by Noel Hynd
A sweet sixteen-year-old girl named Paulina, the niece of one of the boat guides, had accepted Christianity. She was a very plain girl with mocha skin and dark hair that she wore pulled back. She had delicate brown eyes and worked small miracles with the granite, making boldly carved crosses onto circular stones. Paulina’s designs were the best of any village girl. They sold well as far away as Ciudad Guyana, Alex learned.
The first time Alex saw one of the Paulina’s works, she gasped at how skilled the artistry was. It was akin to hearing a gifted child sit down and play Mozart on the piano.
In reaction, Alex’s hand subconsciously went to her neck where her father’s gold cross had been for many years.
Paulina giggled.
“Why did you do that? You’re not wearing anything at your neck,” she asked.
“I used to. But I lost it,” Alex said.
“Oh.”
Alex grinned and selected one of the girl’s pieces. It was a flat round stone, graying pink, slightly smaller than an old American fifty-cent piece, but twice as thick. The cross had been carefully cut into the center of the stone. The stone was heavy for a piece of jewelry but had a slight hole at the top where a fine strand of leather was threaded through.
Alex put it on right away.
“It will protect you,” the girl said engagingly.
“Of course it will,” Alex said. Impetuously, she hugged the child. The asking price was less than fifty cents American. Alex gave the girl the equivalent of five dollars. Then she bought two smaller ones for friends back home.
The stone crosses were, Alex reasoned, the perfect souvenirs of her stay at Barranco Lajoya. For some reason, it made her feel complete again, as if she had found something that had been missing. Even when bathing in the river, even when washing her hair in the river with the coarse Mexican soap, it was the one thing she never removed.
A fifth week passed. Then a sixth.
She thought of Robert many times during these days, his smile, his sense of humor, his kindness, his body, his warmth. She still was resentful for one aspect of her life, angry with God so to speak, over Robert’s abrupt departure from this world, without even a word of farewell. How could that have been in the plan of an almighty and forgiving God?
But she mentioned this to no one. Being so far away from her normal life, all her past experiences, allowed her to think, to put things in perspective, to turn new emotional corners.
Curiously, she also realized that she had no remorse about the men she had shot and presumably killed in Kiev while defending herself. She kept all of this locked up inside her, and went about her daily business in her remote venue, even while no answers were coming forth for Mr. Collins. She had been sent here to observe, to develop a theory about who would want these indigenous people off their land and want the missionaries gone. She had by now spent several weeks studying the area from the ground, from the air, and occasionally by water. And there were no suggestions of anything amiss.
She began to wonder if she had made this trip for nothing.
SIXTY-EIGHT
T hen there were the events of late July.
They began when the young girl, Paulina, who had sold Alex her new pendant, had traveled halfway down the mountain path one morning with two other girls. The three girls came running back in terror around noon.
Alex was one of the first to see them. “?De que se trata? ” Alex asked the breathless girls. “? Quien es? ” What’s this about? Who is it? A group from the village gathered, including the missionaries.
The girls explained. “Strange men,” Paulina said. “A whole band of them!”
“? Donde estan? ” Alex asked. Where are they?
“At the clearing. Halfway down the mountain,” said a second girl, trembling with fright. The men, the girls said when they came breathlessly back to the village, were heavily armed and had threatened them. They had tried to capture the youngest and prettiest of the three girls, but the girls had run.
“? Quantos? ” Alex asked. How many men?
Maybe a dozen of them, the girls answered. Men they had never seen before, at one of the clearings. Men who had no good business in this area.
“? Cazadores??Banditos??Soldados? ” Alex pressed. Hunters? Bandits? Soldiers?
“?No se, no se! ” Paulina said, starting to cry. The girls couldn’t tell. They only knew enough to be frightened of this band of outsiders.
“Did they follow you?” Alex asked.
“No,” Paulina said. “They looked like they were scouting. They didn’t follow.”
Alex embraced Paulina and turned to the men of Barranco Lajoya. “We should go have a look,” she said.
Several men from the village went into their homes. They emerged with rifles and an array of handguns. Alex went back to her own hut and strapped the holster with the Beretta around her waist. The pistol hung on her right side. She tucked an extra clip of bullets in her pocket. She brought a canteen of water, also, as well as a compact pair of binoculars.
A group of angry men waited for her when she emerged. They looked at her oddly.
“You are going with us?” one of them questioned. “? Una mujer? ” A woman?
“I’m going with you,” she said steadfastly in Spanish. “?Claro! ?Si!?Una mujer! ”
The men looked at each other, then nodded, all in accord. There were no further questions. They brought with them every rifle in Barranco Lajoya.
In a burning sun, they went back down the mountain to take a look. Paulina went along, staying close to Alex. They tried to find the place where the strange group of intruders had been seen.
Alex expected the worst. Her heart was like a drumbeat as the group from the village descended the rugged mountain trail. She wondered whether this event would throw some light on what she had been sent here to discover. She wondered what Robert would have thought if he could have seen her here now with these people. He would have been proud of her, she thought to herself.
After a march of half an hour, they found the spot where the girls had seen the men. “They were here,” Paulina said. But no one was there now, other than the party from the village.
Alex stepped slightly off the path near the clearing. She examined the thick underbrush. It had recently been trampled, but that indicated nothing. She looked for other signs of human activity, food wrappers, cigarettes, bullet casings, but found nothing.
“There were men here. I swear,” Paulina said to Alex.
Alex placed a hand on the girl’s shoulder. “ Yo se. Te creo,” she answered. I know. I believe you.
A moment later, there was a sudden noise in the brush about fifty feet away. Reflexively, Alex’s hand went to her pistol. She drew it and instinctively went down to one knee. The men of the village turned toward the sound with their rifles. And then a wild ram emerged slowly from a thicket. The beast looked at them in contempt, chewing on something, then turned its head and disappeared.
Alex put her gun back into its holster.
“We shouldn’t return home until we’ve had a thorough look around,” she said.
There was agreement. The group from the village split in two and followed two paths that led away from the clearing, about a dozen individuals in each group. They searched the area, found vantage points that allowed them to look across clearings up and down the mountain. At her locations, when she could, Alex used her binoculars to scan in every direction. But she saw nothing.
The two groups made a rendezvous back at the larger clearing an hour later, hot and exhausted. The blazing summer sun was starting to sink in the sky by this time. Alex glanced at her watch. It was past 5:00 p.m.
The search party returned to the village without a shot fired. Several men had the nagging suspicion that for whatever reason the teenage girls had made up a tall tale.
Alex quickly grew tired of listening to them. Quietly, she slipped away from everyone and disappeared to a secluded cove in the river with a change of clothing. She wanted to bathe and
wash the day’s sweat from her body as well as rinse the shorts, T-shirt, and underwear she had worn that day. Alone and undressed, she was careful to go only knee deep in the water and keep her pistol within quick reach on the riverbank.
She washed quickly, herself and her clothes, then stepped out of the water, dried off, and dressed in a clean shirt and shorts. Her only witnesses were a flock of noisy parrots who kept her company overhead. She welcomed the presence of the birds, as they formed a primitive sentry system. She had already learned that the birds’ chatter changed when strangers approached.
In the evening, after dinner, the men from the search party grumbled loudly about the hike down the mountain. They didn’t feel the story Paulina and her friends had told was reliable. Later, many of them buried their complaints in warm beer on an outdoor patio.
Alex could hear them and understand them as she lay on her own foam mattress, reading a novel in Spanish by Isabel Allende by the light from two candles.
Alex wasn’t so sure that the girls had made up their story. Why would they? And the trampled underbrush suggested larger bodies, and several of them.
Alex had fallen into the habit of sleeping in her clothing, except for the socks and shoes. She also kept her pistol loaded and at her bedside.
Tonight was no exception. Yet the night was calm, the darkness deep in the jungle around the small enclave. The only noise, distantly, were the normal jungle sounds of the feral creatures that lived by night. And the only sounds nearby were the occasional mutterings of some of the village men, slumped on front doorsteps drunk on guarapo, the local cane-sugar liquor.
SIXTY-NINE
M any of the residents of the Barranco Lajoya left each morning before dawn to make the long trek down the mountain. A jitney, a rusting old minivan with missing windows, would pick them up at daybreak at the base where Manuel had parked his Jeep. The van would take them to either the nearby ranch or a more distant one where they would work in the fields of sugar cane. There they worked for the equivalent of three dollars a day, plus a lunch of beans and rice. This they would do seven days a week for ten hours a day in the torrential subtropical rainy seasons of the winter as well as the sweltering heat of the summer. These were the lucky ones.
The ranchers also owned some of the water rights in the area, excluding the native people from one of their few resources, except in the higher elevations. The people here were used to having nothing and expecting nothing. So when missionaries came in, they were grateful but knew the generosity could end any day and their schools and minimal clinics could disappear. It had been this way for as long as anyone could remember. The armies of Spain had come through in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and had tortured and crushed everyone. Bolivar, el libertador, had lived at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth and had managed to create an independence based on the ideals of the American independence. Now everything in Venezuela was still named after Bolivar. You even paid with a Bolivar if you had any money. But for three quarters of the people, nothing had really changed. There remained poverty and oppression. The people learned not to complain. Once again, the little that these people had could disappear with no warning.
“A couple of years ago,” Father Martin said one evening, “there was an incident at another village named Barranco Yopal.” Martin spoke as he shared a fish dinner by candlelight with the other resident missionaries inside the church. “President Chavez ordered a Christian missionary group working with indigenous tribes to leave the country. They were mostly American from a group based in Florida.”
“Why did Chavez want them out?” Alex asked.
Father Martin laughed ruefully and shook his head. “Chavez accused the missionaries of ‘imperialist infiltration’ and links to the CIA.”
“Was there any truth to it?” she asked.
“No, Chavez was being a demagogue,” the priest said. “The missionaries at Barranco Yopal were dedicated people. They spent several years living among the tribes in order to learn the language, creating a written form for it, and translating the Bible into it. Then they taught Christianity to the people. The missionaries brought along their families. Their kids grew among the native children and didn’t interfere with native culture. All they wanted to do was bring Christ and the Word of God to the people. They dedicated years of their lives to this. Then Chavez turned up one day with his military uniform and his red beret and held a ceremony to denounce ‘colonialism.’ He presented property titles to several indigenous groups. He gave them title to land that they had been on anyway. Title to something that they already had. He came off as a hero and, in truth, hadn’t really done anything.”
Around the table, people shook their heads.
“Chavez accused the missionaries of building luxurious camps next to poor Indian villages,” Father Martin continued. “He accused them of circumventing Venezuelan customs authorities as they freely flew in and out on private planes. The missionaries had built their own compound, but it was hardly luxurious. And they flew their own aircraft in and out so that their supplies wouldn’t be stolen. The most efficient thieves in any South American country are the customs officials, the police, and the army.”
One of the female missionaries at the table, a nurse from Toronto, chipped in. “There are people who resent us for philosophical reasons,” she said. “In primitive societies, there’s no separation of religion and the rest of the society. We are among people who for centuries have followed rituals intended to make the corn grow, bring rain, and remain healthy. The people who criticize us claim that by bringing Christianity to them, even if we leave their own rituals alone, we’ve rendered meaningless the core of the native culture.”
“But we’re here to help them,” someone said.
“All cultures are in transition,” Father Martin added. “We feel we’ve given them something new and joyous.”
“We’re accused of acting the same way the Spaniards and Catholic Church did with less remote Indians when the conquistadores came through,” the nurse said.
“Except the Spaniards and the Catholic Church didn’t try to bring them electricity and health care,” another missionary chipped in.
There was laughter.
“It’s incredible,” Father Martin said. “As soon as you try to bring these people anything, people try to stop you, to take it away. Why?”
Alex had no answer. To the obvious next question of who was undercutting the missionaries’ work there, there remained no easy answer, either.
Leaving dinner that night, Alex watched a group of men assembled on the edge of the field that was contiguous to the village. The men were watching their children, teenage boys for the most part, compete in a soccer game in the dying daylight.
Despite the efforts on the missionaries, everyone she saw was destined for a life of poverty. These men would work in the distant fields, swelter in the sunshine and the humidity, and barely get by day to day, grateful for any small crumbs from life’s table.
She went to bed fitfully that night. Very early the next morning, in the midst of a pleasant dream, she awoke to the staccato sound of gunfire.
The little village of Barranco Lajoya was under attack.
SEVENTY
A lex threw off the mosquito netting that covered her and sprang to her feet. She grabbed her gun belt, which had both her Beretta and her knife hitched to it. She strapped it over her hiking shorts. She shoved her feet into her boots without bothering with socks and went quickly to the window of her hut.
It was just past dawn. She could hear a terrible commotion but couldn’t see it. There was sporadic gunfire and people screaming.
She saw people of the village running in every direction, fleeing into the woods.
She drew her Beretta. Then she moved quickly to her door, opened it slightly, saw that it was safe to leave, and stepped out. The commotion was coming from the center of the village. She headed toward it, her weapon aloft, moving along the wall of
the church.
Screaming became louder. Voices pleading. People fleeing past her. She reached the corner and looked around it.
At first she thought that a gang of bandits had invaded. When she looked closer, a greater fear coursed through her. These were soldiers of some paramilitary organization, some local militia, she guessed. Maybe they were the men the girls had seen on the mountain. There was no way of knowing.
There must have been a dozen of them, just that Alex could see. Everything was happening too fast, too chaotically. It was Kiev all over again, except this time in Spanish, in the heat, and just after dawn.
More shouts and screams. The gunmen wore masks. They fired rifles and pistols into the air. They were using clubs and huge sledgehammers to strike at houses and structures. Residents, some of them barely clad, fled into the woods around the village.
Then she saw some of the gunmen drag Father Martin and his family out of their residence. Father Martin’s hands were raised and he looked terrified. He was pleading with the invaders. They kept yelling at him.
“? Donde esta? ” their leader screamed to Father Martin. “? Donde? ?Donde??Donde? ”
Where, where, where? They wanted to know where something was. Something they wanted. They threw Father Martin to the ground. He shook his head. Whatever the secret was, he wasn’t telling. They let his family flee.
They meant to kill him.
A local boy came out of a hut with a rifle to defend the priest, and the attackers shot him from two different directions. When a woman came to the door behind him, his mother, she too was dropped by gunfire.
Alex watched transfixed, her horror so deep that she could barely assimilate what was happening. But she pinpointed the gunmen who had shot the boy and his mother.