by James Siegel
It was early morning—save for the brief respite by the abandoned coca field, she’d been walking six straight hours.
Then she smelled it.
She stopped dead, closed her eyes, crossed her fingers.
Sniff.
She smelled it again.
Sausage.
Was that possible?
Hot, sizzling, aromatic sausage?
Maybe it was some kind of plant? An animal? A jungle smell she was simply unfamiliar with?
She sniffed the air again, taking her time. No. It was clear as day. Someone was cooking breakfast.
Her heart leaped, soared, did pirouettes. She stopped rocking Joelle and brought her up under her chin.
“We made it. We’re going home. We’re free.”
She couldn’t see anyone—the same panorama of trees, vines, stumps, and ferns. A massive dew-laden spiderweb refracted the sun into sparkling carats of fire.
She followed the smell.
Left, then right, then straight ahead.
Nose, don’t fail me now.
The jungle seemed to thin—not all at once, but slowly, inexorably. The air lost its heaviness, her lungs eased, the insects drifted off.
The smell intensified, tickling her taste buds, reeling her in.
Now she could see patches of empty space through the trees.
She quickened her pace—if she’d been wearing sneakers instead of half-inch heels, she would’ve broken into a run.
Even Joelle seemed to sense a change in the air. Her crying lessened, then stopped altogether. She emitted a series of gurgles and hoarse sniffles.
Joanna skirted vegetation that had clearly been stepped on. Someone had walked here, snapping stems, grinding broad green fronds into the dirt. She thought she could make out an actual footprint.
The smell was intoxicating. She was nearly drunk on it. She lurched past a massive banyan tree and was suddenly staring into thin air.
A lone figure was standing there, backlit by a sun the color of marmalade.
The figure was saying something to her.
Joanna dropped to the ground, Joelle nestled in her ams. She hung her head, rocked back and forth, began weeping.
“No,” she whispered to herself, to Joelle, to the person standing in the clearing, maybe to God. “No . . .”
The clearing sloped uphill to a ridge where a modest farmhouse stood.
It had a smoking chimney, lime-green shutters, and a dilapidated back pen holding roosters, goats, and cows.
It was the first time she’d seen it from the outside.
“Quick,” Galina said, “back to the room before they see you.”
THIRTY-FIVE
Galina snuck her back into the house. Not without being detected. The Indian girl with long black hair came out of the bathroom and nearly bumped into them. Galina had an explanation.
She fainted, Galina told her in Spanish, she needed some air.
The girl nodded, seemingly disinterested.
Once Galina ushered Joanna back into the room, once she closed the door and sat down, she said, “It was stupid. You don’t know the jungle.” She took Joelle from her exhausted arms, changed and fed her. “You would’ve died out there.”
“I’m going to die anyway,” Joanna answered. It was the first time she’d uttered that thought out loud. It seemed to give it an awful legitimacy.
Galina shook her head. “You shouldn’t say that.”
“Why not? It’s true. They’ll kill me like they killed Maruja and Beatriz. You don’t want to talk about it. They killed them in here—in this room. I can show you their blood.”
“Her cold’s worse,” she said, referring to Joelle, continuing to avoid any mention of the two ghosts still hovering in the room.
“Yes, her cold’s worse. And her mother’s still chained to a wall. And we won’t talk about two murdered women.” Joanna’s own voice seemed alien to her now—flat, emotionless. It’s hope, she thought—she’d lost it out there in the jungle.
“I’m going to put her to sleep,” Galina said.
“Yes. Wonderful idea. While you’re at it, put me to sleep.”
Galina winced and rubbed her left arm.
Nurse. Kidnapper. Friend. Jailer.
“I don’t understand you,” Joanna said.
“What?”
“I don’t understand. You. Why you’re here. Why you’re with these people. Killers. Murderers. You were a mother.”
Galina had turned to leave, but now she stopped, looked back at her. It was that word, Joanna thought.
Mother.
“You never finished your story,” Joanna said. “Tell me. I need a good story tonight. I do. I need to understand why.”
THIRTY-SIX
I need a good story tonight.”
Just the way Claudia used to say it to me because she didn’t want to go to sleep yet.
A story, Mama, she’d beg. A story.
Well, okay.
A story.
AFTER GALINA AND HER HUSBAND HAD LEFT THE BAR THAT NIGHT, they didn’t speak to Claudia again.
Sometimes the boy from La Nacional would call them.
There was a firefight with helicopter-borne Special Forces in the mountains. A new initiative by a just-sworn-in president who’d promised to get tough with the guerrilleros. The boy said Claudia was there—army officers reported a beautiful young girl in camouflage fatigues. Don’t worry, the boy said, she wasn’t hurt.
These government forays were infrequent and entirely for show. Getting tough on the guerrilleros, everyone knew, was simple posturing. There might be two tough factions in Colombia, but the government wasn’t one of them.
There was FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, on the left.
And on the right, the United Self-Defense Forces.
All names in these kinds of conflicts were exercises in irony. Self-Defense—as if they’d been punched in the nose and were simply defending themselves from a playground bully. Maybe that’s what some of them believed they were doing.
Just not the man who ran it.
If you wanted to understand what happened to Claudia, you had to understand him too. If you saw Claudia tripping down the alleyways of Chapinero as a sensitive and easily bruised eight-year-old, you had to see him growing up in Medellín and doing a generous share of the bruising. They were counterparts. If Claudia was the light, he was the dark.
They were due to collide.
How do you explain a Manuel Riojas?
Bogeymen aren’t usually born, they just are. They lurk in the swamp of human fear and misery. They don’t have beginnings, just ends. But even then, they never go quietly, not before they leave behind desolate swaths of scorched earth.
Real bogeymen do have beginnings. They have birthdays and confirmations and school graduations. They live in neighborhoods, not swamps. Manuel Riojas grew up in the grimy Jesús de Navarona neighborhood of Medellín.
Galina had visited relatives there once. She remembered how a steady gray rain washed the garbage downhill. It was possible she’d driven by Riojas himself—later she’d wonder about that. If he might’ve been carjacking by then. If he might’ve picked their car—pointed a pistol through the window and ended everything before it began.
It’s said he grew up on the stories.
The legends of Colombia’s bandidos. Desquite and Tirofijo and Sangrenegra. Revenge, Sureshot, and Blackblood. Galina came to believe that countries where much of the population is poor and oppressed are doomed to worship the wrong people. People who steal from the rich, even if they never actually give anything back to the poor. It doesn’t matter—they are poor. Or were. They might be vicious, murderous, clearly psychotic. They’re victimizing the victimizers. That’s enough to make them folk heroes. Enough to make children who grow up in uncertain circumstances daydream of becoming them.
Riojas’ criminal beginnings were murky. It’s said he went back and had police files altered, court records erased, various
acquaintances from his early life eliminated. It’s known he was arrested at least once by the time he was fourteen—possibly for petty theft. It’s believed he bartered fake lottery tickets, hijacked cigarettes, stole cars, before moving on to something infinitely more lucrative. The particular scourge of their godforsaken country: drugs. Specifically, coca. He started as a runner, a small dealer. He was apparently a favorite of the local contrabandista, who made the fatal mistake of trusting him, promoting him through the ranks. Somehow the severed head of this contrabandista ended up stuck on a pole on a mountain road outside Medellín. Somehow Riojas ended up in charge of the Medellín cocaine trade. This was generally acknowledged to be the first exhibition of Riojas’ particular business ethos. He didn’t compete with rivals. He murdered them. He did it in ways meant to discourage others. Children were murdered in front of their parents. Mothers were raped in front of their husbands. Enemies were tortured and mutilated, their freshly slaughtered corpses placed on public display. More fodder for the newspapers.
Property wasn’t excluded. Warehouses, factories, competing cocaine fields, were torched and obliterated.
The stories grew; the legend took form and substance.
He rose to nearly unimaginable heights.
That’s necessary for a bogeyman. To tower over the cringing. And they did cringe. Not just rival gangs, the Ochoas, the Escobars, who soon disappeared in a series of vicious and prolonged bloodbaths. But the familias who pulled the strings. They bowed down too. Riojas ate the heart of his enemies, then became them. He was elected state senator. They say he’d promised this to his mother. Respectability. They say he’d pledged this to the idols he kept in a secret chapel on one of his haciendas. Santeria, they whispered, the bastard religion practiced throughout much of the country outside Bogotá.
But rulers demand more than obedience. They demand armies. The one belonging to the government was toothless. It didn’t take any particular intelligence to realize that the only army worth fighting lived in the mountains north of Bogotá and called themselves FARC. They spouted Marxist mumbo jumbo about toppling the elite, talked about the people as if the people actually mattered. Under different circumstances, Riojas might’ve sympathized with them, even joined them. After all, he came from the same impoverished background. Now he was another successful capitalista trying to protect his investments. They were the enemy.
He armed his own militia. He gave his most trusted executioners titles. Captain. General. Major. That made them more or less an army. He demanded money from the five familias to fund it.
Now they could have a real war.
Riojas could conduct it the way war was supposed to be conducted. When the USDF wanted to keep campesino villages from harboring FARC guerrillas—not that they had, not that they’d even thought about it, just that they might—they’d pick twenty campesinos at random. You, you, and you. They’d make them dig their own graves, then force their fathers or brothers or uncles to execute them. Whoever refused, joined them in the pit. This was the kind of muscular teaching a simple campesino could understand.
Claudia was captured by the USDF two years after she walked out of that bar.
The boy from the university called and told them.
After Galina had dropped the phone to the floor and stared at it as if it were something alien, after she had reluctantly picked it up and found her voice, she asked the boy if her daughter was dead. Only it wasn’t her voice—it sounded like someone years older.
No, he said. She’d been captured alive.
He didn’t add that it wouldn’t be for long.
He didn’t have to.
For one entire year Galina assumed Claudia was dead.
She thought of having a proper funeral but was always dissuaded at the last moment. Sometimes it was something she found as she cleaned the house. She cleaned all the time now. Ceaselessly, relentlessly, religiously. She’d trudge back from caring for someone else’s daughter or son and immediately grab a mop, a sponge, a dustpan, desperately clinging to routine as a way to stave off thoughts of suicide. One day while vacuuming under Claudia’s desk, she found a birthday card an eight-year-old Claudia had drawn for her in school. A stick-figure mommy holding a stick-figure baby in her arms. Te adoro, the baby whispered.
Galina said not yet. The funeral would wait.
Sometimes memory would be triggered by something completely ordinary. Stuffing a bedsheet into the washer and suddenly remembering Claudia’s first period, how Galina had stood flustered and embarrassed before Claudia’s soiled bed one morning before middle school. Even as her daughter remained oddly composed, even comforting. I know what it is, Mama—it means I can have grandbabies for you.
Galina pushed the funeral off again.
Everything that follows, Galina would find out later.
Claudia was captured in the town of Chiappa. They’d sent her there for supplies, and someone spotted her. Stories about her had been circulating for months. The beautiful university girl with the revolutionary fever. Someone was sitting and waiting for her. He followed her from town, called in reinforcements. When Claudia got back to the ravine where her fellow soldiers in the war against capitalism were holed up and waiting, a USDF brigade was already circling in for the kill.
When she opened the flap of their makeshift tent, just a few shirts strung together to keep out the rain, bullets rained down on them instead.
Three of the guerrilleros were killed. Two made it back through the jungle, one of them dragging a shot-up right leg that was later amputated.
Why wasn’t Claudia killed like the others?
Maybe because they were told not to.
Because Riojas had heard the stories and was curious to see her in the flesh. More than curious. Desirous.
He left a state dinner in Bogotá that night. Someone whispered into his ear, and he flew by helicopter to a hacienda in the north. When he entered the room where Claudia was on her knees, both hands tied tightly behind her back, he was still wearing his tuxedo.
He took his time. Examining her, the way you appraise horseflesh or hunting dogs. Apparently, he had plenty of both.
He must’ve liked what he saw.
You can imagine what happened during the next two days. You can close your eyes and say a prayer and peek. Riojas personally took charge of her interrogation. She came very close to dying. She prayed for it, hoped to God that the next time he beat her into unconsciousness she wouldn’t wake up. Despite having joined the army of the godless, Claudia still believed. Somewhere inside herself she retained her Catholic core. She spoke to it now.
She’d heard the stories: prisoners pushed out of helicopters, fed to the tigers. It would happen to her.
But two days turned into three.
Then four.
An entire week passed.
No one came to take her off in a helicopter, or for a trip to the tiger cage. Yes, there were tigers. She squinted out her window through nearly beaten-shut eyes and saw them pacing back and forth like sentries. In the afternoon someone threw a live pony into the cage and the tigers ripped its throat out.
Then something odd happened.
One day Riojas came in and didn’t beat her. He asked her something instead.
To open her legs for him. Politely requested it. Claudia said no, shut her eyes, waited for a fresh onslaught of pain.
Riojas left the room.
The next time he came in, he was bearing gifts.
French lingerie.
Riojas asked her to try it on for him. Claudia said no.
Again he didn’t touch her.
By the third time, Claudia began to understand something.
She wasn’t experienced with men; she’d had a casual boyfriend or two.
She could tell when someone was in love.
It had happened before—boys in primary school, then university, who’d begin acting stupid around her, wholly outside the realm of normal behavior.
It became increasingly clear th
at Riojas wasn’t going to kill her.
He was going to court her.
Why?
Maybe because Claudia was Claudia.
Because he coveted what he couldn’t destroy. Love is strange—isn’t that what the songs say?
At some point Claudia began to understand that this adoration might save her. Maybe not forever. Just for a while. Somewhere she stopped wanting to die and began wanting to live.
When he asked her a fourth time to dress in French lingerie, to turn around and please kneel on the bed for him, she said yes. She understood it wouldn’t do to always deny him. Eventually, he’d tire of that. Then he’d tire of her.
There’s something truly pathetic about a captor falling in love with his prisoner. Claudia needed to use that to her advantage. She needed to hold something back. To sometimes give in, but always deny the one thing he wanted more than anything else. Reciprocity.
Her heart—as the poets say.
She began to dine with him, at an actual dinner table. Set with gleaming silver, translucent china. Dressed up in whichever five-hundred-dollar dress he’d picked out for her. Sometimes she’d wear something else, deliberately ignoring his wishes. He’d throw tantrums that subsided only after most of their dinner had ended up on the floor.
He delighted in telling her what he’d done to other women. Women who’d crossed him. That singer—Evi, the pop star who’d thought she could carry on with a musician while seeing him.
I went up to her apartment with my personal doctor. I held her down while he cut out her vocal cords, then I sat there and watched as he sewed her up. She no longer sings very well.
He was trying to evoke fear and obedience. Claudia would act bored. She was convinced if she did the opposite of what he expected, she could survive another day.
He loosened the leash a little.
She was allowed outside—always accompanied by one of his goons. She listened. She observed. She memorized things.
Where were they? She smelled salt in the air. Not all the time, just on the days when the wind blew hard from the north. They had to be on the coast. Even so, they were hopelessly isolated. There wasn’t a single roof in any direction. Just lush palms, overgrown ferns, tumbling birds-of-paradise. Wild parrots serenaded her on her walks around the hacienda.