by Phil Klay
Of course, they didn’t admire. They never did. They looked away. Afraid. Even the whores. And he didn’t want whores. Disgusting, diseased. He walked through the room, standing straight, not wanting to crease his shirt, and if a woman ever caught his eye it was by accident, and she quickly looked away. Or sometimes she would hold his eye, but that was always whores who did that. They’re mostly whores, women.
There was one, short and pretty and a little fat, and she danced and danced and danced and didn’t look at him once. Not even as he stood beside her and stared. She was dancing by herself, not even with someone else. An hour or so later, the short and pretty and fat one got into a fight with a tall and dark indio-looking woman, and he had his men break up the fight. He was furious. And it was worse when he found one of them was a mother. That’s what she told him. Please, sir, my children are at home. He should have killed her, if there were justice in this world. But of course, Javier was a man, he could control himself. Instead he gave them his usual punishment. Cleaning the town square. Naked. To show their whorishness to the world, and to teach them shame.
Women used to throw themselves at Jefferson. They threw themselves at him and he never wanted them. Jefferson had only fucked whores, which Javier found disgusting. Though, as time passed, Jefferson fucked no one at all. Perhaps he’d been ill, toward the end. He wasn’t as sharp as before. And then there was the absurdity with the gringa journalist. Such a stupid thing to let spin out of control. Such a stupid thing to allow that woman, Luisa, to bring into town anyway.
Perhaps Jefferson would still be alive if he had let Javier deal with the problem. Perhaps he’d still be alive if he’d followed Javier’s advice and shut down the foundation. Now the news was full of talk about the raid on Jefferson, bringing up accusations of old crimes from the paramilitary days, rapes and murders and other things.
Javier’s first action was to reach out to Jefferson’s contacts across the border and to assure them they still had a stable partner. His second action was to reach out to the Urabeños and let them know that their access to local routes into Venezuela still depended on their willingness to work with the Jesúses. But his third action was to send a warning shot to the foundation.
Javier was sure it was the foundation who had sent out that photo of Jefferson at their offices, accusing him of crimes on that website “Twitter.” Until now Javier had never heard of Twitter, or had any idea it could be capable of causing him problems, this website where anyone can go and make baseless accusations against brave men who fight for their communities.
He had summoned Abel and together they went down the list of people who’d visited the foundation. When they found the name of a former guerrillera, Alma, the sort of person whose death would bother no one but Luisa, he had ordered some of his men to kill her. And then, as they were on their way, he remembered some of the lessons he’d learned from Jefferson and radioed them to tell them to make it look like an accident.
Now that Jefferson was dead, the people at the foundation were probably feeling good about themselves. Perhaps they hadn’t heard yet about the guerrillera. So he went to them, just to let them know he was still in charge. Luisa was in, as well as the students and the foundation worker from Bogotá.
“I heard terrible news about someone who visited the foundation,” he said, a smile across his face. “I want to assure you, we had nothing to do with it.” He said this in a way to let them know that he had everything to do with it, and left feeling very pleased with himself. Dogs were being brought to heel.
Jefferson had his skills, but his permissiveness had led to his death. When Javier was in charge, he wasn’t going to run things so loose. He’d close La Serpiente de Tierra Caliente, he’d leave that bitch Luisa’s body in a ditch, he’d bring order to the town. It was necessary. It was right. But could he also do what Jefferson had done? Could he make people love him for it?
* * *
—
Even though Javier had not said the name of the person they’d killed, Valencia knew, somehow, that it must be Alma. Of all the stories she’d transcribed, Alma’s had been the one that struck her the most powerfully. She wasn’t sure why. Perhaps because of the way she looked, or the way she told the story, or simply because she’d been one of the hated guerrilla and yet Valencia had sympathized with her and even celebrated her story in her mind, the fact that a little chubby woman like that used to go into battle cheerfully inspired her, even though she had gone into battle to kill men like her own father. It had to be Alma.
Luisa told them they would first go to the clinic on their way out of town. “I want you to see,” she said. They were both still denying they had anything to do with the Twitter account and the photo of Jefferson.
Nevertheless, they packed their bags into the van, feeling like the condemned heading to an execution, and made their way to the clinic. And in the clinic Luisa bulldogged her way past the doctor and into a room with a corpse under a sheet. It was a small corpse, Valencia could see that. And then the doctor nodded to Agudelo, and Agudelo gathered the students around the corpse, and the doctor removed the sheet, and Alma’s dead face and crushed body stared up at them.
“It was a road accident,” the doctor said.
Luisa said nothing, but she crossed herself and then reached down and held Alma’s hand. She remained like that, still and silent, while Agudelo shuffled Valencia and Sara back into the van.
Afterward, Agudelo drove back to Cúcuta through the stifling heat. And he ignored Sara when Sara said it was her, it was her fault, it was her idea, not Valencia’s. And Valencia stared at Sara as she accepted the blood guilt, and envied her, envied her courage in speaking those words, the liberation of being able to admit your sins. Yet she stayed silent.
Sara punched the back of the seat in front of her, then punched it again and again until Agudelo told her to stop. Valencia stared at her hands. She wanted to speak but shame suffocated her. She found it difficult to breathe, and then she couldn’t breathe, her breath shallow and quick, the edges of her vision collapsing in, the stifling air too thick to force down her throat, and then Sara was talking to her, calming words, and she fought to control her breathing, but there was this heaviness, this crushing, unmaking pain. Her soul, if she had one, screaming at her in protest of her stupidity, her narcissism, her desire.
There was silence for a long time, but as they crossed over the Tibú River, Agudelo started speaking. He said it was good that they knew they had blood on their hands. That to live in a country like this was to have blood on your hands, that the lives they lived in Bogotá were paid for in blood, and if they wanted to continue in this work it was the most important thing to know. Most people will never get to stare at the corpses of the men and women who die because the elites of this country don’t see it in their interest to fashion a just society, and it is a sight they should always remember, no matter what work they end up in, but especially if they continue working in human rights.
“This is no kind of work for messiahs,” Agudelo said. “This is no kind of work for saviors. We only want the guilty here.”
And then Agudelo waited, as if he thought they’d respond, but what was there to say? And so he added, “You think I haven’t made mistakes? I’ve made mistakes. I’ve never made mistakes this stupid, but that’s your generation. Inventing new ways to be fools.”
Valencia heard nothing, saw nothing but the body, the broken, distorted body lying in the clinic. And God, if there was a God, reached into Valencia’s body, and squeezed her lungs with His large hands, and ran His fingers down her nerves, and breathed hot breath over her eyes, and He tapped her heart once, then twice, as the blood rushed and drained and rushed and drained through her, and then He drew back, leaving a hole behind where air rushed in. If she could have wept tears of blood she would have wept tears of blood, and Agudelo kept speaking, making elliptical statements about this kind of work, and the mistakes
he’d made, and what they must learn from it.
Two days later, when she reunited with her father, that feeling had not left. She had not slept, had not done much of anything but trace her guilt. She may not have driven the car that ran Alma down, but she’d taken a shot at a drug lord, in the drug lord’s territory. Of course someone would die as a result. And the fact that it was Alma who died felt like something beyond simple chance. It felt like a judgment of God. She only admitted all this to Agudelo on the plane ride back to Bogotá, and Agudelo had responded with nothing more than a grave nod.
After that, she remained silent about what happened. Valencia had cried when she reunited with her mother and father, but she didn’t tell them why. Discussion of the kidnapping, and what happened afterward, was limited. Even in these circumstances, her family’s rule about what they did and did not talk about remained in effect. Valencia went back to school. She studied, she excelled, life returned to normal. Her mother had her talk to a psychiatrist and a priest. She told both about watching the journalist torn from the car, but with neither did she confess her sin. The psychiatrist sniffed around for evidence of trauma like a pig rooting for truffles. Finding nothing, she’d declared her a perfectly healthy, normal, resilient young woman. The priest took her through her paces, going down the usual catalogue of sins and pronouncing her forgiven.
Of course, she didn’t tell him her real sin. He would have forgiven her, and it would have felt like blasphemy against the seriousness of what she’d done to believe forgiveness could come so easily. I have done evil, and the evil cannot be erased by a priest with some magic words. Later, when her faith returned more fully to her, she would describe this feeling as the sin of pride.
She and Sara got coffee, and Sara seemed strangely fine. She spoke of the coming peace vote, of her new boyfriend, who’d thrown a Molotov cocktail at a police vehicle during a student protest a couple of years ago, of how Human Rights Watch was allying with the conservatives to trash the peace.
“Left and right long ago collapsed into each other. This is what capital does,” she said, as if that explained things.
Valencia tried to get her to talk about La Vigia and was cut off. “It was a waste of time,” Sara said. “I’m done with human rights.”
“You’re dropping the class?”
“I’ll finish the class for the credits, but then I’m done,” she said. “You know, half the people here would think Agudelo is a hero, but he’s just as stuck in the past as the FARC.” Then she launched into what seemed like a rehearsed rant about how fixating on whether guerrillas or politicians or soldiers or narcos are playing nice obscured how “technocapital,” whatever that was, jumped forward, outsourcing and automating, sending T-shirt jobs to Vietnam and the rest of manufacturing to robots.
“Have you thought about what we did?” Valencia asked.
Sara stopped. “I never met Alma,” she said, as if the name were a strange new dish she was tasting for the first time. “I only saw her coming in and out of the offices. I never heard her testimony.”
“Would you like to?”
Sara’s hard features softened into an expression of surprise. Perhaps fear.
“I have the audio,” Valencia added. “I could send it to you.”
“No.”
It was only after she’d been home for a few weeks, and after her father had noted for the fourth time that she still didn’t seem to be herself, that he decided they needed a night out. He took her to the restaurant on top of Monserrate, and they ate, and he spoke to her of the journalist and how terrifying it must have been and so on. He told her about the possible end of his military career, and his plans to continue using the skills he had acquired for the good of the world, but that his next step might mean even more time away from home than usual.
“I got someone killed,” she said. And she told him about Sara, and the photo of Jefferson, and what they’d done with it, and how it had gotten Alma killed. And she saw how her father was stunned into silence. The sun was setting over Bogotá, her breath was coming short, and she focused in on herself, determined not to cry or in some other way shame herself further.
“Mother of God,” he said. “Mother of God. That was you? Mother of God!”
Miserably, she nodded.
“Mother of God,” he said again. He controlled himself, reached forward and held her by the chin, bringing her face up, staring intently in her eyes, as if searching for something there. “Of course,” he said.
He let his hand down, but continued staring at her. “Of course,” he said again. And then he smiled. “I’m proud of you.”
“What?”
“I’m proud of you.”
And he explained how they’d been getting conflicting reports about who had taken the gringa, and why, and her little stunt had focused attention and, critically, resources on Jefferson. All of which had led to his death.
“You killed that son of a whore,” he said. Her father. Who didn’t curse. “Like you wanted to. Clever girl.”
“But . . .”
“This woman. Alma?”
She nodded. She could not say her name.
“You were in a war, my dear.”
She nodded yes.
“People die in battle. Yes?”
She shrugged her shoulders.
“I know,” he said. “I know. I know well. I know what it’s like to lose men. You’ll have to find her family. Send . . . money. Something. It will make you feel better. And it’s good to do. But listen to me well. I know what it is to lose men.”
He reached down and covered her hand with his.
“Some officers can’t risk their men in battle. They don’t have the guts for it. They lose a taste for boldness. They just want to protect their men, and themselves. They’re cowards. In the long run, they get more people killed. But you, my daughter. My daughter.” He was grinning widely now. “You’re in some little town in the countryside, surrounded by narcos and guerrillas, and what do you do? You take action. You take bold action.”
She shook her head.
“I know,” he said again, and he put his palm over his heart. “The deaths, they weigh on you. Daughter, I know. I know very well. And you remember her well. I know you will. Alma. Your first casualty. But don’t lose heart. This is the person I raised you to be. Just . . . in the future, pick your targets more carefully. You caused a lot of problems.”
He leaned back in his chair and looked out over the city.
“Look,” he said. “The sun is setting.”
So it was. And as it set he spoke of the beauty of their country, pointing to the shifting colors over the mountains, over the white modern high-rise apartments, the old colonial buildings of the Candelaria. “Bogotá is a beautiful city,” he said.
“Bogotá is a graveyard,” she said, parroting a phrase she’d read in a Juan Gabriel Vásquez novel.
“That’s every city,” he said. “Every city, every town. Every village worthy of the name.”
While he spoke, she stared silently out at the same city and mountains he did, but saw a different place. As a girl, she had wanted a simple faith. A sense that she was a sister to all mankind, connected to all creation, that the natural beauty and wonder of the world was a caress of God. Looking out on her city, that was gone, replaced with emptiness, churning, her soul exposed, every nerve raw. This is not my home, and this is not my father. As he spoke on and on and on, she felt herself unraveling. She was nothing but an unforgiven girl in an ugly world. A shuddering sob broke through her. The beginning of her period of mourning. And her father held her hand, and his love for her felt painful and cruel, and she wondered, if there was a God, if that was what His love actually felt like.
* * *
—
Luisa went to see Javier first. It was a task that frightened her, and so she tried to remind herself as she walked ov
er that he wasn’t really human. Perhaps he had a tumor in his brain. Perhaps he was possessed. If there was indeed a human soul inside his body it was dying of thirst in cracked, dry soil. He wasn’t anything to be afraid of. He would be pitiable, if only there were enough of a person there to be worth pitying.
But the problem for her was that he wore the same face as the thing that had severed her father in half. Whenever she saw him in La Vigia, mounted on horseback, patrolling the town as if he were its chief of police, it provoked one of those irritating reactions in her. Terror. Sunlight on frightened faces. The smell of shit and rot in the hot sun. But fearing him was as foolish as fearing the chain saw that had torn through her father’s spine. They were both no more than tools. Mechanisms in a broader system. Though, of course, the sight of chainsaws made her shudder, too.
When the young fools hanging outside Javier’s office told her he’d be around shortly, that he was handling business, she smiled. Business! Officially he worked in the export of leather goods.
“I’ll wait inside,” she told them, almost adding, Until he oozes back this way.
On the wall of the small waiting area were photographs of Javier. Javier on a horse. Javier in his old paramilitary uniform. Javier behind Jefferson at a construction site. She made herself look at them. She’d be facing his real face soon. Might as well face the memories now.
In the days when Father Iván was helping her and a few other refugees who had stayed in the area, rather than flee all the way to Tibú or Cúcuta, she’d seen visions of him before her constantly. She’d felt isolated from all mankind then, but she wasn’t alone. She always had Javier Ocasio with her.
She had gone daily to the chapel in Cunaviche, knelt before the bloody Christ on the eastern wall of the church, and prayed the 88th Psalm. The only psalm in the Bible without hope. She asked God if He showed His wonders only to the dead, if His love was declared only in the grave, His faithfulness only in destruction. And she had received no answer, but was comforted nonetheless.