by Hector Abad
PILAR
We didn’t use to live year-round at La Oculta, but in order not to lose it we moved here. We had to rent out our house in Medellín to be able to buy food and cover everyday expenses, and moved everything to La Oculta, which is our real house, where we’d always dreamed of returning, if the region ever became less dangerous. Now we live here, comfortably, on Alberto’s retirement pension, which is not great, but helps, and the rent from the Medellín house, where a Jehovah’s Witness temple now operates. Oh, if not for them, those blessed Jehovah’s Witnesses, so noisy, shouting about all the silly things they believe in…they believe the world is going to end. I believe the world is going to end one day too, of course, but not so soon. The house, which thirty years ago was beautiful, is ruined now, it’s like a big shed without walls, a storehouse where they don’t stockpile things but believers. We had to allow them to knock down the walls because if not, they wouldn’t have rented it from us. And there they get stirred up, pray, sing, and jump around. They shout about the world ending half hysterically, that our Lord’s silver head is already peeking over the mountains of the East to come and judge the living and the dead, most of all the living who don’t think like they do, who haven’t seen the light of truth, but in the meantime they pay us a good rent, and thanks to that we can live at La Oculta. Sometimes, on long weekends and at Easter, we rent it out to groups of doctors, or pilots, or to big families nostalgic for the family farms that no longer exist, and we have to go and stay at Eva’s place in Medellín, or with one of our kids, because renting it out for holidays is what enables us to pay for the repairs the house constantly needs. We return and have to air out the mattresses because they don’t smell of us, but of other people’s sweat, other people’s sex. A handful of glasses and plates always get broken, a few forks and teaspoons always get lost, or a toilet gets plugged up with toilet paper or pads. A lame horse, a broken chair. Half the money from renting it out goes to pay for what they damage, and I work on the repairs until the next time we rent it out, which is like another earthquake. Eva’s the one who insists we rent out the house, because it matters less to her, she doesn’t even think of her own bed as hers, and her monthly contribution gets considerably lowered. Toño, who’s so far away, doesn’t say anything, and doesn’t even notice, because he’s a man and men don’t notice these things.
The rental of the Medellín house, however, is a long-term contract, five years, and now we don’t worry about what they do to it; it’s lost to us as a house, and we no longer think they’re damaging or defiling it. That house, now converted into a temple and storehouse, is all we have left of the years of opulence, when Alberto was the director of Gacela Plastics, one of the many businesses his father left them. It was a factory that made cheap toys, very cheap. They were distributed in the poorest towns and villages of Colombia, but then it was bankrupted when people began to smuggle in toys from China; there was no way to compete with the Chinese. Nobody can explain how they can produce things so cheaply; it seems like workers must be forced to work fifteen-hour days over there and they pay them terribly, almost like slaves. Well, that’s what people say, I have no idea. Besides, Alberto, being such a good person, and being so influenced by my father, who just for saying people should be paid fairly was called a communist, accepted everything the workers asked for in the petitions they brought every two years with their union. Education subsidies for workers’ children: okay. June bonus and Christmas bonus: okay. Housing subsidies so they could get their own houses, of course, why not, that’s what Cobo thought correct. A cafeteria in the factory serving lunch and dinner, yes. Shorter work days and the whole weekend free like rich people: fine. My papá said it was possible to build harmony between proprietors and workers if the bosses were fair. Between my dad’s altruistic advice, the union, and the Chinese, the factory went bust. Alberto pampered the union for ten years, and when the business went bankrupt from having given so many bonuses and benefits and a soccer field and a gym and education and housing subsidies, when they had to close the plant because the toys didn’t sell anymore, when they had to liquidate the land the factory stood on to pay the social benefits of the laid-off workers, they put up posters with Alberto’s photo, saying: “Alberto Gil, enemy and murderer of the working class.” Oh, my heaven-sent sweetheart, how awful. That was the first blow, when Gacela went bankrupt. And then we lost almost everything we had left when the guerrillas kidnapped Lucas right here at La Oculta.
Lucas was seventeen when he was taken and turned eighteen in captivity. We marked the day from afar, lighting candles at home, and singing happy birthday to him over the radio. I’ve never suffered as much as during those nine months that he was held in the jungle. Alberto hasn’t entirely recovered either; and not because of the money, that was the least of it, since at least we were able to save him, but the anguish, the awful nights and worse days. Since then he’s become quieter, more disappointed in the world and people, and takes more refuge in music and his fruit trees, especially the mandarins and the oranges. All day he prunes, fertilizes, brushes the trunks of the citrus trees, removes lichen and mosses, affectionately caresses the fruits as they grow, and maybe that’s why there are no sweeter or more delicious oranges than the ones from La Oculta. Not even Spanish, Sicilian, or Egyptian ones can compete with his.
We are born believing that people are good, until life comes along to prove us wrong and show us that yes, there are good people, but there are also many very bad people, with evil intentions, calculating, underhanded, and ungrateful. People with tiny hearts, not like a mango but like a bitter, unripe little guava. Until Lucas was kidnapped I believed with the optimists that the good people are the majority; yeah right, Lucas getting kidnapped was the worst rebuttal I could ever have gotten: every day with the fear that those bandits – idealists, those fighting for a fairer society, good revolutionaries – would kill him. What were we guilty of, tell me? Having a forty- or fifty-acre farm that gave us nothing but expenses and a couple of jobs? Was it our fault that we were less poor than the majority of Colombians?
They phoned us and threatened to kill him if we didn’t hand over the ransom money quickly. One day, in about the third month since they’d taken him, they sent us the first photograph of him, holding the previous Sunday’s El Colombiano newspaper, as proof he was still alive. Not much later they sent more photos where Lucas looks sad, pale, with a chain around his right ankle, as thin as a noodle, beaten like a dog, head down, with a lost look in his eyes. As we sold things we offered them more and more money, a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand, three hundred thousand dollars, but they wouldn’t accept, they wanted a million, which we didn’t have, not even by selling everything, including the house in Medellín and La Oculta. We had people from a foundation, País Libre, by our sides, advising us on how to negotiate, and who told us to gradually increase the amount, but slowly. It was heartbreaking.
The night that the guerrillas came almost everybody was asleep, except for the men and me, as I always stayed up listening to music and talking with them until they went to bed. Suddenly we heard a racket by the stream and the dogs started to bark. We turned off the music to hear better and the lights so we could see what was going on. Everyone knows that night is daytime for thieves, that the worst things almost always happen at night. Several flashlight beams were coming up the gully. The radiotelephone didn’t work at that hour, and there was no one to call to ask for help. We went to wake up Próspero, but nobody here has ever had any weapons or anything, and the only thing Próspero could grab was a machete in need of sharpening which he had to hand over to them as soon as they pointed a rifle at him. They came in through the stables, single file, as if they didn’t mean us any harm, as if they were just passing through on their way up the hill, to Támesis or Jericó, impressively calm, as if they were anesthetized, with a coldness and faces as hard and inexpressive as I’ve ever seen in my entire life. You could tell their souls were damaged by hatred and resentment.
They were walking hatred; they were people – men and women – who had killed and watched others kill. Who had tortured and been tortured. They had their hearts wrapped in an icy bark. They didn’t speak, they grunted with cold rage, gave brief orders as if they were in barracks and we were all recruits. I remember that Eva’s boyfriend at the time locked himself in one of the bathrooms, with several women and the youngest children, Benji, Florencia, and Simón, trembling with fear, crying in terror. Eva broke up with him as soon as they got back to Medellín, because she couldn’t stand such cowardice. Alberto, Lucas, Eva, Próspero, and I went out to the stable. Toño was in New York. We tried to reason with them, but it was impossible, they just grunted and barked, trained their guns on us. They wouldn’t let us speak: “Shut up, you old bitch; shut up, you rich bastard!” That was all they said to us.
They put a sack over Lucas’s head. He was the one who suggested they take him because he was in good shape. He played basketball and was seventeen years old. He offered himself so they wouldn’t take me, who they’d asked for (“Which one of you is Pilar Ángel?”), for back then everyone thought I was the owner of La Oculta, because I was the one who went most, and contracted day laborers and carpenters and builders in Jericó or Palermo. Lucas said that Alberto and I were sick, that I smoked and got tired out after walking ten steps, but if they took him it would be the same. I didn’t want to let him, but the guerrillas liked the idea. “How old are you?” they asked him, and he lied and said he’d just turned eighteen. Alberto objected to their taking Lucas, said no, that they should take him, that he was strong because he rode horses and bikes, but the guerrillas chose Lucas and when they heard the word horses told Próspero to go and get them. And we barely got a chance to say goodbye, but we looked at each other with streaming eyes, before they tied the sack over his head. I screamed: “Why are you putting that on him?” “So he doesn’t learn the way,” they said. “But he already knows it,” I answered and they shut me up with a shove. They also said that it wasn’t a kidnapping, but rather a retention to guarantee the payment of a revolutionary tax. That the faster we got the money together, the sooner they’d return the boy.
They went on uphill with him, toward Casablanca, toward the chilly uplands; they forced us to saddle horses for them to take. The horses came back at dawn, on their own, without riders, saddles sideways, in search of their feeding trough. Later Lucas told us how he and three guerrillas rode up the crags until the horses could go no further because it was too steep, and from there they’d kept walking for the rest of the night, until they reached a camp. As well as the sack over his head, while they walked they’d kept him tied up, like a calf, so he wouldn’t escape into the woods. Every day they moved him to a different place, farther and farther away, higher and higher up into the mountain range, and at night they chained him to a tree.
They’d given him a plastic sheet for the rain, and a blanket, but Lucas says that what he felt most all the time he was kidnapped was intense cold, the kind of cold that goes right to your bones and that made him shiver like jelly, cold that didn’t abate even in daytime, because he almost never saw any sunlight, under the canopy of the trees. Finally they stayed put in some part of the Citará mountains, and more kidnapped people were brought there. For some weeks, at least, he had someone to talk to, because he was not allowed to speak to the guerrilla fighters, much less the female ones. Those were the least awful weeks, he told us, because one of the kidnapped men, Señor Angulo, knew about orchids and birds, and he taught him how to recognize them, by their calls, by color, and by the leaves. One of the guards even lent them a small telescope to distinguish the bromeliads from the orchids on the tree branches. Later, unfortunately, but fortunately for him, they’d let that knowledgeable and calm Señor Angulo go free. But we didn’t know anything about this; we were in Medellín, with no news, receiving the odd phone call to frighten us and repeat the ransom terms.
We got up early every day to try to sell something to be able to pay. That was when my papá despaired of ever having sympathized with the communists, of having been so understanding with Cuba, with real socialism, and began to hate the guerrillas. When they sent us a photo of Lucas without a shirt on (so skinny his ribs stuck out), with a sad look on his face, and with an iron manacle and chain around his ankle, Papá began to drink outrageously. He would have whiskey for breakfast, or rum or aguardiente. His eyes were always red, his face looked congested, his nose was red and deformed, and his hands shook. Day and night Papá cried like a baby because Lucas was his eldest grandchild, and his favorite ever since almost dying at birth. My papá also wanted to sell the apartment where he lived with Mamá, the car, the furniture, whatever would keep them from killing Lucas. At night we thought about how frightened Lucas must be in the jungle, about the wound he must have from the slave manacle fastened on his ankle, and we’d think about what would happen if it got infected, if he got tetanus or leishmaniasis, as many did in the mountains when they went barefoot, about his solitude, the horrible way he must be being treated, and his sadness; we cried when we thought about what he’d be eating. In the early mornings we’d go to a radio station that broadcast a program called The Voices of Seizure, and we’d send him messages of encouragement, trying to keep our voices from breaking, but with our hearts broken in two. Lucas told us later that the guerrillas let him listen to a small transistor radio, and hearing our voices in the early hours was his only solace during that time, which made him think we hadn’t forgotten him, and the guerrillas were lying, to weaken him, when they said that we didn’t care about his life and didn’t want to spend a single peso to save him. That he might as well join them since he didn’t have a mother or father anymore. Another day, by phone, they told us that Lucas had been having attacks, that he went into convulsions and thrashed around and foamed at the mouth. We didn’t know whether to believe them or not, the País Libre people said it was most likely a lie, but it turned out to be true; he’d developed epilepsy while he was in the jungle, we don’t know whether from his suffering, or as a delayed consequence of his birth trauma, or something else.
It was really hard, living without living, sleeping without sleeping, eating without eating, dreaming horrible dreams every night; nothing was really real, for life went on, but my mind was always on something else, always elsewhere, in the jungle, in the solitude of that open-air prison where they had Lucas without any contact with anyone, or any affection. Alberto and I sold everything we had left, except the house where we still lived, which was spared. We sold a really good warehouse that we rented out in the industrial part of Medellín; a lot in La Estrella; an apartment in Laureles that my mother-in-law, Doña Helena, had left us; my car, which was brand-new, a portion of the bakery, which Mamá had given me and that Eva bought for much more than it was worth. We sold everything to pay. Everything except our house and La Oculta, which anyway didn’t belong to us kids yet but was still my father’s. La Oculta was not sold; the farm is not for sale. I have this engraved like a tattoo upon my memory: La Oculta is not for sale.
Papá got sick while Lucas was kidnapped. When they told us about the attacks and convulsions over the phone, Papá screamed. He got sick from suffering and drinking because he couldn’t bear that the guerrillas had kidnapped his eldest grandson, his ñaña, the child he loved most in the world. He’d talked to all the contacts he had in the leftist movements in Medellín, in Bogotá, but with no results, nobody paid him any attention. Lucas had already been held for half a year and had just turned eighteen in the jungle, when Papá developed pancreatitis. I was so anguished, without any news of Lucas, no proof he was alive, and suddenly the person I most loved, my greatest support at that moment, my papá, was in the clinic, with pancreatitis, dying. Sometimes misfortunes come like that, all together, they don’t space themselves out over the years, but arrive all at once, as joys also do sometimes, one after the other. Life is made up of gusts of happiness and gusts of sadness and long years of calm, with no surpri
ses, which are the best.
Papá knew that he was dying, he told Eva and me himself: “The pancreas is the seat of the soul, mijitas; if the pancreas gets damaged, it’s time to get ready for the funeral straight away.” I had no life either; every night counting money we’d collected in cash: a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand, three hundred thousand dollars. In the end they settled for four hundred and thirty thousand, which was all we could raise, at the same time as my papá was dying. Those were the months in which I most clearly perceived the tragedy of life, of motherhood, of the love we have for our children, for our parents, which caused me that unbearable heartbreak, and double, side by side: my son in captivity and my father dying. Maybe the worst moment was when I had to go on the radio and tell Lucas out loud that Cobo, his grandpa, had died the night before, but that he’d left him a message advising him to be very strong, and optimistic, and hold on, because now very soon, they would let him go. Those things people say, always the same ones in those circumstances, because only ordinary phrases seem to tell the truth when life is horrendous. That my papá’s soul was accompanying him and helping him from heaven, that’s what I told him, because I believed it, I still believe it, and I can almost see him up there watching, watching me, protecting me, happy that I’ve now come to live on his farm, on his land, at La Oculta.