Return to the Dark Valley

by Santiago Gamboa

  It was Teresa, the Mexican diplomat!

  “How’s it going, my dear Consul, and how wonderful that you managed to find Juana. How is she? And the child? Maybe you can send me some photographs. I left Thailand for Mexico City in 2010, but last year I was sent abroad again. I’m an ambassador now! Don’t go thinking they sent me to Washington or Paris. No, I’m in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Mexico has just opened an embassy because this is the headquarters of the African Union and you can talk directly with fifty-four countries, it’s just like the Brussels of Africa. You should come and see me, I have a nicer house than the one in Bangkok and much bigger. Why don’t you come and spend a few days with Juana? Where are you both now? From Rome there’s a direct flight on Ethiopian. Let me know if you like the idea. Affectionately, Teresa.”

  What a surprise: Ethiopia, Ethiopia.

  I went back to my guard post in front of the TV, waiting for new revelations. The news may be the only drug that can make waiting more bearable. All the same, I was surprised by the amount of unimportant news that was produced daily.

  “Two trucks were involved in a head-on collision on the way out of the Unicentro shopping mall in the city of Pereira, leaving one person injured and losses of several million. Since one of the trucks was transporting foodstuffs from Venezuela, it is believed that this may have been a premeditated act.”

  “An Italian citizen named Rocco Dozzino, a promoter of young Colombian soccer players to European clubs, reappeared yesterday in the city of Cartagena de Indias, where he was presumed to have been kidnapped two weeks ago. The supposed disappearance had alarmed the consulate of his country, which informed the authorities. On boarding the plane back to Bogotá, Señor Dozzino expressed surprise that he was the object of a search and explained that he had withdrawn to an isolated hotel on one of the Barú islands with his new partner, the Afro-Colombian Luis Pupo, thirty-six years old, former goalkeeper of Cortuluá soccer club. In any case”—and this was the other news—“Señor Dozzino will have to face a number of accusations of fraud.”

  And of course, the slow and laborious construction of the Republic of Goodness continued.

  One of the principal changes in the legal system was the “legal jubilee,” in which one day every two months the Public Prosecutor’s offices were opened to all those who wanted to confess a crime, in this way obtaining a substantial reduction in the sentence, provided it did not involve a murder or a crime against humanity. The aim was to institutionalize forgiveness and provide incentives that could heal the wounds left behind by the conflict.

  In a similar vein, the Union of Prosecutors’ Departments and the Ministry of Defense created a show on the educational channel called The Forgiveness Hour, which knocked the most popular soap operas, and in some cases even soccer matches involving our beloved national team, off the top ratings slots. The format of the show was to confront former combatants, from whichever sides, with their victims. It was recorded in the open air in front of a large audience. In most of the episodes, the perpetrator would present his case in front of the victim, who watched him from one of the seats on the improvised set. When he had finished, the perpetrator would approach with a wireless microphone and beg forgiveness, sometimes even getting down on his knees. This was the most emotional part of the show, since the victim, generally in tears and clenching his teeth, ended up by agreeing and saying, “Yes, I forgive you,” which would lead to thunderous applause, cries of congratulations, and whoops of joy from the audience. In some cases, the perpetrator and the victim embraced.

  This program of reconciliation had been imported from the experience of the Republic of Rwanda, where the Hutu population had exterminated a million ethnic Tutsis in the space of two or three months in 1994.

  Many hours passed before Manuela returned. Tertullian told us we had to go back to Bogotá immediately. He would travel that same night to Amsterdam. My attention was drawn to his strange golfer’s outfit: a pair of plaid pants and a light jacket.

  “Well, my dear friends, it was a pleasure,” he said, bowing, “nature can feel proud of us. Mother Earth is a little better than she was a while ago, and that’s something our ancestors will thank us for; anyway, Manuelita will tell you the ending of this story. I just want to repeat two instructions: stay together, but keep out of sight, am I making myself clear? Juanita: you and I are quits. It was a pleasure being able to help you. Consul, the honor was all mine.”

  Having said this, he left.

  Two hours later we were on a flight to Bogotá. Manuela maintained her silence during the flight and when we got to the apartment in the Nogal she shut herself in her room. When Juana went to ask her if she would like a cup of tea, she found her on the floor, in a fetal position, hugging her legs.

  That night, watching the news, Juana and I found out what had happened.

  THEORY OF ACIDS

  (MANUELA’S STORY)

  When we got to the house they took off the eye mask they’d put on me because Tertullian said, if anything happens, it’s best you don’t know where we went, and that’s why I was only able to see when I was already inside, although of course thanks to the clouds and the air and the smell and what was visible in the distance I knew we were somewhere between Cali and Palmira, how could I not know where we were when this is my land? He said to me, Manuelita, think carefully about what’s going to happen now, all right? when you see him, he’ll be unconscious because we gave him a very powerful soporific; he’s also tied up in case he wakes up, but I want you to internalize whatever it is you’re going to do, all right? I don’t want you to get cold feet, and I said, cold feet? forget it, this is the moment I’ve been waiting for my whole life, how can I turn back now?

  Revenge is the great orgasm of hate, I thought, it’s when you can at last give shape to what you’ve been feeling and harboring inside you, like the fetus of an unborn child, because you devote energy and imagination to hate, almost as much as or even more than to love; and of course, they’ve both done me a lot of harm, but life is like that, we steal from each other, although this is different because Freddy stole my childhood and you know that childhood is the only true country, and as far as I’m concerned that man kicked me out of mine, tore it to pieces, and then killed my mother, who was an idiot who first let my father go and then got involved with a thug like that, out of pure stupidity, and that’s why she had to die, by the law of female ignorance and stupidity, but in spite of that she was my mother and the guy killed her.

  He humiliated her and killed her.

  Tertullian led me down some steps to the basement, asked if I was ready, and said that they had him behind the door he was going to open. I told him not to worry, I was ready, and then, being a man who loves rituals, he had a servant bring him an urn filled with earth and explained that before seeing him we had to honor it, that I should grab a few handfuls and kiss it, and he did the same and even rubbed it on his cheeks, and when he finished he opened the door and fortunately Freddy was still asleep, because when I saw him, my knees started shaking, it was as if I’d been hit but I stood there and took it.

  We went in.

  They had him on a metal bed, like a hospital bed, with the floor covered in plastic that was stuck to the wall with tape and there I saw his face, that cursed face I remembered so well. The bastard was well preserved, life in the paramilitaries had kept him in good shape. He was going to make a slim corpse. He had lost weight and his face was thinner, but the rest was the same, with that expression of someone who’s about to do something terrible or explode with rage; then I focused on his hands, which lay rigid on the bedspread, and looked at his fingers: I couldn’t avoid the image of those foul meat hooks taking down my panties, parting my legs, touching me with his filth; it was those fingers that raped me, and I thought, how many people have those short, thick, hairy fingers killed, how many women have they beaten or hurt; I was struck by how well tended his nails were, but of course, sin
ce he was going to a party he probably had a manicure; what a good thing it was to appear before the judges looking so good, because this would be a premature final judgment.

  Suddenly I noticed something imperceptible, a reflex, so I raised my eyes and I saw him looking at me: there were his horrible eyes; a wide surgical bandage covered his mouth and he couldn’t speak, but the way he looked at me showed what was going through his head, or what he was trying to understand, because I think he recognized me: I saw it in the cold intense way he was looking at me; I felt a tear in the stomach so strong that I even started my period because of the nerves, but I didn’t cry out or say anything, and when Tertullian said to him, hey, what have we here? a little angel opening his eyes! hello, I have some so-so news for you that has to do with your immediate future, isn’t that right?, Freddy moved and tried to free himself but the straps kept him tied to the bed, and then Tertullian said to me, well, what do you want to do? this sack of garbage is all yours, I’ve put out a few things to give you some ideas, I don’t know, for example we have a nice bottle of sulfuric acid, which corrodes the tissues, sometimes it even gets down to the bone, and maybe even reaches the trachea, do you see? I know a lot about this because, I have to confess, I love acid, I have a weakness for acids, if you know how to do things you can achieve a gastric perforation and cause peritonitis, and when you get to that point the die is cast, it’s one step from circulatory collapse; the likeliest thing is that eternal sleep follows, but I don’t know, you choose, Tertullian said to me. My tongue was stuck to my palate, my mouth was dry, I couldn’t utter a sound.

  I asked him to excuse me, left the room for a moment, and threw up in the bathroom, crouching, while one of Tertullian’s colleagues held my hair away from my face; when it was over I wiped my mouth and went back, already recovered, and said to him: I’m not going to be capable of killing him, I know you’ve taken risks to help me, this world disgusts me completely, but killing him would be going over to the other side, so Tertullian said, don’t worry, Manuelita, you don’t have to do anything, just tell me what you want and that’s it, this man is a mistake of nature, a tumor to be cut out of the human race, a humanoid and a piece of scum, you know nothing is going to change under the stars when this piece of shit goes, bye-bye, you know that, don’t you? and I said, of course I do, I leave him in your hands, he’s yours, I can’t forgive him; and I confess, Consul, that I actually made an effort to forgive him, but I couldn’t.

  I had more than two years of psychoanalysis in Madrid, I devoted myself to studying Indian gurus, like Osho, who teach you to control “associative thinking,” but it made no difference. In the end I realized, or thought I realized, that forgiveness can only be collective and form part of a project; that’s the only way to be human again and maybe some people can accept it, but realizing this distanced me even more because nobody was going to rebuild anything with my forgiveness, not even myself; in my case, it would be tantamount to keeping the past fresh and not allowing the future to occupy my life; to leaving the scar open and bleeding, as it has been since the day that man mutilated me.

  I can’t kill him, I said to Tertullian, but he has to undergo a terrible punishment. My hate rose again and overcame the fear, and so I said to Tertullian, killing him would be a gift. He has to suffer for as long as he lives, he has to yearn for death, he has to be marked by this.

  Then Tertullian said, I like that idea, Manuelita, I was always amenable conceptually to what I call partial removals, and for the same reason that you say, it’s a truly educational task! And anyway, don’t worry: this gentleman, or what’ll be left of him, will go to prison as soon as they find him; they may not recognize him at first, you can be sure of that, but with the criminal record he has I don’t think he’ll ever again spend a single free day in his life. He’ll think that what we’re going to do to him was the work of the rival gang. He saw you, of course, but when he opens his eyes again he’ll think it was a dream.

  Then Tertullian said, now let’s get down to action, I’m very fond of amputations, what would you like us to take off him?

  He suggested making two large cuts, one arm and one leg, on opposite sides, and because he was a rapist emasculation was almost obligatory; if in addition I wanted to do something in my mother’s name, we could think about a controlled sprinkling of acid on the cheeks, enough to burn his skin and some cartilage in such a way that even his fucking mother wouldn’t recognize him, that’s what Tertullian said, Consul, how embarrassing to repeat these things to you, and I replied yes, I liked that idea, although I hated his fingers, especially his rapist’s fingers, and he said that with the arm we were thinking to leave him we could do another small amputation and leave him only the thumb.

  I went in to look at him for the last time and again felt that stabbing sensation in the stomach, so I went back out again and looked through the hole in the door. Tertullian and his assistants got down to work. They moved some small metal tables close to the bed, with surgical instruments on them: dividers and forceps, scissors and scalpels, three sizes of metal saw, a precision hammer and a millimetric aluminum ruler; seeing all that, Freddy started writhing and struggling. I saw the panic in his eyes when he lifted his head a little and discovered that the floor was covered in plastic sheeting.

  I sat down in the corridor and saw them putting on white coats and gloves. Tertullian seemed excited; when they were about to start I heard him say to Freddy: well now, my dear friend, we’re going to give you one last surprise gift, a cocktail of ether and two other anesthetics, courtesy of the house, of course, so that your muscles are relaxed while we remove a few things you’re really not going to need anymore, just wait and see how relaxed and light you feel when you wake up, but for now, take this moment to have a last look, because soon you’re going to lose approximately thirty percent of your body mass; the first thing we’re going to remove is your cock, nip and stitch, and be grateful I’m not such a good surgeon because if I was I’d give you an artificial cunt, so they can fuck you that way in prison. The most likely thing, my friend, is that they’ll use you as an inflatable doll and break your ass, I hope you like that, they say it only hurts the first time, and it’s better late than never; anyway, my dear Freddy, what you see around you is both a mausoleum and a delivery room, one goes and another is born, a metaphor for life, don’t you think? You’ll have plenty of time later to think about existence and the painful dominance of the flesh.

  Okay, enough of the induction speech, boys, let’s get on with it!

  I heard gasping and struggling.

  I realized they’d given him the anesthetics when he stopped moving and emitting noises. I dared to look and they were already operating on him. Tertullian was whistling and saying incoherent things. A kind of antiphonal chant to which the others responded, as if in chorus. I listened to them for a while and felt my heart beat faster, I was sweating and dizzy. I asked one of the men, the one who’d held my hair while I was throwing up, to take me out of there. He took me to a servant’s room where there was a TV and a bed. I tried to distract myself for a while and fell asleep. When I woke, someone was looking at me from the door and signaling to me. It was still night, or maybe I was in a part of the house that the light didn’t reach. I had no way of knowing.

  The master wants to see you, he said, so I went along the corridor again and got to the door of the room, thinking I’d never heard him called “master” before. Tertullian came out looking tired and sweaty and said, my dear, the operation was a success, we’ve already removed quite a lot of the body, including the fingers you wanted, and we gave him a face mask of sulfuric acid, nothing very deep, just enough for him to be disfigured without it eating into the bones. It was difficult to keep control of the nose and in the end almost all the cartilage got burned away, I was tired, but we managed to save half. Oh, I almost forgot: I also removed his cock. With his face all burned and disfigured like that, he isn’t likely to be using it much, don�
��t you think?

  His colleagues finished taking off the plastic sheets. They dissolved the amputated limbs in a five-liter earthenware bottle of acid then threw them on the fire. I looked at what was left of Freddy. There wasn’t much to see. His face was covered with a bandage and there was a blue sheet over his body. I asked how long he would be like that, and Tertullian said, he’ll wake up in six hours. They would leave him connected to a drip containing serum and a carefully measured dose of morphine. Because we’re going now, he said, but before that we’ll call the ambulance service and the police and ask them to come for him.

  I want you to know something, Tertullian said as he left: when he opens his eyes and sees the hell he’s in he may think of you, although it’s unlikely he’ll remember what he saw. The dose of anesthetics we gave him cuts out short-term memory. Gradually he’ll remember the party in the other house, where they would have killed him if we hadn’t gotten him out of there.

  * * *

  What I saw on the TV news that night left me astonished. It was in all the main headlines: the discovery of Freddy Otálora abandoned in an old house in the country, alive but with horrible amputations and his face dissolved by acid. After the massacre in the house to the south of Cali, it seemed like an even more macabre sequel; nobody had the slightest doubt that both events were connected, that the second was a consequence of the massacre, which had been interrupted by the police. That kind of torture and amputation led them to think of the Mexican cartels, which were famous for their horrendous crimes.

  One of the main commentators said the following: “These internecine wars between drug gangs are an example of how the new actions of the police and the army, which in this new country can be devoted exclusively to public order, are having a devastating effect on crime, generating such nervousness and insecurity among the gangs that they end up destroying each other.”