I didn’t answer.
William stood up to look more closely at me. “You’re covered in cuitibas. After the bath you’ll have to get some treatment.”
There was no bath, not that evening nor any that followed. Enrique put us on a bongo that was only a third the size of the ones we’d known before. He squeezed ten of us into a tiny space that was six feet by six, next to the engine, with a drum of gasoline in the middle. It was impossible to sit without having someone’s head or legs in the way. He had arranged the chains so that we were attached to one another and to the metal bars of the boat at the same time. If the boat sank, we sank with it. He covered our hole with a thick tarpaulin, and beneath it our breath mingled with the fumes of the engine. The air was suffocating. He obliged us to stay like that day and night, using the river for a toilet, clinging to the tarpaulin, in front of everybody. We were like worms crawling over one another in a matchbox. Gafas was experienced; he didn’t need to raise the tone of his voice or bring out a whip. He was a torturer who wore gloves.
The stifling, condensed, contaminated air that burned our throats till we coughed, the heat rising under the tarpaulin, the murderous sun, our bodies stewing in sweat—all of this, of course, was the collective price paid for our escape.
Yet not one of my companions ever blamed us.
SIXTY-FIVE
PUNISHMENT
LATE JULY 2005
I couldn’t sleep. How was I supposed to sleep with a chain around my neck that pulled painfully every time William moved? My companions’ legs were tangled around me, and I was obliged to shrink into myself to avoid any inappropriate contact—a foot against my ribs, another one behind my neck. I was crushed in a vise of bodies, where no one had enough room.
I lifted a corner of the tarpaulin cautiously. It was already daylight. I put my nose out to fill my lungs with fresh air. The guard’s foot stomped my fingers to punish me for my boldness. Then he sealed the tarpaulin. I was mortally thirsty, and I badly needed to urinate. I asked for permission to relieve myself. Enrique shouted from the prow, “Tell the cucha she can piss in a pot!”
“There’s no room,” said the guard.
“She can make room,” replied Gafas.
“She says she can’t do it in front of the men.”
“Tell her she doesn’t have anything that the men haven’t already seen.”
I blushed in the darkness. I felt a hand reaching for mine. It was Lucho. His gesture brought down the dam inside me. For the first time since we’d been captured, I burst into tears. What more must I endure, Lord, to earn the right to go home! Enrique removed the tarpaulin for a few seconds. My companions’ faces were distorted, dry, corpselike. We looked all around us, straining our necks anxiously, not knowing what to think, blinking, our eyes blinded by the harsh midday sun. For a brief moment, we had a vision of the expanse of our misery. We were in a place where four vast rivers met. Water crisscrossing through an endless forest, with us, an infinitesimal spot pitching dangerously in the turbulent eddies where the currents collided.
The bongo stopped heavily one morning, on a whim of Enrique’s. The guards disembarked. We didn’t. Lucho swapped places to sit by me.
“Things will get better, you’ll see,” I told him.
“That’s what you think. It can only get worse.”
Finally, after three days, they had us get out in the middle of nowhere. “If it rains,” said Armando, “we’ll all get wet.” It rained. My companions managed to stay dry under their tents. Enrique chained me to a tree, away from the group. I was under the storm for hours. The guards refused to let me use the plastic sheet my companions sent to me.
Drenched and shivering, I was once again chained to William. He asked for permission to go to the chontos. The guerrillas had just dug some. They removed his chain. When he came back, I asked to go in turn. Pipiolo, a potbellied little man with chubby fingers, from Jeiner and Pata-Grande’s group, stared at me while he was slowly replacing the padlock around William’s neck. He remained stubbornly silent. And then he went away.
William looked at me, embarrassed. Then he hailed the guard. “Guard! She needs to go to the toilet, didn’t you hear?”
“So what? It’s none of your business! Are you asking for trouble or what?”
He wanted to suck up to Enrique. This meant the end of Pata-Grande’s reign. Pipiolo broke off a twig to use as a toothpick and glared at me.
“Pipiolo, I need to go the chontos,” I repeated monotonously.
“You want to take a shit? Do it here, in front of me. Squat here at my feet. The chontos are not for you!” he shouted.
Oswald and Angel went by, carrying logs on their shoulders. They burst out laughing and slapped Pipiolo on the back to congratulate him. Pipiolo pretended to catch himself on his Galil 5.56 mm assault rifle, delighted to have an audience.
I would wait for the changing of the guard.
William began to talk with me. As if nothing had happened. He wanted me to pretend to ignore Pipiolo, and I was grateful to him for that. Pipiolo came up to me. He planted himself before me.
“You shut up, get it? Now it’s my turn to have fun. As long as I’m here, you keep your mouth shut.”
Enrique let Pipiolo stay on guard all day long. There was no relief until evening.
The troops were working flat out, building something we could just discern between the trees. In one day the prison was set up—fences, barbed wire, eight caletas close together in a row, and two others in the corner on either side. Right up next to one of them, hidden from sight by a screen of palm leaves, they had built a latrine. On the other side, there was a tree. In the middle a reservoir of water. All around the caletas, there was a muddy pond.
I was assigned to the caleta between the latrine and the tree, to which I was chained. I had enough slack to be able to go from my hammock to the latrine, but if I tried to reach the pool of water, I choked. Lucho was on the far side of the reservoir, also chained. They removed our boots, making us walk barefoot. I was not allowed to communicate with anyone.
Being next to the latrine was a refined form of punishment. I lived in the permanent stench of our sick bodies. The nausea never left me, as I was the unhappy witness to all my companions’ physical afflictions.
I retreated to my bubble, under my mosquito net. I sought refuge from the attacks of jején, pajarilla, mosca-marrana,76 and contact with men. I spent twenty-four hours curled up in my cocoon, huddled in my hammock, clinging to a silence with no end.
Eventually I switched on the radio. One day I came upon a preacher who was broadcasting from the West Coast of the United States. He was preaching the Bible as if it were a philosophy class. I encountered his program several times, and I was disdainful. I thought that he was one of those cranks who had made God their milk cow. But then I stopped to listen. He was analyzing a passage in the Bible, dissecting the texts, basing his erudite arguments on the Greek and Latin versions of the text. Every word took on a deeper, more precise meaning, and it was as if he were cutting a diamond there before me. And he said to me, My grace is sufficient for you: for my strength is made perfect in weakness . . . for when I am weak, then am I strong. It was one of the first paragraphs in chapter 12 of the second letter from St. Paul to the Corinthians. And he said to me, My grace is sufficient for you: for my strength is made perfect in weakness . . . for when I am weak, then am I strong. It should be read like a poem, without any preconceived ideas. I thought it was universal and could be used by anyone seeking for a meaning in suffering. I began to hibernate. There was no longer any day or any night, any sun or any rain. Noise, smells, insects, hunger and thirst, everything disappeared. I read, listened, meditated, sifted each episode of my life through my new thoughts. My relationship with God changed. I no longer had to go through others to have access to him, nor did I need rituals. Reading his book, I saw a gaze, a voice, a finger that showed the way and transformed things. The human condition that was revealed in the Bible became a mirror that
sent my own reflection back to me.
I liked that God. He spoke, he chose his words, he had a sense of humor. Like the Little Prince charming the rose, he was cautious.
One evening when I was listening to the nighttime rebroadcast of one of the preacher’s lectures, someone called me. It was mink black outside, and it was impossible to see anything. I raised my head and listened, and the voice came closer.
“What’s going on?” I cried, afraid that it might be the alert to strike camp.
“Shh! Stay calm.” I recognized Mono Liso’s childish voice.
“What do you want?” I asked warily.
He had put his hand through the wire fence and was trying to touch me, saying obscene things that sounded ridiculous in his little-boy’s voice.
“Guaaard!” I screamed.
“What!” answered an irritated voice from the other end of the prison.
“Call the relevante!”77
“I’m the relevante! What do you want?”
“I have a problem—Mono Liso.”
“We’ll see about it tomorrow,” he said curtly.
“He has to learn respect!” shouted someone from inside the enclosure. “We heard everything. He’s a foul-mouthed brat!”
“Shut up!” the guard shouted back.
The relevante circled with his flashlight beam, and it caught Mono Liso, who leaped back from the fence and pretended to be cleaning his AK-47.
The next morning after breakfast, Enrique sent Mono Liso with the keys to the lock hanging from my neck. He sauntered over, proud as a peacock.
“Come here!” he shouted, with the smugness of authority acquired too soon.
He opened the padlock and tightened the chain around my throat. I could hardly breathe. Pleased with his work, he went back out, rolling his shoulders. Once he was outside, he gave some useless instructions to the men on duty. He wanted everyone to know that he had just been promoted to relevante.
I went back to my hammock and opened my Bible.
After several days had gone by, Enrique decided to visit the prison. He got the military prisoners together and acted all chummy with them. He pretended to write down everyone’s requests. In the end, when he saw that everything had gone smoothly and no one had any reason to protest, he asked if anyone had any special requests.
Pinchao raised a finger. “I do have one for you, Commander.”
“Tell me, my boy, I’m listening,” Gafas said in a syrupy voice.
“I would like to ask you”—Pinchao paused to clear his throat—“I would like to ask you to remove my companions’ chains. They’ve been chained up for nearly six months and—”
Gafas interrupted him. “They’ll be chained up until they leave here,” he said, a touch too spitefully.
Then, thinking better of it, he got up and smiled and said, “I don’t suppose there’s anything else? Right. Good night, muchachos!”
The next morning at around six, planes flew right over the top of the camp. And a few minutes later, there was a series of explosions, about twelve miles away.
“They’re bombing!”
“They’re bombing!”
My companions didn’t know what else to say.
The first thing I put into my equipo was my Bible. I anxiously sorted through my belongings. All I wanted to keep were the things that reminded me of my children. They had just turned twenty and seventeen. I had missed all their adolescent years. Did they still remember my face? My hands were trembling. I had to throw out all the rest—recycled pots, patched scraps of clothing, my men’s underwear. Permanent contact with mud, insects, and athlete’s foot had made my feet a frightful mess. My legs had atrophied, and I had lost most of my muscle mass.
When the guard came to announce our imminent departure, I was ready to march.
SIXTY-SIX
THE RETREAT
NOVEMBER 2005
While we were walking in single file, silently, bent, I prayed, with my rosary in my hands. No one had told us anything, but I imagined that we must be in the same part of the country as our former companions, Orlando, Gloria, Jorge, Consuelo, and Clara. I prayed that the bombing had not caught any of them in the line of fire.
We went through changing forests, and every step entailed risk. Those at the front of the line had their faces deformed by brambles and bee stings. “They’re Chinese,” said the others, making fun of them. I would march with a hat pulled down over my head, a mosquito net covering my face and gloves that I had made from old camouflage uniforms. I am an astronaut, I told myself, feeling like an alien landed on another planet. I was absent, lost in my prayers, concentrating on the effort, and I did not see the mountain coming. I looked up, and the wall of vegetation disappeared into the clouds. The climb was very hard, I could not keep the pace. My companions were far ahead of me, excited by the physical effort—who would go fastest, carry the most, complain the least.
“I’ll never make it,” I said quietly.
Angel was getting impatient. “Hurry up!” he shouted, pushing me.
“Hand me your equipo,” said someone behind us with false resignation.
It was Efrén, a tall, muscular black man who never spoke. He had just caught up with us at a slow jog. He was meant to come last. We were the last ones in the group, and he didn’t want to get left behind because of me.
He took my equipo and wedged it behind his neck above his own backpack.
“Go ahead,” he said with a smile.
I looked one last time toward the top and began to climb, clinging to everything I could get my hands on. Three hours later, after crossing waterfalls, rock faces, and an astonishing esplanade of stones piled in pyramids like the ruins of an ancient Inca temple, I reached the top.
Sitting in a row on the slope, my companions were eating rice. Lucho sat against a tree, his cheeks hollow with fatigue, unable to lift his food to his mouth. I moved toward him.
Angel called out in a nasty voice, “Come back here! You will sit where I tell you to.”
Enrique gave the order to start marching again. We didn’t even have time to rest for a moment. Efrén, exhausted, protested against Enrique’s decision. He took off my equipo to give it back to me. He was called up front, then came back, tail between his legs. Enrique had not appreciated his complaint; he would have to go on carrying my equipo as a punishment. Angel, too, protested. He was fed up with being last because of me and losing his chance to eat. He was relieved from his mission and replaced by Katerina, the black girl who’d looked after me when we left Sombra. I did my best to hide that I was overjoyed.
“Let’s not let them get ahead,” she said, mingling authority with complicity.
We crossed a high, desertlike plateau, where the clay ground baked beneath the sun. The open horizon revealed the expanse of the jungle. A green line carved through the blue sky around the 360 degrees of our field of vision. To the left a huge river stretched lazily, in traceries of India ink. That must be the Río Negro, I thought.
At the far side of the plateau, we entered a cloister of scraggly dry trees with neither leaves nor shade, growing in a tangle. They tore at my hat with their clawed branches, held me back by the straps of my pack, blocked my way whenever I could squeeze my equipo between them, and finally sliced through my boot with a branch as sharp as a blade that was sticking up from the ground. “I’ll have water in my socks,” I muttered, cursing. We had a dizzying descent, down a slope built in terraces, which we could hurry down, jumping, at the risk of missing our landing and rolling the rest of the way in freefall. The last part of the descent gave onto an expanse of rainwater captured in the moss and bushes, and I had to jump from one tree root to the other to avoid water getting into my damaged boots. The next morning the terrain was flat and dry. Out of nowhere came a huge dirt road. “We’ve found our way out,” said Katerina. We’d made good time, not letting the others get ahead.
“Let’s stop here,” she said. “I’m tired.”
I put my pack on the ground.
“What do you like to eat?” she asked, lighting a cigarette.
“I like pasta,” I answered.
Katerina pouted. “Normally I’m pretty good at pasta. But here, with nothing, it’s hard. Do you like pizza?”
“I love pizza.”
“When I was little, my mother sent me to live with my aunt in Venezuela. She worked for a very rich lady who liked me a lot. She would take me to eat pizza with her children.”
“Were they the same age?”
“No, they were older. The boy said that when he grew up, he would marry me. I would have liked to marry him.”
“Why didn’t you stay there?”
“My mother wanted me with her. She lives in Calamar with her new husband. But I didn’t want to come back. And when I did, there were problems. We didn’t have any money, and I couldn’t leave again.”
“Did you like it in Calamar?”
“No, I wanted to go back to my aunt, in that nice house. They had a swimming pool. We ate hamburgers. Here they don’t know what that is.”
“Were you studying in Calamar?”
“I was in school at the beginning. I was good in school. I liked drawing a lot, and I had nice handwriting. Later on I needed money, so I had to work.”
“Work where?”
She hesitated for a moment, then said, “In a bar.”
I didn’t say anything. Most of the girls had worked in a bar, and I knew what that meant.
“That’s why I enlisted. Here at least, if you have a boyfriend, you don’t have to wash his laundry for him. We women and men are equal.”
I listened to her, thinking that it wasn’t quite true.
What was true, on the other hand, was that the girls had to work like men. I can still see Katerina in her tank top and camouflage pants, an ax in her hand, swinging her arms back with a spectacular twist of her waist to land a precise blow at the base of a fine tree she chopped down without any difficulty. It was a vision that had left my companions breathless, this black Venus displaying a physical prowess that emphasized every muscle on her body. How could a girl like her stay in a place like this?
Even Silence Has an End Page 49
