”

  “You’re the first to know. Can I give you a hug?”

  “Of course you can. I’m happy for you. It’s the worst time and the worst place, but a child is always a blessing from above.”

  Clara sat down next to me and took my hand and said, “I’m going to call her Raquel.”

  “Fine. But think about some boys’ names, too, just in case.”

  She remained thoughtful, staring into space. “I’ll be a father and mother at the same time.”

  “The child has a father. You have to tell him.”

  “No! Never!”

  She got up to go, took a step, and then turned around again. “Ingrid?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m afraid.”

  “Don’t be afraid. Everything will be fine.”

  “Am I beautiful?”

  “Yes, Clara, you’re beautiful. A pregnant woman is always beautiful.”

  Clara went to make her announcement to the others. Their reception was cold. One of them came to see me. “How can you possibly tell her that this child is a blessing from heaven? You don’t realize! Try to imagine what it will be like with the added screaming of a newborn child in this hell we’re in!”

  When our companions asked who the father was, Clara refused to discuss it, and this vagueness left them ill at ease. The men in the prison found her attitude threatening, because they suspected her of wanting to hide the guerrilla’s identity in order to make them believe the father could be one of them. Keith said they had a right to know who it was.

  “It would be terrible if our families got wind of that and thought one of us could be the father.”

  “Don’t worry,” I replied. “No one is going to believe that you’re the father. I’m sure that Clara will explain it’s the child of one of the guards. But she doesn’t have to give a name if she doesn’t want to. She’ll just have to confirm that the father isn’t one of you.”

  My words did not calm him down. His personal history left him extremely touchy. He’d just had twins that he hadn’t planned for, and he felt that if there was a scandal, the eyes of the entire world would be turned on him. He confronted Clara. He demanded that she reveal to him the name of the father, as a proof of her honest intentions.

  “I don’t give a shit about your family problems. I have my own to deal with,” she said, to put a definite end to the discussion.

  A few days later, in a confrontation with her over something unimportant, Keith exploded: “You’re nothing but a slut! The whore of the jungle!”

  Livid, Clara backed away. He ran after her, screaming insults at her. Lucho and Jorge restrained me, asking me to listen to them for once and not get involved. It was very distressing to watch. Clara tripped and reached out to plastic chairs to keep herself from falling in the mud.

  The next day everything was back to normal. Clara spoke with Keith as if nothing had happened. We had all learned the hard way: There was no point in bearing grudges. We were condemned to live together.

  At that point Sombra took action. A guard came and ordered Clara to get her things together. Her belly had suddenly become enormous, and by the time she left the prison, she no longer tried to hide it.

  For the rest of us, life went on as before, with a bit more room inside the prison. The news we heard on the radio became a topic of great debate. But there was very little information about us or about our families. Any measures taken that might eventually affect us were examined with a fine-tooth comb: a rise in the military budget, President Uribe’s visit to the European Parliament, an increase in U.S. aid for the war on drugs, the initiation of the Patriot plan.39 Each of us interpreted the news in light of our mood more than as the result of any rational analysis of the information.

  I remained optimistic. Even when the news was bad, I looked for a glimmer of hope. I wanted to believe that those who were struggling on our behalf would find a way to get us out of there. My disposition irritated Lucho.

  “Every day spent in this hole,” he said, “increases exponentially our chances of staying here. The longer we are held captive, the more complicated our situation becomes. Everything is bad for us: If committees in Europe are active on our behalf, the FARC benefits from the exposure and sees no point in releasing us. But if the committees do nothing, we’ll be forgotten and we’ll spend ten more years locked up in the jungle.”

  During these debates I always found unexpected allies. Our Americans companions, just like me, looked for every possible reason to remain confident. They surprised me one day by explaining why, in their opinion, it was in Fidel Castro’s interest to try to bring about our liberation, a hypothesis I endorsed. Other debates often turned sour. We were divided about the strategies to obtain our freedom. France had made our liberation a top priority in its agenda with Colombia, while the United States wanted to keep a low profile when it came to the American hostages to avoid transforming them into trophies that the FARC would refuse to release. Uribe was waging a war against the FARC that excluded any negotiations for our freedom and counted on a military rescue. The discussions among us were fraught.

  We would split up before the arguments disintegrated, in the hope that the next day another little bit of information might allow us to consolidate our beliefs and pick up where we’d left off the day before, with renewed ammunition. “He’s as stubborn as a mule,” we would say about the other person, to avoid being accused of the same fault.

  We were all defending an attitude toward life, each in our own way, deploying a survival tactic. There were those who wanted to prepare for the worst and those, like me, who wanted to believe in the best.

  Eventually a feeling of harmony seemed to set in. Perhaps we’d learned to keep quiet, to let go of things, to wait. A desire to do things together returned. We dusted off some of the projects we’d set aside when confrontations had reached their peak. Marc and Consuelo spent all their time playing cards; Lucho and Orlando talked politics; I read for the twentieth time the copy of John Grisham’s Street Lawyer that Tom had lent me as required reading for the English lessons he was giving me.

  With Orlando we decided one morning to make some plastic mugs by cutting up the Quaker oatmeal containers we could get from the guards. Last Christmas in Andres’s camp, Yiseth had made me one, and she’d shown me how. It was easy, but we had to borrow a machete to cut into the container and turn it inside out in order to make the handles for the cup.

  Orlando obtained what we needed: the container and the machete. That was already quite a performance. We sat down at the big table outside in the courtyard. I was already sitting down, the container in my hand, the machete in the other, when we were startled by someone shouting behind us.

  It was Tom, who was lying in his hammock and was suddenly overwhelmed by anger. I went on with my project, not realizing that in fact I was the object of his fury. I realized only when I saw Lucho arguing with him. Tom had lost his temper when he saw that the guard had lent me a machete, because he considered it a proof of favoritism. It was impossible to reason with him. In fact, he was delighted at the ruckus he’d stirred up. Sure enough, the prison gate opened. Two sturdy guards came in and took me by the arms. “Get your things together. You’re leaving!” It happened so suddenly that all I had time to do was look at Lucho, in the hope of an explanation.

  “They asked for you to be separated from the group,�
�� he said. “I didn’t want to tell you about it. I didn’t think they’d manage to do it.”

  I had no idea what was happening, particularly as all my companions got up one by one to hug me before I left.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THE CHICKEN RUN

  MARCH 2004

  For a moment, when I heard the steel gates close behind me, I had a flash of hope: “And what if . . . ?” I had my bundle over my shoulder and followed the guard along a muddy path that went around the camp. I could already picture myself in a boat, going upstream. But before we reached the river, the guard turned to the left, crossed a little bridge over a ditch, and made me go into the chicken run.

  Behind the enclosure, in one corner there was a hut with a plastic roof. A woman came out. We were equally startled to see each other. It was Clara. “You’ll be among friends,” said the guard with a sneer. We looked at each other, not knowing what to say. We were not happy to see each other again, but perhaps deep down we were. There she was in her tiny hut, with just a bed and a little table. There was hardly any room. I didn’t know what they wanted to do with me, and above all I did not want to disturb her in what was her space. She asked me to put my things down in a corner. Our spontaneous displays of politeness put us at ease. This was the Clara I’d known from before the jungle. I was very surprised to find her still here in the camp. I thought they’d taken her far away, where she would have access to hospital care. She had only one month left until her due date.

  “I’m going to give birth here, on this bed,” she said, inspecting the place for the hundredth time. “There’s a girl who comes every day to massage my stomach. I think the baby is facing the wrong way.”

  Obviously, she was at risk. But what was the point of talking about it? The best thing would be to create a trusting environment, not to add anxiety to the long list of disturbing factors.