Colombiano Read online

  From the way Humberto Díaz had acted on earth, I didn’t fancy his chances anyway. But at least we’d give him a shot.

  At 2 am we reached the church cemetery. I held the torch while Papá broke the earth. Perspiring as he dug, he wiped his brow repeatedly. Several times I held out my hand for the shovel but he removed his shirt and waved me away. In the pale, flickering torchlight his muscles were like strips of rope under a sheet.

  ‘Cowards,’ he muttered as the digging got the better of him. ‘Cowards!’

  At first I thought he meant the Guerrilla for killing Humberto Díaz and not disclosing his whereabouts.

  ‘Cowards!’ he said again, and only then did I realise he was referring to Díaz’s sons. Javier and Fabián were in their twenties. They should have been the ones doing this.

  We lowered the body into the grave. Papá handed me the shovel. Pleased that I could finally help, I began scooping dirt back in.

  ‘No!’ he whispered, gesturing that he’d meant for me to take the shovel and tarpaulin to the truck.

  Papá rapped quietly on the priest’s door but returned without waiting for it to open. It was important that Humberto Díaz be commended to God. But it was also important that Padre Rojas could deny seeing whoever had dropped off the body. Papá didn’t think anything would happen to the priest. At that stage of the war, the armed groups were still feigning respect for the church.

  With Díaz’s body out of our vehicle, the danger had passed. Papá tossed me the car keys. We arrived home safely. No one had seen us and no one saw Padre Rojas conducting the burial. We’d gotten away with it. Almost.

  4

  THERE WAS NO proof of who had retrieved Díaz’s body, but people speculated. Every time the rumour that he was now in the cemetery came up, I feigned ignorance whilst tingling at the dangerous, shared secret that bonded me with Papá. At lunch, when Mamá mentioned it, Papá peered over his newspaper and suggested she lay flowers on the grave on behalf of Díaz’s wife and sons, who’d now fled to the city. He didn’t even glance at me. He didn’t have to. I was his midnight accomplice and his midday vault.

  But the Guerrilla knew for certain that Padre Rojas was involved. They would never dream of digging up a body – in those days, they were godless but not depraved. Instead, they sent an emissary, Ratón, to question the priest. Aged in his mid-twenties, he was a rat-faced commander with a pointy nose and thin, triangular ears. Padre Rojas informed Ratón that someone had knocked on his door at around 3 am and he’d come out to find the body already half-buried.

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ declared Ratón.

  ‘I’m not lying.’

  ‘You’re not telling the whole truth either.’

  ‘I’ll leave that for God to decide,’ the priest said, peremptorily closing the presbytery door.

  Ratón blocked it with his foot.

  ‘Who helped you, old man?’

  ‘God,’ responded Rojas. ‘And that’s Padre to you, son.’

  Never one to dip his words in honey, the Padre already had strained relations with both the Guerrilla and army. He was like the town’s moral conscience; he pronounced judgments from the pulpit that everyone knew would never be enforced, but that they liked to hear anyway. In sermons, he never mentioned culprits by name, although he came razor close.

  ‘Those parties responsible for kidnapping Lara Benítez,’ he might say, ‘should return her immediately to where she belongs.’ Then he would adjust his reading glasses and peer over them before booming into the microphone, ‘With her family.’ And everyone would know because he’d said ‘those parties’ and not ‘that party’ that his message was intended for the Guerrilla units. But Rojas was equally unforgiving of the army. In response to their illegal searches and roughing up of peasant farmers at gunpoint to gain apparent confessions, he said, ‘Those persons who falsely accuse, should refer to the eighth commandment, in which Moses was told not to bear false witness …’

  As a priest with community influence, Padre Rojas was given religious leeway by both sides. Nevertheless, he was poking his tongue into beehives. Then a Guerrilla mortar bomb, aimed towards the police station, went astray by five blocks, crashing through the church roof and exploding in the aisle. Luckily, it was 3.30 am and no one was inside.

  Señor Muñoz and my father led the work party to repair the damage. Extension ladders and labourers were borrowed from our finca. Even Colonel Buitrago, the head of the Garbanzos army battalion, came to show community support. On hands and knees, he patiently removed metal shards from the pews using tweezers, then relacquered them while Papá cut out the singed segment of carpet and dragged another section across to cover the gap.

  After Colonel Buitrago and his twelve-man security contingent departed, the rodent-faced Ratón walked in, flanked by three bodyguards from the Milicia Bolivariana – the Guerrilla’s plain-clothed urban militia that was in charge of their logistics, intelligence, recruitment and community liaison. He apologised for the mishap and offered compensation. Padre Rojas accepted the apology but refused their cash. Ratón eyed him fatally.

  Then, two weeks after the cylinder bomb, we buried Humberto Díaz and Ratón visited Padre Rojas a second time. After slamming the presbytery door, the priest was sent a formally worded threat typed under official Guerrilla letterhead:

  In furtherance of the mutual respect and esteem the church and the Guerrilla have for each other’s humanitarian work carried out for the good of the people, the FARC Guerrilla hereby advises that further interference in our affairs will not be tolerated.

  Daniel Joaquim Gómez, Comandante, 34th Unit

  Daniel Gómez was Ratón’s alias. A muffled phone call followed, demanding Padre Rojas leave town. He didn’t. Finally, a single 9mm round was fired through the stained-glass windows. Rojas was obliged to inform the Bogotá diocese of any material event that affected the security of its personnel. The bullet was, as they say in these parts, the final drop that caused the cup to overflow. Padre Rojas was recalled to the capital, effective immediately. His maid could pack and send his belongings.

  We did not know who the new priest would be, just as we did not know that one brave man leaving a town’s decade-long tug of war would permit even greater acts of cowardice.

  In a Catholic town where everyone knew the Bible by heart, the new priest’s arrival stirred expectations. Padre Rojas would be a tough act to follow. The new priest certainly looked the part. Where Rojas had worn pleated pants and collared shirts, Guzmán wore a white robe and coloured sashes that contrasted with his thick, jet-black hair. He ascended the pulpit with pomp and solemnity and raised his chubby, porcelain-white hands in the air, ready to inspire a tumult of passion. Some anticipated the eye-for-an-eye sermon to provoke the government army into action. Some wanted Matthew’s turn-the-other-cheek sermon in order to calm the situation. At the very least, we all expected a simple restatement of community values.

  Instead, the weak-chinned Padre Guzmán opted for love-thy-neighbour in times of trouble. That might have worked in the big city, where not knowing your neighbours made it easier to love them. But in a town of four thousand people it fooled no one.

  Bored and disappointed, the congregation spilled through the mahogany doors grumbling about the new priest. He’d already made the women irate by firing the presbytery maid, a local girl. He’d brought his own mulata maid with him from the city. In the car on the way home, even Mamá got in on the criticising.

  ‘It’s not because of her colour,’ she said. ‘I’m not a racist. You know I have no problem with Palillo coming to our house. But that mulata girl is half his age.’ She whispered this last part. Mamá still tried to have coded conversations in front of me. She was referring to the mulata’s massive bosom and the fact that she was remarkably pretty.

  ‘I think it’s best not to judge until you know her story,’ Papá said tersely. He was unusually tense that day.

  ‘Let’s not fight, amor,’ said Mamá, resting her hand gently on his
knee. ‘I know how much you miss him.’

  Most people don’t think of priests as having dear friends. However, Padre Rojas and Papá were truly close. Before leaving for the capital, the priest had ridden his red motorbike to our finca to shake Papá’s hand a final time. They nodded and exchanged pocket bibles.

  ‘There goes a brave man,’ my father said, and I never doubted it.

  As we watched Padre Rojas recede from view, I looked skyward and a raindrop splattered onto my nose.

  ‘Big change coming through,’ said my father without looking up.

  He was right. Until then, the changes had been gradual. However, the Guerrilla bombing of our town represented a significant shift. It meant their informal truce with the army had ended. The threats against the priest and the bullet through the stained-glass window were another tectonic shift – the church was no longer sacred. Not burying the dead was another step towards the abyss. And finally, Padre Rojas’s departure itself caused a collective mood change. Ripping away a man profoundly attached to his community is like tearing a long stitch from a pullover. When that stitch is one on which all other threads depend, things behind him begin to unravel.

  Anyhow, that was how I grew up until the age of fifteen. It was how many kids grew up in small Colombian towns. You tried not to see, hear or speak of things around you. Sometimes, it was best not to even think.

  For the most part, that strategy worked.

  Between the army and the Guerrilla, tensions flared up, then died down. One side advanced; the other retreated. The war was like a slow-burning campfire onto which both sides occasionally threw wood. And that’s probably the way it would have continued, if not for the arrival of the Autodefensas.

  5

  ON THE FRIDAY afternoon two days before our conversation on the church steps, Camila raced up to the grain store where I was buying cattle pellets and clinked a coin against the window. I waved for her to come inside. She waved for me to come out.

  ‘I’ve been looking for you everywhere,’ she wheezed. ‘Palillo’s gone!’

  ‘Gone where?’

  Biting her lip, she looked up and down Avenida Independencia then whispered, ‘With the duros.’

  In Llorona, we didn’t call them Autodefensas or Paramilitaries, or even paras or paracos like they did in newspapers. They were simply los duros – the hard men. The duros were the archenemy of the Guerrilla. Fearsome hit squads committed to wiping out communism, they’d been founded in cities and worked their way into towns and villages, then outwards into the mountains where Guerrilla bases were located. Recently, their recruiters had arrived in Garbanzos. In other parts of Colombia, it was an open secret that the Paramilitaries worked hand in hand with the army. In fact, there was speculation their leaders were the army.

  ‘Shit!’ I raced for the Mazda.

  Camila followed. ‘I’m coming with you.’

  ‘What if someone sees you? Your dad will kill you.’

  ‘Palillo’s my friend too.’

  I drove quickly. Palillo had wanted to join the army since he was seven. I remember his arrival at our primary school; it was the week before our tests, a strange time to be changing schools. He was also the first boy to volunteer to play the soldier in our game of war.

  ‘Why do you want to be on the army’s side?’ I’d asked provocatively.

  ‘Why not?’ he retorted, sucking air into his lungs and stepping forward. ‘It’s good practice for eliminating Guerrilla.’

  I called him a fascista. We fought. He knocked me to the ground. When he offered me his hand too quickly, I realised he’d gone easy on me and was giving me a way out. Once I accepted his hand, he hoisted me to my feet, hugged me and said softly so no one would overhear, ‘Now we can be friends.’

  Palillo hailed from the coastal port of Turbo. His father had been a boat captain. His mother made Palillo tell everyone he had drowned in a riverboat collision. But really, he’d been murdered by the Guerrilla for defying a ban on shipping medical supplies to Indian villagers. The family was ordered to leave Turbo.

  His mother took up with a visiting mechanic, Diomedes Murillo, and they moved twenty-nine hours inland to Llorona, where Diomedes discovered a far more lucrative profession: picking the leaves from coca plants to be used in cocaine production.

  Coca crops were grown in the mountains south of Santo Paraíso. Harvesting them four times a year required casual labourers who worked ten-hour days to strip the small, rounded leaves from the shrubs. It was gruelling, sweaty work in the roasting sun, but since the crops were illegal, the leaf pickers – known as raspachínes – could earn a year’s wage in a month.

  On payday, when his stepfather got drunk, a skinny Palillo would follow him home on his bicycle.

  ‘¡Lárguese!’ warned Diomedes, his fist bulging. ‘Get the hell outta here.’

  But Palillo maintained a safe distance, hoping Diomedes would give chase and use up energy. As he got bigger, Palillo let himself get caught so Diomedes would take everything out on him instead of his mother. However, when his stepfather wised up to this, Palillo would be sent outside, from where he’d watch, seething, through the window. He thought maybe a witness might save his mother some trouble, even if the witness was just a kid. But it never did.

  Hoping I’d have a better idea, he requested I join his vigil. We rattled bins and made a ruckus until Diomedes came thundering out like a bull.

  ‘You kids scram!’

  When Palillo turned nine, Diomedes decided his stepson needed a job. Children were often employed as raspachínes since their nimble fingers were more adept at stripping the leaves. For two weeks, Palillo didn’t turn up for school. His stepfather had taken him deep into the mountains and forced him to pick coca leaves until his fingers bled.

  When Palillo’s mother found out, she marched Palillo back to school by the ear. This earned her another beating, but she was adamant: no child of hers would participate in the drug trade.

  Palillo hated the Guerrilla for causing his father’s death. And since his father’s death had caused his stepfather’s arrival, he hated them even more. Not to mention how much he hated them for causing his move to Llorona. He said it was a shitty town with shitty people, where there was nothing to do except smoke cigarettes. He wanted out. But boys in Llorona knew there were only two ways to leave town – the Guerrilla or the army. Eighteen was the minimum age to join the army; Palillo had already presented himself twice at the gates of the army barracks, claiming to have lost his birth certificate, to no avail. Now, with the arrival of the Paramilitaries in Garbanzos, there was a third option.

  The Paramilitaries had no minimum age; you simply had to be big enough to carry a pack and fire a rifle. Those who left rarely returned to Llorona – it was too dangerous if the Guerrilla found out – although some had been sighted in Garbanzos. They now cruised around in four-wheel drives or rode motorbikes. They wore new sneakers and jeans with the latest cell phones hooked to their belts. Under their shirts, many concealed pistols. They drank beer in public plazas. Their parents no longer told them what to do. Pretty girls pointed at them. Older men avoided them. They had respect.

  ‘You’ll get yourself killed,’ I warned Palillo when he mentioned joining.

  He shrugged. ‘Better to die from a bullet than boredom.’

  ‘You don’t really mean that.’

  ‘Easy for you to say.’

  Although my family wasn’t wealthy, the fact we owned land made us rich by Palillo’s standards. Since I’d refused to enlist, he was waiting for me to realise there was no future in Llorona. But that Friday he must have grown tired of waiting. Camila’s best friend, Carolina, had seen him boarding the colectivo to Garbanzos half an hour before, carrying a bulging backpack with tent poles poking out.

  ‘There he is!’ said Camila as we parked by the fruit juice stand in the central plaza. Palillo was sitting at a plastic table with three men. ‘What are we going to do?’

  ‘Wait in the car,’ I ordered. Then I
softened. ‘I won’t be a minute. Honk if you need me.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’ she asked, folding her arms grumpily.

  ‘No idea.’

  Palillo’s beer arrived just as I did, which meant he hadn’t been there long.

  ‘Sorry I’m late,’ I said, slapping him on the back and sitting down. I recognised two of his three companions – they’d attended my high school before dropping out. A couple of years above me, they now looked far older than seventeen.

  ‘I’m Pedro,’ I said, leaning forward and extending my hand to the third – a huge, cinder block of a man with a mean squint, who was known as El Tigre. He shook my hand and raised his eyebrows at Palillo, who hadn’t mentioned a friend coming along.

  ‘He’s cool,’ Palillo said without looking at me, and there was a pause while El Tigre studied me. With the waiter hovering, he couldn’t ask questions.

  ‘Drink, Pedro?’

  I nodded. These were not people you wanted to offend. Besides, I needed El Tigre to think I was genuine. Eyes locked on me, he ordered another beer. The can hissed open and he slid it across. I took a tiny sip and, when the waiter stopped loitering, spoke quickly.

  ‘Palillo said there was a job opportunity. Would you mind giving us more details before we decide?’

  El Tigre again looked at Palillo – he’d believed they had a done deal. But he said nothing, instead nodding to his underlings. I listened courteously to their vague proposition. They called it ‘work’ – we would live on a finca and all food would be paid for – although they did not make clear what duties were entailed.

  ‘I’d like to think about it, if that’s okay?’ I said, prodding Palillo under the table. ‘I think we both need some time. Palillo, you need a lift back?’ I stood gingerly.

  El Tigre’s eyes narrowed. He slapped the table. ‘Wait!’

  I sat back down.