Even Silence Has an End

by Ingrid Betancourt

  I turned to Mary, imagining God was too far away to be reached. I prayed for a long time, with the force of despair. “Mother Mary, I beg you, you’re a mother, too. I have to see my children. Today it’s still possible, tomorrow it will be too late. I know that you are listening. I wish I could ask you to help me with something more spiritual—to become better, more patient, more humble. I’m asking all that of you, too. But now, I beg you, come and get me.”

  Mom had told me in her letter that one Saturday, nearly losing her mind with pain, she rebelled against Mary. She was informed that the same day the guerrillas had sent my second proof of survival.

  I no longer believed in coincidences. Ever since I’d been abducted, in this space of life outside time, I’d been able to look back over my life like someone who has too much time on her hands. I’d concluded that you had to be patient and wait for the purpose of things to become visible. And then coincidence ceased to exist.

  I spoke to her like a madwoman for hours, using the most elementary emotional blackmail, sulking, getting angry, throwing myself at her feet again. The Virgin Mary to whom I prayed was not some idealized image. Nor was she a supernatural being. She was a woman who had lived thousands of years before me but who, through exceptional grace, could help me. Frustrated and exhausted by my pleading, I collapsed into a dreamless sleep, convinced I was still keeping watch. I felt someone was touching my shoulder; then, when I did not respond, whoever it was began to shake me. That’s when I understood I was sound asleep, because my return to the surface was heavy and painful, and with a disjointed leap I found myself springing back in time, to sit up, my eyes wide open, my heart pounding. “Thank you,” I said out of politeness. Nothing divine, just a sensation of a presence.

  I did not have time to ask myself any more questions. El Abuelo had stood and was staring in my direction. I held my breath, because I realized he was fed up and had decided to leave. I didn’t move, banking on the probability that the darkness would not enable him to see that I was sitting up. He stayed there motionless for a few seconds, like a wildcat. He headed off, went around the walkway, then came back in my direction. “Mary, I beg you, make him go away!” He again inspected the surrounding darkness, took a breath; reassured, he cut through the woods to go back to his camp.

  A rush of gratitude overwhelmed me. Without waiting another second, I left my mosquito net and crawled along on all fours, constantly murmuring, “Thank you, thank you.” The two other guards were standing behind the row of tents and hammocks where my companions were sleeping. They could have seen my feet if they’d squatted down to look, but they were just as I imagined, rolled up in their black plastic sheets, shivering with cold and boredom. It was 1:50 in the morning. We had only two and a half hours to get away from the camp. It was enough time for us to vanish into the jungle and lose them. But we had only ten minutes before the next change of guard.

  I groped my way toward the soldiers’ tents. I took the first pair of boots I found on my way and crept up closer to the guards to get another pair. I knew that there were orders to keep a close watch on Lucho and me. The first thing the new guards would do would be to make sure that our boots were there by our mattresses. They would see the soldiers’ boots I had just put there and unsuspectingly go away.

  I went up to Lucho’s caleta to wake him.

  “Lucho, Lucho, it’s time.”

  “Huh . . . what . . . what’s going on?”

  He was sound asleep.

  “Lucho, we’re leaving, hurry up!”

  “What? What are you thinking? We can’t leave now!”

  “There are no more guards! This is our only chance!”

  “Damn! You want them to kill us or what!”

  “Listen, you’ve been talking about this escape for six months,”

  He was silent.

  “Everything is ready. I even have the soldiers’ boots. They won’t notice a thing.”

  Suddenly Lucho’s destiny was staring him in the face, and so was I. He transformed his fear into anger.

  “You want us to leave, okay! They’re going to shoot us, but maybe that’s better than dying here.”

  He made a sudden movement, and a pile of pans, bowls, cups, and spoons he had balanced against a post went flying in a terrible clatter.

  “Don’t move,” I said, to restrain him in his suicidal recklessness.

  We crouched behind the mattress, hidden by the mosquito net. A beam of light shone over our heads, then moved away. The guards were laughing. They must have thought we’d had a visit from a rat.

  “Okay, I’m coming! I’m ready, I’m coming!” said Lucho, grabbing his two oilcans, his tiny backpack, his sun hat, and the gloves I’d made for him for the occasion. He walked off, taking large strides. I was about to follow, then realized I’d lost a glove. In my panic I groped my way back toward the soldiers’ tents. This is stupid! We have to leave now! I thought. Lucho was already climbing over the walkway, charging straight ahead, trampling all the plants in his path. There was a horrible rustling of leaves as they clung to the polyester pants he was wearing. I turned around. How could the guards fail to hear the deafening clamor we were making? And yet behind me there was total calm. I looked at my watch: In three minutes the other guards would arrive. They were surely already on the way. We had to jump over the walkway and run across the cleared terrain ahead of us to have time to hide in the undergrowth.

  Lucho was already there. I was afraid he might head in the wrong direction. We had to take a sharp turn to our left to jump into the caño and swim to the other side. If he kept straight ahead, he’d end up on Gafas’s lap. I made the sign of the cross and began to run, certain the guards must have already seen us. I arrived breathless behind the bushes, just in time to catch Lucho’s hand and pull him to the ground. Crouching close together, we took a good look through the branches to see what was going on. The relief had just arrived. They were training their flashlight beams first on our boots and mosquito nets, then over our way, sweeping the empty space in every direction.

  “They’ve seen us!”

  “No, they haven’t seen us.”

  “Let’s go. We’re not going to wait for them to come and get us.”

  I put my oilcans in their cover, hung them around my neck, and tied them to my belt. They hampered my progress. We had to climb over a tangle of branches and bushes piled up there after the spot had been cleared to build the camp. Lucho grabbed me with one hand, his oilcans in the other, and he ran straight toward the bank of the stream. The plastic cans seemed to explode whenever they hit the dead trees, and dry wood cracked painfully beneath our weight.

  We had reached the riverbank. Before sliding down the slope, I looked behind me. Nobody. The flashlight beams were still sweeping along the tents. One more step and I literally rolled over on top of Lucho to land on the fine sandy beach where we used to come every day to wash. It had almost stopped raining. The noise we were making wouldn’t be covered by the rain. Without another thought, we threw ourselves like stampeding cattle into the water. I tried to keep control over my movements, but I was quickly caught by the current.

  “We have to cross, quickly, quickly!”

  Lucho seemed to be drifting toward the other arm of the tributary, the one that led to Enrique’s camp. I was swimming with one arm, holding Lucho with the other, by the straps on his backpack. We were no longer in control of our movements; we were paralyzed with fright and were trying at best simply not to drown.

  The current helped us. We were borne over to the left, to the other arm of the tributary, into a curve where the speed of the current increased. I couldn’t see the guerrillas’ tents anymore, and for a moment I had a sensation that this was possible. We headed deeper, farther, into the warm waters of the Amazon Basin. The caño closed around itself, thick, dark, noiseless, like a tunnel.

  “We have to get out of the caño. We have to get out of the water,” I said repeatedly to Lucho.

  We landed unceremoniously on a b
ed of thick leaves, which led to a passage between brambles and ferns.

  This is perfect, I thought to myself. No traces.

  I knew instinctively which way to go.

  “It’s this way,” I said to Lucho, who was hesitating.

  We plunged into increasingly thick, tall vegetation. Beyond a wall of young bushes with sharp brambles, we came upon a clearing of moss. I hurried onto it in the hope of decreasing the resistance of the undergrowth so that we could go more quickly, but I fell into an enormous ditch that the moss concealed like mesh above a trap. The ditch was deep, I was in moss up to my neck, and I couldn’t see what was below me. I imagined that all sorts of prehistoric monsters must live there, waiting for prey to land in their mouths as I had just done. Panicking, I tried to get out, but my movements were clumsy and I made no headway. Lucho dropped down into the same ditch and tried to calm me.

  “Don’t worry, it’s nothing. Keep walking, we’ll get out of it.”

  A bit farther along, some tree branches helped us hoist ourselves out. I wanted to run. I could sense that the guards must be on our tail, and I expected to see them burst from the scrub to pounce on us.

  The vegetation changed abruptly. We left behind the shrubs of bramble and thorns to penetrate into mangroves. I saw the mirror of water shining through the roots of the trees. A bit farther still, a beach of gray sand sloped to the rush of the river. There was a last row of trees caught in the flood of the river, and after that lay the vast silver surface, waiting for us.

  “We’re there!” I said to Lucho, not knowing whether it was relief or the vision of our upcoming ordeal that was terrifying me.

  I was hypnotized. This water flowing rapidly before us: This was our freedom.

  I looked behind me once again. No movement, no sound, just the deafening pounding of my heart.

  We ventured cautiously into the warm water up to our chests. We pulled out our ropes, and I conscientiously went through the gestures I knew by heart for having practiced them daily during the long months leading up to this moment. Every knot had its own purpose. We had to be firmly attached to each other.

  We couldn’t use sliding knots, but they had to be ready to release in case of emergency. I meticulously checked our life jackets. They had to be placed on our chests in such a way that they would not rise up against our necks, which would hamper our movement in the water. Our little backpacks had to be firmly against our spines so that they wouldn’t pull us backward. One set of ropes had to be intertwined over our boots so that they would stay firmly against our calves and we wouldn’t lose them to the current. Lucho had trouble keeping his balance in the water.

  “Don’t worry. Once we start swimming, you’ll get your balance.”

  We were ready. We held hands to walk forward until we lost our footing. We let ourselves float, gently paddling until the last line of trees.

  The river opened up before us, grandiose, beneath the vault of sky. The moon was immense, luminous, like a silver sun. I was aware that a powerful current was about to suck us up. There was no going back.

  “Careful, it’s going to go fast,” I warned Lucho.

  In one second, once we had gone through the last barrier of plants, we found ourselves rapidly propelled into the middle of the river. The shore went by at great speed before our eyes. Behind us I could see the guerrillas’ landing stage growing smaller and smaller, and I was overwhelmed with a feeling of plenitude, as vast as the horizon that we had just rediscovered.

  The river went around a bend, the landing stage disappeared for good. There was nothing left behind us. We were alone. Nature had conspired in our favor, putting all her strength at the service of our flight. I felt protected.

  “We are free!” I cried at the top of my lungs.

  “We are free!” shouted Lucho, laughing, his eyes in the stars.

  SIXTY-TWO

  FREEDOM

  We had made it. Lucho was no longer struggling; he let himself be carried peacefully, trustingly, and so did I. The idea of drowning no longer seemed possible. We were in no danger. The current was very powerful, but there were no undercurrents. The river flowed quickly forward. There were a hundred yards or so to the bank on either side.

  “How are we going to get to the shore?” asked Lucho.

  “The current is strong. It’s going to take some time. We’ll begin by swimming slowly to the opposite shore. If they’re looking for us, they’ll start by inspecting their own side. They’ll never believe we could have crossed this river.”

  We began to swim, a gentle, sustained, rhythmic breaststroke, careful not to get tired. We had to keep our bodies warm and work our way to the right in order to get beyond the pull of the current that was keeping us in the middle of the river. Lucho was slightly behind me, and the rope between us was still taut, which reassured me, because I could keep moving without looking at him yet know he was there.

  I knew that the greatest danger in the water would be hypothermia. I had always suffered from it. I have memories of Mom pulling me out of the swimming pool when I was a child, wrapping me in a blanket, rubbing me vigorously as I shivered uncontrollably, angry that I had been interrupted in my childish games, surprised at my body’s reaction, which I had not noticed until that very moment. “Your lips are blue,” she would say, as if in apology.

  I loved the water. Except when my teeth began to chatter. I would do everything to ignore it, but when that happened, I knew I had lost the struggle and that it was time to get out. When I went diving, even in tropical water, I made a point of wearing a thick wet suit, because I liked to stay at the bottom for a long time.

  So it was the onset of cramps I feared. I wasn’t thinking about anacondas; I thought that in the water they stayed near the shore to wait for their prey. I thought that the guíos must have reserves of food that were more accessible than we were.

  I was more worried about the piranhas. I had seen them at work, and I was unable to distinguish between myth and reality. Several times I’d gone to bathe in the caño when I had my period. Surrounded by men as I was, my sole preoccupation had been that no one notice my condition.

  In captivity I had always suffered from the condescending attitude with which the guerrillas treated female needs. There was a far greater guarantee of shipments of cigarettes and their distribution than of the supply of sanitary napkins. The guard in charge of bringing them to me always shouted, to the amusement of his companions, “You’d better not waste them! They have to last!” They never lasted long enough. Even less so if we were on a march, because my companions raided my supply to put them in their shoes when their blisters were torturing them. When I prepared our escape, the thought of having to swim in this condition had compelled me to devise a form of personal protection, but I wasn’t certain it was working.

  Now, in this dark brown current, I swirled the water around me, as much to make headway as to drive off any creatures attracted by our presence.

  We swam, propelled by the momentum of our euphoria, for three hours. The luminescence of the moonlight-bathed landscape changed gradually as dawn approached. The sky was again cloaked in a black velvet. Darkness fell on us, and with it the chill that precedes daybreak.

  My teeth had been chattering for a while, without my being aware. When I tried to speak to Lucho, I realized I could hardly say anything.

  “Your lips are blue,” he said anxiously.

  We had to get out of the water.

  We came closer to the bank, or rather the foliage along the river. The level of water had risen so high that the trees at the fringes were completely submerged, and only the treetops were still visible. The bank had withdrawn inland, but to get there, we had to plunge into the foliage along the edge.

  I hesitated. The idea of being engulfed by this secretive nature terrified me. What might there be beneath this silent greenery, that was impervious to everything save the powerful current? Might an anaconda be lurking, waiting for us there, curled around the highest branch of tha
t half-submerged tree? How long would we have to swim toward the interior before finding solid ground? I stopped trying to choose the best spot, because there wasn’t one.

  “Let’s go in here, Lucho,” I said, and ducked my head beneath the first branches resting on the surface.

  The undergrowth was dark, but we could just make out the shapes of things. Our eyes adjusted. I went slowly forward, closing the distance between Lucho and myself so I could take his arm.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, I’m okay.”

  Sounds were muffled. The roar of the river had given way to the muted sound of quiet waters. A bird flew along the surface and just missed us. My gestures had lost, instinctively, some of their expansiveness, as if I feared bumping into something. And yet nothing I could see was any different from what I’d already seen thousands of times. We were swimming among the branches of the trees like the bongo thrusting its way, opening a course. The sound of water lapping told us we were near the riverbank.

  “Over there!” whispered Lucho.

  I followed with my gaze. To my left, a bed of leaves and, farther along, the roots of a majestic ceiba tree. My feet had just found the land. I came out of the water, heavy with emotion, shivering, so glad to be standing on solid ground. I was exhausted. I needed to find a place to collapse. Lucho climbed the gentle slope at the same time, and he pulled me over to the roots of the tree.

  “We have to hide. They could show up at any moment.”

  He opened the black plastic sheet he kept in his belongings and helped me off with my backpack.

  “Hand me your clothes one piece at a time. We have to wring them out.”

  I did as he said, only to be immediately attacked by jejenes, tiny little midges that are particularly voracious and move around in dense clouds. I had to do a war dance to keep them away.

  It was nearly six o’clock in the morning. The forest was so dense where we were that daylight was taking its time to reach us. We decided to wait, because we couldn’t see what was around us. My God, today is my sister’s birthday! I thought, happy to have remembered. The light reached the undergrowth at that very moment and spread like wildfire.