I zip up my pants and stagger to my feet. Everyone else in camp is still asleep in the makeshift tents, plastic tarps hung over branches. From where I’ve been squatting over the latrine trench I can see how we’re scattered over the hillside, hidden from the sight of any military aircraft in the tangled overgrowth of coffee and papaya trees. The sun hasn’t come up yet, the sky is still water-colored, so for now there are no bugs buzzing against my face, and everyone’s boots lined up outside their tents are shiny from last night’s rain.
—You could have told me somehow, you know.
Fuck off!
—You could have found a way.
I do a quick supply check while listening to the radio. Lanterns. Blankets. Plastic tarp. Ants the size of beetles crawl over my hand as I count the ammunition. Battered packets of antibiotics. Moldy rope. A knife. We’ll bury equipment today to make marching faster; in two days’ time the daily rations will be reduced to cans of sardines and blocks of panela sugar. Machete. Black garbage bag. A single plastic spoon. It’s not raining, but it’s still cold enough to make me shiver: the kind of dank, sticky jungle morning cold that I can never get used to, even after five years out here. Sweatpants. Spare shoelaces. And last of all the beret, which I pull over my head as tight as I can.
I sling the pack on and stand up. Not bad. Could be heavier, could be worse. The radio announcer is saying there was one dead, one wounded on the army’s side in Saturday’s clash. Casualties on our side are still being estimated but range between six and nine.
—Hey. Did you know with that pack on, you look like a turtle?
I shrug the pack off immediately; it lands with a squelch in the porridgelike mud. I sit down on it and shuffle off my boots, peeling off my socks to examine the white spongy growths on my feet. They burn when I poke them and smell faintly of salt. Slowly flexing my toes back and forth, I carefully go over the steps of our overall strategy. Listing them calmly, mechanically, just like an alien would, or a robot. An alien robot.
Top priorities: Get our strength back. Contact local peasants to guarantee us food for five to six days. Send some weapons ahead in a peasant’s truck to lighten the load, if possible. Keep our presence a secret. Identify the scout from Putumayo who claims to be an herbalist; have him make poultices for the wounded. Clean the wounds that are infected. Those who died during the night—bury them in a well-hidden place by the river so that neither the soldiers nor animals can find them.
—Jesus, you stink. Gross. What’s that nickname that everyone calls you behind your back—Comandante Piggy? Or are they still calling you Blondie?
Reinforce sentries. Punish anyone who fell asleep during last night’s guard duty. Double-check rations. Our most urgent tasks remain unchanged, for two months and counting: Reestablish contact. Recruit combatants. Above all else: Stay strong.
—So you’re just going to ignore me? Seriously? You think you can cut me out that easily? Like Stephanie and Betsy and La Flaca and all the rest?
I yank my socks up my ankles as brusquely as I can, jam my feet back into the boots.
—You could have told me if you wanted to. But you didn’t.
Go away. Please.
—They were laughing at me, all of them, and you didn’t do a thing.
Could you leave me alone for once? For today? For five minutes?
—Do you ever think about it? What about on your very first day—when they handed you a pair of black rubber boots with yellow bottoms? Like you were a common peasant, wading around in the mud, instead of a future hot-shit commander?
God. Five years ago now. First day in the jungle, first day of training camp—
—Your first day at school. It was eighth grade and I was chewing on the tip of my braid when you came in. You were led through the door of Mr. B’s classroom by Sebastián, your assigned buddy for the day, and one of the volleyball team girls immediately covered her mouth with her hands and started giggling, exchanging glances with her friends as though already thrilled by the idea of having a new boy in the classroom. It was Katrina, or maybe Stephanie—the one whose fruit-colored thong always peeked out the top of her blue jeans, mango or raspberry or lime. You pulled the last empty chair back and its high-pitched screech against the floor gave me goosebumps, while Mr. B went on talking about Laertes’s sword fight with Hamlet like it was no big deal, whatever, we had new kids on scholarships come join us all the time.
We knew you were on a scholarship right away. We knew because your skin was the same coffee-candy color of our maids and chauffeurs and gardeners—not like ours, peach-pale tan, the shade of makeup always on display in the front rack at the mall. But your hair was blond. Not brunette-blond like Katrina in the front row, intensely raising her hand to Mr. B’s every question, focused on getting the best grades possible for the academic transcript she’d mail to the prestigious boarding school in Switzerland. Not even a white-blond like Mr. B, who was scribbling the chalk furiously across the blackboard. You were a dirty blond, the color of the scorched grass in August after being burnt for months by the sun. It always confused me: How could you be so blond and still be on a scholarship? It wasn’t even until the end of class that Mr. B finally turned to you, stroking that epic beard of his, and said, Good morning, now why don’t you go ahead and tell us your name?
“Good morning, comandante,” the cook says. I’m sitting on a flat rock next to the fire, watching as he makes coffee. He holds the wooden spoon in a tight clamp with his only hand, the left one: His right shirtsleeve is empty, safety-pinned up high on his shoulder. I know for a fact that he’s barely in his early twenties—almost the same age as me—but his face (like all our faces) is that of a tiny old man, shriveled by sunshine, bitter river water, tinned food twice a day.
The two lieutenants are also up and about by now: mustaches carefully groomed, owl-eye spectacles clean from splashes of water. They’re standing downhill by the river, fiddling with the skinny antennas of their walkie-talkies. Their skin is the same color as mine, but their hair is dark and thick, as if someone scribbled on the top of their skulls with a pen, not leaving a single white spot.
“Here,” the cook says, handing over a tin cup filled with just enough coffee to cover the bottom. “Just like home. Better than anything you’d get in Cali.” He smiles broadly.
“I’m not from Cali,” I say, in a voice that sounds too loud, even to me.
The cook blinks. His empty shirtsleeve sways as he takes a step back.
“Is that what people say?” I say. “That I’m from Cali? That’s funny. Why on earth would I be from there? Ha-ha-ha.”
He looks away.
“I’m from right here,” I say, gesturing around me toward the tents, the river, the trees dotting the mountains like iguana scales.
He stares intently into the pot. He’s from around Pasto himself, his family killed by paramilitaries for electing a former insurgent as mayor. Or maybe it was the army that did it. Or the police. I can’t remember.
The lieutenants have adjusted the antennas by now and are walking uphill toward us. They’re coming to ask me about our plan, our goals and objectives for the day. The second they get here, I’ll say, “Let’s do this,” before they even have a chance to open their mouths.
I’m always the one who gets asked. I’m the one who knows what he’s doing.
—You knew what you were doing. I could tell, that time in world history when you took the lighter from the football team boys. They were passing it among themselves, giggling and trying to keep it hidden from Ms. Márquez, testing to see who could hold their finger in the flame the longest before shouting Puta madre! and yanking their hand back. I didn’t move when they tapped the lighter on my shoulder, bringing the flame close to my arm, and somebody, maybe Álvaro, said, What do you think fat smells like when it’s burning? And somebody else, maybe Katrina, said, No, no, you’ll get in trouble. I was trying not to watch, but somehow I knew when to raise my eyes and see when they placed the lighter in your hands
. You held it in your palm for a second, as though testing to see how heavy it was. But when you flicked it on, it wasn’t your finger hovering above the flame. We all stared. I pulled my braid out of my mouth. In the back of the room somebody (maybe Stephanie) sucked in her breath and said, Ave Maria! Under my breath I said, What the freaking heck. You were sticking your tongue out, pink and steady, the orange flame licking underneath. A second went by, then another one, and another. You slammed the lighter against the table with a sound as loud and definitive as a geography textbook getting banged shut and Ms. Márquez looked up from her desk and said, Yes, Martin? Can I help you? You shook your head back and forth, and even though your eyes were watery we could all see how wide you were grinning. I’m good, miss, you said. I couldn’t help myself. I tried to cover my mouth with my hand but I wasn’t fast enough; the laughter streamed out. Ms. Márquez said, Mariela, that’s enough. That’s when you looked at me, and I looked right back. A few minutes later she asked if everyone had a partner for the Interview a Historical Figure project, and when you raised your hand and said, I need one, you were looking right at me.
I’m looking right at it: the abandoned farmhouse sitting on the hill’s highest point. Creeping vines heavy with yellow flowers grow out of the collapsed wall, and when the next batch of coffee is ready that’s where we’ll head. A few people will drink while standing, leaning against the wall and staring at the surrounding mountains, but most will sit cross-legged on the dirt with their heads bowed, prodding at the parasite scars on their arms. On the lower side of the wall somebody has painstakingly written one of my most famous quotes, spray-painted in streaky black letters: Friends, are you ready to pulverize the enemies of us, the people? We’ll share cigarettes and maybe a bit of powdered milk if someone has a crumpled packet jammed deep inside a pocket somewhere. As the sun continues to rise, there’ll be government observation planes droning overhead, but none of us will move: As long as we stay inside the farmhouse or under the thick overgrowth, we can’t be seen. There’ll be no meat today, but depending on how morale seems over the next couple of hours, I’ll tell the cook to redesign my original rationing schedule. We’ll assign groups of six—no, eight—a single can of sardines.
—We were assigned William Wallace and Eleanor of Aquitaine. I have an idea, you said, do you have a video camera? I snuck it out of my father’s bedroom and stuffed it into my backpack as fast as possible so that the maid wouldn’t catch me, my heart pounding hard. You said we could work at your house, because you had a lot of younger cousins and we could get them to play the role of the Second Crusade and Scottish army. We took a city bus to get there, one of the blue and red ones that roar down the streets spewing thick clouds of black exhaust. I’d never been on a bus before and I didn’t want to tell you that, didn’t want you to guess how nervous I was, but maybe you knew anyway when I had to ask you, How much does it cost? and you said, Thirteen-year-olds go for free before five. I pushed the rusty turnstile with my hands and you pushed it with your hips, same as the other passengers. As we rattled along the road, you talked calmly about your last school, in the village with the famous marketplace; how the soccer field was just a strip of yellow dust and sometimes it’d get so cloudy you couldn’t even tell where the ball was, how instead of textbooks you had stapled packets of blurry photocopies, and I kept nodding, making noises I hoped sounded unsurprised. As we walked up the steep hill, passing under the lines of white laundry flapping between the windows, we passed a little girl hitting another girl over the head with an empty soda bottle and you said, Linda, stop that or I’ll tell your mother. You stopped in front of a house made out of orange-red brick with a tin roof and took a pair of jangly keys out of your backpack. You live here? I almost said, but was able to stop myself in time. The inside of your house was cool and dark and there wasn’t any furniture in the hallway. You said, I have to feed Lassie, and I watched you shake out a bag of pork rinds onto a plate and put it on the floor in front of a scabby Dalmatian. You said, That’s his favorite.
We sat down on a wooden bench in a stuffy room with only one fan, which rattled violently. You said, So who would you rather be, William or Eleanor, and I said, Either is fine. There was a framed photograph next to the Virgin Mary candle on the table: A short, dark-haired woman stood behind a birthday cake, wearing an apron. A brown-haired girl with light skin had her arms wrapped around the woman’s waist. Even though the candles were all lit up and glowing, the woman’s eyes were serious, mouth flat, expressionless. I asked, Who’s that lady? You said, That’s my mother. I kept looking at the brown-haired girl, then at the woman. I said, Is your mother here right now? You didn’t say anything, and then you said, If we go into my cousin’s room, we can put on costumes. The room was strewn with clothes and smelled like sour milk, and you dropped your backpack on top of a mattress on the floor in the corner. You picked a stiff white dress off the floor, the kind a girl would wear to First Communion, and I tensed up, already dreading the struggle to get my arms through the tight sleeves, but instead you pressed it against your chest and said, Perfect. At first I thought you were kidding, but the way your eyes darted quickly over to me told me that you weren’t. Then you let the dress drop slowly to the floor. You reached for a stick that was propped up against the wall, a broom with no bristles. What do you need that for? I said. You looked at me and smiled. This isn’t a broomstick, you said. It’s a sword.
We spent all afternoon filming our project. As William Wallace you were perfect, leading the Scottish army into battle, charging furiously across the living room, sword raised high. As Eleanor of Aquitaine I was prim but effective, shaking hands with you in order to seal our unbreakable alliance against the English. We invented our own history, something that had nothing to do with time lines and facts and geography. I mostly held the camera while you directed the dialogue. You especially liked the way I zoomed in and out like crazy during the battle sequences, just like that part in Saving Private Ryan. You said, Nice job. You said, If you have any money, we can order pizza. I ate six slices and you had four. When I went into the kitchen to get cups, I saw a giant metal bowl sitting in the sink encrusted with fish scales and rimmed with milk. It smelled terrible, as though it’d been sitting there for days. When the chauffeur came to pick me up, the sun had almost set but you were still the only one home. You said, We are going to get the best grade.
After Morning Drills and Weapon Cleaning is Lecture Time. The recruits sit on the ground while I lean against the ceiba tree, arms crossed behind my head, listening to the lieutenant with the owl glasses. I have to turn my right ear toward him, the left one half-deaf from a long-ago grenade. The lieutenant is saying words that sound like his but I know are really mine; they’ve been said so many different times, in so many different press releases and official statements, that now they sound like they could be anybody’s.
“We are revolutionaries,” he says. He paces, boots crusty with mud. “Fighting for socialism. The paramilitary assassins of the so-called government try to paint us as nothing more than drug traffickers, but of course we can expect nothing better from them.” The recruits are sitting up straight, hands clasped neatly in laps. They are hanging on to his every word—my words. “We know that we are fighting for justice,” he continues. “To overthrow the oligarchy, just as our liberator, Simón Bolívar, did. Ours is a legitimate struggle against oppression.”
I rip a strand of grass out of the ground and twirl it by my face, brushing my lips.
He says, “The other important thing to remember is that we’re like priests. Celibate, but not because we want to be.” (This statement always gets a snigger, especially among the new recruits.) “Poor, but not because of vows. And obedient, but not because of God.” His eyes are getting wider behind his spectacles, like a teacher getting swept away by his own lecture. “We must be priestlike—because of the war and the massacres. Because of what the oligarchy has done and continues to do to our mothers and our families.”
He doe
sn’t say the next part, because I’ve never spoken it out loud to anyone: Once a priest, always a priest. But a priest can leave the church and not be killed. Even the paramilitaries can go back to being ordinary citizens. But us? It’ll never happen. They’ll never forgive us, so we’ll never forgive them. What’s the point?
He keeps going, my words sounding both familiar and strange as they leave his mouth. He says things like “The best food is hunger.” He says, “If you don’t work, you don’t eat,” and “You have to fuck them first before they fuck you.” He says, “After the revolution,” in the same flat tone of voice I used earlier when somebody asked me, “What time is it?” and I said, “It’s almost ten o’clock.” He says, “The task of Simón Bolívar has yet to be completed,” like it’s a homework assignment. Every once in a while one of the new recruits fidgets, but for the most part everybody is silent, listening. The best classroom behavior ever.
I bite down on the blade of grass and let the other half flutter to the ground. He doesn’t say, At least we pay better than the paramilitaries, right? He doesn’t say, So many acronyms to choose from: FARC, ELN, EPL, even the paramilitaries (AUC) and the army (FFAA) got in on the action, so you might as well choose us. And he definitely doesn’t say, In any case, desertion will result in automatic execution. Without exception.
I lean my head back against the trunk and close my eyes.
—We started sitting next to each other at the wooden picnic tables during lunch and watching the volleyball team girls, the football player boys. You said, Do you think those girls eat anything besides mango Popsicles and tiny bags of salt? and I crumpled the bag of Doritos I was holding into a tight ball in my fist so that no one would see it was my second and said, Who cares, they’re all idiots anyway. You sat next to me in art class when we were making figures with wire and pliers and asked me what I was making, and I said, A virus, you? You said, A cow. I sat next to you in English class when we had to interview someone about My Hero from History. I said, Kafka, and you said, Mary Magdalene. In biology class we had to list the different steps of blood circulation through the heart, and you said, Forget lists, they’re dumb, let’s write an epic poem instead. You even made it rhyme. In world history when you went to the bathroom, Stephanie waved a torn-out magazine photo of a famous chubby soap opera star in front of my face and said, Look, Fatty, it’s your boyfriend! But when you came back into the room she whipped it away as fast as anything, like it had never happened. After eating lunch we’d sit on the grass by the football field, or in the hallways leaning against the lockers. You’d sit with your legs sticking straight out in front of you and arms crossed behind your head, and I’d write your name on your shoe with a Liquid Paper pen, coloring it in carefully with different colored markers. In third grade I was famous for having the best bubble handwriting out of anybody, and everybody would pass me their notebooks and ask me to write the title of their assignments, saying, Do me next, do me! After finishing your name on your shoe I did mine, our initials the same letter. Wow, you said when I finished, I’ve been labeled. I burned you a CD of my favorite songs, PJ Harvey and Nine Inch Nails and the Clash, and you said, I liked how the songs didn’t have any choruses, and also how they sounded like Satan. We argued about Titanic (you loved it, I didn’t). I said it was sentimental, commercial, Hollywood crap, historically inaccurate rubbish. You said, Well, sometimes all that really matters is a good ending. You had this way of laughing where it sounded like you were just saying the words aloud, Ha-ha-ha.
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