I was sitting between Armando and William, very near the door, because we were the last ones to board. I had my backpack between my legs, and I was trying in secret to pull off my handcuffs to get my blood flowing again. That was fairly easy, since it was a system not unlike the straps for suitcases used in airports.
“Put them back on. It’s not allowed,” warned Armando, shocked.
“I don’t care,” I answered testily.
Enrique took his seat, and the door closed. The helicopter took off. I looked through the porthole behind me: The guerrillas were standing at attention, watching us leave. Soon they became tiny, until they were a line of black dots in the greenery. We could overpower them and take control of the helicopter, I thought, looking toward the cockpit.
The nurse came up to me again and offered me something to drink. I didn’t want anything from her, for she was taking part in an operation to prolong our captivity. I rejected her coldly, irritated by her friendly look.
Then I saw it. A quick movement, and Enrique fell out of his seat. The big Arab was on top of him. My companions were kicking him. I didn’t know what was going on. I couldn’t even dare to believe what was happening. My thoughts seized up. My brain was blocked. Nothing seemed coherent.
The tall man in the white cap stood up, the Arab was holding his position, on top of Enrique. All I could see was the victory of these giants over the man I had hated so much. Everybody turned around to look at them. The colossus threw his white cap in the air as he yelled with all his might, “¡Somos el ejército de Colombia! ¡Están libres!”98
The sound of the engine filled my head with vibrations, and I couldn’t comprehend what was going on. The words took some time to penetrate the carapace of incredulity that had hardened over so many years around my brain. The words soaked in like the first rains after a long winter, gradually filling me through layers of pain and despair that had grown rock hard inside me, and with those words came back a surge of power, rising like lava, deep from my entrails, burning its way out, about to explode.
A long, long, and very painful cry came breaking through like a burst of flames wanting to reach the skies, forcing me open, like a mother in childbirth. When I finished emptying my lungs, my eyes opened to another world. I had just been catapulted into life. A rich, intense serenity flooded over me. I felt like a lake with deep waters, its surface reflecting an image of snowy peaks all around.
I kissed my rosary in an inexpressible élan of gratitude. We were hugging, whimpering with tears. William was clinging to me and I to him, suddenly afraid and breathless in front of this void of freedom opening up before us. As if we were about to take flight, our feet on the edge of a cliff.
I turned my head away. My eyes met Marc’s for the first time on the other side of life, in the world of the living, and at that precise moment I saw the kindred spirit I had discovered in the jungle, when we were in chains and had written to each other. Marc smiled. What we became is what we are, I thought.
At my feet, curled up like a fetus, his hands and feet bound, lay Enrique. No, I didn’t like our violence, nor the kicks we had given him. That wasn’t us. I took William’s hand. Next to me he was weeping.
“It’s over,” I said, caressing his head. “We’re going home.”
EIGHTY-TWO
THE END OF SILENCE
William put his arm around my shoulders. Only then did I realize that I, too, was weeping.
But in fact it wasn’t me crying—it was my body that had gone to pieces trying to become whole again, through tears, submerged by a multitude of disparate and disconnected feelings colliding. I walked barefoot for a few more moments on the planks of precious wood they had cut with the chain saw in the camp of horror and which was now rotting in the past with the thousands of trees sacrificed during those six and a half years of waste. I thought about my body that had not regained its female functions since my near death and which now seemed to have stopped hibernating at the most inopportune moment. It was the first time in my life that the thought of it made me happy.
My companions were jumping around Cesar’s and Enrique’s recumbent bodies in a war dance of our victory with shouts and cheers. I watched as Armando was singing in Enrique’s ear, “¡La vida es una tómbola, tómbola, tómbola!”
The helicopter’s going to crash, I thought, startled by a rush of adrenaline, suddenly fearful that our euphoria would disturb the aircraft. I sat back down, tense. What if the curse still followed us? I imagined the accident, I couldn’t help it. “How soon do we land?” I screamed, hoping for someone to hear.
In the cockpit the mechanic turned around with a huge smile, showing me five fingers.
My God, I thought, five minutes! That’s an eternity!
The tall man with the white cap stood before me and lifted me from my seat in a bear hug that took my breath away. He introduced himself. “Major in the Colombian army,” he said, telling me his name. He had the build of a Thracian gladiator, I thought immediately.
He put his mouth up to my ear, his hands cupped. “I left my family over a month ago to take command of this mission. I couldn’t tell anyone anything— we were sworn to the utmost secrecy. My wife kissed me before I left and said, ‘What you’re doing is incredibly important. I know you’re going to get Ingrid. My prayers go with you. You’ll succeed, and you’ll be back. And remember that whatever happens, I know I have shared my life with a hero.’ . . . I wanted you to understand, Ingrid, that we’ve all been behind you, every day, bearing your pain like our own cross, all Colombians.”
I was hanging on his words, clinging to him, as if in his arms I could be safe from all misfortune.
I gave thanks to God, not for releasing me but for this release. For the selfless love of these men and women—whom I had never met before and whose sacrifice had given a transcendent meaning to all that I had lived through.
An immense serenity came over me. Everything was as it should be. Out of the porthole behind my seat, the little village of San José del Guaviare, in a garden of greenery, grew larger and larger beneath my feet. There is the oasis, the promised land. I thought. Was it possible?
The door opened. My companions leaped out of the helicopter, jumping over the bodies of the two subdued men. Enrique looked unconscious, stretched out on the floor in his underwear. I felt a pang. There was nothing to cover him. He would be cold. The woman who had played the nurse during the operation took me by the arm. “It’s over,” she said gently. I stood up and squeezed her tight. She pushed me toward the door, and I jumped with my backpack onto the tarmac.
At the end of the runway, the presidential airplane was waiting to fly us to Bogotá. A man in uniform opened his arms to me. It was General Mario Montoya, the man who was responsible for Operation Jaque. His exuberant joy was contagious. My companions were dancing, waving their handkerchiefs around him.
In the airplane he filled me in on the details of the operation and the preparations made to ensure its success. In the depths of the jungle, the helicopters had been painted white, in a secret camp where for one month the team had rehearsed the operation down to the smallest detail. They had intercepted communications between Cesar and Enrique, and their leader, Mono Jojoy. Jojoy thought he was speaking to his subordinates, but it was the Colombian army. Cesar and Enrique in turn thought they were getting their orders from Jojoy, not suspecting that it was Montoya’s men. The initial order was to identify the group of hostages under Enrique’s command and then to put us all together in the same group. When they saw that their orders had been carried out, they took their bold enterprise one step further, ordering Cesar to put us in the helicopter belonging to the fake international commission. They had copied the procedure that had been set up for unilateral releases at the beginning of the year. The operation seemed to follow the same logic as the previous ones, and it worked. The death of the FARC leadership, Manuel Marulanda and Raúl Reyes, made the premise of an interview with the new leader, Alfonso Cano, believable, which ex
plained why Cesar and Enrique were so eager to travel in the helicopter. Like a giant jigsaw puzzle, all the pieces came together just as they should, in the right place at the right time.
I listened to the general. He was describing my children in detail and giving me news of Mom and my sister.
“Does my family already know?” I asked.
“At exactly one o’clock this afternoon, we announced the news to the entire world.”
Then, without thinking, I asked for permission to go to the toilet. He said nothing, just looked at me. “You don’t need to ask permission anymore,” he whispered. He courteously stood up and offered to take me there.
I changed and braided my hair in a real mirror, behind a real locked door, and I laughed at the idea that I’d never again have to ask permission.
We were about to land. I found Marc toward the front of the plane, lost in his silence. I motioned to him, and we went to sit in a corner with some empty seats. “Marc, I just wanted to say . . . I want you to know that those letters that I didn’t give back to you, I burned them—”
“It’s not important,” he said gently, interrupting me. Our hands clasped, and he closed his eyes to murmur, “We are free.”
When he opened his eyes again, I found myself saying, “Promise me that when you are back in your life, you won’t forget me.” He looked at me as if he’d just found his bearings in the sky and assured me with a nod. “I’ll always know where to find you.”
The plane landed, and General Montoya greeted the minister of defense, who was still standing at the entrance to the aircraft. I had not seen Juan Manuel Santos in many years. He kissed me affectionately and said, “Colombia is celebrating, and so is France. President Sarkozy is sending a plane. Your children will be here tomorrow.” Then, without giving me the time to react, he took me by the hand and led me out of the plane. I went down the steps in a dream. On the tarmac a hundred or more soldiers cheered our arrival. All those men and women in uniform kissed me, and I was giving myself to them as if I needed their gestures, their voices, their smells to believe that this was real.
The minister handed me a cell phone. “It’s your mother.”
If you believe what you say, words become reality, I told myself, for I had imagined this moment so many times. I had wanted it so badly and waited for it for so long.
“Hello, Mom?”
“Astrid, is that you?”
“No, Mom, it’s me, it’s Ingrid.”
Mom’s happiness was just as I had imagined. Her voice filled with light, and her words seemed to flow on from the ones I’d heard at dawn on the radio that very day. We had never left each other. I had lived through these six and a half years of captivity hanging on to life from the thread of her voice.
We left Tolemaida, this military base a few minutes from the capital, where we had made a stop. During the flight to Bogotá, I closed my eyes in an exercise of meditation and saw again everything I’d experienced since my capture, as if in a film screened at high speed. I saw my entire family, just as I’d pictured them during all those years we’d been apart. I had an inexpressible fear, as if I might not recognize them anymore, or they might brush past me without seeing me. Papa was almost more alive for me than they were, or at best they were as far away from me as he was. I knew I had to resolve to bury him for good, and this was still very painful. I would need my sister’s help to mourn him. How could I possibly accept him as being dead when I was coming back to life? That was an immense task awaiting me. I would have to find out myself, in my home among my loved ones, knowing all the while that I was now so different, almost a stranger for them.
My greatest worry was reestablishing the connection with my children, to found our relationship on a new basis, to create trust, complicity, and start from scratch while delving into our past to restore the codes of our love. My son was still a child when I was captured. What memories might he have kept of his mother from his childhood? Would there be room for me in his life as a young man? And Melanie—who was Melanie? Who was this determined, thoughtful young woman who insisted I not give up? Would she be disappointed by the woman I had become? Could she, could I, recover the intimacy that had bound us so deeply before my disappearance? Papa was right: The most important thing in life is family.
This new world, about which I knew nothing, had meaning for me only in my family and through my family. During the years of agony, they had been my sun, my moon, and my stars. I had escaped from that green hell every day, carried away by the burning memory of my children’s kisses, and so that the memory of our past happiness would not be confiscated, I had buried it in the stars, near the constellation of Cygnus that I had given to my daughter when she was born. Deprived of everything, I had devoted my energy to the coming happiness, of hearing the voice of my son change into that of a man, and like Penelope I had woven and unwoven my work, waiting for that day to come.
Only a few more hours and I would see them all—Mom, my children, my sister. Would they be sad to see me so worn down by captivity? I took a deep breath, with my eyes closed; I knew that we were transformed. I saw it when I looked at Willie, Armando, Arteaga. They were all different, as if radiating from within. I must be, too. I kept my eyes closed for a long time. When I opened them again, I knew precisely what I would do and say when I came off the airplane. I felt neither impatience nor fear nor exaltation. Everything I had thought during those interminable cycles of marches and camps, season after season, was ready, was ripe in my heart.
At last the door opened.
On the tarmac Mom was waiting, intimidated by so much blessedness, and on her face, as if she would have liked to hide them from me, were the traces of her years of suffering. I liked her new fragility. It was familiar to me. I descended the steps slowly, to have time to admire her, to love her better. We embraced with the energy of victory. A victory that we alone could understand, because it was a victory over despair, over oblivion, over resignation, a victory solely over ourselves.
My companions, too, had disembarked. Armando took me by the hand and led me along. We looked forward with our arms around each other’s shoulders, as happy as children, on clouds. I felt with a shiver that everything was new, everything was dense and weightless at the same time, and in the explosion of light everything had disappeared, been swept away, emptied, cleansed. I had been born once again. There was nothing left in me but love.
I fell to my knees, looking ahead to the world in front of me, and I thanked the heavens for everything that was still to come.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To Susanna Lea, who inexhaustibly sustained my writing and my soul.
1 The FARC word for the makeshift toilets they dug in the ground for us.
2 “Those sons of bitches oligarchs who steal the poor man’s silver, / Those ill-bred bourgeois, we’ll destroy them all, we’ll destroy them all.”
3 A popular hot drink made up of water, flour, and sugar.
4 “I don’t think you’re an old son of a bitch. I want to ask your pardon. I know that you are a good person!”
5 The official initials are FARC-EP, which in Spanish stands for Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces- People’s Army.
6 In Colombia, this is a polite way to address someone and replaces “Madam” or “Sir.”
7 Mocho means “chopped off” in Spanish.
8 Lively music from Valledupar on the Caribbean coast.
9 “Interchangeable” is the FARC term used to describe political prisoners who can be exchanged for FARC prisoners held in Colombian prisons.
10 “The forest” in the peasants’ vernacular.
11 Jungle.
12 The American show Ugly Betty was based on the Colombian series Yo so Betty, la fea.
13 “Look out, shit! It’s the Fat Pig!”
14 “Look up there! The Fat Pig is overhead!”
15 “It’s the vultures. That’s how they look at us, and then they bomb us.”
16 A finca is a property.
&n
bsp; 17 Corners.
18 Cooking area.
19 Because he dealt with “the masses,” meaning the peasants, the people living in the region.
20 A partner or girlfriend in FARC jargon.
21 Meaning “bull’s blood,” the name of a tree in Amazonia, with a wood particularly prized for its easy combustibility.
22 The bushes.
23 Shelf.
24 Rodents.
25 A large tree, the Amazonian version of the African baobab, it can grow up to 230 feet tall, and is also known as a kapok.
26 Communist university named after Patrice Lumumba, the Congolese independence leader.
27 Known as the massacre of Urrao; it took place on May 5, 2003.
28 A canoa is a small boat.
29 “It’s me, Luis Eladio, Luis Eladio Pérez. We were senators at the same time.”
30 “Are you Clarita?”
31 A colloquial term of affection among Colombians.
32 Chopped pork and chicken, cooked with rice and corn, mixed with boiled eggs and carrots, reheated in a banana-leaf wrap.
33 Jorge used “madame” in French in deference to my French origins, and as a term of endearment.
34 “Prisoners! Count, hurry up!”
35 The French Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
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