Missionaries

by Phil Klay

  Eventually, Alma settled on a specific phrasing. Jefferson, who did not participate in the rape so much as orchestrate it, stood above her and said: “Tell them they pleased you. Or we can give you more.”

  Luisa nodded. “You were smart to do what you did,” she said. “They would have killed you.”

  Alma nodded in response to Luisa’s nod, but her face showed she neither understood nor agreed.

  “What you did, very hard, after that torture. You’re a berraca.”

  Alma, unconvinced, nodded again.

  “Believe me,” Luisa said, with that authority she wielded. “I know.”

  Then Alma told how she stayed with Osmin after the rape, even though he held it against her, and even beat her, and blamed her for having been with so many men. Osmin told her that girls who did what she did ended up working for Jefferson in a brothel in Cunaviche, but he had protected her, even though she was dirty. Then Osmin got her pregnant, but she miscarried, and he said it was a sign. He left her, and disappeared soon after.

  “People said the guerrilla had caught him and tortured him to death,” Alma said. “I heard that and felt nothing. I was like a corpse, then. I was a corpse when he beat me. I was a corpse when he slept with me. And I was a corpse when I became pregnant. Of course the baby died. A corpse can only give birth to dead things.”

  Alma told them that she fled to the guerrilla not long after that. There was no life for her in her town, where she was a tainted woman. And she told them how, in the FARC, she began to feel freer, and how there were more opportunities for women, even though the new recruits were also supposed to sleep with their campañeros, which she found difficult at first. As she told of her life in the FARC, her flat tone became inflected with other notes.

  “My first combat, I went with the machine-gun detachment,” she said, smiling. “There is no discrimination in the FARC, the women fight in the front. But I only had a pistol. Still, even if I had to go with nothing but my own two hands, I would have gone. I’m not afraid to fight. The smell of it excites me. It’s like nothing else. I’ve never been scared. For me, it’s like going to a party. I would sing and jump and skip because it makes me happy fighting.”

  It was, by that point, only mildly surprising to Valencia to hear that Alma was an ex-guerrillera. One of the people she had come here, in a spirit of Christian compassion, to forgive.

  Luisa asked Alma why she left the FARC.

  “To have children,” she said. “I have two children now,” she said. “My husband and I are very happy. But the corpse, the corpse of the girl I was, many days the corpse reaches up and grabs me, and it is terrible. I would like it to stop.”

  Luisa walked back to Ricardo, who pointed at a place on the form, and Luisa nodded, walked back to her seat, asked Alma a few family history questions in a light tone of voice, about her mother, father, and their backgrounds, and then the interview was done.

  In the common room, Valencia lingered by the smelly fridge rather than joining Sara and Professor Agudelo at the table. It felt as though something should be said, though more than that it felt as though nothing should be said.

  “To work!” Luisa shouted when she popped her head out of her office and saw her like that, useless. As she shook herself free of lethargy, Luisa added, “Tomorrow is easier. We will take a trip to a destroyed village. With a man who was in the paramilitaries. A man who still works for Jefferson.”

  Luisa laughed, but no one else said anything. Sara raised her eyebrows slightly.

  Professor Agudelo rolled his eyes. “Oh, don’t let her bait you. It’s just the same kind of work. You’ll see.”

  And the next morning, they got in a van and drove to a shuttered shop on the road into town, where a man in his late twenties was waiting by the side of the road. He shook their hands, and he told them that he was a victim, and an ex-combatant, and that his name was Abel.

  * * *

  —

  The journalist was a woman. Muscular, thin, pale. A face that could have been pretty when she was younger but seemed to have been out too long in the sun. Afghanistan and Iraq, she’d said. Abel figured there was a lot of sun there. And of all the people in the van—the professor, the students—she was the only one who really spoke to him, or gave him a kind glance. He felt an old feeling, shame. It reminded him of when he’d just left the paras. Then, it had spurred him to change his life, to move forward. Maybe it was a good thing.

  The first relic they passed was the old missionary school. Simple. Concrete. Also shrunken in the way that all childhood grandeur shrinks under adult eyes.

  “This was the school I told you about,” he said.

  The journalist seemed to notice something in his voice, some betrayal of feeling, and she turned to the professor and said, “We stop?”

  He grimaced and slowed the van down, made a U-turn, and drove back to the abandoned building. The professor nodded to one of the students. “Sara, you’ll want to get this.” And as they all left the van Sara hefted her camera to her shoulder, then walked over to Abel, reached without asking to the battery pack for the microphone the other student had threaded up through his shirt and pinned to his collar, and turned it on. She didn’t ask, she just did it.

  “What do you want me to say?”

  Sara shrugged.

  “What happened here?” the journalist asked.

  “People said the guerrilla kidnapped the teachers but it wasn’t true.”

  He walked in front of the padlocked doors. The camerawoman moved slowly in, closer and closer to his face. He looked past her, to the professor.

  “They left. They’d been threatened by both sides. Guerrilla. Paramilitaries. So they escaped in the middle of the night. Safer that way, but I think we told ourselves they were chained in the jungle so it wouldn’t seem like they’d abandoned us.”

  “Were they good teachers?”

  “Yes.”

  The journalist made a motion with her head toward the doors, with their rusty lock, and then at the three shattered windows on the side of the building.

  “Empty rooms,” Abel said.

  The journalist snapped a few photos, then they got back in the van.

  The next set of ruins was a house with no roof, with trees growing inside and thrusting their branches out of the windows. The professor slowed the van but Abel shook his head.

  “No, not here,” he said. “This was abandoned.” He tried to remember the name of the family. Cabrales? Rovira? “Not from the guerrilla.”

  “Did you know Luisa when you lived here?” the professor asked.

  Abel shook his head. He didn’t think Luisa wanted anyone to know too much about their past.

  “Okay,” the professor said. “Take us to where it happened.”

  So Abel took them to where it happened. A cluster of abandoned buildings, all overgrown, some with walls knocked down, and the faint outline of what had been Chepe’s bar before the FARC had hustled his family and friends inside and burned them to death. He walked down what had been the main street. Sara filmed him and the journalist photographed him as he knelt down and touched the dirt. He cupped some, and then poured it through his hands. It seemed he had split in two, and there was one Abel who was walking the grounds of his old village, doing the things he was supposed to do, and another Abel watching, wondering what they were thinking that he was thinking, what they were feeling as they watched him and imagined that some great feeling was going on when in fact there was nothing. Nothing inside at all. He walked to the overgrown footprint of Chepe’s bar and pulled shoots of grass from the earth, and let them fall to the ground. There was nothing inside him.

  Click click click. He could hear the journalist taking photos. He could feel the weight of the microphone’s battery pack on his belt. Click click click. The only thing that cared less than that reporter about what had happened here, about hi
s parents and sisters, was that camera. Mechanical. Indifferent. Click.

  “You told the foundation,” the reporter said, “that . . . was it Gustavo?”

  “Gustavo was tortured.”

  Sara began taking slow, careful steps toward him, like a cat stalking a bird.

  “But you weren’t here. How do you know?”

  That was a good question. He couldn’t even remember where he’d first heard what they’d done. He just knew he believed it.

  “Torture is very important,” he said. “It was the same in the paracos. Your new fighters are children, but you have to make them men. So when the FARC catch a defector, or a paraco, or someone who stands up to them, they gather the youngest children, and they take the prisoner out and they cut off the fingers and the ears and the nose, and then cut open the belly and pull out the guts while they’re still alive.”

  The journalist nodded. She swung her camera around and caught him in its eye. He froze. Click.

  Abel looked down, away from the eye. He shrugged. “There are more painful ways to kill a man. It’s not for punishment. It’s for the children. To educate them.”

  “Did you do this?”

  “My group had different methods,” Abel said.

  The journalist stared at him. Her eyes were gentle, soft, but fixed on him, as if she were waiting for him to say more. When the silence began to feel uncomfortable, he added, “When I demobilized, I confessed all my crimes.”

  He stepped onto the ground where Chepe’s bar had been. Where his parents and sisters had died. This was their grave, if they had one.

  “Yes. But I hear the man you committed crimes for is back in La Vigia.”

  “Yes.”

  He knelt and scooped out some earth, making a small hole. He put one hand to his pocket, where he had the pouch with the toad.

  “You see over there,” he said, pointing across the road. “That is where they came from.” The students and the journalist turned and looked, and he slipped the toad into the earth unseen.

  “Did Jefferson help you . . . with justice for what happened here?”

  Abel smiled. Osmin had thought he’d wanted revenge, too. He pushed the earth on top of the toad, covering the hole. Now he only had to say the name.

  “Jefferson,” he whispered. He looked up at the gringa journalist. “No. Jefferson did not help me get justice.”

  * * *

  —

  The checkpoint wasn’t manned by the Jesúses, but by men in uniforms that, as they drew closer, appeared to be those of the FARC. They were maybe four hundred meters in front of them, the road heading in a straight line up to a slight elevation, with a stream on one side and heavy vegetation on the other, where there was no real room for cars to maneuver.

  “This is strange?” Lisette said to Agudelo, who was slowing the van and looking back at Abel, who seemed tense, his jaw clenched.

  “Turn around,” he said in a level voice. “Turn around.”

  As Agudelo brought the van to a crawl, Sara, who’d been filming Abel’s tour of his ruined hometown, took the camera she’d been using, a Canon 5D, and put it in her lap, facing upward at the windows of the van. Lisette watched her press the button to record, and Lisette smiled. Good.

  Two men cradling rifles emerged from the side of the road, about a hundred yards away, and waved at the van to keep going. The checkpoint was past those two by about four hundred yards. There were three vehicles waiting to be inspected. The first, a gray sedan, moved forward, past the checkpoint; the next one, a truck loaded with scrap metal, came forward.

  “Just a shakedown?” Agudelo said, looking back at Abel.

  Lisette looked up at the men closest to them, one of whom had placed the buttstock of his rifle to his shoulder. It was still pointed down, but Lisette figured he could be up and firing accurately in under a second. If that was an AK, the max effective range was four hundred meters. Even if it was poorly maintained, even if the men up ahead didn’t know what they were doing, it’d be capable of shooting through the engine block of the van at two hundred meters.

  “Go,” Lisette said, motioning up to the checkpoint. “They are . . . close.”

  “They are not FARC,” Abel said. “They are not . . .”

  Agudelo shifted gears and the van stuttered forward.

  “Turn around,” Abel said.

  Lisette pointed to the men with rifles, who were now less than a hundred meters away.

  “It’s not safe,” Abel said.

  “Who are they?” Agudelo asked.

  And then they were passing the men with rifles, who smiled and waved and it calmed Lisette a little. A bribe, that would be all. She removed the memory card, slipped it into her pocket, and shoved her camera into her bag. No need to give them reason to loot anything.

  Agudelo checked his rearview mirror, the van still moving forward, closing the distance to the checkpoint, which was now about two hundred meters away. Lisette looked back at the students. They’d been unusually cold to Abel, to the point of rudeness, but now they were all looking at him as if he might have some kind of answer. Clearly there was something about this guy that everybody knew except her.

  “They’re looking for someone,” Agudelo said.

  “Do you still work for Jefferson?” Lisette asked.

  They came to the line of cars just as the fighters were waving the truck with scrap metal forward, and the final vehicle, a motorcycle, moved in between the fighters as Agudelo brought the van to a stop. Lisette heard laughter. The motorcyclist was making some kind of joke. She turned and smiled at Abel, as if to assure him it would be all right, then turned back and saw one of the fighters slap the motorcyclist on the back. It was an oddly comforting sight. Normal. Friendly.

  “No bribe,” Agudelo said, puzzled. And he, too, looked at Abel. “They’re not asking for money.”

  Perhaps they were looking for someone. And then the motorcyclist was speeding away, and the fighters were motioning to Agudelo, and the van was moving forward, and there were rifles pointing at the car, and the passenger side door was opening, and hands were reaching in, and Lisette was gripping the seat, and someone was shouting, and it was Agudelo who was shouting, and the rifles pointed at the car, and the hands tore at Lisette’s seat belt, and Agudelo gripped Lisette’s hand, and Lisette gripped back, and she felt a blow in her side, and the blow registered dully in the sudden charge of fear and adrenaline, and Agudelo was pleading, and Abel was shouting, and more blows came, and Lisette’s fingers slipped, and she felt the sun in her eyes, and she squirmed in their grasp, and she planted one foot against the side of the van, and she kicked with all her strength, and the man holding her fell backward, and she fell backward, and the world spun and then stopped, and dirt and trees made a wall before her, and the man moved beneath her, and she twisted, and she kicked, and she moved herself a foot toward the trees, and a hand grabbed her leg, and a boot exploded against her breast, and a boot exploded against her ribs, and a boot stomped on her calf, and she fell to the earth, and a fist struck her face, and a boot struck her face, and the muscles of her neck twisted with the force, and she fell to the earth, and something struck her side, and her legs, and her legs, and she fell to the earth, and then her side, and then her legs, and then her side, and then . . .

  Quick Spanish. Lisette only caught a word here and there. A fog. Pain. A sneaker lying two feet from her face. That’s mine. Agudelo’s voice. And another voice. A man’s voice, a pleasant voice, a jazz singer’s voice, deep and rough. Breathing hurt. She breathed. Sound faded. She slowed her breathing. Took it gentle. Shallow. So shallow she hardly got any air at all. Agudelo’s voice saying . . . something. The deep voice responding. “She works for the Sia.” Lisette wanted to laugh, it was funny, wasn’t it? Sia was a singer. And waves filled her head and pushed the sounds away, converted the sounds into incomprehensible bits of accent
and intonation hovering somewhere beyond understanding. She breathed out, and in. She heard “the Sia” once again, and again she wanted to laugh. Sia wasn’t a singer. Sia was how Colombians said “CIA.” And it was funny, wasn’t it? And then sounds were directed at her, the sounds were liquid, a stream of Spanish punctuated by three syllables, “Liz-EH-tee.” Her name. She focused, but the words had ended, there was only the sound of the engine of the van, and the van slowly turning, going into reverse, then forward, turning slowly until it was heading back the way they came, back to La Vigia, and up above Lisette in the window of the van were the faces of the students, terrified, longing, and then blue sky and the sound of the van leaving her behind.

  5

  The previous winter Mason’s father took his eldest, Inez, and taught her how to fell a tree. He didn’t ask if he could, just left with Inez and an ax, a chain saw, and a peavey. When she came back, Inez showed Mason her hands, where the slow repetition of wooden handle rubbing against skin had raised blisters, and then ripped those blisters off. And as Mason treated her, Inez spoke excitedly of how to recognize the dangerous snags high in branches. How to tell whether a log should be cut from the bottom or top, how to handle a tree that hangs up on the way down, how to work your way around a large piece of wood by attacking the outer parts before sinking your blade into the core. How to pile a face cord four feet high and eight feet long with each end perpendicular to the ground so you don’t need end posts.

  “You need to take care of yourself, Pops,” he’d told his father, who didn’t even bother to reply, to say he wasn’t dead yet, or some other cliché. He knew he should feel disapproval—his aging father had risked his health doing hard manual labor, risked his daughter’s safety doing a dangerous and unnecessary chore. But as his daughter babbled excitedly, he mostly felt jealous.