Evelio Rosero - The Armies

“Be careful, profesor . We don’t yet know whose hands the town is in.”

“Whoever they belong to, they’re the same hands,” I say, and take my leave and carry on.

How good to get away from San José, full to the brim with solitude and fear, so sure am I of finding Otilia up on the mountain.

Far from town, near the bridle path, when night has still not quite separated from dawn, three shadows emerge from the bushes and jump out at me, surround me, too close, so close I cannot see their eyes. It is not possible to tell if they are soldiers — or whose, whether from here, or there, or from the other side, does it matter? Otilia is waiting. Something like the smell of blood paralyzes me. I ask myself: have I even forgotten the war? What is wrong with me? Too late I regret not having listened to Gloria Dorado: in whose hands are we; I should have gone back home, and what about Otilia?

“Where do you think you’re going, old man?”

They press against me, grip me, the point of a dagger at my stomach, the coldness of a gun at my neck.

“I’m going to get Otilia,” I say. “She’s just up here, on the mountain.”

“Otilia,” they repeat.

And then, one of the shadows: “Who is Otilia, a cow?”

I thought the other shadows were going to laugh at the question but the silence continues, oppressive, insistent. I believed it was a joke, and thought it best amid the laughter to make my escape with my hen. It was a serious question. They really wanted to know if I was talking about a cow.

“She is my wife. I am going to find her, up there, on the mountain.”

“A stone’s throw,” says one of the shadows. He has put his face in my face, his cigarette breath covers me: “Haven’t you heard? You can’t just leave any time you want. Go back where you came from.”

They are all still crushed together, pinning me.

“I did not hear,” I tell them. “I am going to get my wife from Maestro Claudino’s place.”

“What maestro? What Claudino?”

Another shadow whispers in my ear, his bitter breath dampens the side of my head.

“Be thankful we’re letting you go back where you came from. Stop fucking around and turn back, don’t get on our nerves.”

The other shadow comes closer and looks into the bag.

“What have you got there?” With a bandaged finger he half opens the shoulder bag. He looks me straight in the eye: “What is your business?” he asks, solemnly.

“I kill chickens,” I reply. I still do not know why I answered that way, because of the stew?

The other two shadows look in.

“And nice fat ones,” says one of them.

Nearby, so near, at the edge of the road, begins the bridle path that climbs the mountain. Otilia is waiting for me up there, I feel it. Or I want to feel it. Only now do I realize how exposed I am on this road, at daybreak, just us: them and me . I hear, I see a gust of wind that lifts small waves of dust among the stones; is it that I am going to die, at last? A desolate cold, that seems to have run straight down the bridle way and flowed out in front of us, guided by the wind, startles me, makes me think that no, Otilia is not up there, makes me think of Otilia for the first time without hope.

“Keep the hen,” I say.

They snatch her out with one swipe.

“This guy’s saved himself,” shouts one of them, laughing.

“I’ll wring its neck right now,” says another. “I could swallow it whole.”

They run to the other side of the road: they don’t even look at me, and I head up the path. It starts to dawn on me that the hen is lost. At the first bend in the trail up the mountain I stop.

I shout at them, cupping my hands around my mouth, through the foliage: “I only kill chickens.”

And I kept shouting this, repeating it — flanked by fury and fear, without the stew I had been dreaming of— “I only kill chickens.”

The panic, the regret at having shouted drives me to run uphill, flee with all my strength, paying no mind to my pounding heart. I was asking them to kill me, but hunger must have been stronger than the desire to chase and kill me for shouting at them that I only kill chickens. It did not matter, in the end: I was only thinking of Otilia.

As soon as I arrived at the hut the fierce silence showed me what it had to show me. Otilia was not there. The body of Maestro Claudino was there, decapitated; at his side the dog’s corpse, curled up in the blood. They had written on the walls with charcoal: Collaborator . Without trying, my gaze found the Maestro’s head, in a corner. Like his face, his tiple guitar was also smashed against the wall: there was no need to take it down, I thought, absurdly, and the only thing I screamed at that moment was Otilia , her name. I walked around the cabin several times, calling her.

It was the only place I had left.

Finally I walked down to the road: the smell of the roasted chicken wafted through the air. Vomit rose to my teeth, and there, right by the side of the highway, in front of the smoke from the bonfire that encircled bushes across the road, I threw up what I had not eaten, my bile. Now they will kill me, I thought, as I walked quickly down the road, entirely out of breath, but I wanted to run because I still thought I would find Otilia in town, looking for me.

It seemed like any old Sunday in San José, well into the morning: Everyone is going where they're coming , I said to myself idiotically, because none of the faces I passed along the way was Otilia’s.

Gloria Dorado again, at the edge of town, said wordlessly: “Have faith.”

Not far from the road, fifty meters away, in the town’s water tank, some soldiers were bathing; they were washing their clothes, joking with each other.

Near the plaza, men’s voices come from the rectangular building that used to be the market, arguing, proposing, rejecting. Someone speaks through a megaphone. I go in but the quantity of bodies crowded into the corridor keeps me from getting very far There I feel the midday heat for the first time. I listen to the discussion, I even distinguish, at the back of the room, in the center of all the heads, the heads of Father Albornoz and the Mayor.

Professor Lesmes is speaking: he proposes vacating the municipality “so the military and the guerrillas find the scene of battle empty.”

Voices reply in shouts, murmurs. Some think they should barricade the highway as a protest until the government moves the police out of San José.

“Yes,” says Lesmes, “they should at least take their fortifications out of the urban center to stop the assaults on the town.”

They announce that the attack has left five soldiers, three policemen, ten insurgents, four civilians and one child dead, and at least fifty wounded. There is no consensus in the meeting, and what does it matter to me? I don’t see Otilia either; I want to leave, but the compact group of recent arrivals behind me blocks me; in vain I try to make my way through; we are all sweating, we regard each other dumbfounded.

The Mayor dismisses the proposals: he will ask the national government to initiate a dialogue immediately with those who have taken up arms.

“We have to get to the roots of this problem,” he says. “Yesterday it was in Apartadó, in Toribío, now in San José, and tomorrow in some other town.”

“They want the town vacated,” Father Albornoz interrupts. “They have let me know.”

“We cannot leave,” several men reply heatedly. “People here have what little they have by the sweat of their brows and we are not going to throw it away.”

“Evacuation is not the answer,” the Mayor determines, and, nevertheless, it is not possible to ignore the deep alarm about another imminent assault on the town center: who would have thought that it would happen to us as well, they say here, they say there, they repeat.