“I’m sorry that happened to you.”
“It happens to many, and usually much worse. Some they take to the jungle for years, so long their own families forget about them. And when they’re freed, they don’t think to leave their country. I’m lucky in comparison, yet I ran away.”
“Survival requires different things of different people.” I don’t know where in me this came from. It was something I hadn’t even begun to understand for myself.
“Can we spend some more time together? I feel comfortable with you. I can’t explain it.”
I nodded. I felt the same but wasn’t yet ready to say it too.
* * *
—
I’d known other people who were kidnapped. It’s not only a Colombian thing like newspapers and movies want you to think. Guerrillas and paramilitaries didn’t invent or even perfect the art of secuestro. Governments have always done it much better.
Back in my hometown, a Jersey suburb where everyone had eyes on each other, a girl from my high school was kidnapped by the young couple she babysat for when they went on the run on account of credit card fraud. The girl’s parents hired a detective, who tracked her down in Jacksonville three months later. She was hooked on pills and heroin. Our mothers were friendly, so I overheard whispers that even after rehab the girl was never the same, and my father never let me babysit for gringo families after that.
In college, the mother of a girl from my Twentieth-Century Art class disappeared while walking the dog on First Avenue. The professor canceled class one day so we could all help post signs with the mother’s picture around Central Park and the Upper East Side. Months passed with no clues and people muttered the husband should be a suspect, though he was never charged. With the spring thaw, a jogger spotted the mother’s body on the banks of the East River, fully clothed, still wearing her wedding ring and her gold watch. Police never figured out who did it. The dog was never found.
I heard a television shrink once say the easiest people to hurt are those who’ve never been hurt before.
They’re the ones who never see it coming, and afterward, it takes a long time for them to understand what’s been done to them.
“He loves you,” Thea said. “You have to forgive and let go.”
I wondered why it had become my burden.
He once told me that, as a kid, when his father was upset with him or one of his brothers, he would take them alone to a tool shed at the far end of the house property. He’d have the boy sit on a folding chair, tie his arms with a rope behind him, blindfold him, and whip him with a power cord, going much harder if the boy cried. This would last an hour. Maybe two. When it was over, the father would untie the son, fall to his knees, and cry over the child’s lap, saying it hurt him to have to do this to his own flesh and blood but he’d had no choice.
I’d come home from a party with Thea, barely able to hold my head up or walk straight; a reaction from a couple of cocktails mixed with antibiotics for strep throat I’d finished the day before. He was waiting outside my building when we pulled up in a cab. He must have been there for hours. Thea handed me off. “You take care of her,” she said. He helped me up to my apartment and into bed. I remember feeling grateful for him in that moment.
* * *
—
Juan said he’d never smoked his entire life until he was taken, when the guards started giving him cigarettes to stave off his hunger. They came for him while he was in a taxi, which is why he still felt a reflexive terror whenever he got into a yellow cab. At a red light on a quiet road on the way to visit his parents in Los Rosales, a car parked close behind them and before he blinked, a machine gun had already poured into the taxi driver’s skull and another man was pulling him out the door and shoving him into the other car. Juan reached for his wallet, told them to take all his money, but they laughed, said they didn’t want his money, they wanted his life.
They were kids, he said. Boys who’d been born and bred to die young, who spoke in indecipherable slang and code, whom he’d get to know by their voices since they’d never let themselves be seen without masks. They made him lie on the car floor, slipped a pillowcase over his head with slits for his nose and mouth, and held their boots tight on his back and neck while another drove for what felt like hours, far enough that when he was pulled out of the car, the air was different, fresh and wet like the sabana air at his family’s finca in Subachoque.
They put him in a windowless room the size of a pantry, and now, he said, he felt most comfortable in small quarters, like the apartment of the Dutch man and his second girlfriend’s tiny chambre de bonne in Paris. There was a bare mattress on the floor on which he spent most of his day. There was a lamp in the ceiling and they would often remove the bulb to taunt him or to control his waking and sleep patterns. At night, the guards sometimes led him into another room where there was a window with curtains drawn, and a radio and a TV, and he saw his picture flash across the news as the presenter reported there was still no clue of his whereabouts. On the radio, he heard the voices of both his parents pleading to his captors for his release. The masked boys laughed, lifting the fabric that concealed them only enough to bring a joint into their lips. They were high much of the time, Juan said, but still had rules, like that Juan had to bow his head and raise his right hand for permission to speak or use the toilet. The first few weeks they beat him regularly. Then they went for stretches in a kind of peace, cohabiting, eating the same crummy mushed rice and bean slop for every meal with an occasional sausage, bringing Juan a pillow and a blanket for his mattress. But then they would get a visit from a superior, or they would get drunk, and would burst into his cell and beat him into a corner, pull his hair, poke their fingers into his eyeballs, spit in his mouth, or piss on his face.
We were in my apartment when he told me this. I had called him this time. It was late and I knew another long night was ahead for me. He arrived quickly. I put out a bowl of chips and made tea. We sat on the sofa along the window, cracked it open enough to let out our smoke but not let in too much city dust or noise of fire trucks roaring from one end of Fourteenth Street to the other. He spoke calmly, often pausing. He said the boys told him that in these cases, when a person is held captive alone, it’s because they’re going to be killed. Otherwise he would have been placed in a house already holding two or three others, which was easier for them to manage until their release.
“So you’re going to kill me,” he’d said, and one boy punched him for speaking out of turn, removed the lightbulb, and locked him in his room.
I got the feeling Juan was waiting for me to ask why he’d been a target. There must have been a reason they saw him as valuable. But I didn’t ask.
Finally, he said, “My family is, well, a word for it would be ‘prominent.’ ”
“Like drug dealers?”
He laughed. “More like presidents and senators, on both sides.”
I wondered which presidents he was related to. Most of the recent ones weren’t anything to brag about.
The day of his release, the boys drove Juan to a parking lot behind some warehouses near El Dorado airport, that same pillowcase around his head, and told him to count to one hundred very slowly before taking it off. He was so scared he counted to five hundred, sure they were watching and waiting and this was some kind of test. But when he removed his hood, he saw he was alone and heard the rush of nearby traffic. He walked until he came to a boulevard and asked a shopkeeper to use his phone. He called his mother.
To this day, he said, his girlfriend still threw in his face that Juan hadn’t called her first. That was another reason he’d stayed with her this long: guilt.
“So why didn’t they kill you?” I asked.
Juan shrugged.
“Either I was worth more than they thought, or not worth enough.”
* * *
—
; I remember it started to rain so I closed the window but Juan asked me to leave it open a crack. He said when they were holding him for two or three months already, he built up the courage to ask the guards for permission to look out the window in the room where they kept the TV and radio. He could hear the soft drum of rain through the walls, feel the humidity in his bones, but he wanted to see the rainfall, he wanted to smell it. The boys agreed to part the curtain for him only this once, and let Juan sit on a chair by the open window, his hands tied tightly behind his back and with duct tape covering his mouth so he couldn’t scream. This is how Juan understood his prison must be in a populated area even though from the window all he saw was a small field surrounded by a high wall, and above it, the rise of the Andes in the distance. And it was on those mountain peaks, that charcoal open sky of equatorial dusk, and on that smell of rain on grass and trees, that Juan meditated for two or three minutes until he was sent back to the hard edges and walls and darkness.
We’d smoked the last of the cigarettes and had been listening to the radio so long the station was repeating songs for the third and fourth time. Even the street had gone quiet. Juan’s narrow lids were drooping; he rested his head on an elbow propped along the back of the couch, his body turned to me from his end while I leaned against the opposite armrest.
I stood up, went to my bedroom, and returned with a pillow. I pulled a spare blanket, one I only ever use in winter, from a closet and placed it on the cushion beside him.
“You can sleep here. It’s a good couch. People like it.”
He gave me a tired smile and nodded as if he’d known this is where we were headed all along. I said good night and went to my room without turning back. I locked the door behind me but stood by the wall that separated us for a while listening for movement, but there was nothing.
That night, I slept. It didn’t happen right away. I lay on my bed, my spine resisting the flatness of the mattress. I pulled the blanket over me, pushed it off, then pulled it back on, over my shoulders and head to block out the white streetlights streaking through the blinds and across the walls and ceiling. My face grew hot, so I pushed the blanket back down around my waist, wondering what I would have done in Juan’s place, if held captive, if upon being freed my absence would have made my family and friends love me more.
Sometimes I sat at a table with my parents and brother, surrounded by the circus hum of a crowded restaurant, hating that they could not see into me. They’d ask why I was so serious all the time, why so quiet, tell jokes to provoke me to smile. It wasn’t their fault, really, that particular blindness. But I couldn’t explain. It would break them to know they’d protected me with their lives and failed.
Juan said his parents had prayed to la Virgen del Socorro to protect him so when he was released they made him promise to name any future daughter after her to show his gratitude. But during captivity, despite having prayed more than ever before, he’d become a complete atheist. His girlfriend didn’t care to keep the promise either. So when their daughter was born they’d named her Azul, simply because it was their favorite color, and his mother cried for days because they’d given her granddaughter such a meaningless name.
“It’s so easy to break a parent’s heart,” he said. “I keep a distance from my daughter for that very reason. I’m afraid she’ll hurt me the way I’ve hurt my parents. One day I will regret it, I’m sure, but it’s the best I can do for now.”
I don’t know at which point my thoughts turned to dreams. Only that they led me to the hazy consciousness of morning and I realized I had slept more that night with Juan in the next room than I had in months.
* * *
—
It was the last of the summerlike days before the thorny autumn turn toward winter. Juan and I were on a bench on the riverside watching the sunset over New Jersey. The sky, graffitied with purple and fuchsia and smoky blue clouds, reflecting off of the Hudson. It hadn’t rained in days.
For weeks, we’d made a routine of sleeping in the same apartment nearly every night. Mostly at my place, Juan on the sofa, curled on the cushions in his trousers and button-downs, only taking off his shoes but never his socks, and me in my bed, finally inhabiting full hours of rest. A few times, I went to his place for dinner and he allowed me to sleep in the bed while he leaned back in the armchair. Once, I sat up in the early hours of morning and saw him hunched over a pillow on his knees, and told him he could get in the bed too, it was okay with me. But he only shook his head and closed his eyes and somehow went back to sleep.
He told me on one of those nights that after sleeping in the small room where they held him all those months, he could sleep anywhere. He’d trained himself, he said, because sleep was the only escape. Now he could have an equally satisfying slumber on a train, a plane, or even while standing on a street corner and holding his eyes shut for a nap of a minute or two.
He would be leaving for Madrid the next day via a connection through London so as to keep up the lie when his girlfriend arrived to meet him at the airport. We’d spent twenty nights together and I’d never once heard him on the phone with either of his girlfriends or even his daughter. I never even heard his cell phone ring.
He invented these ways to disappear, he said, because he’d learned all those years ago how it felt to be forgotten, and in some perverse way, he’d grown to like it.
When it was dark, we started the walk back to my apartment. He held my hand at times, the length of a block or two. I wondered what passersby thought when they looked at us, what was their immediate impression. A man and a young woman twenty-five years apart, though we shared no resemblance so there was no way we could be father and daughter. And yet there was still a distance between us, a raw awkwardness that never dissipated despite all our shared nights that would make it obvious to anyone that we could not be lovers.
The farewell was not a farewell, really, because he’d planned to come back to New York in late November and I had no plans that would take me anywhere else.
“We’ll see each other again soon,” he said.
We exchanged contact information and it was only when I wrote out my email address for him that I realized I still hadn’t told him my real name.
He wasn’t mad when I confessed. Not even surprised.
“I’ll still call you Sara,” he said, “if that’s okay with you.”
* * *
—
In the ten years since, I have often wondered if any of what Juan told me was true. The taxi secuestro. The months of imprisonment. He could have gathered those details from any news report or documentary about real kidnapping victims. There have been so many.
I couldn’t even be sure the story of the two girlfriends was true. I’d never seen pictures. But then I’d feel bad about my skepticism. He was a man who claimed to have been forced to give proof of his life through an audiocassette with a machine gun aimed at his head, while reciting headlines from that day’s El Tiempo, and recalling the names of his favorite stuffed animals from childhood so his parents would believe it was him.
We never saw each other after that September. November came and I didn’t hear from him. I sat at my computer some nights, running my fingertips over the keyboard, wondering if I should send him a note, but I never did. I could have searched the Internet for archived details of his kidnapping, but neither of us had told the other their last name.
A year later, I left New York. I moved to Miami, where I slept heavily through the night and awoke to the sound of doves outside my window and the aroma of sweet morning dew. Here, it rains often, and I welcome the tropical aguaceros, letting water run over my face, drip off my chin, tasting it on my lips, salty and cool and soothing like bits of ocean. I remembered Juan’s telling me that when he was released and finally returned to the safety of his parents’ home, the first thing he did was go out to the garden and rub dirt on his face, run his hands ove
r the bark of the trees, crush bunches of leaves in his palms, and smell the air, which, while dusty and polluted, was at least not the stale air of that windowless box of a room. He’d lie for hours on his back staring at the open sky, even as allergies and asthma kicked in, and even as police came to interview him over and over about his captors. When it rained, he let himself be soaked, eyes closed, remembering the months he’d had to beg for a shower, when that room he existed in might as well have been a desert. He had never felt freer, he told me, but with night came the cold and he had no choice but to go indoors, where unrelenting panic returned, and it was quickly decided he and his girlfriend should leave for Spain, where his parents and the police agreed they would be safer.
A few years ago, while in Madrid for the wedding of a friend, I sat by a fountain in El Retiro one afternoon and was sure I saw Juan walking by, looking older, thinner, grayer. I followed him several meters but as I approached, I realized it was someone else.
I thought of calling him or writing him, though he’d never done so, but convinced myself that if we were to see each other again, neither of us would have anything to say.
After a recent visit, my mother left some Colombian magazines behind for me on the kitchen table. It’s there, while thumbing through an old issue of Semana, that I recognize a face printed in color on the page. The rest of the spread shows shots of a funeral. Women dressed in black, wearing dark glasses, exiting a church with arms linked. I read that the funeral is for a man named Juan who died of a pulmonary embolism while vacationing in Marbella. The photos of the mourners are captioned with the names of his parents, his longtime companion, and his daughter, Azul, now sixteen.
The article says that despite having made his home in Spain for the last twenty years, it was the wish of his family that Juan’s body be returned to Colombia for burial.
The O. Henry Prize Stories 100th Anniversary Edition (2019) Page 22
