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

by Ingrid Betancourt

  They told us to line up one behind the other, and out we went. I took my dictionary. I wasn’t nervous. I was slowly recovering from that long sadness, from that silence without thoughts. I wanted to go outside, I needed words.

  “It will be good for us.”

  “Yes, it will be good for us.”

  “She was already dead.”

  “Yes, she was already gone. She had forgotten that I was no longer there.” Then he added, “I was expecting it.”

  “You expect it, but you’re never prepared.”

  We went slowly through the outside fence of the prison. Ahead of us the military prisoners walked, in chains, two by two. They had seen us, and now they waved, with big smiles across their hollow faces.

  “Do you think we look like that?”

  “I think we look worse.”

  We filed out of the camp, walking past the trenches for twenty minutes along the little path we’d taken with Shirley on the night of the raid.

  We sat down among the trees, on our black plastic sheeting, far from the military prisoners, whom we couldn’t see but whom we could still hear through the trees.

  “Orlando, did you take the radio?”

  “Yes, I’ve got it, don’t worry.”

  Gloria went to set up her hammock, since it looked like we would be waiting a long time. She stretched out in it, then fell to the ground like a ripe fruit. This time it didn’t make her laugh, although we did. We needed such moments to be lighthearted and silly. I went to give her a hug.

  “Leave me alone, I’m in a bad mood.”

  “Oh, come on!”

  “Leave me alone. I don’t like it when you make fun of me. I’m sure it was Tom who untied the knots so I’d fall down.”

  “Not at all! Don’t be silly! He didn’t do anything to you, poor Tom.”

  They gave the order to set up tents. We would sleep three per tent. We were about to set ours up—Lucho, Orlando, and I.

  “I warn you, I’m a terrible snorer,” said Orlando.

  Just then an increasingly loud roar made us raise our heads. We stopped everything.

  “Helicopters.”

  “There are at least three of them.”

  “They’re flying right over us—they’re on top of us.”

  The forest began to shiver. We were all looking up. I could feel the sound of the engines in my breast.

  “They’re right nearby!”

  The sky went dark. The metal birds seemed immense as they passed above us.

  Orlando, Lucho, and I all thought the same thing at the same time. We had just put our mini-cruseros on our backs. I took Lucho’s hand. With him, I could face anything.

  FORTY-FOUR

  TE CHILD

  The guards loaded their rifles and came closer. We were surrounded. I was praying for a miracle, some unexpected event. A bombardment that would create panic and allow us to slip away. A troop landing, even if it meant death. I knew that there was a standing order to kill me. Before any maneuver or change of location, a guerrilla was assigned to this mission. He had orders either to save me and pull me out of the way if there was crossfire or to execute me if there was a chance I might end up in the hands of the chulos.

  Some years later, during one of the long marches that became our martyrdom in the hands of the FARC, a young guerrilla woman bluntly explained the situation to me.

  She was called “Fluff,” and she deserved the nickname: She was petite and very cute. I liked her. She had a big heart. On this occasion I was having trouble walking and keeping up with the others. She’d been assigned as my guard, which was a relief to me. That day when we stopped somewhere to drink water, we heard a movement in the underbrush, and she loaded her revolver and aimed it at me. Her expression changed; I could hardly recognize her, she was so ugly and cold.

  “What’s going on?”

  “You do what I say, or I’ll shoot you.”

  I was speechless.

  “Walk ahead of me. Start running straight ahead, and don’t stop until I tell you to.”

  I began trotting ahead of her, weighed down by a backpack that was too heavy.

  “Hurry up!” she shouted, annoyed.

  She pushed me abruptly behind some rocks and we stayed hidden like that for a few minutes. A cajuche45 ran straight ahead, a few yards from us, head down. Then came the entire herd, twenty animals or more, much bigger than the first one. Fluff took aim, fired, and hit one of the wild boars. The animal collapsed in front of us, steaming black blood running from the back of its skull.

  “We were lucky it was only cajuches! But it could’ve been the army, and if it had been, I would have had to execute you. Those are the orders.” She explained that the chulos would not be able to tell the difference between us, and they would shoot me. Therefore, I had to learn to run fast, or else she would be the one shooting me. “So you’ve got no choice—or, better still, your best choice is me!”

  I hovered behind Lucho. The helicopters shaved the treetops, went away, came back again, circled, and then went right over our heads again, without seeing us. They disappeared in the distance.

  The day was nearly over, and there were a few minutes of light left. We had just enough time to put up our tent, spread out our plastic sheets, hang up our mosquito nets, and lie down for the night.

  Orlando handed me the radio.

  “Listen to the news tonight. Be careful, they’re right nearby. Lucho and I will talk loudly to cover the sound.”

  The next morning at dawn, I handed him the radio after Mom’s message and the one from Angela, Lucho’s wife. I got up to go clean my teeth and stretch my legs while waiting for breakfast. Orlando was last to come out of the tent, long after us. All the blood had drained from his face. He looked like a walking corpse.

  Lucho took me by the arm. “My God, something’s happened!”

  Orlando looked at us without seeing us and walked like a robot down to the river to get some water. He came back with his eyes red and swollen, his face empty of any expression.

  “Orlando? What’s going on?” After a long silence, he opened his mouth.

  “My mother has died,” he said with a sigh, looking away.

  “Shit! Shit!” shouted Lucho, stamping his foot on the ground. “I hate this jungle, I hate the FARC! How much longer is the Lord going to hound us like this?” he cried, looking up at the sky.

  At the beginning of December, it was Jorge’s mother who had passed away, then Lucho’s, and now Orlando’s. Death was pursuing us. Without their mothers my companions felt adrift, dispossessed of the women who safeguarded the memory of their lives. Now they were projected into a space where to be forgotten by others was to enter the worst of prisons. I shuddered at the idea that I might be the next victim of this curse.

  As if fate wanted to make fun of us, life, like death, was also present in this makeshift camp. At least, I thought so. During the night, in the silence of the trees, I’d heard the cries of a small baby. Clara had given birth, I concluded. On waking, I spoke of it to my companions, but they hadn’t heard anything.

  Lucho made fun of me. “That’s no baby you heard—those are cats. The soldiers have a few. I saw them carrying them when they went ahead of us.”

  The helicopters didn’t come back. We returned to Sombra’s prison and to our belongings, which had been colonized by ants and termites while we were tramping around the forest, and as if to confirm Lucho’s comment, some cats had shown up.

  There was a big tomcat with the coat of a jaguar and fiery yellow eyes that drew everyone’s gaze, no doubt a cross between a cat and a jaguar. He was the king of the gang, surrounded by females all as extraordinary as he was, but more belligerent. He was immediately adopted by our group, and we all did what we could to contribute to his well-being. He was a magnificent animal, with a white chest and white paws that made him look as if he were wearing elegant gloves.

  “I’m gonna take him home with me,” said one of my companions. “Can you imagine if I sold
the kittens? I’d make a fortune!”

  But Tiger—that was his name—was a free creature. He had no master, and he treated us all with indifference, disappearing for days and returning when we least expected him to. One of the females in his harem, just as fierce, had decided to come and stay with us. Right from the start, it was Lucho who conquered her affections. She jumped up on his lap and settled down, purring, mercilessly scratching anyone who tried to come near. Lucho was intimidated and thought it wiser not to get up off his chair until she condescended to leave. From then on, every day she did exactly the same thing. The cat had tamed Lucho, and not the other way around. She was an unloved, unnamed cat with a defect in one eye. She would show up in the evening, meowing, looking for him, and he opened his cans of tuna, not to feed himself or to share with us but to feed his kitty, whom we finally baptized Sabba. Sabba meowed like a crying baby, so for a while I thought that I’d been mistaken and that the baby’s cry I thought I heard must have been hers. But one evening while the cat was sleeping nearby, I again heard the cries. I no longer had any doubt. When Arnoldo showed up the next morning with the stewpot, I bombarded him with questions. Clara hadn’t given birth yet, he said, and she was no longer in the camp.

  I knew that he was lying, and my imagination ran away with me. In an awful dream that night, she was dead and her child lost.

  In the morning I shared the dream with my comrades, insisting that she must be in danger. We all questioned the guards, each on our own, but they told us nothing. Then Sombra and Alfredo came one afternoon. They talked to us from behind the fence, as if we had the plague. The discussion turned sour, because Alfredo called our American companions mercenaries and CIA agents, and we didn’t like it.

  Before leaving, Alfredo declared, “By the way, your friend had her baby. It’s a boy and his name is Emmanuel. She’ll be back in a few days.”

  I was relieved, but my companions weren’t. “It’s going to be awful with a baby in the prison, screaming all night long!” said the very same person who had lectured me when our American captives arrived.

  “I’ll answer you with your own words: We have to welcome everybody here.”

  A few days later, Guillermo told us about Clara’s labor. He had prepared for the operation by reading about the procedure on the computer. He said he’d saved the child’s life, because it was almost dead when he’d intervened, and he had reanimated it. He then explained that Clara was already up and about.

  Clara did indeed make an appearance one morning, with her little baby swaddled in her arms. We all greeted her with emotion, touched by this tiny being that had been born here in the jungle, in our prison, in our misfortune. He slept with his eyes wrinkled up, blind to the dreadful world in which he’d landed.

  Clara put the baby down on my mattress, and we sat together looking at him. She told me in detail what her life had been like since we’d last seen each other in the chicken run, then added, “I was very sick, for days after the birth. The guerrillas took care of the baby. I never breast-fed him, and I only saw him once a day. I couldn’t look after him. I’ve never given him a bath.”

  “Well, that’s all right. We’ll do it together, you’ll see. It’s a wonderful moment.”

  I took the baby in my hands to unwrap him, and I discovered that his left arm was bandaged.

  “What happened?”

  “When they took him out, they pulled a bit hard on his arm, and they broke it.”

  “My God, it must hurt him terribly!”

  “He hardly cries at all. He must not feel it.”

  I was deeply moved.

  The weather was fine, the air was warm. We filled a basin that Lucho had found when we were at the pig pond. While I undressed the infant, I relived the moment Mom had taught me to give Melanie her bath. I copied Mom’s gestures one by one, placing the baby on my forearm, holding his head in my hand, dipping his small body gently into the water, speaking to him, looking into his eyes, humming a happy little tune so that his first contact with water would become a sign of a pleasure, the way I’d seen her do. I scooped some water up with the palm of my other hand.

  “You see, like this. Then you splash the water on his head, taking care not to let it get into his eyes, because that might frighten him. And you talk to him and caress his body, because it’s a special moment, and each time it has to be a moment of harmony between the two of you.”

  Mom’s words came back to me. Crouching above the basin with Clara’s baby in my arms I understood all their significance. I was experiencing with Clara what I knew her mother would have liked to have had the chance to share with her. Clara was fascinated, as I probably had been myself when I watched my mother’s sure and experienced gestures. In fact, the point was not to transmit anything. My role was to liberate her from her fear and apprehension, so that she could discover in herself her own particular way of being together with her child.

  FORTY-FIVE

  THE STRIKE

  I asked them to set up another hut next to mine, up against the fence, for Clara and her child. I wanted to be near her, especially at night, to help her take care of the baby without disturbing the others. I had tried to make my request at the right time, with the right words, in a tone that left no room for suspicion. But they refused, and Clara returned to her place inside the barracks with her child.

  I was so sorry, particularly as, very quickly, Clara refused my help and denied me any contact with the child. My companions rallied around her in turn, but she declined their help with equal stubbornness. It sank our hearts to witness her beginner’s clumsiness as she rebuffed our advice. The infant cried all day, and the receptionist removed him, putting him in the care of one of the female guerrillas.

  “You don’t know how to do it!” Arnoldo shouted at Clara, exasperated.

  I heard my companions telling her off, too.

  “The bottle was scalding hot. You have to test it before you give it to him.”

  “You’re going to make his diaper rash even worse if you go on wiping him with toilet paper! It’s like sandpaper for him!”

  “You have to give him his bath every day, but you mustn’t move his arm. Otherwise it won’t heal.”

  When they brought the baby back from his emergency caregiver, he looked much calmer. Too calm. I observed him from a distance. I spoke about it to Gloria and Consuelo. They, too, had noticed that something was wrong. The child wasn’t following things with his gaze. He reacted to sound, but not to light.

  It was very painful to look at him. There was no point discussing this with his mother. We thought the baby might be sick, but saying so out loud wouldn’t help matters. If they had kept Clara in the camp to give birth, clearly they would do nothing to secure medical help for her child. They were prepared to let us die in prison, and that included newborn babies.

  I would not forget the nurse impassively looking on while Lucho was having a seizure on the ground. Nor the way they had dealt with Jorge’s heart attacks. Lucho had revived him, massaging his chest, something he’d learned from his sister, a doctor. We begged them to give us some aspirin to thin Jorge’s blood and reduce the risk of a heart attack, to no avail. They eventually removed him from the prison, saying we had stressed him out, that we were responsible for his relapse because we fussed over him. He’d spent an entire week in the leather workshop, alone, lying on the ground.

  We’d hoped that they gave him some medical care, but when he came back, he confessed that he’d had a series of other attacks and that the guard had done nothing to help him. Being alive, for every one of us, was becoming more and more miraculous.

  Immersed in a world governed by cynicism, where our lives had become worthless, we had witnessed a reversal of values to which I could still not resign myself.

  In the evening, stretched out in my hut, I followed with a heavy heart the petty trade that some of my companions had set up along the chain-link fence that surrounded us. Anything that might be the object of a transaction was brought the
re, with the aim of obtaining in exchange medication or food.

  I had seen instances of fondling, when some of the guards, taking advantage of our distress and of our needs, pressed their demands ever further and increased our humiliation. Days would go by before I had the strength to say a word to the victim of such abuse.

  It was disturbing to watch the way, for some, embezzlement was becoming a way of life. They justified it as a strategy to win the guerrillas’ trust, with a view to improving their chances of survival. Whatever their true reasons were, they befriended our torturers. They strove to provide proof of their allegiance every time the opportunity arose.

  Whenever a shipment of clothing arrived, which was rare—once a year, twice at the most with a bit of luck—one of our companions would generally receive the most coveted item in the lot. Then later he would come out and say he didn’t want it, and instead of offering it to one of us, who could always have put it to good use, he gave it to a guerrilla he wanted to please. His gesture was duly appreciated, and in exchange he received favors of all sorts—like a greater quantity of better food in his bowl, or medication.

  This attitude gained ground, and consequently some of us became mentally conditioned to see the guerrillas as figures of power and authority and to excuse them for all kinds of cruelty and abuse. Relations had been reversed, and, in contrast, fellow prisoners were viewed as rivals against whom aversion and hostility were nurtured.

  We were beginning to behave like serfs trembling in the presence of a lord whom we would try to please to obtain favors, because we saw only the superiority of rank and not the human reality of the individual. We were becoming as obsequious as courtiers.

  The suffering of Clara’s baby acted as a healthy catalyst for rebellion among our little community. The baby would go from hysterical crying, caused by the pain of his broken arm, to apathy, under the effect of the strong sedatives that the guerrillas gave him unrestrainedly. Tom, who had previously refused to support our hunger strike to protest our treatment, agreed this time to join us in demanding that the child receive pediatric care. We all went on strike. Lucho made himself a dunce cap and a sign on which he wrote, DOWN WITH THE FARC! Following him in single file, chanting slogans of protest, we marched in circles around the courtyard. Orlando had the good idea of fermenting some panela, a piece of brown cane sugar that he’d been keeping in reserve for a long time, to make some homemade alcohol called chicha.