Asprilla came to check on me, all smiles. “It’s only for a few weeks. You’ll come back to the camp afterward,” he explained, although I had not asked him.
Marc wandered through all the tents, inspecting the premises, and eventually found a spot where I could see him without him being seen. Using signs, he conveyed that he’d be going to the chontos and from there he would throw me a piece of paper.
I followed his instructions. With a bit of luck, his missile might reach me. The paper landed outside my designated area, but I rushed into the bushes to pick it up. It was a letter on a tiny space filled with a jumble of overlapping words, a space too small for all he had to say.
Settled in my hammock beneath my mosquito net, I read the letter. It was so sad and funny at the same time. I could see him standing, keeping a lookout, waiting for me to finish reading it to see the effect of his words on my face.
Very soon we made a routine of sending each other messages this way, until Oswald’s girlfriend, who was on duty, found us out and instantly reported us to Asprilla. We would have to find another system.
Marc asked Asprilla if we could share the Bible, and he agreed. That became our new letter box. He came to get my Bible in the morning and brought it back in the evening. We wrote in pencil in the margins of the Gospels and indicated where to write the answer. If it occurred to Asprilla to leaf through the pages, he wouldn’t find anything, just words in the margins, sometimes in Spanish, sometimes in French or English, the fruit of five years of reflection, carefully annotated.
This daily contact allowed Marc to gain Asprilla’s trust, and the guerrilla informed him that Enrique was going to divide the group in two and that we would be in the same group as Lucho. This news filled me with hope.
I asked to speak to Lucho and to Marc. Asprilla advised me to wait patiently; he didn’t want Enrique to refuse and decide to prolong my isolation. A shipment of chains arrived. The new ones were much thicker and heavier than Pinchao’s. I was the first one to try them out—one huge padlock around my neck and then another one just as enormous to attach my chain to the tree. I witnessed my American companions’ anguish when they understood for the first time that they would also be chained up. The sight of that enormous chain shining around Marc’s neck made me sick.
On that day his letter was distraught. He explained to me how you could snap the lock on a padlock by rusting it with salt, how you could release the inner latch with some tweezers or nail clippers. He explained that we had to be near each other to be able to run if the military suddenly attacked. There we were, naked before our fear of death, but we didn’t want to face it without each other.
At dawn we prepared to leave the camp, and I was hurriedly packing my things, impatient to be together again with Marc and Lucho. It was a splendid day, unusual for the rainy season. I was ready before everybody. But there was no hurry. Sitting on my rotten tree trunk, chained by the neck, I watched the hours go slowly by, while the sounds from the guerrillas’ camp indicated that it was being totally dismantled in a slow and organized way. The hollow sound of metal banging against the riverbank announced the arrival of the bongo. It wasn’t a march, I concluded, relieved.
Late in the afternoon, Lili, Enrique’s girlfriend, showed up. Her friendly attitude misled me. As I waited to be reunited with my group, I let down my guard.
Lili began talking about this and that, making pleasant comments about Lucho. Then she spoke about some of the other prisoners and asked me about Marc. Something in her tone of voice rang an alarm bell, but I was unable to identify the danger. I paused before I replied that Marc and I had indeed become good friends. As if she’d gotten what she’d come for, she left without even saying good-bye. I closed my eyes with the horrid impression that I had fallen into a trap.
Then I saw old Erminson. He came up to me acting as cold as an executioner and tried the keys of a heavy key ring he held pompously until he found the right one to open my padlock. He took it off the ring and brandished it victoriously, shouting to Asprilla and Enrique that everything was ready.
The guards ordered us to put on our backpacks. Then they separated my companions into two groups. Marc and Lucho’s group was told to go to the fore of the boat without me. No, it can’t be! Lord, don’t let this happen! I prayed with all my strength. Lucho stopped to hug me, even though this infuriated the guards. Marc went by last; he took my hand and squeezed it tight. I saw him go off, his equipo filled to the brim with useless things, and I told myself that our lives were worthless.
When the second group headed off, I was ordered to follow. Massimo was next to the bongo, and he took me by the arm to help me on board. I looked everywhere for Lucho and Marc. They were sitting at the bottom of the hull, and their heads were hardly any higher than the level of the guardrail where I was walking. Enrique had built a dividing wall by piling up our equipos, and I had to sit down on the other side with the second group. I longed to hear Monster, “El Tuerto,” or Asprilla telling me that I had to sit with my friends. But all I heard was Enrique’s voice, cold and cruel, addressing us as if we were dogs. “Move it! At the back, on the other side, hurry up!”
Zamaidy was on guard, holding a Galil rifle pointed at us as she watched me go down into the hole where the rest of my companions were already arguing over the best spots. She maintained a stony silence in the middle of all the shouts and noise the troops were making as they boarded. Night fell instantly, and the bongo moved off like an ogre emerging from its sleep. The engine filled the air with nauseating bluish fumes, and its throbbing drowned out all else. We were once again on the smooth track of a great river. A huge full moon rose in the sky like the eye of a cyclops.
I no longer had any doubt. My fate was hounding me, relentlessly, like an avalanche sweeping before it everything I cared about. I didn’t have much time left; we were going to be separated for good. Marc moved to the wall of backpacks that divided us. I crept up there, too, and put my hand over the wall, hoping to find his. Zamaidy looked at me. “You have a few hours,” she said, placing her body as a screen. This was the first and last time Marc and I held each other’s hands. Our companions were already sleeping, and our words were muffled by the sound of the engine.
“Tell me about your dream house,” I urged him.
“It’s an old house, the kind you find in New England. There are two big fireplaces on either side and a wooden staircase that creaks when you go up it. There are trees all around, and gardens. There are two cows in the garden. One is called Ciclo and the other is Timica.”
I smiled. He was playing with the syllables of the first word I’d taught him in Spanish: ciclotímica.
“But this house won’t be my home until I share it with the person I love.”
“I’ve never yet seen such a beautiful, sad night,” I confessed.
“They may separate us, but they can’t prevent us from thinking about each other,” he said, caressing my hand. “Someday we’ll be free, and we’ll have another night like this one, beneath the same fantastic moon, and it will be a beautiful night. And it won’t be sad anymore.”
The bongo slowed heavily to its mooring. The air suddenly became heavy. They were ordered to disembark. Lucho came up to me. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll look after him, and he’ll look after me,” he added, looking at Marc. “But you promise me that you’ll hang in there!”
We held each other. I was torn apart.
Marc took my face between his hands. “I will see you soon,” he said, placing a kiss on my cheek.
SEVENTY-SIX
STROKING DEATH
AUGUST 31, 2007
I stood there gasping for breath, frozen in a void, absent from the commotion around me. The guerrillas were loading and unloading equipos and bags of supplies. I waited for the bongo to move off again. I needed some distance. But the commotion had given way to a calm that was even more despairing, and I eventually understood that our group would spend the night in the hull. It was bound to rain. I looke
d around me at the inscrutable faces of my companions. They were each setting out items to mark their territory. My former neighbor was restless in his corner. Enrique did this on purpose, I thought. Diagonally across from me, as far away as possible, there was one small free spot. William was looking at me. He smiled faintly and motioned to me. I crouched down in the empty space, drawing my body in as much as I could.
I have to sleep. I have to sleep, I repeated relentlessly, hour after hour, until dawn. I can’t go through another night like this one.
“Doctora,” someone murmured close to me.
Doctora? Who was calling me that? For years no one had called me that, ever since Enrique had ordered them not to. I was Ingrid, la vieja, la cucha, the Heron. But not Doctora.
“Doctora, psst!”
I turned around. It was Massimo.
“Doctora, go tell him. He’s there, go get him! He can have you change groups.”
Indeed, Enrique was standing at the prow, in the same spot where they had disappeared. How can I go on living? I thought, as I moved along the railing in spite of myself. Enrique had already seen me. His entire body stiffened, like a spider who can sense its prey struggling in its web. Dear Lord, I’ll go down on my knees before that monster, I thought, horrified. He knew. He pretended to chat with a guerrillera; he was being hard, sharp, humiliating the girl. He deliberately made me wait and refused to look over for a long time. So long that on the boat, everything stopped, as if the world were holding its breath not to miss a word of what was about to be said.
“Enrique?”
He refused to turn around.
“Enrique?”
After a long, exacerbated silence, he grumbled, “What do you want?”
“I have a request to make.”
“I can’t do anything for you.”
“Yes you can. I’m asking you to change me to the other group.”
“That’s impossible.”
“For you everything is possible. You’re the leader here. You’re the one who decides.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Why do you hate me so much?”
“I can’t do it.”
“Yes you can. You’re a god here. You can do whatever you want.”
Enrique puffed himself up, and his gaze glided down over the world of humans. From on high, pleased with his genius, he declaimed, “It is the Secretariado who decides. I received a precise list; your name is in Commander Chiqui’s group.” He pointed to a small, round man, with pink, porcine skin and a bushy little beard.
“I humbly beg you to show some compassion toward us.”
He took a deep breath of contempt, certain that the world belonged to him.
“I beg you, Enrique,” I said again. “They’re my family, the one that happened to be here in this jungle, in this captivity, in this hell. Don’t forget that the wheel turns. Treat us as you would like to be treated if ever you were taken prisoner.”
“I shall never be taken prisoner,” he retorted. “I would kill myself before I let myself be taken. And I would never lower myself to ask for anything from my enemy.”
“Well, I do. My dignity does not depend on this. I’m not ashamed to beg you, even if it costs me a great deal. But you see, the strength of love is always greater.”
Enrique gave me a vicious look, squinting, searching in me for his own dark abyss. He was aware that everybody was listening, and as if he were tossing his gloves onto a piece of furniture, he said disdainfully, “I will pass on your request to the high command. That’s all I can do for you.”
He turned his back on me, caressed the head of the guerrillera who was on duty. And jump-landed on the ground with a sharp sound, like the blade of a guillotine falling on a neck.
The bongo shuddered and floated away from land again, and the deafening sound of the engine throbbed and shook the empty shell of my inert body. The canal grew increasingly narrow. Oswald and Pipiolo, armed with a chain saw, were attacking the immense trees that had grown horizontally across the water-course, blocking the way. Everything is upside down now, I thought.
Two hours later El Chiqui, standing poised on the prow, motioned the bongo to moor.
An Indian girl, called Consolacion, with a long black braid, in green uniform, had just brushed my shoulder with her hand. I shivered on opening my eyes. I followed, stooped under my heavy load. Ahead of me was a steep incline, which I set about climbing like a mule, my eyes staring at the ground. I stumbled against one of my companions who had stopped, and I realized that we were unloading right there.
I collapsed against a young tree off to one side and sank into limbo. Someone was shaking me. The meal had just come. The idea of food disgusted me. It felt impossible to move.
There were no more trees within reach of my chain. They had set up a huge post under my tent. Now it’s the post that’s chained to me. Pipiolo came with the key ring. He was overjoyed. He spoke to me, sticking his face right up against mine, spluttering. I recoiled from his rancid breath. Pipiolo took his revenge by tightening the chain around my neck, several links. I could feel it painfully when I swallowed.
He wants me to beg him, I thought. He went away. Don’t ask for anything, don’t desire anything.
The days were nothing but a succession of meals. I forced myself to get up and pass my bowl. Above all to avoid any comments. I felt a chronic nausea welling up in waves—whenever I smelled the pot, whenever I heard the sound of the changing of the guards or felt the padlock being closed too tightly after I’d been shuttled to the chontos.
Someone had given me a brand-new school notebook with a pirated picture of Snow White. I was still writing to Marc, but it wasn’t fun anymore, because he was not there to answer. I reread his letters, a small bundle that never left my pocket, to hear his voice. Those moments were the only ones I could look forward to, and I pushed them back as far as I could, to a time just before twilight.
I’m hibernating was my explanation to myself for my insurmountable lack of appetite.
My pants were beginning to float on me. Before, I used to alter the pants so they would fit. Now I used the belts that I’d woven for the children. They’ll rot otherwise, I said to myself.
I was startled one morning by the horrified look on the face of one of my companions standing in line with his bowl. I turned around, ready to see a monster behind me. He was staring at me. All I had was a little piece of a broken mirror that I hardly used anymore. I could only see myself in bits—an eye, my nose, a quarter of my cheek and my neck. I was green, with purple shadows around my eyes like spectacles, my skin was dry.
I had made a hole at the foot of my post with a little stick to bury the strands of hair that I picked up every day. My comb never failed to come away with a dusty clump that I hid so that the wind wouldn’t blow it over to the neighbors. They’d complain. They’d say I was dirty. I wasn’t. Through sheer will I put on the damp, stinking shorts I euphemistically called my “bath outfit,” which were decomposing because they could never actually dry out, covered with a transparent sticky film of mildew. We had to run down a steep slope and climb back up it to get to the wash area, carry our jugs of water, and the clothes we invariably had to wash.
I’ve turned into a cat, I mused, stunned, thinking of my grandmother’s sweet expression. When she was a child, no one had warned her about the transformations of puberty. Terrified to see how her body was changing, she concluded she was under a spell and changing into a feline.
My mutation was less spectacular. I began to despise contact with the water. I would slip into it tensely at the last minute and come out shaking, blue, my scalp as painful as if some invisible hand were pulling my hair. My boots filled with water, my legs and arms were taut; I would struggle back to my caleta, hoping that with the next step I would fall and never get up.
El Chiqui’s camp was built the first week of August, 2007. I had remained secluded in my hammock for a month, oblivious to time and space. Melanie is going to be twenty-two. T
hese words contained all the horror in the world. I went to the chontos and vomited blood.
I was drinking hardly anything, and I ate nothing. When I went to the toilet, which was constantly, a greenish, slimy liquid left my body, excruciating, and I threw up blood, more out of weariness than from some violent urge; my skin was covered with burning pustules that I scratched until they bled to stop the itching. I got up every morning to brush my teeth. That was all I did all day long. I went back to my hammock and held my radio up against my ear, but I listened without hearing as I wandered through the labyrinth of illogical thoughts made up of memories, images, patchwork ideas with which I filled my eternal boredom. Nothing awoke me from my introspection except my mom’s voice and the music of the Colombian artist Juanes singing “Sueños”—“Dreams”—because I shared them so badly.
Pipiolo came to me one evening and stared at me, his voice honeyed. He opened the padlock and gave me some slack around my neck, loosening the chain by a few links. He wanted me to thank him. “You’ll feel better like this. You’ll get your appetite back.”
Poor idiot. I hadn’t noticed the chain for a long time.
I was finding it harder and harder to make the simplest gestures of life. One day I gave up bathing and remained prostrate in my bed. I’m going to die, like Captain Guevara.92 Everyone dies for the New Year, it would be a perfect cycle, I thought, without emotion.
Massimo came to see me from time to time. “Nothing,” he said, because he knew I was still waiting for an answer from the leaders. Each time I felt the same pang. “I’m going to write a letter to Marulanda,” I decided, as a last resort. The prospect of undertaking something in order to be with my friends again propelled me for a few days into a state of near-delirious energy. “If you write a letter for the Secretariado, Gafas has to make sure it gets there, or he’ll be punished,” asserted Massimo. “Give it to Asprilla, or to El Chiqui, so that there are witnesses. They will have to give it to Enrique first, but it will end up in Manuel Marulanda’s hands.”
Even Silence Has an End: My Six Years of Captivity in the Colombian Jungle Page 56