by Hector Abad
Now I would have to continue on foot. I had no choice but to find the Toros’ farm, which wasn’t far from there, and was owned by some friends of Lucas. I hoped the caretaker – I couldn’t remember his name – would recognize me and help. I had to keep escaping, but I didn’t even really know where to. The next bus from Palermo wouldn’t come until the next morning. If I could ride up to Jericó, I could possibly risk asking for the mayor’s protection there, or that of the police, or the procurator, but in those days it was difficult to trust the authorities, for one never knew whose side they were on, whether they were with the gangsters or the citizens. The police who weren’t with the armed groups were murdered or transferred, and the same thing happened to many public officials. Often mayors had to leave and carry out their town duties from Medellín, because if not they’d be murdered too. But things in Jericó hadn’t been too bad compared to some places, for the town hadn’t suffered atrocities as other parts of Antioquia had, there hadn’t been any massacres of more than five, and the town had never been taken by the guerrillas or the paramilitaries, or at least not completely.
My legs were trembling again, my teeth chattering, my hands shivering, and tears were rolling down my cheeks. I was following a narrow dirt path along the mountain, the cattle track to the drinking trough and back. I was looking for the Toros’ farm, but I didn’t know these lowlands well, down near the Cauca. If I’d gone across to the other side I could have gone to La Botero; I knew Camila, the owner, and it would have been easier to ask for help there. But getting to La Botero meant passing in front of those guys and the army. Impossible.
The path now descended abruptly toward a ravine; below I could hear the sound of a stream that flowed down the mountainside between enormous, polished round rocks. I was very thirsty again; I needed to drink some water. The path ended in front of a guadua bamboo grove that shaded the current; there was a steep bank above the stream and I began to inch my way down, slowly. I was two or three meters away from the crystal-clear little river, which I could see below. I leaned on one of the guadua to keep going down, but the trunk was rotten and gave way beneath my weight and I fell. I landed sitting in the streambed, straight onto a rock, on the edge. My whole body shuddered from the blow. The spasm shot up from my coccyx through my spine and echoed round my cranium, clouding my vision and deafening me. I felt as though my backbone had stabbed me in the nape of the neck, as if my spinal column had penetrated my brain, inside my skull, and as if my tailbone had become lodged in my perineum and had splintered there like an asterisk. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t inhale any air, and the only sensation was unbearable pain between my buttocks and my back. My body fell over onto one side, amid the sand, rocks, and water pooling along the bank of the stream; I was unable to stand up and in my ears my agitated heartbeat thundered. It was as if someone had stabbed a dagger between my buttocks and shot a cloud between my temples. I closed my eyes and waited; I remembered the pains of childbirth, when Benjamín was about to be born. I had never felt anything like that since, until now, but this time was worse since it was a senseless pain, a pain that couldn’t bring any good with it. I kept waiting in a cold sweat. I felt a tickling in my legs, like an electric current running up my vertebrae. The intensity of the pain gave way a little. I was afraid I might have broken something important, that I might not be able to move some part of my body.
I let a few more minutes go by, keeping still, petrified, in silence, and several times I was on the verge of fainting. Finally I heard the water rushing against the stones again. My fear had vanished; my thirst had vanished; one single, omnipresent sensation had taken over: pain. I managed to drag myself into the flowing creek and instead of drinking I splashed handfuls of cold water on my face. The pain began to subside and turn into a sort of numbness and tingling in the middle of my body; I felt nauseous, but managed to ease myself onto my side and slowly, gradually get onto my feet. I moved in several ways I’d once learned would demonstrate whether or not a person had a serious lesion in their spinal column: I stood on tiptoe, stood on my heels, brushed my legs with a blade of grass all the way up and down, making sure I felt it tickling my skin. I could walk, and on foot I couldn’t even feel the dagger stuck in the middle of my body. I knelt down beside the stream and drank water, a lot of water, until almost choking from drinking so much. Water, since the night before, the only thing that had saved me was water. It didn’t even occur to me to think the water might be contaminated from something upstream, me who doesn’t even trust the water from the aqueduct and always prefers to boil it.
Everything is within me, I thought. The pain, but also the thirst. The only thing not within me is fear: the fear comes from outside, from them. I accept my pain, my thirst, my fatigue, but I don’t accept the fear; fear is intolerable, I thought. I went to the other side of the stream, getting wet up to my thighs in the cold water, stepping carefully on some large stones to retain my balance. I climbed up the ravine on the other side and when I emerged from the guadua grove I saw in the distance, and even thought it might be a mirage, the Toros’ house, a modern, elegant, comfortable house. I walked toward it slowly, ducking under the barbed wire when I came to a fence. When I crouched down I felt a piercing pain at the base of my back, between my buttocks, but I didn’t cry anymore, I bore the pain the way a pack animal, a mule or a mare, bears her burden and keeps walking.
Julio’s caretaker was a gruff, sour-faced guy. He treated me very badly, with suspicion. He seemed like an ally of Los Músicos. He said he didn’t recognize me, that Don Julio didn’t let him lend out horses and there wasn’t enough gasoline in the motorcycle to get him to Puente Iglesias, let alone Jericó; he told me it wasn’t easy in this area to receive strangers; he told me to go and to thank him for not calling the people who looked after the farm. The only thing I could get out of him was that there was a camino real that led to Jericó along the River Piedras, and I headed for it, with a terrible pain in the middle of my body. I walked up and up, without stopping all morning and part of the afternoon, leaning on a stick that I picked up along the way, asking at campesinos’ houses when I lost my bearings. It was strange, many little houses were abandoned, falling down, with initials of various armed groups painted on them (faded ELN and FARC, and fresher EPL and AUC); those were years of displacements and many campesinos had to flee, some frightened off by the guerrillas and others by the paramilitaries. When one or the other arrived they accused them of being allies of their enemies, because they’d given them a hen or a drink of sugar-sweet aguapanela, and they were always between two firing lines, and always guilty of something. It was much worse for them than for me because I, sooner or later – this was my hope – could get to a safe house in Medellín; they would have to go and live with some relatives as poor as they were, to sleep piled up in a single room or ask for charity at traffic lights with a sign saying, We’ve been displaced from San Rafael (or any other town). Please help.
A good woman, now very old, halfway up the climb, gave me two cups of aguapanela, despite knowing that being charitable could be a crime; we spoke for a moment. Part of her family had escaped from the violence, but she and her husband were still weathering the storm, trying not to have problems with anybody, she told me, without asking who I was, where I was coming from, or where I was going. She saw me simply as a human being. I drank standing up and the aguapanela tasted more delicious than ever and gave me the strength for at least another hour of walking. Later, I started to get dizzy from exhaustion and hunger, and had to sit down every once in a while to recover.
As I walked, leaning on my improvised walking stick, I thought that my ancestors must have gone up this very same path, a century and a half earlier, to help found the town, according to Toño’s papers. I told myself I needed to have as much strength as them, and had to climb with some expectation of finding something good. I told myself that I was on foot as the poorest of them had been, and not on horseback or mule, as the more fortunate had arriv
ed. I also thought at least I had shoes. It was a painful, very long ascent, during which I always avoided the road out of fear the pickup trucks of Los Músicos might come by. I thought of how the first settlers, the young men with their wives and children, had arrived sweaty and dirty to the first houses, greeted by barking dogs, with their eyes wide open, their clothes in tatters, and feet aching with blisters, but with great hopes, for them land, for me salvation from this wretched land for which I’d almost been killed. The first settlers had been welcomed happily. They’d been greeted by a Mass and a sancocho chicken stew. No one was waiting for me and much less would anyone welcome me. I was coming to leave, to get away as soon as I could.
I was dirty, tired, ugly, battered, with a smell of old sweat. I wasn’t happy to arrive, just eager to leave on some form of transport that wouldn’t have to cross Puente Iglesias but would go down to Medellín on the Tarso road. I didn’t trust anyone and everyone looked at me from a distance with a mixture of disgust and suspicion. I really felt like screaming, shouting like a madwoman, bawling out what had happened to me, so the whole town would hear about the injustice, but I held back. I looked like a lunatic, I’m sure. Being dirty, sweaty, disheveled, and careworn is the first stage of being badly treated: it’s the beginning of contempt. And if on top of that you don’t have a single centavo in your pocket, you’re already almost inhuman, disposable.
All faces looked like enemies to me, allies of the assassins; I was afraid of the police, the army, the mayor. Apart from that, I had a lot of pain in my tailbone, and pain disfigures your face, gives you a sickly severity that increases other people’s mistrust, except in those who understand pain and are able to feel more compassion than repugnance. Perhaps for that reason I headed for the hospital and not to the office of any of the authorities. When I got to the hospital, I spoke with a nurse; she at least listened to me and let me wash up a little in the bathroom. I told her I’d fallen and showed her my back. When she saw I heard her gasp and she told me I must have broken something because my buttocks and back were as black as an eggplant. She said I needed to have an X-ray and told me the price. I told her I didn’t have any money or time, that I was scared, that I had to get to Medellín that very day and didn’t have a centavo in my pocket, that I’d given all my money to a bus conductor and then had to leave without my change to escape from some people who were hunting me down; that I didn’t want to take another bus, that I had to go down the Tarso route, or maybe she could tell me some way to get to Medellín without going over Puente Iglesias and without anyone noticing me. She advised me to take a collective taxi and gave me a ten-thousand peso bill to pay my fare. She said I’d have enough left over to buy a coffee and sweet roll. Sometimes people are just simply good like that. I don’t even know her name, she who saved me expecting nothing in return. I’ve never seen her again. The only thing I did, when I said goodbye, was kiss her hands, and she gave me a tender, distant smile, I’m not sure whether it was incredulous, but I don’t think so.
I went to the plaza and saw the collective taxis. They left as soon as they had four passengers, three in the back and one up front. I got in line. I could tell I smelled bad. I went to a shop and drank an orange soda straight out of the bottle; I bought a coffee with milk and a sweet roll, too, and paid for them with the money the nurse had given me. I went to the bathroom and drank more water; nothing quenched my thirst. I was sweaty, smelly, my face looked like a madwoman’s. I smelled myself and saw my face in the bathroom mirror. When I sat in the taxi a piercing pain shot up through my body from my ass to my neck. I could feel I had a huge swelling down below, like a heavy cushion of blood; a new heart beating in my buttocks. I tried to sit half sideways, but the pain made me faint. The taxi pulled out and I think the pain was so intense I lost consciousness a few times. The other passengers thought I was a drunk or a drug addict and a pig as well. They opened the windows so they wouldn’t have to smell me, they kept apart from me, didn’t touch me even on the curves.
I didn’t feel fear anymore, just pain, for over three hours. When we got to the terminal, in Medellín, I didn’t have enough money to pay my fare, and I owed them money; they insulted me, called me a bitch, a disgusting whore, and a thief. I caught another taxi and begged the driver to take me to my mother’s address. I arrived and asked the doorman to pay the taxi. I went up the elevator. Anita opened the door and I threw myself into her arms, bellowing like a calf; I was crying for half an hour unstoppably before I could start to tell her what had happened to me since the previous night. She gave me a painkiller, called Pilar, and they took me to see the doctor. The black bruise went up my back and down my legs as well now; they took an X-ray and found I had broken and dislocated my tailbone, my coccyx. The orthopedist explained that they should try to put it back in place, operating on me immediately and without anesthesia, just a tranquilizer, sticking his thumb and index finger up my anus, to reach the bone fragment and push it back into place. I agreed and this was the final horrible humiliation of those two days. Two thick male digits entered forcefully, in spite of the lubricant, and grasped the bone. Nothing had ever, ever hurt so much, not Benji’s birth, and the only thing that saved me from the pain was fainting, fainting again. The doctor tried several times to push the bone back into place, without success. Face down I sweated and screamed and howled in pain, until I lost consciousness, but the doctor didn’t manage to repair the dislocation or set the fracture; he gave up, pulled his fingers out, and they injected analgesics into my vein. In the mists of morphine, at last, I felt a little bit better.
Since then I haven’t been able to sit for more than an hour in any chair, and on horseback I have to put almost all my weight on the stirrups. Since then, whenever my coccyx hurts, which happens several times every day, I think I should never go back to that farm, that the farm is literally “a pain in the ass,” as my brother’s husband would say, that we should sell La Oculta no matter what, and that I have to convince my siblings to do so before that farm ends up killing us all.
PILAR
My God will punish me, but I didn’t get sad when they burnt La Oculta. Or yes, I was sad for the first few weeks, I cried like an orphaned child when I got there and saw the black walls and a piece of the roof collapsed on top of the furniture, when I saw my bed and mosquito net scorched and when I smelled that smell that my nose couldn’t forget for days, that clings to your skin and your clothes, but then it struck me as even a good thing to get rid of so much old junk, so many family burdens that prevent a person from looking to the future. And I went there two or three days later, without fear, because if we’d already lost everything, the best thing to do was go see, and if they wanted to kill me too, well let them get it over with. I told Alberto, let’s go, let’s go or we’ll lose everything, and Alberto came with me in spite of the fear.
Of course what had happened to Eva was horrible, and even more frightening to think that maybe they would have burnt her alive, like a witch, that that was what they’d wanted to do, which was why they’d syphoned a bucket of gasoline out of her jeep, sucking on a length of hose: “We burned that slutty witch’s house down, and if she comes back we’ll burn her too,” they said in the village, in Palermo, when they got back. And I have people who tell me. If I had been there, with Alberto, they would have killed us, first of all because I barely know how to swim, three strokes and I get tired, and because Alberto and I would have stayed there, paralyzed, and we would have confronted Los Músicos just with words and by playing innocent. But who can convince those barbarians; Eva did the right thing, fleeing through the water, over the rocks, on horseback and by bus, barefoot and however possible.
We went to La Oculta to see the arson with our heads held high, so they could kill us if they wanted to kill us, but to retake possession of the farm. Próspero and Berta were okay, terrorized, but okay. They’d been insulted, pushed around, and knocked down. Próspero had been pistol-whipped and had a gash in his head, they told him they were go
ing to kill him, but in the end they left them alive, tied to the bars of a window. Juan, from the roadhouse, had arrived in the morning and untied them. They all still tremble with fear when they talk about that night. Próspero had buried Gaspar, the dog, by the side of the house and when we arrived he was still cleaning up the wreckage of the disaster, with an incredulous, stunned look on his face.
Alberto and I were scared too but we pretended to feel self-assured, although we felt like Los Músicos might return at any moment. We were barely there for two or three hours, in the daytime, fearing the night, and we saw the disaster, and tears sprang to our eyes, and we took photos for the insurance company, who didn’t want to go, out of fear, because in those days everyone was afraid of the people who wanted to take over the country, and were succeeding. All of Colombia was ending up in the hands of the paramilitaries: the best land, the best farms, the city centers, the most beautiful buildings, everything.