Even Silence Has an End: My Six Years of Captivity in the Colombian Jungle

by Ingrid Betancourt

  “They’re African wasps!” I heard myself scream.

  “Stop it! You’ll excite them even more!” replied Clara.

  Our voices echoed in the forest. If our captors had heard us, they would know where to come and find us! Gripped by panic, I continued to cry out from the pain of each sting. Then, all of a sudden, reason returned. I left the road and rushed toward the nearest bush. I noticed that by moving I was able to shake off some of the wasps. I felt emboldened again. The proximity of denser vegetation had confused some of them, and others simply abandoned me to rejoin the main swarm. But there were still a lot stuck to my pants. Using two fingers, I grabbed them by their furiously beating wings and plucked them off one by one, mercilessly crushing them under my foot. I shuddered at the crunching sound but forced myself to continue methodically. Most of the time I ended up breaking them in two, leaving the still-quivering abdomen embedded in my skin. I thanked heaven it was I who had experienced this and not my mother or my sister; they would have died of fright. I made a major effort to control myself, in part because of fear but mainly because I was in the grip of a nervous aversion to touching the cold, damp bodies of these insects—I was trembling with revulsion. Finally I won the battle, surprised not to feel any pain, as if I had been anesthetized. I saw that Clara had won her battle, too, except that her attack had been far worse than mine, and she’d managed to keep her cool better than I had.

  “My father kept hives in the country. I got used to them,” she said testily. The hornet attack had shaken us. I thought about the noise we’d made and could not dismiss the idea that our pursuers had dispatched a reconnaissance mission.

  The hornet bridge was the first in a long series of wooden bridges erected every fifty yards, similar to those we had crossed to reach the camp from which we’d escaped. At times these bridges looked like viaducts because they went on interminably, meandering between the trees over hundreds of yards. They must have been built in previous years and abandoned. The planks were rotting and the sides crumbling, eaten away by hungry vegetation. We walked over them, six feet aboveground, inspecting each plank and beam as we made our way forward, terrified we might fall through at any moment. We were aware of the risk of being spotted if guerrillas were in the area, but these bridges saved us from getting trapped in the tangle of roots and creepers that were lurking underneath.

  We decided to take turns carrying the bag. Without eating and having drunk little, we had succumbed to exhaustion.

  Once the bridges became less frequent, we decided to hang the bag over the stick I’d been using as a cane, placing one end of the stick on the shoulder of the person in front and the other on the shoulder of the person behind. This technique made the walk easier, and we continued like this at a faster pace for a few more hours.

  The forest began to lose its color, and the air gradually became cooler. We had to find somewhere to spend the night. Straight ahead the path climbed, with a final wooden bridge awaiting us after a bend. Beyond the bridge, the forest seemed less dense; the light filtering through was different. We might be very close to the river and, who knows, to finding peasants, a boat, or any type of help.

  But my companion was exhausted. I could see how her feet had doubled in size. The wasps had stung her all over. She wanted to stop before we crossed the bridge. I thought for a moment. I was aware that tiredness was a very poor counselor, and I prayed that I would not make any mistakes. Or maybe it was because I sensed I was making a mistake that I called to the heavens for help. In less than an hour, it would be dark, and the guerrillas would be back at camp, reviewing another day they had returned empty-handed. The thought calmed me down. I agreed to stop, and I explained to Clara the precautions we needed to take. What I didn’t see was that she had left the bag propped up against a tree in full view of the path, before going down to drink from a spring flowing just below us.

  I heard their voices. They had come up from behind and were talking normally as they walked, not imagining for one moment that we were a few yards away. My blood froze. I saw them before they saw me. If Clara hid in time, they would pass by without noticing us. There were two of them, the pretty guerrilla who in spite of herself had served to distract the guard and thus facilitate our escape, and Edinson, a wily-looking youth who was always guffawing. They were talking loudly enough to be heard from a distance.

  I took my eyes off them and turned toward Clara. She dashed up to get her bag, moving completely into the open—and came face-to-face with Edinson. The kid stared at her, his eyes popping out of his head. Then she turned to look at me, the blood draining from her face, fear and pain deforming her features. Edinson followed her movement to where I was standing. We looked at each other. I closed my eyes. It was all over. I heard Edinson’s carnivorous giggle, which cut through the air like a razor, then the sound of a machine gun being fired into the air to celebrate their victory and announce it to the others. I hated them for their happiness.

  NINE

  THE STRAINS OF COMMUNAL LIFE

  SUMMER 2003

  I was with Papa. He was wearing his square, horn-rimmed glasses that I had not seen on him since the happy days of my childhood. I was hanging on to his hand and crossing a busy road, swinging my arm back and forth to get his attention. I was a little girl. I was laughing from the delight of being with him. Once on the sidewalk, he stopped abruptly without looking at me and inhaled deeply. He pressed my hand, still held in his, against his heart. His voice became strained as he grimaced in pain, and my joy suddenly turned to anguish.

  “Papa, are you all right?”

  “It’s my heart, my darling, it’s my heart.”

  I looked everywhere for a car, and we bundled into the first taxi heading toward the hospital. But it was at home that we arrived, it was into his bed that I put him; he was still unwell, and I tried frantically to reach his doctor, my mother, my sister, but the phone remained silent. Papa collapsed against me. I caught him and shook him, but he was too heavy, his weight was smothering me, he was dying on me, and I didn’t have the physical strength to put him back into bed or help him, save him. A muted scream remained lodged in my throat, and I found myself sitting under my mosquito net, panting, covered in sweat, wide-eyed, and blind. Dear God! Thank goodness it was only a nightmare! . . . But what am I talking about? Papa is dead, and I am a prisoner: The real nightmare is waking up here.

  I cried for hours and hours, waiting for daybreak so that I could bury my pain in the everyday gestures I would perform mechanically, to give myself the impression of still being alive. My companion was head to tail next to me and was annoyed.

  “Stop crying, you’re keeping me awake.”

  I took refuge in my silence, my soul ravaged to the core at having to endure a fate that would not even allow me to cry in peace. I was angry at God for turning against me. I hate you, I hate you! You don’t exist, and if you do, you are a monster! Every night for more than a year, I dreamed that Papa was dying in my arms. Every night I would wake up terrified, disoriented, in emptiness, trying to work out where I was, only to discover that my worst nightmares were nothing compared to my reality.

  The months went by in devastating sameness, empty hours that needed to be filled, punctuated only by meals and bathing. Lassitude set in, creating a distance between Clara and me. I no longer spoke to her, or at least very little—just what was required to move forward or sometimes to give us heart. I refrained from revealing my feelings so as not to start a conversation I wanted to avoid. It began with the little things—a silence, embarrassment at having seen in the other something we did not want to discover. It was nothing; we were just settling in to daily life in spite of the horror.

  In the beginning we shared everything without keeping count. Very soon we had to divide meticulously what was allotted to us. We gave each other dark looks, we were annoyed with the space we each took from the other, and we slid imperceptibly toward intolerance and rejection.

  The feeling of “every man for himsel
f” was gradually surfacing. It was definitely not something to verbalize. There was a boundary or, better still, a bulwark, between us and our abductors, composed of our secrets, our conversations that were inaccessible to them in spite of their constant surveillance. As long as we maintained our unity, I felt we would remain armored. But daily life was wearing us down. One day I asked the guard for a piece of line to hang our laundry on. He didn’t want to help. The line nevertheless turned up the following day, and I set about installing it between the trees, using the entire length as efficiently as possible. I went to fetch my laundry, and when I came back, I discovered that there was no room for my things. Clara had taken up all the space with hers.

  Another day the area under the mosquito net became a problem. Next it was the issue of hygiene to control odors. Then noise management. It was impossible to agree on the most basic rules of behavior. In this enforced intimacy, there was a major risk of becoming indifferent and cynical and ending up forcing the other person, shamelessly, to put up with you. One evening, after asking Clara to move over because I had no room in the bed, she exploded. “Your father would be ashamed of you if he could see you!” Her words stung my heart as if she’d slapped me. I was overwhelmed by the gratuitousness of the insult and devastated to realize that I would no longer be able to lean on her.

  Every day brought a new dose of pain and acrimony. I saw us drifting apart. It took considerable strength not to seek relief from the guards’ constant humiliation by humiliating in turn the person sharing the same fate. It was surely neither conscious nor desired, but it was a form of release for our bitterness.

  Yet, estranged as we now were, we were still chained to a tree twenty-four hours a day, sitting crammed together in a space six feet long by four feet wide.

  I persuaded them to bring us fabric and thread, and I thanked heaven I had spent time listening to my elderly aunt Lucy, who, when I was a teenager, insisted on teaching me the art of embroidery. My cousins were too bored to stick around, but I stayed out of curiosity. Now I realized that life supplies us with everything we need for the journey. Everything I had acquired either actively or passively, everything I had learned either voluntarily or by osmosis, was coming back to me as the real riches of my life, even though I had lost everything.

  I was surprised to find myself repeating my aunt’s gestures and using her words and mannerisms to explain to Clara the rudiments of cross-stitch, straight stitch, and blanket stitch. Before long, when they weren’t on guard duty, the young women of the camp started coming over to watch us work. They, too, wanted to learn.

  The hours, the days, and the months went by less painfully. The concentration required for embroidery lightened our endless silences. There was a kinship in our gestures, which made our fate more bearable. It lasted many months in many camps until the thread ran out. But while we were sewing, I understood how crucial it was to entertain my body in order to be able to free my mind.

  A few weeks after our failed escape, with no explanation, they made us gather our belongings to leave in the opposite direction from what I had been calling “our way out.” We ventured even deeper into the jungle, and for the first time there was no path, no sign of human life. We walked in single file, one guard up front, another at the rear. These sudden changes in location filled me with immense anxiety. The coincidence of this feeling, which we sensed was the same for both of us, made our war of silence—a war fed by the constant strain of defining our space and our independence from each other—vanish instantly.

  We would look at each other and all was said. It was in these terrible moments, when our destiny seemed to be sinking even further into the abyss, that we acknowledged defeat, recognizing only then how much we needed each other.

  While the guerrillas finished breaking down the camp and we witnessed the dismantling of this space, which we had ended up adopting as “ours,” while the last of them were pulling up and throwing into the bushes the stakes that had supported our tent until there was nothing left but an indistinct, muddy area, and any proof of our existence in this place had just been eliminated, Clara and I would take each other silently by the hand in an instinctive effort to give strength to the other.

  I applied myself to memorizing everything in the hope of retaining some spatial consistency in my brain that could potentially enable me find my way back. But the more we walked, the more new obstacles had to be incorporated into my calculations. Feverish chills ran over my skin, and my hands were so damp that I had to wipe them continually on my pants. Then came the nausea. I was well aware of the process that took place each time a departure was announced. In one and a half hours, at most, I would have to dash behind a bush, where I could throw up without being seen. I always made sure to have a small roll of tissue to wipe my mouth and clothes, a somewhat superfluous gesture given that I was already covered in mud.

  The new camp that awaited us was very different from the previous one. The guerrillas thought it prudent to build our caleta away from their own dwellings. From where they placed us, it was impossible to see what they were doing or how they organized themselves. We were isolated, with a gloomy-looking guard posted a few feet from our mosquito net, obviously unhappy at being condemned to the boredom of being separated from his comrades and the embarrassment of being so close to us.

  I preferred it this way. It would be easier, if circumstances permitted, to dupe the surveillance of just one man.

  We had already gotten our bearings again and had resumed our embroidery when I saw Patricia, the nurse, walking toward us with a man I’d never seen before. He was young, in his thirties, with copper-colored skin, a small, shiny black mustache, and short hair. He was wearing regulation khaki pants, the usual rubber boots, and a shirt unbuttoned to the navel, revealing a hairy bulk that stopped just short of being fat. Around his neck hung a gold chain bearing a large, yellowed tooth.

  He arrived all smiles, rolling his shoulders, and I couldn’t help thinking that there was something bloodthirsty about him. Patricia made the introductions.

  “This is Commander Andres!” she said with an adulation that took me by surprise.

  The man obviously wanted to make a bold entrance and impress the troops who had gathered a few yards away to witness the scene.

  “What are you doing?” he asked me, half authoritarian, half friendly.

  “Hello,” I replied, looking up from my work.

  He looked me straight in the eye, as if trying to read my thoughts, and burst out laughing as he stroked his mustache. Then, still smiling, he continued, “What is that?”

  “This? It’s a tablecloth for my mother.”

  “Let me see!” he ordered.

  I passed him my sewing, taking care not to raise my mosquito net too much. He pretended to inspect my work with the eye of a connoisseur and was about to return it to me with a “not bad” when a striking young woman who was standing behind me and whom I had not seen before snatched my work from his hands with a confidence that left no doubt as to the nature of their relationship. “Oh! It’s so pretty! I want to do this! Please!” She rolled her hips with the full intention of enticing him. Andres looked delighted. “Maybe later,” he replied, laughing.

  Patricia chimed in. “He is the new commander!”

  So this was the man with whom we had to get along from now on. I was already missing Young Cesar, who had obviously been dismissed because of our escape attempt.

  “What’s that you have around your neck?” I asked.

  “This? It’s a jaguar’s tooth.”

  “A jaguar’s?!”

  “Yes, it was huge. I killed it myself.”

  His black eyes shone with pleasure. His expression changed, and he became almost charming.

  “Those animals are on the verge of extinction. You shouldn’t kill them.”

  “Oh, we’re eco-conscious in the FARC! We don’t kill, we execute!”

  He turned on his heel and left, followed by his retinue of women.

  My com
panion stared at me. “You’re an idiot!”

  “Yes I know, but I couldn’t help it.”

  I plunged back into my work, thinking about Papa. I hadn’t eaten for ten days; I needed to say good-bye to him, to mark his death in my flesh and etch in my memory these painful days spent in a time and place void of any distinguishing features. I have to learn to hold my tongue, I told myself, wincing as I pricked myself with a needle.

  My deepest regrets assailed me when darkness fell. The memory of Papa was their primary trigger. I had stopped fighting it, telling myself that it was better to cry until my pain ran dry. But I also had the feeling that my suffering, instead of dissipating, was increasing and that as a result instead of easing my burden it was simply compacting it. I decided therefore to confront my distress in stages. I permitted myself to wallow in the sorrow of recalling the moments that had created my love for my father, but I would not permit myself any thoughts at all of my own children. That, for me, was quite simply unbearable. The times when I had opened up a small crack at the mention of them, I thought I would go mad. I could not think of Mom either. Now that Papa had died, I had begun to torture myself thinking that she, too, could go at any moment. And this thought, which always accompanied my memories of her like a perverse dread, filled me with terror: I had also imagined Papa might die, and it had become a reality, as if I had acquired the abominable power to transform my fears into reality.