by María Ospina
“Perfect. I’ll add that in, then, if you don’t mind.”
The editor is taking notes on her computer. Marcela feels a rush of pride at having come up with such a believable lie. She imagines the caterpillars, which she’s never tasted and never will, crunching across the pages of her book forever. And the readers, wrinkled in disgust.
After the daily ritual of customer appreciation, Marcela goes to see the floor manager, who has called her into his office.
“I’m told this is the third time you’ve left the register in the middle of your shift. I’ll remind you that every absence during working hours must be accompanied by a doctor’s note. If this continues, your absences will be deducted from your paycheck as time not worked. More than three absences is grounds for dismissal. It’s all in your contract. You did read the contract, didn’t you?”
“I’m sorry, sir. It’s true that I’ve stepped away briefly from the register for minor health issues, but I always come back quickly. Don’t worry, sir. It won’t happen again.”
She’s been using the word sir a lot lately. She doesn’t like it, but she uses it. To tame it. Just like she does with her old name.
“It concerns me that you keep leaving the customers hanging with their purchases. Listen, we’ve welcomed you folks in the reintegration program with open arms. It’s part of Carrefour’s social mission and our commitment to peace. And I congratulate you personally on your decision to leave the jungle behind. But I must remind you that here, we work on a schedule, and each employee is responsible for her own discipline as part of her commitment to the company. No one is forcing you to be here, it’s not like back there.”
Marcela scratches near her sternum to interrupt the manager’s gaze, which is fixed on her chest. Before leaving the area where the offices are for the giant warehouse of products on display, she stops to observe a plaque celebrating the employee of the month and a large aerial image of an agricultural field divided by neatly hewn paths. The slogan written across the poster is meant to be inspirational. “Carrefour: At the Crossroads.”
Right, so anyway, when When it started getting dark, I followed the path a little further until I saw recognized a field where we’d laid mines a few weeks earlier. I’d been in charge of the operation, so I knew the terrain. So I thought to myself, you’re going to blow your legs off if you that it would be too dangerous to try to cross it in the dark, and I decided to wait until daybreak. I dragged a whole bunch of branches over to the trunk of a tree and spent the whole night there, I mean, what else was I supposed to do. I think I slept a little. At dawn, as I continued on my journey my escape, I saw that a large animal had been killed by one of the mines. It looked like a jaguar, but I couldn’t say for sure because by then it was just meat carrion. It made me so sad, so angry with myself because what did he have to do with the war. I even thought about staying to bury him, but that would have been irresponsible and so I kept going. The path brought me to a big, beautiful lake that I recognized because we’d passed it a few weeks earlier and I remembered thinking how pretty it was. I’d needed to help carry the prisoner in my care person we’d kidnapped when we crossed it coming the other way.
“All right, Marcela. This seems like a good time to remind you that we need more details about your relationship with the kidnapping victims.”
“I told you before that I only saw a few right at the end, around six months before I left. I never wanted anything to do with that.”
“But it’s something people want to read about. People want to know if you got close to any of them. The whole thing about the older woman you cared for has to be in here. Try to give us more details.”
“There was this one political prisoner they brought to the front for a few weeks, but then they moved him to another camp, and later I found out he’d been executed when the fighting started over there. We never spoke. In the end, they ordered me to watch over a woman who was called Doña Helena, or I should say, who is called that, since I figure she’s still alive. She was old already and had been detained for six months by the time they ordered me to look after her. Jenny, who always cared for the detainees, had been wounded in combat. They picked me because I’d been in the unit longer than almost anyone. You have no idea how hard it was for me to accept the assignment. It was a job I’d always tried to avoid.”
“Why?”
“Because I knew it would mess me up to see a detainee suffer up close like that. The others never talked about it, the subject was off-limits, but I knew it wrecked even the toughest ones, even if nobody was willing to admit it.”
“As if you sensed you might realize that you were a captive too.”
“I mean, maybe…. But you can’t really compare one thing with the other, since I was the one who was holding the keys, right?”
“Right, but weren’t you following orders too?”
“Anyway, in the end, it was being with her that gave me the push I needed to leave. She was actually the one who convinced me to go.”
“Who was she?”
“They said she was from a family that owned a bunch of factories, but she never wanted to talk to me about any of that. And I never asked. She’d complain to me that her family had already sent piles of cash to pay the tax and she wasn’t being released. The handler assigned to her before me had been tough on her and threatened to confiscate the notebooks she’d managed to get her hands on. But we were close right from the start. We talked about lots of things, about our families. She told me about her children, I told her about my sisters, we even talked for hours about birds. She was an expert. Ever since I arrived, I’d been drawing the birds I saw in my notebook, so I’d show them to her and she’d tell me what they were called and sometimes even give me their scientific name—their elegant name, I call it. Sometimes she didn’t recognize the birds in my drawings and she’d get really excited and ask me to describe them in more detail. She even told me that I had to make my escape when the big migrations were happening because the birds traveling together could be like a compass for me so I wouldn’t get lost. While I was taking care of her, she turned seventy-two and I made her a cake. I got her pain pills, too, for her arthritis. I think she felt better around me, like she wasn’t so alone, poor thing. In the end, I managed to leave her my radio to remember me by.”
“And she knew you were leaving?”
“We’d started to trust each other more, and I tried to convince her to come with me, but we both knew she wasn’t up to such a rough journey. Especially with the pain she had. She’d say to me, ‘Poli, why are you still here? Scoot, darling.’ I always thought they’d release her before I ran, which is why I had her memorize the names of my sisters and my mom so she could go find them and tell them I was all right, that I was alive, that they should wait for me because I was on my way. But go figure, I was the one who went first, and I didn’t even have time to say good-bye.”
The editor takes notes.
“Do you know if she’s back now?”
“I don’t know. No idea. I hope so. Poor thing.”
She feels an overwhelming urge to tell her editor about the old woman in the superstore but catches herself in time.
“Anyway, none of this goes in. It’s one thing for me to tell you the story like this, but none of it’s going in.”
She keeps reading.
Yeah, of course I’d come across alligators in rivers and swamps a few times and figured there were probably lots of animals in the lake, and tons of snakes too. So I tried not to think about that and while I swam across like a shot as quickly as possible. Somewhere around t There I came across a little river, one of the ones that feed into the Inírida. On the other side, two boys were out grazing their cattle. I didn’t know what to do until I started waving to them, but they ran off in a flash as soon as they saw me. When I crossed the river, I thought I heard the motors of a few boats and that scared the shit out of me. I ran away from the river forever for about an hour until I found a trench cover under another
fallen tree. and I stayed there a few hours. and Then it began to pour, and I thought I’d try my luck make the most of it and walk toward where I thought the army was, since I’d figured out taking into account the direction of the helicopters that had just flown over me overhead were going.
“Have you decided when you’re going to call your sisters?”
Diana likes to talk to her when they assign them neighboring cash registers.
“I don’t know. This week for sure, I think. But only Zenaida, not Nubia. And not my mom, not yet. I couldn’t call her without talking to Zenaida first.”
They’d recently brought a woman who had fought with the M-19 guerrilla before joining the Ministry of Defense into the therapy sessions at the Agency. Wrapped in the dark fabric of her business suit, the woman told them about her return to Bogotá after years of fighting in Cauca. She had nearly committed suicide when the children she hadn’t been able to raise bombarded her with questions just days after she arrived. But then she dug deep and found the strength not to kill herself. By way of a conclusion, the psychologist wrote on the board, “IMPORTANT: do not contact your family before a reasonable amount of time has gone by.” Marcela had wanted to ask what a reasonable amount of time was but didn’t dare.
“You have to let it go, Marci. It’s been a long time, I’m sure they’ll forgive you. Mothers forgive everything, you know.”
She likes that Diana calls her Marci. It makes her feel young, like when she was in school in Teorama. She gets a sudden urge to tell her everything, like an avalanche. She feels it rise in her throat but holds back.
“Hey, Di. What happened with that bedding set? Is your aunt going to lend you the money for it? I can go with you to pick it out if you want.”
She likes addressing Diana informally, though she senses they’re still a long way from the friendship they’ve been building little by little, in the momentary truces granted to them by the customers and machines.
“Marcela, I find myself needing to remind you, again, that this book needs more details about your love life. We have plenty of descriptions of your adventures and how hard it is to cross the jungle, and of the chaos and all that, but it won’t be powerful enough without the emotional aspect. No one’s going to want to read something so dry. Try and remember if there isn’t something you can include. Think hard.”
“Well, I did have a boyfriend there. I’ve never loved anyone as much as I loved him. They recruited him during a raid in Meta, and I helped him learn the ropes. We were together in secret for almost a year before they moved him to a different front because it was against the rules to be with someone in your own unit, and they suspected there was something going on between us. That was in 2006, I haven’t seen him since. Later, I heard he’d been caught and was in jail in Popayán. I haven’t gone to look for him yet, but I’m thinking about it. One day. I mean, I’m not still in love with him, but I do care.”
There’s a silence.
“But don’t put that in. That doesn’t go in. And I’m not sure I want to say anything else about my family, either. Or, I don’t know. That’s something we’d have to negotiate.”
Marcela makes a long-distance call from the internet café next to the superstore. The Agency has given her a number where she can supposedly reach her mother. The unfamiliar voice of a young man announces the woman’s absence.
“Hm. I’m calling from Bogotá with an important message for her. Who am I speaking with?”
“I’m her son. Who is this?”
It’s the first time she’s heard the voice of her little brother cradled in words. Rubén was only a year old when she left. On the spur of the moment she can’t think of any name besides her alias to give, but she softens it. Poli. Then she reproaches herself for using it. She explains that she is a friend looking for Zenaida and Nubia.
“They live in Bogotá, but Zenaida has a cell phone. If you want, I can give you the number.”
She writes it down in the new notebook she bought to draw, all over again, the birds she remembers from back there. Before she hangs up, she tells Rubén she hopes to meet him one day.
This time she doesn’t tell her editor she’s going to miss their meeting. After work she takes a bus downtown. She doesn’t know the area yet, even though she’s supposed to go twice a month for therapy and to get her stipend from the Agency. She never has time to stroll past the old graffiti-covered walls that catch her eye from the bus. Diana told her once that San Victorino had nice gifts for a good price—cheaper than at the superstore, even with their employee discount. She is startled by the rage she senses behind the shrill honking of cars and buses along Carrera Décima. Overwhelmed by the din of the loudspeakers announcing sales, she steps into the plaza. She has a hard time getting her bearings.
She takes shelter in a clothing store. The name on the awning reads USA Fashion. She tries to recall the secretariat’s communiqués about imperialist capitalism, but the clothes gleaming on their hangers dilute her thinking. After making two rounds of the store, she tries on a few sweaters in royal blue, Zenaida’s favorite color. Did they still wear the same size? Was this still her favorite color? She ends up buying one of them, along with a gold watch for herself and a white onesie with a bear hugging a heart printed on it. In case Nubia and Zenaida have babies or for whenever they do. Or in case some other relative has one in the future. Maybe Diana would decide to have a kid with her new boyfriend.
The phone rings. For the first time in her life, she leaves a message. (She’d asked Diana how to leave messages on a cell phone, hoping she would guess what was behind the question.)
“Hi, Zena. It’s Marcela. I’m calling from Bogotá. I live here now, kiddo, for the last three weeks or so. I’m out. I know it’s been a long time but, well, I’d like to see you all again. I’ll try you again later. Bye.”
She wishes she’d left a longer message to explain why she’s not so far away anymore. On the wall across from where she’s waiting for the bus, she makes out some graffiti that reads coke diet, Diet Coke.
The old woman’s driver pushes a full shopping cart up to the checkout. That same tie, that same thick mustache he’s worn these last three weeks. Marcela sets the Closed sign on her register and walks quickly toward the employee restroom. She thinks she passes the woman in one of the aisles. She leans over the sink to vomit, but all that comes up is an acidic saliva that takes her three tries to spit out.
That afternoon in group therapy, she works up the nerve to speak for the first time. She describes her frantic sprints down the aisles of the superstore. The psychologist encourages the others to respond. They look at one another, but no one says anything. The psychologist intervenes.
“You’re not the only one who has these experiences, Marcela. They’re a common effect of the post-traumatic stress of war. The visage you think you see isn’t really someone you know.”
The word visage unsettles her. She’s seen it on some of the creams and soaps she bought from the superstore. She thinks about how she’s never used it in a sentence. At the end of the session, Marcela approaches the psychologist to ask about that stress she mentioned, what the symptoms are. To see if maybe she has it.
Sunday is the only day she doesn’t have to deal with shopping carts or hear the cash register’s trill echo in her head. No one lines up for the bathroom that early, so she can spend extra time in the shower. She shaves her armpits, then scrubs the scar on her shoulder with a bit of the exfoliant she bought and spreads the rest up toward her neck. She applies a special conditioner formulated to prevent hair loss, twice. She dries off and lets her hair hang loose, the way she wore it back when she left Teorama, even though she suspects more will fall out that way. Still naked, she sweeps up the strands she’s left orphaned around her room during the week. She moves the cardboard boxes where she keeps her clothes to reveal the hair entrenched in the corners. She returns to the thought that one day she’ll have a huge armoire with lots of drawers and a mirror inside one of the doors.
An elegant piece made of fine wood like the one she saw on a hacienda she entered with her unit in Meta. She’d stick photos inside the other door (she is unsettled to realize that she has no idea where those photos would come from). She’d hang others on the walls in shiny frames, like the ones her editor has in her office. The psychologist keeps saying that they need to “come up with new dreams,” and Marcela wonders if this is what she means. She has recently begun to identify certain things she lacks.
It’s still early. She dusts off the hot plate she picked up at the pawnshop so she wouldn’t have to share a kitchen with the others in her tenement and notices, again, the fragility of the cardboard box it rests on. As she mops the white tiles, her longing for the leaf-covered dirt floors of her past unsettles her. She repositions the thick pile of manuscript pages engulfing the plastic chair, and her eyes fall on the Agency’s pamphlet about options for finishing high school. She reproaches herself for not having read it. While she straightens the sheets, she thinks that if Diana ends up asking her to go buy that bedding set with her, she might be able to get a quilt or something to mask the austerity of her cot. A nice, warm one to protect her from the cold she can’t seem to chase from her feet. She suppresses her desire for heavy curtains, like the ones that arrogantly hide everything she might strain to glimpse inside the apartments of the oligarchs (the oligarchs controlled by the empire, as the manuals insist). One day, she thinks, she’ll want a television. She has a few minutes left for cleaning, to dust off the books that her editor has been giving her but that she hasn’t had time to read and has nowhere to keep. If she gets a few more, she’ll be able to stack them into a bedside table for her alarm clock.