by Phil Klay
She didn’t know what to make of Luisa. She knew the stories about Luisa’s past, about her father’s murder and how she’d come to La Vigia a refugee and risen up to be the foundation’s indispensable woman in this region. One of the other workers had told Valencia that Luisa had even helped in the reintegration of ex-paramilitaries directly involved in her father’s death. A few spoke of her as if she were a living saint. Valencia wanted to feel that. Awe. Proximity to a holy person who had dedicated their life to forgiveness and redemption. But when the squat, fat, unattractive woman barked an order at Valencia, some deep, patrician instinct rose up and she found herself quivering with indignant rage. She wasn’t proud of the reaction. She tried to tamp it down with calls to Christian humility. But whenever Luisa barked at her, it stirred. A coiled, angry emotion she didn’t want, but was nevertheless hers.
One day a sleepy-eyed older gentleman arrived to tell the story of his kidnapped daughter, and he seemed so frail, and initially spoke so softly that Valencia had set the levels on the lavalier microphone much higher than usual. It was fine starting out, as the man talked about his business and his family, subjects that would tug a faint smile onto his thin, dry lips, his voice coming out in a whisper. But as he moved on to the changes wrought by the encroaching guerrilla his voice took on a harder, and louder, edge.
“I knew they’d come for me,” he was saying, and over the headphones his voice was distorted, as if there were a bee buzzing in the equipment.
Valencia looked back to Luisa, and behind her to Ricardo, the short, skinny, and unimpressively mustachioed registrar officer who rarely looked up from his papers and who, throughout the process, always did his best to blend in with the cracked, off-white wall behind him. He even wore shirts and pants of a similar color to the wall, and he sat motionless, like an iguana on a rock.
“I got letters, invitations to a funeral with my name as the deceased. Even a Mass card.” The rancher laughed, the noise coming through with that same buzzing noise. “I thought that was nice.”
The only way to fix the levels was to stop the interview and change them on the battery pack for the wireless microphone that she’d attached to the old man’s belt. Which would disrupt the process. And there was an art to the process. Valencia had come to respect that.
Luisa would walk in, hefting her weight around in a kind of powerful, bulldog way that exuded authority, plump herself down, and begin. There were no tears, no hugs, and no expressions of surprise. She’d heard it all before, all of it. If she showed compassion, it wasn’t through a gross parading of emotion, but through careful and attentive listening. She asked probing questions, accepted the gaps and distortions that come with painful memories, but also pushed into those gaps, finding context, making the victim gather up the broken shards of experience into something that could be strung together into a story. As they talked, the registrar would constantly make notes on a lengthy form, only at the very end asking a few targeted questions.
People understand their lives as stories. Or they try to. In the worst cases, cases Professor Agudelo had warned them they’d encounter, people cannot understand. They struggle to turn what happened to them into a coherent whole. And Ricardo’s form, which would be submitted through the Victims’ Unit to the government, was a long series of open and closed questions designed to break apart individual stories into different metrics of victimization relevant to the different categories and benefits they are due. Questions designed to assess eligibility, need, vulnerability, harms suffered. Questions about the perpetrator, questions about criminal versus politically motivated violence. Questions that, by necessity, implied a hierarchy of suffering, and a hierarchy of victims. Questions that produced results that could, in the end, be fed into a computer and compiled into graphs, columns, and pie charts.
To simply follow the questions, going one by one through the form with a victim, would be to subject them to a kind of mental torture. “For the victims,” Professor Agudelo had told them, “it can feel like we’re putting their life through a sausage grinder. We don’t want them to feel that way but we do need the sausage.” Luisa’s job was to get the necessary details without going through them in a manner that denied the specificity of what the victims had suffered.
It was especially when going back through the transcripts that Valencia had learned to spot the sensitivity and care with which Luisa pulled out details from the participants, helping them build a narrative while clarifying everything Ricardo needed. It was a delicate, almost beautiful process. And Luisa had delicately, beautifully, brought the old man to the heart of what was clearly going to be a very painful story.
“One moment,” Valencia said.
Everything stopped. Luisa’s head swiveled slowly. Valencia walked over, reset the levels, and returned to her spot at the laptop. Luisa said nothing, merely continued the interview.
Afterward, Valencia braced herself for shouting and screaming, but in a way what happened was worse. Luisa sat her down and said quietly, “We have to show these people respect. If you are not capable of that, you need to think very hard about what you are doing here, and what type of person you are.”
Those words weighed on her. She’d come out here to be a different type of person than she was in Bogotá. To experience something different from the comfortable life her parents had provided her, going from one safe space to another. Apartment to car to school. School to car to mall. Mall to car to apartment. Apartment to university to law degree to professional career. That path ahead seemed so very rational and orderly. But she liked to think there was also within her a series of wilder desires. Did she want to secure a place in the world or to change it? Did she believe in miracles? Did she believe in God? Was there something inside her, call it a soul, that could be connected to the brutal life of her country in a way that could not be scoffed at, pushed aside, dismissed as unreal? And what would she have to do to earn such a soul? So far she’d transcribed interview after interview until the tales of suffering lost their uniqueness and blended into the numerically designated categories of the government form. If these stories were a challenge, then she was failing to meet it. And Luisa knew.
That night as she prepared for bed she told Sara what had happened. Sara put a hand on her shoulder and said, “I know Professor Agudelo thinks Luisa is amazing but I think maybe there’s something he doesn’t know.” And when Valencia asked her what that was Sara smiled and said, “Maybe she’s a complete bitch.”
Valencia laughed uncomfortably. Valencia’s father had told her once that a true leader must sometimes show a little cruelty. Your men won’t respect you if you don’t, he claimed. Softness and sentimentality and kindness are no virtues, and men, in their hearts, know they are often deserving of a little cruelty.
“I screwed up. Again. I deserved it.”
“You’re working for free in la quinta porra. And you’re studying law, not electronics. You think Luisa would do better? Without you, she’d be screwing up with the microphones. She should be thanking us every day.”
Sara had a hard kind of prettiness. Angular cheekbones, a tough little nose, dark brown eyes perpetually narrowed, and a small mouth in a perpetual frown. Perhaps she, too, was a true leader.
“I think I get nervous around them,” Valencia said. “The victims.”
“You should,” Sara said. “One of them grabbed my ass the other day.”
“Have you ever heard stories like this?” Valencia asked.
“My father is a journalist,” Sara said. “I’ve heard stories like this all my life.”
How to respond to that? Valencia wished she were back in Bogotá, back in her nice, safe, boring life. At school, sitting in Professor Agudelo’s lecture hall and listening to him preach, she had imagined a heroic role for herself, documenting abuses in one of the poorest and most violent stretches of the country. There was an element of almost Christian witness in it. And sacrifice.
When, years ago, he had been attacked by the Black Eagles, they’d fractured his eye socket, broken several ribs, and slashed his arms, chest, and legs. Luisa’s father had been murdered. Even Sara was familiar with this world. What did Valencia have?
* * *
—
Abel had people keeping track of each and every soul entering the foundation’s office. He knew about the two students and the professor from Bogotá. He knew about the American journalist. And as the days stretched forward and townspeople and peasants and drunkards and drug addicts and fools made their way across the town square, he began mapping out a network of the people in and around La Vigia who believed in the promise Luisa held out for them. That their sufferings would not go ignored. That justice might be slow, but was coming. That things in this town could get better.
Most of them were harmless people with no power: displaced indios who begged or sold trinkets on the roads outside of town. Subsistence farmers who lived on bits of reclaimed jungle. Madwomen and drunks who dirtied the face of La Vigia at all hours and who would soon, he figured, fall victim to the kinds of “cleansings” he’d once practiced for Jefferson. But there were surprises as well. Fermín, who ran the gas station near Abel’s store. Sebastián, a hunchback who sold rice.
He had pity for them. Come tell your story, the workers at the foundation had said. Come. We’ll have a registrar officer from the Victims’ Unit there. We’ll handle the paperwork for you. The state of Colombia has declared that you are owed reparation. And though the government is the government and so the money does not always come, still. You play the lottery, don’t you? This is no worse.
Fools. And he’d soon be one of them. But not at the foundation’s offices. He’d told Luisa he couldn’t be seen going in. He couldn’t become one of the names on his list. “That’s fine,” she’d said. The national office wanted video at the site of a massacre, and so he could go with her team out to where his family was murdered. He’d wear a microphone, and stand in front of their cameras and tell them what had happened. It was ridiculous. And it was the price she demanded.
Abel stood up from the desk he had in the back room of his store, a back room that held his bed, a little portable gas burner to heat up food, and several boxes of goods for the store, which he feared might never open again. He doubted that he would unshutter it while Jefferson ran La Vigia. And who could displace Jefferson? Jefferson had all the connections to the Venezuelans—it was how he kept the ELN and the Peludos and even the Urabeños playing nice. It made him untouchable. Immortal, perhaps.
Abel walked out of the back room into the silent, shuttered store, bags of crackers and chicharrónes sitting on shelves, never to be sold. He grabbed a bag of chicharrónes, opened it, and began munching. He walked behind the counter. On a low shelf underneath the register, he knew, was a small cloth pouch. He’d got it the day after meeting with Luisa. Inside was a boiled and dried toad, its forelegs tied together with colorful strings. “Bury it in a place of death,” the bruja had told him, “and say the name of the man you want to ruin.”
He’d been holding on to it ever since, unsure of what to do. What would be the right thing? It wasn’t all bad, his work. When Jefferson lived in a town, he wanted that town to run well. For the people to have housing. The roads to be paved. The schools running. Petty criminals kept in line. “You can have all the money, and all the sicarios you want,” Jefferson had told him once, “but if you don’t have the people’s love, you will never be secure.” Jefferson was a dangerous man, it was true. But most of the work Abel did made things better for the people in La Vigia. Perhaps that’s what really matters.
He was no hero, he knew that. Heroism was what Luisa did. Heroism got towns destroyed, women raped, men tortured and murdered. Perhaps he should burn the list of people going into the foundation. Perhaps he should tell Jefferson to go fuck himself, be tortured to death, and go up to Heaven as a saint. Or perhaps he should take the toad with him to whatever was left of Chepe’s bar, bury it where his life had ended, and whisper Jefferson’s name. That was not just any place of death. It would be powerful. The most powerful place he could complete the spell.
He knelt down, grabbed that cloth pouch from where it was hidden, and held it tightly, feeling the toad’s bound legs with his fingers. Would ruin for Jefferson mean ruin for La Vigia?
* * *
—
With some victims, Luisa would ban all men from the room except for Ricardo, who was so small and self-effacing that it was less like having a man in the room than some kind of man-shaped plant, a fern with a sparse black mustache. This generally signified the victim of sexual crimes, usually rapes, though in one case a former guerrillera described her forced abortion at the hands of a FARC doctor. Guerrilleras are supposed to sleep with their comrades, but they’re not supposed to get pregnant, so the FARC doctor induced early labor at six months, took the still-living baby away, and then left it to die slowly in a basket, an event the guerrillera told us was no abortion but “the execution of the son of two revolutionaries.” It was during one of these cases that Valencia first saw Luisa slip.
The victim’s name was Alma, a woman who said she was in her thirties but had a round, childish face, with fat cheeks and a shy, pretty smile. And Alma began telling a story about how when she was young she had a paramilitary boyfriend named Osmin. Osmin was very handsome, she said, and she knew that he had other girlfriends, which made her jealous, but she was only thirteen, and he bought her things, and suggested to her that another life was possible. One day he invited her to a party at one of his boss’s homes, on the river, near Cunaviche.
“Jefferson?” Luisa said, her tone flat, seemingly disinterested. This was her slip. Alma spooked, drawing back and tensing, her whole body defensive and closed off.
“I think this was a mistake,” Alma said.
“No.” Luisa turned to Valencia. “Strike that from the record. Leave it off the transcript.”
She turned back to Alma.
“I know about him. I am from Rioclaro. Do you understand?”
Alma nodded, and started again.
She told her story coldly, robotically. In some ways, she was startlingly ineloquent. Repeating flat phrases. Cursing again and again without emotion, describing the story in a way that made it seem less something that happened to a person than to a thing. The sequences of actions were laid out like a shopping list. Alma goes to the party. Alma sees drugs and people having sex. Alma runs, frightened, to a back room. Alma is found by Jefferson. Jefferson brings in Osmin and a few others. Jefferson gives her some aguardiente. Alma starts crying because she doesn’t want to drink. Jefferson slaps her. Jefferson tells her it is his house and she is very rude. Jefferson laughs while she drinks. Jefferson says, “Look at this fucking whore.” Jefferson says, “Osmin told me you want to become a woman.”
“I was an idiot,” Alma said, her voice suddenly full of life, full of bitterness and hate. “A stupid girl.”
Carefully, but with a series of insistent, methodical questions, Luisa pushed Alma forward in the narrative. Alma told how the rape began, and how Jefferson didn’t take part, but would call in other paras from the party, the youngest ones there, each time calling out, “Hey Jhon, you want to eat?” “Hey Abel, you want to eat?” And then he’d tell them that Alma wanted to make them men. Some seemed to take pleasure in causing her pain, slapping her or roughly shoving fingers into her. One put his hands over her eyes so she couldn’t look at him. Alma described one boy, maybe her age, who moved over her, his penis completely flaccid, and he mushed it repeatedly against the bloody mess between her legs, calling out, “Yes, whore, yes,” pretending to rape her for Jefferson’s approval.
She said everything flatly, without emotion, but as she described the rape she began punctuating the story with the phrase, “It was horrible,” said in the same flat tone. “Another boy came. It was horrible. I was in so much pain. It
was horrible. It was so horrible. I called Osmin but he looked away. It was horrible. It was horrible. It was horrible.”
At the end, Jefferson made Alma thank each one of her rapists for “pleasing her.” This seemed to bother Alma more than any other aspect of the rape. The flat tone shifted to the hateful one. “I looked each one in the eye. Thank you, you pleased me very much. Thank you, that was so good.” She took a breath. “If I looked away, he made me say it again.”
Valencia found this unbearable to listen to. She stared at her hands, ashamed even to be in the same room with this woman. Her lunch, greasy fried pasteles, turned in her stomach. She wanted to vomit.
“What did he say to you?” Luisa asked. “I mean, what did he tell you to say? The words.”
“I told you. He made me . . . I thanked them.”
Luisa asked again, Alma hedged again, Luisa asked her to remember. Valencia nervously stared at her computer screen where the audio wave appeared in mountains and valleys of indifferent data. She thought of Luisa’s demand that during the interviews she give the victims her complete attention, and to not show any pity or shame. She forced herself to stare into Alma’s face, which was blank, unaffected, as if the words were coming from some other person. It was not how she imagined a person would sound, telling such a story. Was there a right way for the story to be told? And was there a right way for the story to be listened to? What should you feel as you hear it? Should you cry? That would be the wrong thing. A disgusting, self-indulgent thing. So what? What do you do with stories like this? Later, she would transcribe it and hope the Colombian state threw Alma some money, though it was not clear the rape constituted a political crime. The other day Sara told her about a woman whose husband had refused to pay the “revolutionary tax” to the FARC, and so he’d been tied to a pole while four FARC raped her in front of him. That was a political rape. Rape as a tool of war. Would Alma’s rape count?