by María Ospina
“I’m going to stop you here for a moment, Marcela. I’d like to know if this diary actually exists. It wasn’t clear in our first interview.”
“No. In the end, I didn’t write a word. Imagine keeping notes on a trek like that. But I’ve got the diary right here in my head, clear as day, and I think that’s maybe even better.”
Marcela remembers a novel she hasn’t read but that she’s been told about in detail. It’s about a poet who gets lost in the jungle and leaves behind a long manuscript about the violence and exploitation he witnessed on the rubber plantations of the Amazon. The woman Marcela had been ordered to care for back there had told her everything that happened in the book over the course of a week. She said it was her favorite novel. Whenever she’d beg them to give her something to read, she’d insist on that book. The commander would snap at her, “What do you think this is, a library?” Until Marcela talked to the higher-ups and managed to get her a Marxist pamphlet, a Bible, and a textbook on Colombian geography, which the two of them later read and discussed. “The problem is that novels aren’t made for the jungle,” the woman said to her one day. Marcela hadn’t understood why she was laughing.
“The novel is called The Vortex, miss. I don’t remember the author’s name, but he’s famous. Could you tell me where I can buy a copy?”
The editor promises to get her one. Marcela goes on reading the heavily edited manuscript.
I carried a notebook with me for many years there from the start. I’d draw things in it (I’ve loved to draw, ever since I was a little girl), jot down important dates like birthdays or when I lost someone close to me, start letters to my mom or my sisters, and write poems. I was going to leave it as a keepsake with Erika, my best friend back there, like a sister or something, that’s what she was, but in the end I decided to bring it with me on this last trip adventure. They say It seems Erika deserted, too, but some people say she died in combat in Nariño. That’s something I’ll figure out, now that I’m here. If she’s alive, I’ve got to find her.
So, yeah, All those years, I was dying wanted to send letters to my mom and my sisters. But I never did. The only letter I sent dispatched in all that time was to high command, to request some special medical tests because I wasall skin and bones had lost a lot of weight and was getting weaker by the day. That was about four years after I joined, when I was about to turn twenty. The commander told me it was nothing, that I just needed to eat more. But I was eating fine and still losing weight, right, and my legs were always shaky. And So they sent me to Villavicencio, to a house they have for medical treatment, and they ran tests on me and said, like, you have diagnosed me with a thyroid problem. I wrote a lot while I was shut in there. Can you imagine? They’d left me lying there in a city I didn’t know, and my only company was in the care of a woman who barely spoke and only came upstairs to bring me food. There was nothing there but, like, a television and an annoying rooster that crowed nonstop down in the garden. It was terrible.
Back then, I had a little dog. She took a shine to me in a settlement near Miraflores. I loved her to pieces. But then when she’d been with me a year the fighting started up again nearby and we had to break camp. I left her with some folks from Mocuare. It broke my heart to leave her behind, I was a wreck. I even wrote her a letter, I wrote to a few of the dogs from when I was a kid. I swear to God, though, one day I’ll go back for her.
Marcela looks up from the paper but avoids the editor’s eyes. Then she goes on reading.
Being shut in like that for two weeks was what made me so desperate to contact my mother and my sisters Nubia and Zenaida, and say to tell them I was okay, even though it had been a long time since they’d heard from me. I think I wanted them to know I was here, I mean, living in this world, close to them alive. I was always worried that they would get used to the idea I was dead or lost my absence, like happens to so many families who get used to it and that’s that. I didn’t want them to bury me in their minds. I wrote them a really long letter, and I swear I meant to send it to them but then I tore the pages out of my notebook and burned them. I knew there was no way they’d let me we weren’t allowed to contact our families under any circumstances. They’d caught Katy and Edwin, two of my comrades friends from training, early on, and the punishment was rough severe.
Marcela sets the last printed page at the top of the stack of paper on the desk. The editor raises her eyebrows, waiting for her approval.
“It’s fine. You know, I remember when I burned that letter—I remember wanting to mix the ashes in a glass of water and swallow them. But instead I threw them out the window to see if the rooster would eat them and hold onto the memory for me.”
She laughs. The editor does not.
“Was that the first time you lived in a city?”
“Yes, but I barely saw any of it. As soon as I got better, they sent me back to the camp. My dad took me to Cúcuta once when I was little, but I don’t remember it.”
“Perfect. I’m going to add in a few sentences explaining that. Too bad you didn’t keep any of those papers, Marcela. Imagine being able to include reproductions of your words in this book, written in your own hand, to underscore how heroic it was that you were writing from the jungle. So. You approve my edits to this section, Marcela?”
“Yes, miss. I approve.”
“Next week, when the transcript is ready, we’ll go over the details of your forced recruitment. That needs to be a separate chapter and should come before what we reviewed today.”
“I signed up, no one forced me. You can’t change that part.”
“All right. You can tell me all about it next time.”
Night is falling when she steps into the street. Between two buildings she catches sight of the mountain tangled in clouds. A fog of uneasiness settles over her skin, and she doesn’t know where she can go to scrub it off. The editor had told her from the start that they would cut and change much of the original transcription. They’d even made her sign a consent form. But she’d rather not witness the crossing out and cutting and condensing, so she’s decided to keep a few things to herself. She won’t mention her silent devotion to the birds she studied for years, how she deciphered their rituals and migration patterns, drew them in her notebook, invented names for them. Or how she would imagine what they saw from up in the trees when the bombing and the shooting intensified. What must have echoed in their hearts with every explosion. None of that deserves to be crossed out.
Marcela walks a while before catching the bus, to see if she can get some blood flowing through her hips and buttocks and all the other flesh not yet accustomed to her new urban stasis. She begins the hectic march that she’s grown used to by now, keeping an eye out for the buses spewing billows of smog at the sidewalk. She waits for the thick air to make its way up the street in the futile hope of avoiding it. Other times, she breaks the straight line of her steps and twists her path away from the metallic cloud that seeps into everything, trying to avoid contact. She holds her breath for ransom as she tries to keep out the smoke that burns her throat, makes her sneeze, irritates her eyes. Do the birds feel its heat? She figures she’ll eventually be able to ignore these little eruptions, like everyone else who moves through the city looking more or less composed.
Every so often she finds a moment to stare at the superstore’s white metal and cement ceiling. Her eyes rest on the bareness of its panels, interrupted by metallic cylinders, cables, smoke detectors, and cameras. She likes to look up at it every morning, as if to escape the fiction of buying and selling. To remind herself that everything stacked orderly under the flat roof—the aisles full of strategically lit products, the signs, the applause—is just a fleeting topography of crates and calculations. The artifice of abundance. It amazes her, how the merchandise so effectively veils the crude box that is the warehouse. Looking up has become her ritual.
She works slowly at the cash register. Too slowly, Diana says from time to time, trying to hurry her up. But Marcela pays atte
ntion to every detail, scrutinizing each product, studying each package, repeating the names of foods she has never seen before and which she wonders if she might one day be able to buy. Dog treats shaped like bacon, peach-flavored vitamin powder, Band-Aids with cartoon monsters on them, unfamiliar vegetables, cheeses with foreign names, gringo creams and soaps. The universe of commodities, as the Marxist pamphlets say. She is surprised at how little the other cashiers seem to care about the hidden anxieties revealed by the contents of each shopping cart. She doesn’t try to hide the fact that she eavesdrops on the customers’ conversations, and they don’t seem to notice. She stares at them like a young girl studying everything an older one wears and says. With brazen fascination, but also a kind of reverence.
It had been less than a day since I’d left the camp, and I was beat exhausted. But I couldn’t stop to rest because I was scared shitless afraid they were going to catch me. By that point in the morning, they must have realized I was gone had deserted and you can bet your ass they had probably sent a few of the others after me. I’d left around three, after my shift on watch, in the middle of a crazy heavy storm. I ran for a few hours along a narrow path before I reached a stream that leads to the Nukak Reserve. We’d taken that same path a few days earlier, when they sent us to find food snakes because we were running out of things to eat.
“This part about the snakes isn’t true, miss. Did you add that in? They sent us for fish because we’d been eating nothing but rice for weeks.”
“I wanted to get your approval specifically on that change. I think it’s more impactful this way. Besides, I’ve read accounts of combatants hunting serpents when their camps were running low on food. And you saw dangerous snakes, didn’t you?”
Marcela’s feet hurt. She hasn’t gotten used to the long hours standing still at the register. It feels good to take her shoes off under the desk. Without answering the editor, she begins reading again.
The fighting had been so intense that we’d spent two weeks hungry, nervous, on edge. I remember chatting talking with some of the others about how in the radio interviews they did with people who’d deserted, some of them said that what made them finally decide to run in the end was that their hunger was out of control so severe. It actually worked out well for me that no food was getting through because everyone’s morale was low. The only snag problem was that I didn’t have much to stash away for the trip either. After that first night away from the camp, not long before as the sun was rising rose, I realized I was on top of a ridge and that I had covered traveled some serious a great distance. A shit ton. Much more than I’d thought.
“I have a question about this part. Let’s see if we can get a little more specific. How far do you think you traveled on this first stretch? The more details you can provide, the more realistic it will seem.”
“With the twists and turns and all that, I’d say about six hours.”
“If I show you a map, do you think we can be a bit more precise? We’ll have one at the beginning of the book so we can show your exact route.”
The editor turns her laptop around. Marcela sees her own reflection in its screen before her eyes focus on the image, a photograph of a surface made up of different shades of green, interrupted by brownish gray splotches and white tufts. A brown line snakes haphazardly through the anodyne vegetation of the jungle. Written across it are the words Río Inírida. The erratic river clashes with the simplicity of the landscape: its contours seem too alive, too winding and evasive, against the static image of the flatland.
“Whoa. Now that’s a map … look at those colors, everything. It’s a satellite image, right? I can’t recognize anything like that, though.”
“Hold on, I’ll zoom in and show you up close.”
The map gradually reappears on the screen. This time, its greenery is blurred, the river’s curves less urgent. The picture vanishes again and is replaced by an indecipherable array of green and brown splotches.
“Now I really can’t see what’s what. No, wait. I know what that is—military camo, right?”
Marcela laughs. The editor does not.
“I zoomed in too far and the image blurred.”
When the map appears again, Marcela recognizes a few names: Río Inírida, El Retorno, Morichal, Puerto Macaco, El Olvido, La Libertad. Thanks to her friendship with the camp’s radio operator, who was also in charge of the GPS, she always knew the names of the towns, villages, and gullies they passed. It had seemed important to memorize them. She wrote them in her notebooks. But now, on the screen, she sees names she doesn’t know: Sabanas de La Fuga, El Resbalón, Isla El Remolino.
“At that point we were near El Olvido, in the zone controlled by Comandante Danilo and the Thirty-Third Front.”
Her finger grazes the computer screen, and she is surprised by the distortion it produces. She apologizes.
“But to say how many kilometers it was, just like that, I don’t know. I was looking for one of the bigger lakes that form off the Inírida on Nukak land. I heard a special unit of the Omega task force was operating in the area, and I was betting on that. Those might be the lakes, there.”
This time she just points, keeping her finger far from the screen.
“But I really can’t say anything for sure from this map…. My eyes were on the ground the whole time, figuring out where to step, looking for paths. How do you think I’m going to be able to tell you what’s what from the air?”
“I’m going to say thirty kilometers. It might be off by a little one way or the other, but at least it gives us an idea.”
Marcela nods. She looks out the window at the mountains, their lines suddenly clearer now that the fog has lifted.
“Sabanas de La Fuga. What a perfect name. Wish I’d known I was running across the plains of escape.”
Marcela hears the clack of a woman’s high-heeled shoes approaching. A tall man with a dark mustache wearing a suit and tie walks beside her, pushing a full cart that he parks at Marcela’s register. He might be a bodyguard or a driver, or both. He passes Marcela a few artichokes (she’s just learned the code for those), a box of rice with words in a different language on it, and a slimy bag filled with rings of white flesh. She studies the name on the outside: squid. She likes how soft the cool flesh feels and gets an urge to pinch it like she does with the little plastic bubbles of the packing wrap she steals from the storage room, exploding each one between her fingers on the endless bus ride home. The man’s tiny boss watches from a moderate distance as he and Marcela perform the choreography of commerce.
Marcela studies every detail of the minuscule woman. Her hair is dyed a pale blond and is suspended in a lacquered bubble; its solidity and airiness is startling. She wears big rings on her fingers and gold bracelets that jingle with her every movement, amplifying her wealth. A light layer of makeup helps conceal her thin skin and those reddish freckles blonds get. To hide her curiosity (Diana has told her that the customers hate to feel like they’re being inspected), Marcela lowers her gaze every so often to the bar codes. When she looks up again, she studies the woman’s hazel eyes and the way their freckled irises sparkle against their worn, gelatinous beds. She feels a whip crack in her throat. It’s the green of those eyes. She imagines the woman dressed in sweats with the white hair of someone who hasn’t been to the salon in a long time, sitting on a tarp under the trees that grow along the Guaviare, discussing a Marxist pamphlet. Marcela thinks she might vomit, right there in front of the golden mass of that woman standing with her wallet open, ready to pay for her purchases. Right there in front of the woman’s driver, who handles everything.
“Do me a favor, Diana, and ring this ticket up? I don’t feel so good.”
She gives the little door that holds her captive at the register a hard push. An ethereal wave of vomit surges up a tube deep inside her, much deeper than her throat. The old woman manages to catch her profile, the snug blue uniform, the tight bun all the women who work at the superstore are expected to wear. She watche
s her disappear down the sale aisle.
“What’s wrong with her?”
For a moment the man beside her is transformed from a domestic helper into a bodyguard and turns down the aisle to see where the checkout girl is headed.
I could have gone on walking, except I risked running into members of the other front, which was trading fire locked in combat with one of the enemy’s army’s mobile units. Maybe they’d already figured out I’d defected, but I knew their orders were to defend against the enemy army above everything else. I heard shots and voices and a couple of army helicopters flying overhead and. So I hid in a shack little cave formed by a few fallen trees. To be honest, Though I wasn’t sure they were looking for me, but I spent the whole afternoon of that first day tucked away in there, not moving, waiting for the sun to go down set so I could take the path to a lake I’d seen on one of our reconnaissance missions. My plan was to swim across it if I could.
“I think we should add something here about food. If you went hungry, if you had to find nourishment in the jungle.”
“In my backpack I had some raw sugar, cooked rice, and two sausages I’d stolen from the kitchen back at camp. The plan was to ration them and eat them later, depending on how hungry I got. On the third day I decided to eat two fat caterpillars I found in the hollow of a tree trunk. No idea what they could have been. They were bright green and covered in bristles. I was worried they might be poisonous and thought to myself, what if I end up with my tongue all paralyzed? But I took a chance and wolfed them down, pretending they were pork rinds. And look at that, I’m here to tell the tale. Actually, they were kinda good.”