by Phil Klay
Despite my hopes, she did have a pretty face. Not beautiful or exceptional, and not with the deep and piercing eyes in my dreams, but the face of a normal young woman of Medellín. Prettier than the average Colombian, but standard for this city. When my father introduced us, she smiled a big smile that shocked me somehow. Perhaps I thought that a woman with such wounds would never smile. Or that she’d only smile looking at her baby, not at the outside world and the people you meet there.
“You have such a handsome son,” she said, and I bristled. She turned so that little Harold faced me, his eyes closed and his face peaceful. “Say hello, Harold. One day you’ll be big, like Juan.”
I didn’t eat much at breakfast, even though my mother made arepa de chocolo, which I loved. I was too confused by this ordinary woman who should not be ordinary, who should be weeping in fear or in joy at the gift of life, who should have been visibly overcoming her horrific past through indomitable will, but who mostly just chatted with my father and the officer from the B2 about the food on base getting better, and how she’d started reading the book the officer from the B2 gave her and she thought the author was better even than Mutis.
Then, since it turned out my mother and Juana had grown up in the same neighborhoods, they began talking about the people there—the grocer who let so many people get by on credit that when he retired there was a line of people down the street to pay off debts, my mother’s cousins who had worked in a factory making T-shirts, and the bad kids who hung out on the corner when they were both little girls. “I think, maybe,” Juana said, “they smoked marijuana,” a comment that made both my father and the intelligence officer laugh. Other than that, nothing that she said was especially remarkable.
Years later, in an attempt to exorcise the impression she made on my young mind, I would write a series of terrible poems about her in which she was an idealized figure, an eternal image of Colombia, a scarred goddess displaying her wounds and bringing forth unblemished new life, and so on. The more airy my descriptive language became, the more it jarred against my memories of this breakfast, during which she was too ordinary and lively to be reduced to a goddess of Colombia. I gave up, deciding she was an image of nothing. Or she was the image of a living and breathing woman who had been brutally attacked, survived, and went on to give birth and live her life. Which is enough poetry for anyone to endure.
As the breakfast finished up, though, she caught me staring at her scars, and she asked, “Would you like to hear the story?”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I said, ashamed to be caught.
“No, it’s good,” she said. “Telling the story is good. I learned that from your father. Though he says you tell these kind of stories with soldiers, and aguardiente.”
“I didn’t . . .” my father began to say, but then stopped. I don’t think I’d ever seen him embarrassed before. My mother shook her head, but said nothing.
“And you tell them over and over,” Juana said, “because it is your story. Right, Colonel?” My father gave an almost imperceptible nod, and then she gritted her jaw, the lightness of her manner disappearing for a second, before she flung her head back, giving me a better view of the scars on her neck.
“I walk the earth by the grace of the Lord’s Prayer and a leather jacket,” she said. There was a stiffness to how she spoke, the words sounding rehearsed, a ritual. But as she continued she relaxed into the story.
“Four of my colleagues at the Department of Security and Control . . . Saúl Londoño, Fernando Tenorio, Augosto Posada, as well as Luis Veléz, who is the son of a whore, and I apologize for using that word, but if I used a nicer word I’d be telling a lie. They asked me to come with them in a van. I trusted them, because I worked with them, and because . . .” She cocked her head and looked down at little sleeping Harold. “I trusted them for many reasons,” she said.
She explained how silent it was in the van, how Luis wouldn’t even look at her, how she refused to accept what was about to happen to her, even though she knew what happened had happened to so many others at the hands of the Department of Security and Control.
“I only accepted it when the van stopped,” she said. “Then I knew, I was about to die. They threw me out of the van, but I fought. I was wearing a black leather jacket, and Luis had a hand on it and it pulled up over my head as I fell to the ground, covering my face so I could not see. And then I felt the first strike of a hatchet.”
She slapped her hands on the table. “Boom,” she said. And then she tilted her head so her hair fell down to the side, and she parted her long, dark hair—quite beautiful hair, in fact—revealing a hidden scar on the side of her skull.
“I started to pray the Our Father,” she said. “I only got to ‘blessed be thy name,’ and, boom! Another strike of the hatchet. I started again. ‘Our Father, who art—’ boom. I kept praying, and they kept hitting me, and every time they hit me I started again.”
She nodded, as if in agreement with what she was saying.
“Thirty-five times, they hit me,” she said, “or they hit my jacket, thanks to God. Thirty-five times I tried to pray the Our Father. That’s how many holes they found in my jacket”—she smiled—“and in me. They left me for dead. I wasn’t sure I was alive. But I recited the Our Father, and made it further than before. ‘Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.’ Imagine, praying that! ‘And lead us not into temptation . . . ’ I prayed, so terrified to reach the end. I was so, so afraid to reach the end. I thought I would finish, and ascend to Heaven or go to hell. And then I reached the end. ‘Deliver us from evil. Amen.’ I waited. I was still alive. I prayed the Our Father once more. I was in so much pain, I knew I must be alive. I prayed a Hail Mary, just to be sure. And then I got up, my jacket and my body all in tatters, cut up and bleeding, and I walked to a road and stopped a bus full of laborers going to work. I told them to take me right to Search Bloc, but they brought me, instead, to your father, and this is where I’ve been ever since.”
I wasn’t sure what to say. I went with, “It’s a miracle.”
Juana smiled indulgently. “Luis is Harold’s father,” she said. “Or was. I think if you try to murder your son and his mother, you are no longer a father. Harold is a child of God now. Which is why we are all here today.”
* * *
• • •
At the baptism I wore white robes not so different from Harold’s baptismal gown. I was nervous, trying to work myself up to a sense of religious devotion, but mainly struck with horror at what Juana and Harold had survived, and shame at my secret history with her. Harold woke up midway through the sacrament and started screaming. “He’s going to sing opera,” the officer from B2 whispered. The priest poured water over Harold’s head, anointing him. A child of God, I thought, remembering Juana’s words. Throughout I kept sneaking glances at Juana’s face. I wondered how many children had been baptized in such circumstances, how many children whose mothers barely survived to bring their children into the world. There must be many. Many even at that very moment, women threatened by the drug business, by the political struggle, by angry, jealous, crazy men, desperate men, drunken men, cruel men. Juana Peréz could not have been the first to crawl bloody out of the mountains, or jungles, or ditches, or alleyways, or broken homes. Most women like her die, I knew, but against all odds, some live.
I looked around at the participants. Juana’s role was obviously closed to me, and I didn’t think much of the father’s contribution. Even the priest seemed peripheral, a mere conduit. My father, though, in his uniform, a representative of another ancient order, was not peripheral at all. His ancient order did not just anoint. They had received and protected Juana, entering into her history in a way that seemed profound.
For the remainder of my visit to Medellín I observed my father through an entirely different lens. His days had a monastic rhythm, given not by an eternal structure of prayer
but by staff meetings, regular reporting requirements, and the rigid timelines of military operations. His days had a monastic austerity, missing meals and sleep to work and enduring time on patrols full of such physical danger and hardship it bordered on mortification of the flesh. And his days had a monastic hierarchal structure, with conscripts in place of novitiates and General Harold Bedoya in place of an abbot. Everything operated in terms of traditions, moral codes, regulations, and trained responses, just the same as in an order, except that in a monastery all this revolves around the awestruck contemplation of a God existing outside of history, and in the military it revolves around the work of violence, which is what makes history happen.
I did not make the decision then, but as time passed, as the memory of the presence of God faded and as Medellín became habitable again, a place I could walk through without fear, I became more and more drawn to the way in which my father’s work impacted the lives of real people, saving lives and creating a space for life to flourish. His wasn’t a life centered on money or things, the shallow currencies of the external world, but on people and duty. There seemed something sacred about such work, or if not sacred then something like it, and by the time I was eighteen I knew.
Thus began my second failed love, one that filled me not with the wonder and gratitude toward existence I’d felt in my little monastic cell as a child, but with a painfully sharp sense of duty toward a broken, evil world. I finished university, I went through training, I was commissioned. I spoke the words, completed the rituals, and received not God’s saving grace but responsibility over the life and death of thirty-two young Colombians. The responsibility puffed me up with an unearned sense of self-importance, which, especially in the early days of my marriage to Sofia, made me almost unbearable in the company of civilians. Though it was a moral duty I was fulfilling, not a sacred one, in its intensity it seemed to rise to a religious level. Standing in starlit fields with instant coffee packed into our lips like tobacco to keep us awake, hiding in ditches by the side of remote roads, patrolling through ruined towns—the war was more than my job. It was the dark star around which the entirety of my existence orbited, to which family and friends and loved ones and sex and money and God seemed like weak abstractions, insubstantial against the weight of the madness we were fighting.
This is enough to give a young man a sense of purpose. No more is necessary.
And since my father made general the year I became an officer, my career was charmed, one desirable post after another, leading me to seek out new difficulties and challenges. Ways to prove myself. Which is how I ended up in Saravena.
Saravena was a guerrilla town where the people hated us so much they’d walk up to soldiers in the street, look for the youngest, most scared-looking conscript, sniff loudly, and say, “I smell formaldehyde.” It was an ugly fight, where the hatred of the people provoked the hatred of our soldiers, who would sometimes take the kind of actions young, scared, hateful, and hated soldiers will do.
Counterinsurgency was in fashion then. My colonel had attended a 2004 Southern Command conference where the American military had pushed population support and development as the critical element of success, something that had amused my father. “The Americans always have a new shiny idea,” he said. “I trained with American veterans of Vietnam at the School of the Americas, and all their tactics were based around zones of annihilation and the logic of attrition. Now we’re supposed to do counterinsurgency? That’s not what they’re doing in Iraq. I think they just want to see if we fail before they change strategies.”
Our colonel came up with the idea of targeting the hearts and minds not of the adults, who were inflexible in their loathing of us, but of their children. And so he created the “Soldier for a Day” program, in which a soldier would put on clown makeup and a clown wig, to go along with his uniform and rifle, and entertain children at the local schools.
Initial runs were not a success. I assigned the first duty to a young soldier, Edgardo Ramos, with a round face and a cheerful manner and a way of always making his fellows laugh in training. When we entered the school, some of the children’s faces turned pale. He did some jokes, pretended to walk into a wall, told them about where he was from and why he was here.
“I was out with my father’s cow and the military caught me!” he said. “They said, ‘You’re going into the military!’ and I said, ‘What do I do with this cow? It belongs to my father.’ And they said, ‘You better sell it!’ Can you imagine how mad my father was? I send him money every month but every month he asks me, ‘What happened to that cow?’”
I thought it was the greatest waste of time I’d ever encountered. After the class, one of the teachers asked to speak to me.
“Privately?” I said.
She looked nervous. “No, no,” but then pulled me around a corner from where Edgardo was doing his best to ease the tension in the room.
“This is not good for the children,” the teacher said. And then she launched into a story about how the paramilitaries had tried to infiltrate the town a couple months ago, and how they had killed some of the guerilla in a bombing attack, and how after that the guerrilla had tightened their grip on the town, controlling who came in and who came out. “Anyone new,” she said, “they killed.”
I nodded my head, confused by why she was telling me this, but listening because I imagined she might give me useful intelligence.
“It was right after the first round of killings that the Peruvians came,” she said.
They were a group of clowns on a humanitarian mission, Clowns Without Borders, idealists who thought that even children in war zones, especially children in war zones, deserved laughter. They entered town with painted faces and big smiles, and were almost immediately lined up, shot in the head, and left in the street as a warning.
“The only other time these children have seen clowns,” the teacher told me, “they were corpses. It was terrifying. Even living clowns frighten me. Even real clowns, not your . . . I don’t know what you are doing, or what to call it . . . but it will give them nightmares.”
Afterward, I spoke to my colonel about the Soldier for a Day program. Knowing about my father, he normally was solicitous of my opinions, but the dead-clowns story only made him more enthusiastic.
“It’s the guerrilla that terrified them, not us!” he said. “Whenever they see clowns, they’ll think of the terror of the guerrilla murderers, and the laughter and jokes of our clowns, laughter and jokes which cannot be stopped because our clowns carry guns.”
He ordered me to continue the program, and suggested that I put my own name on the roster. “Lead by example,” he said. “Practice some funny faces.”
There was no way, I told myself, I would play the clown, but we did keep running the program, sometimes even succeeding in making children laugh, or at the very least getting them to marvel at the guns our clowns carried, and to wonder how they, too, could acquire such guns and carry them in the service of the state.
A little later, one of my platoons was ambushed by a large force of guerrilla four kilometers outside of town. It was the most aggressive force-on-force engagement the guerrilla had tried, and it didn’t end well for them. Since this was during a brief window in which I had access to air assets, I got in an old Huey to fly out and direct the battle, although everything had ended by the time I arrived. The men, as trained, had driven through the heart of the ambush and routed the guerrilla, miraculously not losing any soldiers and killing a few of the enemy.
As we flew down, I could see the men moving about, conducting the rituals of men after battles—treating their wounded, stacking ammunition, hauling trash, and talking among themselves, telling the story of the combat to each other so that, with the telling and retelling, they could come to some group version of what happened, and what it meant to them. Looking at them from above, from the outside, I felt sharp, almost painful pangs of pride. They had
succeeded in the task we had set for them, gone out patrolling in the land of the dead, faced down carnage, and survived.
I left my Huey, saying little but walking among the men, clapping them on their shoulders, showing my appreciation for what they’d been through without trying to intrude. A young lieutenant with haunted eyes delivered his report on the battle, his quavering voice slowly steadying as he slipped into the dry language of the military, taking the jumbled memories of chaos he’d just experienced and squeezing them into the precise categories of official reports. I felt like a priest, taking his confession.
When I returned to Saravena, I was energized. The dead stares of the people, their empty eyes as they looked upon us the way you’d look at the corpses of animals, it meant nothing. We’d had a force-on-force engagement, at a time and place chosen by the enemy, and had won. Within the hour, though, I heard an explosion. Reporting came on through the radio—gas canisters turned to bombs in a road by one of the schools where we brought our Soldier for the Day clowns. Casualties.
* * *
• • •
A difficult period began. The enemy perfected its methods against us, and we perfected our hatred against the population that shielded them. More bombs in gas canisters, violence against us perpetrated by ghosts. I began taking sleeping pills. First one, then two, then three or four, and still I could not sleep. Beyond the difficulties of our mission, there were troubles for my family, whispers bubbling against my father, sensational reports in the news.
The day my father was fired by Álvaro Uribe, I’d spent the morning on a patrol through a town that had only further hardened its hearts against us, and then I had signed off on a report that listed three eleno dead, though I secretly suspected it was at most one eleno dead, and two civilians suspected of aiding the guerrilla. That afternoon a bomb went off and took the hand of Edgardo Ramos, our first clown, and I’d sat with him, waiting for medical evacuation, holding his one remaining hand while he smiled and laughed his way through the pain and told me, “But I still haven’t paid off my father’s cow!” I got the news about my father in the evening, and then read through the press reports and the official, emotionless language of the release announcing the firing.