The Dispossessed. Aviva Chomsky
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of your friends.
When they murdered Jaime Garzón,b however, I knew I could not go home soon. So I picked out a large work table, sharpened my pencil, and began this book. On completing it, I understood—and bowed my head in profound respect—that in spite of its pains, the drama of my exile is but a pale reflection of the terrible tragedy that millions of Colombians live each day, uprooted and exiled in their own country. I believe, as they do, that the seeds of a true democracy can be found only in a negotiated political agreement. The war will have only one outcome, the dictatorship of the victors.
a Annibal Caro was the sixteenth-century Italian translator of Virgil’s Aeneid, the classical Roman epic poem. In translating the Aeneid from Latin into vernacular Italian, Caro intended to promote a sense of patriotism for early modern Rome rooted in the “glories” of the Roman Empire.
b Jaime Garzón, a journalist and human rights advocate, was Colombia’s best-loved political satirist. Assassins gunned him down on a Bogotá street in August, 1999.
I watched her spread her things out on the bed, the way we always did, then open her bag and pack quickly. She left without looking at me. I had known she no longer loved me since the day we stopped laughing together. But I didn’t dwell on it, so I wouldn’t have to believe it and accept it. I was expecting this farewell, and I reminded her of that the day she came back distraught and told me what had happened. She knew I had to write about her in order to put a period—or perhaps a semicolon—after my grief.
Boca del Cajambre is a port hidden in a mangrove swamp on Colombia’s Pacific coast. Or at least in what the negro Bonifacio Mosquera left of the mangrove after building a house, buying a boat, bringing up a family there, and setting up a sawmill, which he kept going by selling “illegal woods” like mangrove to Don Enrique Ortiz, a businessman who bought all the wood he could get his hands on to sell to Cartones Colombianos.a It was finding out about that little business that proved to be the beginning of the end for Diego and his friend Aníbal. Someone in Buenaventura had told them about the settlement of whites being organized along the Cajambre River and the two old men had been their neighbors since she and her boyfriend arrived. That had been her dream ever since I first met her—to live by the ocean with nothing more than the sarong she was wearing. Even if that meant supporting Ramón from time to time as I assumed it would.
Diego was a petroleum engineer who’d spent all his life working for Ecopetrol. After finishing school in the Escuela de Minas in Medellín, he was put in charge of the Puerto Niño camp in the Middle Magdalena River valley during the 1950s. After that, he moved to El Tarra in Norte de Santander to run the company’s operations, then went to Kuwait to take a lengthy course. He retired after that and, to make life easier for his wife and children, bought the house they’d been renting, then left for Boca del Cajambre. There, he built a small house beside the ocean and spent his time learning to play chess with a book he’d bought in Istanbul about the great chess masters, from Capablanca to Kasparov.
One morning, Diego saw a man land on the beach. He had a white beard and carried a backpack and Diego thought he was probably a traveler passing through. But that wasn’t the case. He’d come to stay, and, for that reason, Diego resolved not to help him. Not a word passed between the two men for six months. Then one afternoon, Aníbal—that was the old man’s name—walked over from the house he had built and challenged Diego to a game of chess. Even though Diego lost the game, it helped him become friends with the man he nicknamed “el forastero,” the outsider.
Aníbal had been a chauffeur for the Mallarinos, an ill-tempered aristocratic family from Bogotá. When his wife died, he decided to spend his time fishing, a passion of his since his boss, Don Arturo, introduced him to its solitary pleasures on his way back from a trip to Florida. Aníbal knew every intimate detail of the Mallarinos’ political and amorous intrigues, and he reproached himself for being unable to write about them in order to tell the country what these so-called decent people were really made of. Instead of writing, he watched the ocean, his small blue eyes glued to his spyglass.
The old men became good friends. They played chess each afternoon and ate the fish Aníbal caught every morning while Diego tended the garden which, to be fair, was only four yucca plants, two papachina roots, and a couple of plantains. The men had few needs. Diego took care of an emaciated cat that had appeared one night, and Aníbal made regular visits to a black woman, generous of her laughter and her body and happy to trade both for a couple of bottles of biche, a local aguardiente very popular in the region. You could say the two men were living out their golden years in a well-deserved and serene manner.
Their only concern was the destruction of the mangroves, and both men had gone to Buenaventura and Cali to tell the authorities about it. But Don Enrique, the biggest buyer, had influential political friends and had put up an impenetrable wall around his business with the votes Bonifacio Mosquera brought him from the men who cut the “illegal” wood and then brazenly stacked it in the port. There were many of them because there was mangrove a long way up the Cajambre River and because Mosquera exploited not only the Cajambre, but also the Agua Sucia, Timba, and Yarumanguí Rivers as well.
One day, the men heard that Don Enrique had been kidnapped.
“It must have been the guerrillas,” said Diego.
“Don’t forget, there are also common criminals,” replied Aníbal.
No one ever found out who paid the ransom, and the wood business continued, with the cutting increased to make up for what had been paid to the kidnappers.
It was about this time that María José—that was her name—and her companion arrived in Boca del Cajambre. They built a shack, hung their hammocks, and dug a fire pit where they could grill their fish. That was all she wanted, and it didn’t take long for the new arrivals and the old men to become friends. Neither bothered the other, and a mutual respect soon existed between them. Then, one afternoon, she saw a group of armed men get out of their boats and come ashore. “Strange, the army coming all the way out here,” she thought as she called Ramón.
There were fifteen men and four women. They walked over to the shack and, without any small talk, said they were guerrillas. They’d be seeing a lot of them from now on, they added, and then, in a severe tone, warned them that the only thing they wouldn’t tolerate were informants. Sapos, they called them. Before they left, the guerrillas also visited Diego and Aníbal.
Days passed and no one saw or heard from them again. But everyone knew they were still around, showing up from time to time, then turning around and disappearing from where they’d come.
The guerrillas came back at about ten in the morning on December 24. Just five of them, four men and a girl. Aníbal was out fishing and Diego was preparing a natilla for Christmas Eve. They sat down and began talking to Diego. The guerrilla commander recalled how people prepared stuffed pig at Christmas-time in El Espinal, his hometown. By the time Aníbal arrived, the conversation had become lively, and he sliced up the fish he’d caught and offered it to the guerrillas with some biche. While the men ate, a guerrillera asked if instead of a glass of aguardiente, she could take a shower. Aníbal, a lady’s man, was glad to be of help and got her a towel, some soap, and shampoo. By the time she’d left the bathroom, picked up her things, and packed them in her Hello Kitty backpack, the men had finished off half a bottle of biche. Aníbal told her the shower would be available anytime she wanted it.
“And so will he,” added Diego with a smile.
In spite of Aníbal’s insistence they continue the Christmas Eve celebration, the guerrillas left when the bottle was finished. Everyone else stayed up until dawn