by Phil Klay
I nodded again.
“Osmin told me the guerrilla killed your family,” he said. “What do you fight for? Revenge?”
I wasn’t sure what to say. When I followed Osmin into this life, it had not occurred to me that I needed a reason to fight. When I saw him in Cunaviche, a door opened, and I did not even think to make a choice, I just walked forward.
“I fight for the people. For freedom from the guerrilla,” I said. I had heard him say similar things.
“Only a slave fights for freedom,” he said. “Men fight for something more.”
* * *
• • •
I did not know Luisa was Sánchez’s daughter until we went to his house and she opened the door. She wore a simple blouse and a sullen face, looking past me as if she did not know me. I knew I should say something to Jefferson. I should tell him I knew her. But then it occurred to me that if I didn’t tell him, there was no way he’d know I’d held my tongue. I had a choice. Part of her fate was in my hands. I decided I would say nothing.
She took us to a little sitting room with a few ratty chairs, a table, and squished into the corner, a piano.
“Look at that,” Jefferson said. He walked over and pressed a key, smiling like a child when a note struck.
I had never seen a piano before. It had chipped white teeth and unblemished black ones. I pressed a black key, slowly depressing it. Nothing sounded. I hit it harder, and sound rang out in the air. Jefferson clunked down a few more keys. Then he mashed the keys with his hands, sending ugly notes quivering into the air while Luisa scowled.
Jefferson was still hitting notes when Sánchez came in. I greeted him enthusiastically, “Mr. Mayor, such a pleasure, very glad to meet you,” while Jefferson clunked upon the keys.
Sánchez looked little like his daughter. He was tall, with a long nose and skin several shades paler than Luisa. A local man had told me he was not from Rioclaro. He had married a local girl who was very dark and who had died in childbirth. “The two types were not a good mix,” he said, “and so the mother died, and the girl came out angry.”
It was a simple meeting. I told him I knew that his town had been negotiating with the manager of the Telecom office in Cúcuta, who refused to lay phone lines to Rioclaro because the area was too dangerous. This was the sort of problem we could fix. I told him that was all we were here for. We knew about the phones, and wanted to help. Would he accept our help?
“Yes, of course,” he said. He even seemed grateful, so relieved the meeting had been about something so simple. Who knows what terrible things he’d imagined we’d come for as we sat and drank beers all afternoon in his town.
I didn’t offer him any money, just said that we would talk with the Telecom manager. Money could come later, once he had become accustomed to accepting our help. He thanked us. I would wait until after it was done to tell him that he was asking us to threaten the manager on his behalf. Everything worked beautifully, until Jefferson decided to have the last word.
“You see,” Jefferson said as we were leaving, “we have advantages. The state has bureaucracy, limitations, less resources. We don’t have bureaucracy, we just solve problems. If you work with us, we get things done.”
It was a mistake. Sánchez’s face went cold, the way his daughter’s had when I threatened her. I looked carefully at Jefferson, with his pitted, square face. It occurred to me that Jefferson only occupied so much space in the world. A cubic volume of flesh and blood. If I ever made my way through that engineering textbook I could calculate how much.
Sánchez let us out politely, and Jefferson clapped me on the back and told me I had done well.
* * *
• • •
That night I dreamed of what it would be like to sleep with Luisa. In my dream she opened the door for us. Her father sat before the piano and she brought us drinks, lulo juice mixed with vodka, and then she unbuckled my pants. Jefferson and her father sat at the piano and discussed telephone lines. I found myself on the floor, she was naked above me, her unlovely body rubbing against mine. When she took my dream virginity, I cried out, and Jefferson laughed, and her father laughed, but she held me with her eyes and began to devour me. My skin dissolved into hers. She was rooting inside me, fingers in my organs, while I lay paralyzed. Every nerve screamed. My desire for her was like physical pain, like a fever inside the body, and inside my mind and soul. I woke, hard to the point of agony.
I left my bed, got on my moto, and drove the four miles to a bar where I knew I could find relief. There was a girl there, beautiful, and just old enough for her beauty to have lost the innocence of youth, the innocence Osmin was always hunting down and ruining. Her name was Flor. Flor was seventeen, with a daughter, and it was to support the daughter that she worked as a prostitute. I knew these things because I had tried to cure my virginity with Flor, and when I had failed, she had told me of her life, sharing herself out of pity.
“But I like this job sometimes,” she had whispered to me, “and I like you. Come back anytime you’re feeling better.”
There was cruelty in her kindness. The power her beauty held over me was painful. Kindness only twisted the knife. So that night I went to her, wanting to fuck her the way Jefferson fucked—hard, mechanical, discharging a need, masturbating into a pussy. “You shit in the toilet, you come in a woman,” he had told me. I wanted her to be nothing, for Luisa to be nothing, and for my desire to disappear.
First, I drank five or six shots, enough to deaden my senses and my awareness of her and other people, enough so that I felt I was swimming inside my own body. This was enough to let the devil inside me, and when I was alone with her I took her and fucked her with hatred, and I released the poison, and then she took my money. I hated myself then, and I wanted to apologize, but for what? She was a whore. This was her job, I told myself, and she had said she liked it sometimes, though even in my haze I could see in her face that she had not liked it. I had hurt her somehow. My soul swam in drunkenness. I tried to give her more money and she said no, and then I said it was for her child, not her, and she took it. I would never speak to Flor again. But my virginity was gone. I had cured myself.
* * *
• • •
Not long after that Jefferson took me up into the cold mountains, alone. We reached a dirt trail and a little farm at the edge of a mountain pass, and we got off our motos and began to walk.
Flowers were in bloom. I wondered if Jefferson knew I had hid information from him about Luisa. Perhaps, I thought, Jefferson was going to kill me. So I took great care to look not at him but at the trees and flowers. There were trees full of fruit with branches that spread out at the base and then curved upward to the sky. There were trees with deep red and purple flowers with yellow stems that shone so brightly it seemed they had their own inner light leaping up to greet the sun. Jefferson stopped and pointed out two hummingbirds with brilliant blue coloring. One had its beak in an orchid that was strangling its way around a tree branch. The other flittered angrily above. “They’re going to fight,” Jefferson said. And he was right. As the first bird drank deep from the flower, the other dove down, stabbing its beak into the first bird’s neck. Jefferson clapped, delighted as a child. It was strange to see beautiful creatures fight.
We walked for about two hours, and the trees changed as we got higher. Tall, narrow trees shot up, then burst at the top in a star of thin green palms. We walked through a cloud, and mist and haze surrounded the forest. The sunlight, already weak through the vegetation, became further shrouded. Everything appeared through dark layers of suffocated light. As we climbed I felt as though we were moving back through time, to older and older forest, each step taking us further into the past, to the beginning of time, just after God made the trees and flowers but before he made us humans, and before he declared his creation good.
Eventually we emerged into a clearing where we could look out o
n the valley. The sun returned in all its force. Clouds dotted the mountainside, some level with us, some below us, some high above.
“Stay here,” Jefferson told me. And he disappeared into the wood. I turned to look at the view but could feel him behind me, a prickling in my back. If he was about to kill me, what should I do? Should I pray? And to who? To the broken, screaming Christ of my childhood? To Luisa, who had seen me and known me for what I was? To God, who has no mercy?
Jefferson returned with firewood in his hands, and he dumped it on the ground.
“Comandante?” I said.
“Yes?” he said. But I did not know how to respond. He disappeared into the wood, and then again returned with more wood, and he disappeared again, and again, until we had a large pile.
Then Jefferson arranged the wood, stacking it into a little structure, almost like a building or a cage. And he stood before me, staring closely into my eyes. I did my best not to tremble. To this day, I am sure that had I trembled, he would have cut my throat and burned my body there, high in the mountains. Instead, he pointed to the forest behind us. “Go,” he said, “and get more.”
So I went into the forest, following a little path, and I saw, next to a pile of firewood, the corpse of a naked man chained by the neck to a tree. His head was slumped and his body covered in bruises. I walked to him, knowing this was what Jefferson wanted me to see, and I put my hand under his chin and lifted his face to mine, and Osmin’s dead eyes looked back at me. His mouth fell open, as if the dead man were about to speak. I took some water from the canteen on my belt, and I poured it in my hands and washed his face, and then I let his head down and picked up some firewood and carried it back to Jefferson, who said nothing.
I did not ask him why, or what Osmin had done. I simply put the wood on the pyre and Jefferson lit the twigs and I blew the small flame to life. A fire starts slow, and we stood and watched the flames lick upward, and I made a tiny sign of the cross with my finger, and prayed for Osmin’s soul.
Jefferson checked the pyre, blew sparks to light the far side, which had not caught yet, grabbed a stick, and pushed a burning nest of twigs further into the heart of the flame. He moved mechanically, without expression, and I wondered whether he was capable of love or horror. Inside my own hollow body, inside the space where my soul had been, echoes of pain and loss rang out, and I knew my nightmares would never cease, and that Jefferson had never slept poorly in his life. The flames slowly rose, and Jefferson took me to the edge of the mountain, the pyre burning behind us.
By this time it was sunset. I looked out on the setting sun and realized that Jefferson had planned all this, down to the timing of dusk. I looked at his craggy face. He seemed satisfied, like a man after a heavy meal. Around me the yellows and purples of the flowers darkened with the fading sun, and the greens darkened into shades of blue and black. They blended into one another and into shadows, and I realized that this high, in the mountains, I did not know the names of things. We were so far up, among trees and flowers different from the trees and flowers I knew from the river valley. A nature both older and wilder. And I had the idiotic thought that perhaps these things had no name, and like Adam, I could name them.
* * *
• • •
Jefferson told me a delicate time was coming.
“There are two elections. For Congress, and for president.”
He said our man was Álvaro Uribe, who I didn’t know much about but whose face I had seen in the papers. Towns that voted for Uribe and his allies were with us. Towns that voted against him were with the guerrilla. It was my job to make sure towns were for us.
Everybody else got to rest. In the months before the elections there were police and soldiers out on roads where there had never been anyone but us before. Our paracos kept the peace and stayed out of trouble. Jefferson even had a man from the International Committee of the Red Cross come to talk to about seventy paracos in a classroom at a school in La Vigia. They sat in children’s desks while he told us about “international law,” and how it didn’t allow torture or “extrajudicial killings” or driving people from their homes. He was describing a lot of their work, and they sat and nodded their heads.
Meanwhile, I scheduled events and meetings with neighborhood associations. I reminded people what they owed us, and who we wanted them to vote for. In most places this was easy. Most people appreciated us, and the delinquents who didn’t we had chased out. On the edges of our territory, though, I could sometimes sense awkwardness, expressions of loyalty that seemed forced.
In Rioclaro they didn’t even act like they loved us. I reached the village on the night that their neighborhood association was supposed to meet, and when I entered the church basement I saw Luisa. She was standing in the crowd, shouting at the man running the meeting. The man we had selected to run these meetings.
“We are hardworking people,” she was saying. “We are good Christian people. We are not the enemies of anyone.”
All eyes were on her. Her passion for what she was saying made her face shine. She was so different from the girl I’d seen dancing awkwardly next to her beautiful friend. I felt proud of her, and glad I’d kept my knowledge of her from Jefferson. But what she was saying was dangerous. If a town does not share your enemies, then they are your enemy.
I waited until the end of the meeting. Then I approached her and told her the truth, that what she was doing was both stupid and dangerous. There are times in life when you can make decisions, and there are times in life when you should respect the place you are in, and the powers above you. This was one of those times.
“I don’t want trouble, and I respect you . . .” she began, and I slapped her.
“No,” I said, “you don’t.”
She stared at me hatefully. She raised her hands, as if about to strike me, then lowered them.
“If Jefferson was here he would break every one of your fingers,” I told her. “And then how would you play the piano?”
* * *
• • •
Election Day we hired buses to bring people out to vote. I coordinated all the schedules, and then after the elections went to La Vigia to find out how the towns voted. To see which towns were for us, and which were our enemies.
The local archivist was a muscular, angry-looking man who walked me over to the town gymnasium, hardly saying a word the whole time. Inside the gymnasium a group of Jehovah’s Witnesses were holding a meeting. They stood in the stands in ill-fitting suits, choked by neckties. We walked underneath the stands, made our way to the stairs, then farther down below, to a room reeking of mildew and bulging with papers, papers in garbage bags and old boxes stamped “Chiquita Banana,” papers spilling out onto the floor and papers bound tightly with rubber bands. And in one corner, the newest addition to the chaos, sat a neat stack of binders holding the list of local electoral results.
As I filtered through the filings, it seemed our municipality was in good order. Plenty of votes for candidates who had received Álvaro Uribe’s blessing. Few votes for Carlos Gaviria types. As the archivist stared at me sullenly, clenching and unclenching his fists, I took careful notes, mapping out the degree to which the towns in our control voted in accordance with our will. Elections, Jefferson told me, are the most valuable source of information we have. People think they can show their souls in the voting booth and no one will know, but it’s not true.
And then I reached Rioclaro, and the numbers changed. A surge in votes for the Social and Political Front. I sucked my teeth and looked up at the archivist.
“What are you going to do with this information?” he said.
I answered him honestly. “I don’t know.”
* * *
• • •
It began with small things. Driving into the streets of Rioclaro and firing guns. Leaving flyers telling people to leave their homes. Then, a few days later, delivering invitat
ions to funerals, with the names of living residents of Rioclaro listed as the deceased.
“By the presidential election,” Jefferson told me, “this town must not exist.”
That gave us several months. First to create a climate of fear. Make the citizens question what was going to happen, make emergency plans, think about what they will take and what they will leave when the time comes. Get them to imagine leaving the only land they’ve ever known, which had nurtured them and their parents and grandparents, and where they had dreamed of raising their children.
“The goal is to avoid a massacre. Nobody wants a massacre right now,” Jefferson said. “If you kill too many people, there are consequences.”
My role was to identify the resistance. The only person beyond the mayor I was sure was involved was Luisa, but I didn’t want to give her name to Jefferson. So I reached out to people in the town, and found out who mattered, who had influence.
The first was Juan Camilo. Jefferson sent four paras dressed in guerrilla uniforms to find him in his fields, rob him and beat him, and then smash his kneecaps with rocks so that he would never work fields again. A week later, the same four went to the home of Ricardo Gómez Gonzalo and raped his wife and daughter. Jefferson sent out paras to spread the word in Rioclaro that, because of the town’s disloyalty, they were no longer going to protect them from guerrillas and bandits. “Rioclaro is no longer safe,” they repeated to everyone who would listen. As they left they fired rifles and broke windows. Then they shot Leonel Fernando on his way to sell goods in La Vigia. He fell off his mule and was dragged hundreds of meters before another traveler stopped the animal and found him, bleeding not only from the bullet wound but from cuts and scrapes, bruised by rocks and sticks in the path, almost but not quite dead. I went to the hospital to check on him, and to hear from the doctors that he’d survive. He hardly looked like a man anymore.