The Armies

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Three months after that last incursion into our town, three months exactly — because since then I count the days — the Brazilian’s son arrived home, without anyone knowing who brought him, or how. He turned up at seven in the evening, alone, and gazed at his mother, motionless, speechless, standing like a statue in the doorway. She ran to embrace him, cried, he remained as if asleep with his eyes open, gone for good, and has not been anything but silent since then. Gaunt, skinnier than he had ever been, because he had never been thin and now he was skin and bones, he looked like a child pushed by force into old age: inscrutable and timid, he does nothing but sit, receive food, listen without listening, look without looking, every morning he wakes and every night he sleeps, he does not respond to any voice, not even his mother’s, the anguished Geraldina in mourning. In his shirt pocket she found a note sent by his captors, where they specified which front they belonged to, with whom Geraldina had to deal and what price they were demanding for the Brazilian’s life — Gracielita was not even mentioned.

Geraldina began to live as if petrified in fear: she was ordered not to give any details of the instructions to anyone, under threat of her husband’s immediate execution. Overwhelmed, unable to decide to act, she could not help but confide her tragedy to Hortensia Galindo and me, who were with her when her son appeared, and who did not know how to help, what solution to propose, what to do, because the same thing was happening to all three of us, to me with the aggravating factor of receiving no news of Otilia — my Otilia without me, both of us without each other. Geraldina confined herself to waiting for the arrival of a brother, from Buga, who “will help her.” Now all her preoccupation is focused entirely on her son so reserved he almost seems dead; in vain she attempts to wake him from the nightmare he is in: she hovers around him every minute of the day, hanging on his every gesture, and falls back desperately on a kind of game of deluded songs, in which she uselessly tries to convince herself that he participates, he, a child who seems mummified, stuck in an urn. She thought of taking him to Bogotá, to see some specialists, but the idea of distancing herself from the region where her husband was held prisoner put her off. The young doctor, who had been assigned to our town to fulfill her year of rural service, one of the few survivors of the attack on the hospital, has told her — in an attempt to calm her that the delicate trance her son is in can only be remedied with time and tranquillity: and yes, the uncertainty that reigns in San José is perhaps similar to tranquility, but it is not the same; people go home early; the few businesses still here open for the morning and a couple of hours in the afternoon; then doors close and San José agonizes in the heat, it is a dead town, or almost, just like us, its last inhabitants. Only the dogs and the pigs sniff around the stones, the vultures flap their wings on the tree branches, the eternally indifferent birds seem to be the only ones not to notice this living death. Because once again we are newsworthy; the death toll goes up daily; after the attack, among the ruins of the school and the hospital, more corpses appeared: Fanny, the caretaker, with grenade shrapnel through her neck, and Sultana García, Cristina’s mother, who was found riddled with bullets under a pile of bricks “with the broom still in her hands,” people commented with bitterness. Realizing I was with them, hours before their deaths, leaves me suddenly stunned, whatever I do, alone or in company, dead to Otilia; the thought that she might show up the way they did makes me open my mouth like an idiot, open my arms as if waving away ghosts, open my eyes wider as if I myself were thinking right that very moment I am going mad at the edge of this cliff and feeling that a hand could push me at the most unexpected moment, at this very moment, now.

More landmines have exploded, or “were heard”—another thing people said — on the outskirts, fortunately without human victims, for now; only an anti-explosives dog (he was buried with military honors), a stray dog, two pigs, a mule, and an army truck, without casualties. It is extraordinary; we seem besieged by an army that is invisible and more efficient for it. No doctor has yet arrived to replace the deceased Gentil Orduz, nor has another lucid drunk resembling Mauricio Rey staggered through the streets. Lesmes and the Mayor travel to Bogotá; their requests for the front line to be pulled back from San José are not listened to. Otherwise, war and famine adapt themselves, more than willingly. The hundreds of hectares of coca planted around San José in the last few years, the “strategic location” of our town, as those in the know classify us in the newspapers, have made of this territory what the protagonists of the war also call “the corridor,” dominion over which they fight for tooth and nail, and which causes the war to surface in everyone’s very pores: this is what people talk about in the street, in furtive hours, and they talk in words and curses, laughter and laments, silence, invocations. I miss the conversation, and I am not going to deny it, of Dr. Orduz and of Mauricio Rey. because Father Albornoz has also decided to die — in his way: leaving San José in the company of his sacristan, without saying goodbye — in his place came a priest more frightened than unfamiliar, recently ordained, Father Sanín, from Manizales.

Chepe was not spared either in the squall of death. They did not kill his pregnant wife, this is true, but they took her: she was in the hospital, for a routine checkup, when the attack started. They slipped Chepe a note under his door: You, sir, have a debt to clear with us, and that’s why we’re taking your pregnant wife. We have Carmenza and need fifty million for her and another fifty for the baby on its way. Don’t try to get around us again. The news of this double kidnapping was soon in the newspaper, under the headline: BABY ANGÉLICA KIDNAPPED BEFORE BIRTH. Chepe himself, in an interview, candid in his pain, had revealed to the journalist the name they planned to give their daughter. The journalist, a young redhead covering the recent attack on San José, does not only publish her articles in the newspaper, but also conducts live interviews for a television news program. Escorted by two officers, as well as her cameraman, she arrived in San José in one of those helicopters meant to evacuate seriously wounded soldiers — and dead ones — to their places of origin. She was granted this military dispensation because she is the niece of General Palacios. She has been strolling around for days under the sun, which at this time of year is intense, her ginger locks adorned with a white straw hat, her eyes hidden behind a pair of dark sunglasses. This morning I saw her pass by my door: she stopped for a moment, seemed doubtful; she looked at her cameraman as if questioning him; the young man looked impatient. The journalist was probably wondering whether I, an old man sitting alone by his house, was a good subject for a photograph. She decided I was not and carried on walking. I recognized her: I had seen her on the television at Chepe’s. Being here, in this town, sunburnt, did not seem very agreeable to her. She continued her meandering through the blown-up streets, the wrecked houses. Slowly, her green T-shirt soaked in sweat — down the back, between her breasts — she seemed to be walking through hell, her mouth twisted in torment.

“Thank God we’re leaving tomorrow, Jairito,” I heard her say to her cameraman.

I had left my house, at dawn, to sit by the side of the door, as Otilia always did when she was waiting for me. I could still see the fog in the sunshine, persistent, this disaster that I do not know why those of us who remain seem determined to ignore. Thinking of Chepe and his pregnant wife, wondering how they managed to take her, how they transport people as fat as Saldarriaga, forcing them to walk up and down hills for kilometers, helps me to walk. I should go and keep Chepe company. Better to listen to someone than to sit here confirming Otilia’s absence.

It is eight o’clock in the morning and I arrive at his shop. Some people are sitting beside him, at one of the tables in the aisle, in complete silence; they are drinking coffee. Others, here and there, are drinking beer, or smoking. There is no music. Chepe nods hello. I sit down with him, across from him, in an uncomfortable chair, which wobbles.

“So, that means they’ll kill her,” Chepe says to me. He stares at me for too long — is he drunk? — and shows me a note, which I do not take, but the contents of which I give him to understand I already know. “Where am I going to get that kind of money?” he asks me. “Damn it, profesor, where?”

What can I say? We remain silent. The girl who wore a daisy in her hair brings me a cup of coffee. She no longer has the daisy and her face is somber. She resents, perhaps, my lingering look. She walks away unhappy. She does not hear us anymore, like before, does not want to hear us. I find aguardiente bottles under the table.

“Where?” Chepe asks us all.

We do not know whether he has started to laugh or to cry, but his mouth slackens, his head trembles.

“Tell them just that, Chepe,” they say to him.

“Negotiate with them, negotiate. That’s what everyone does.”

I see, behind Chepe, several neighbors’ heads; some smile in silence, on the verge of a joke, because in spite of the bullets and splashes of blood there is always someone who laughs and makes the rest laugh, at the expense of death and the disappearances. This time there was just a touch of somewhat kind irony: Chepe’s tears look like tears of laughter.

He recovers. It is as if he swallows his tears.

“And you, profesor? Any word about your wife?”

“Nothing.”

“It won’t be long, profesor, before they let you know,” someone says. “They must be weighing up your treasures.”

And someone else:

“Profesor, stop in at the post office. There were two letters for you.”

“Really? So there’s still post?”

“The world hasn’t come to an end, profesor,” says one of the ones who laugh.

“What do you know,” I say. “Your world may not have ended, but mine has.”

I finish my coffee, leave Chepe’s shop, and head straight for the post office. Must be letters from my daughter, I think. When the church was blown up she wrote to us asking if we wanted to go and live with them, assuring us we would be welcomed by her husband, begging us to think of our grandchildren. Neither Otilia nor I had any hesitation: we were never leaving here.