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JOURNALIST
SILVANA PATERNOSTRO DISCUSSES WAR AND MAGIC REALISM IN COLOMBIA:
19/05/2008
(MaximsNews Network)
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UNITED
NATIONS - / MaximsNews Network / 19
May 2008 -- Award-winning journalist Silvana Paternostro provides a
detailed account of war and magic realism in Colombia, the country of her birth,
at The Actors' Gang during the Zócalo Public Square Lecture Series in Los
Angeles on 11 March 2008:
I would like to thank
Gregory, Kara and Susanna for inviting me to come to Los Angeles and talk to
you about Colombia, the country of my birth, a country that has been at war
for at least the last 40 years, the country that I left when I was 15, and the
country where my family still lives. We all know of
Colombia
as the birthplace of Garcia Marquez and magical realism.
Well, I was born right there in the land of what literature critics
like to call magical realism. But on the north coast of Colombia
where I was born, sometimes things happen that can be as absurd as the events
that unfold in his novels in which bullets turn corners and women levitate. I
grew up believing that if I swam in the ocean on Good Friday I would turn into
a fish. My nanny, a young woman from the countryside, said it with such
belief—that who was I to test the waters?
Magical
realism is perfectly suited to a country like Colombia, where the truth is often so terrible and unspeakable that it needs to be
told as if it were a fantasy. In fact, much of what you read in Garcia
Marquez’ books is something that has happened or he has heard has happened.
Marquez said that to write magical realism one has to become a journalist in Colombia. Garcia Marquez, a journalist before he was a novelist, transcribes Colombia's daily life.
Yet
although these stories are the basis for beautiful literature, life in Colombia
is not quite as beautiful. In the first sentence of Chronicle of A Death
Foretold, Santiago Nassar is told his killers are looking for him—they had
told everyone that they were going to kill him. In fact something quite
similar happened to a distant member of my family.
He
lived in a town not very different from where the novel took place, towns far
away from laws and infrastructure, towns that have been living with a rigid
structure of landowners and day laborers now for two hundred years. This
distant relative, a man in his sixties was a landowner and like all the men
who have farms in
Colombia, he was a target of the left-wing rebels that are now known more for their
kidnapping practices than for their revolutionary beliefs. The rebels
announced that they were coming for him. Instead of going out like the
protagonist of the Garcia Marquez’s novella, who donned his suit and went
out in spite of his mother’s protests, Don Mario hired four bodyguards and
locked himself in his house. Every day when the clock marked six, he shut the
windows and turned the lights out. Don
Mario missed his land so much that to remember the smell of soil, he lay down
on the patio of his house, and put his nose to the ground. He did this every
night for four years: he smelled earth to be able to continue living.
As
someone who has not lived there since the age of 15, that story sounded
surreal, ridiculous even if beautiful.
But it was told to me as the most natural thing in the world. It was
reported in the local newspapers. Don Mario locked himself in his house for
four years, with his nose to the ground and that was just the way it was. Just
like when Kafka’s narrator registers quite matter-of-factly that he has
turned into an insect overnight or when Garcia Marquez writes that one of the
bullets that killed Nassar turned a corner and went up the stairs.
In
1999 after a 20 year absence from Colombia
I went back to make sense of what was happening there.
The idyllic place of my childhood was disintegrating and I wanted to
know what was happening.
Colombia
had in the years that I had been away become the largest exporter of cocaine,
it held the highest number of kidnappings and murders, and it had millions of
displaced people, almost as many as
Darfur
would later have. Shortly after I
left my very grounded life in Barranquilla, any other place in the world interested me more was than
Colombia. That was in the eighties when to be a curious traveler from
Colombia
was a great inconvenience. I needed a VISA to travel anywhere. More than that.
Being from Colombia
came with all sets of stereotypes. I was strip-searched many times. The
difficulty of traveling also came with a wave of violence.
Colombia
had to make driving motorcycles with a helmet illegal because there were so
many drive-by shootings that this way it was easier to identify the murderers.
Most of the time, they turned out to be paid teenagers. Commercial airplanes
exploded in midair. All that happened in Colombia
while I was not there then had a name: Pablo Escobar and the drug cartels. But
Pablo Escobar has been dead 7 years. What was happening?
So,
I got an assignment letter. I would go and report on
Colombia
like I had done so many times before throughout Latin America.
I
grew up surrounded by a loving family that made up better stories than Disney
and better games than Mattel. My grandfather, a landowner, would call up to a
creature known as Pretty Bird when we came over to visit him. Tell Pretty Bird
what you want. I’d ask for Kraft caramels. My sister would want sugar-coated
almonds. By the time we reached the patio, candy rained over our little heads.
Years later we found out that Pajarito Lindo was Alfredo, the guard
that he had brought from the farm and who slept in the back room of the house
armed with a machete next to the cook and the two other maids that helped
around.
I
went back to Colombia
as a journalist, but not to talk to the actors of the conflict and write it as
foreign news. I
went as the kind of journalist that Garcia Marquez suggests. I went to
move between the magic and the real except I like to call my stories
non-fiction magical realism.
So
tonight in order to help you understand the feeling
of living in Colombia I am going to tell the stories that will I hope also
clarify the situation that has been unraveling in front of our TV screens in
the past few weeks - about the Colombian rebel killed in Ecuador by the
Colombian army with the help of US intelligence, sanctioned by the OAS
as a violation of international law, an attack that led Hugo Chavez to
send troops to the border with Colombia.
Thanks
to that story you have all been hearing about the FARC, the dead rebel was the
No. 2 leader of the organization, an
organization that started out in 1964 to overthrow the government and to bring
social justice to Colombia
but that lately has been in the business of kidnapping. Right now they have
around 700 hostages, some of whom have been kidnapped for as long as ten
years. These include soldiers, a
presidential candidate with a French passport, three Americans and many many
others. You might have even heard
the story of the child born in captivity who was recently reunited with his
mother after being released.
You
might have also heard about the right wing paramilitary army—the AUC—that
has vowed to kill every FARC or FARC sympathizer alive.
To do that anything is allowed, from stoning to hacking. To clean
entire towns from guerrillas, the paras as they are known, massacre entire
villages.
Both
sides are heavily involved in drug trafficking. And then to complicate matters
there’s the military aid packages from Washington.
What
does the story of Pretty Bird and the man who smells soil for four years have
to do with the war you might ask? Aren’t talks about wars more about taking
sides? Who are the good guys and who are the bad guys? Is Uribe and his US
supported hard line military actions good or bad? Is the FARC a revolutionary
group fighting in the name of the oppressed or is it a terrorist organization?
Are the paramilitary a legitimate self-defense army or a terrorist
organization? This is not that
kind of talk. This is about my
Colombian War. It is about non
fiction magical realism.
To
start to talk about Colombia
I have to tell you something. Colombia
is spelled C-O-L-O-M-B-I-A. I would have to commend Zocalo because in all of
the back and forth of our correspondence, they did not once misspell Colombia. I’m serious about this. The
United States
is so unaware of the complexities of Colombia
that most everyone thinks its spelled C-O-L-U-M-B-I-A like the university. In
fact, it was the misspelling of
Colombia
that made me realize that the
US
government was hugely interested in Colombia.
This
was again back in 1999 at a liberal arts college in upstate New York. A friend who taught there had organized a one day conference to discuss the
newly formed military aid package. All day long academics debated if Plan
Colombia—remember this is before 9-11, and the ensuing events in Afghanistan
and Iraq -- would turn Colombia into the next Vietnam, the next El Salvador,
the next Balkan War.
As
someone who had been closely following US foreign policy in
Latin America
for many years, this was quite a turn of events. I have always been surprised
and confused as to why there is such little interest in news from Colombia. What happens in
Colombia
has always been of little interest in the United States. What happens in
Colombia
stays in Colombia! I know the Colombians like it this way. They are very sensitive about
creating a mala imagen, a bad image abroad so Colombians would prefer
it if you don’t know that they have the FARC that kidnaps and the AUC that
massacres and that it has four million displaced people. They prefer to
emphasize the good stuff: emeralds as heavy as apples, the richest coffee in
the world, so many types of orchids and birds. Still Americans like to know
where their tax dollars are going and I wonder if Colombia’s situation here
gets such little attention because there is not a large Colombian community in
this country swaying the vote like the Cuban Americans do in Florida or the Mexican Americans here in California.
Anyway,
back to that college conference where Colombia
was discussed for one day. I don’t remember much of the academic
discussions. What I remember the most about that day is a poster held by a
young student that was like the posters that I had seen in my college campus
in the late seventies. In my college days they read:
US Hands Out of El Salvador. This one read: U.S.
HANDS OUT OF COLUMBIA. But
Colombia
was spelled with a U. Great I
thought, the country is getting 1.3 billion dollars of military aid, the
college students are marching with posters, but they had gotten the spelling
wrong. There seemed to be something appropriate about this misspelling. It is
a war as complicated as it is to get people to spell its name right.
Tonight
I am here as the journalist who went to Colombia
to move between the magical and the real—and sometime actually the awful. I
went back and lived again with
parents and grandparents and siblings and friends and relatives who live there
with the emeralds and the coffee and the best carnivals after
Rio
and with the kidnaps and the killings, a war that everyone dates as forty
years old but really started 200
years ago.
Colombia’s war started with the creation of Colombia. To when it went from being the Viceroyalty of the Nueva Granada to the
Republica de Colombia named after Cristobal Colon---that would be Christopher
Columbus and because
Colon
is spelled with two Os -- so is Colombia.
A little history is important.
Colombia
was the seat of power of
the Viceroyalty of the Nueva Granada, a colony of the Spanish Crown. Simon
Bolivar, an educated and well travelled criollo didn’t like the rules
of the Spanish crown and he led an army against them and won independence for
the colony in 1820. The Viceroyalty became the
Republic
of
Nueva Granada, and shortly thereafter it became the Republic
of
Colombia. If most criollos, the name given to the men
of Spanish parents who were born in the colonies, were in agreement to fight
against the Spanish Crown, they disagreed on how to build a republic. There
were two major schools of thoughts.
The Conservatives wanted to follow the rules of the Spanish
crown and have a government ruled by the Church and by some men with land.
The Liberals, influenced by the French Enlightenment, believed in
secularism and in laissez-faire commerce. Between the start of the Republic in
1832 and the turn of the century,
Colombia
managed to have 32 wars between the Liberals and the Conservatives.
Bloody wars. Remember the
wars that Coronel Aureliano Buendia, the fictional character of One Hundred
Years, fought on the liberal side? They weren’t made up. It’s historia
patria as Colombians call their history. In fact, my great great great
grandfather fought on the side of the Conservatives. He was the son of a
French colonizer. He was a descendant of el frances que llego, the Frenchman
who arrived as everyone in my family refers to their European roots. What gave
my family an upperhand in a world that believes in class structure was a 25
year old who arrived to
Colombia
in 1848 from
Bordeaux, bought some land, married a woman with some more land and settled. When it
was time to fight the war the Frenchman's son, as the son of a landowner was
naturally on the side of the Conservatives government.
The War is known as
La Guerra
de Los Mil Dias, which sounds much more poetic than a war that lasted for
three years. The Liberals and
Conservatives paraded the streets in their respective colors. The Liberals
used red towels on their waists. The Conservatives, who were prissier, wore
blue handkerchiefs. Under their party colors they both carried knives and
machetes. The Conservatives won in
1902. But neither side disarmed.
The battles between the Liberals and the Conservatives of
the Garcia Marquez novel are part of my family lore. And the town where the
Conservative General lived is as storied as the town of Macondo. The General in the family was such a proud conservative that his house was
painted blue, the color of the Conservative party. He lived across the street
from the Church with three spires, he had the monsignor to lunch once a week,
and he organized the processions of the Virgin from his house. But the
Conservative and Catholic General, I also learned, had a great many children
out of wedlock. When I asked how many, the family historian told me many more
than there are letters in the alphabet. His eulogy read that he contributed
greatly to the progress of the town even if his propensity for violence was
misunderstood. Nobody I ask can tell me what exactly that means.
My grandfather was born in The Frenchman's House and he
married my grandmother, another descendant of the Frenchman in the church
across the street. Conservatives married Conservatives and good Conservative
families married good Conservative families.
Same happened with Liberals.
I remember reading about a town that had both Liberals and
Conservatives but only one Church, so the priest decided to build two different
entrances. One door painted red for the liberals, the other painted blue for the
conservatives. If this was how Colombia
came into the twentieth century this is how it would enter into the 21st.
If the fight in 1898 was between Liberals and Conservatives, the one in 2001,
they tell us, is between the rebels and the paramilitary.
The only difference perhaps is that if the war of the one
thousand days was fought in both the countryside and the capitals, its modern
incarnation spares the centers of population and commerce.
The month I arrived, the papers reported one kidnapping every three hours
in the countryside, but in my hometown of
Barranquilla
where I grew up going to the American high school, everyone was getting ready
for Carnival. Nor was there violence
in sophisticated Bogota, with its new facelift of modern city, public spaces and gourmet restaurants
and all its weekly magazines.
The month I arrived to report on the situation, I decided
to visit the family farm and the storied places that the Frenchman had colonized
in the 19th century. I
was told, of course, No Way! The
roads were off limits specifically for people who owned farms or had certain
last names such as mine. If I went, my family explained, I ran the risk of being
stopped at a rebel checkpoint and taken, the word everyone uses for being
kidnapped. It seemed improbable to
me that in the midst of this crisis everyone would be preparing almost
constantly for Carnival. When I ask my friends how they can live there, they
laugh at me and quote a recent study that named Colombians the happiest people
in the world.
In fact, during the week that more than 70 people were
kidnapped, the main weekly had run a cover story on a study done by a scientist
in England. A big daisy painted in the colors of the Colombian flag announced Happy
Colombia. A day did not go by
without someone quoting the unknown English sociologist that had just become the
most quoted man in Colombia. This is Happy Colombia, the best place to live, everyone told me even if they
need armored cars and bodyguards to move around.
To me it all had the quality of magical realism mixed in
with a big dose of denial. A country with one of the highest rates of violence
prefers to call itself Colombia Feliz. The
country had the highest rate of kidnapping and I was hearing from those who were
labeled as targets of kidnapping that
Colombia
was el mejor vividero del
mundo.
The FARC kidnap in the name of what they call
LA NUEVA COLOMBIA, which is the future country that they hope will come into being as a result of
their revolutionary efforts. It’s
clear that some kind of revolution
needs to occur in Colombia where 96 percent of the arable land is in the hands
of 3 percent of the population, where corruption and murder run rampant and 99
percent of all crimes go unpunished, where a paramilitary organization that
opposes the FARC has infiltrated 30 percent of the country’s congress.
But despite their aspirations, Colombians in general, and
not just the landed Colombians, do not support the FARC.
They are perhaps the most unpopular revolutionary movement in the world.
Just last month millions of Colombians went out in protest.
In 2001 when I got there, the kidnappings were called
retentions or fiscal evasions. Every citizen, especially the oligarchs and the
landowners, needed to pay this “tax” to create this New Colombia.
And they argue that their retentions have had to increase because of Plan
Colombia, the aid package of 1.3 billion dollars that
Washington
was giving the oligarchic government. To
counter this aid package, the FARC passed their own Law 002, which dictates that
every Colombian worth one million dollars would be retained until they paid the
tax they owed to the rebels.
The FARC were formed in 1964 after the Cuban revolution,
but their roots go back before Fidel Castro’s and Che Guevara’s victory. The
Colombian rebels surely benefited from the Cuban revolution. Not only were
revolutionary movements popular around the world but they received training by
the Communist bloc during the Cold War. But the FARC leader, Comandante
Manuel Marulanda, aka Tirofijo which means Sureshot began his fight
against the Colombian government long before that. The origin of his rebel group
can be traced back to The One Thousand Day War between the Liberals and the
Conservatives.
Between the end of the war in 1903 and the beginning of the
FARC, there is another war, one that doesn’t have such a poetic name although
it also lasted thousands of days. This one is simply called La Violencia. Between
the late 1940’s and the early 50s, the Conservatives and the Liberals were at
it again. This time the horror increased and this time each side had a
paramilitary branch. The Conservatives killing arm was called the Chulavitas,
named after a black bird. Groups of men wearing black clothes would arrive into
Liberal towns. The next day corpses of Liberals would be found floating down the
river. The Liberals had armies too and their leaders were called Black Blood and
Vengeance.
The
issues were quite similar: the
Conservatives linked to the landowners wanted to get rid of the freethinking
Liberals who were telling the day laborers and the workers about benefits and
about land ownership. The Liberal rebel army was accusing the Conservatives of
killing the peasants to rid them of their land and expand their holdings. Is
every finca in Colombia
a product of this practice? If you believe the FARC it is—and that is the
reason why every landowning person in
Colombia
has been labeled a military object by the FARC.
One
of the peasants on the liberal side was a man named Pedro Antonio Marin, and he
commanded what were called the republicas
independientes in the south of
Colombia. The war ended with a pact to
disarm in the late 50s but Marin did not comply. In 1964, the Conservative
government sent the Army in. It is said that napalm was used as a test for the
US
to later use in Vietnam. Marin’s camp was destroyed. He took the name Manuel Marulanda in honor of a
slain union leader, and vowed to fight the Colombian oligarchs Conservative
landowners and their army till the end. He called it the Fuerzas Revolucionarias
Armadas de Colombia, The FARC, and has been leading it since then. Manuel
Marulanda is almost 80 years old He must be the oldest guerrillero in history. He
has been fighting against the Colombian government since 1964, that’s 44 years
of living in the jungle with a gun at his bedside. Last week and for the first
time ever the Colombian government destroyed one of Marulanda’s main camps. The
government went in after the rebels bedtime. They killed more than 20 rebels.
My
uncle who lived in the farm during the week tells me that at first the
guerrillas were even welcomed by the landowners. They would serve as police
force in these provinces that the State had never cared for. He
tells me that they would punish the petty thieves, the little guy who stole
chickens and even the cattle rustlers. He
tells me that when at first they asked for medicines or food, he would send them
both. But that slowly the requests became impositions, and eventually came with
threats at the barrel of a gun. He
had to scurry away to the city and manage the farm via cell phone and videotape.
He couldn’t afford to run the risk of being in the countryside any more.
There
were others who stayed in the fincas
and fought back. One in particular, Ramon Isaza, who has been labeled as the
father of paramilitarism, killed 20 rebels in 1978.
“A peasant came to tell me that 20 rebels were coming for me,” he
told a reporter recently. So he grabbed his eight rifles and gathered 8 of his
workers and when the rebels arrived they just ambushed them. “We were born
here, and here we will die,” he said.
By
the year 2000 the AUC had become a household name just like the FARC. Both had
websites. The FARCs was called NuevaColombia.com and the Paras was called
Colombialibre.com. Soon the buzz was that there
were now parts of Colombia
where landowners could return to their fincas. There were zones especially in
the part of Colombia
called Magdalena Medio where people could even go back and sleep there.
It
was thanks to a man who went by the name of Carlos Castano who took up arms
after his father was killed by the FARC. In
a few years, his organization would become the AUC, the secret group mostly
financed by the landowners and their sympathizers to rid the country of the FARC.
Like Marulanda vowed to fight the Colombian government till death,
Castano promised to avenge his father’s death and rid Colombia
of every guerrilla or guerrilla sympathizer alive.
From Castano’s perspective, that could mean a store owner who sold food
to a rebel.
Castano
first came into the public awareness because in August of 2000 he gave an
interview to the Diane Sawyer of Colombia
who was helicoptered in for the exclusive:
“Yes, I am an extortionist.
It’s very similar to what the guerrilla does but I do it more tenderly,
with more affection. Because they
are my friends, they can bargain with me. To
some I even give them IOU’s. With
some, our friendly ties help. But
they all have to pay something. That
we use drastic measures is true but Colombians must understand that when you
have to exercise authority it is too difficult to limit yourself to moral norms.
If the narcos offer help, I take it.
If the army offers help, I take it—although they haven’t.
If they want to stoop down to the level of the devil with me then we
stoop down to that but I swear I will finish these guerrillas.
If the army did what we did, they would all be in jail.
This produces excellent results because we can attack our enemy using
their same methods. It is inevitable
that in an irregular war, human rights get violated.”
After
the interview Colombia
fell in love with Castano. In a court of law his crimes would get him 600 years
in prison, but Colombians wanted him to run for President. Women found him sexy.
It didn’t matter what he did as long as he was ridding
Colombia
of the guerrillas. By 2002 his
organization controlled 35 per cent of the Colombian Congress. For better of for
worse, the existence of the paramilitary was seen as a necessary evil. I heard
all kind of explanations and validations. Even
the Swedish would like them if they had to live with the FARC, someone once told
me.
Like
the rebels, the paras became the lawmakers and the police force. In some areas they forbid men to wear long hair or pierce their ears. In others, they punished a man who was thought to be abusing his wife. They established their own curfews. They
also killed people with chainsaws in order to intimidate a populace that was
caught between two violent poles.
While
Castano was never elusive about what his group stood for and the need to do
whatever it takes to get results, the extent of their atrocities is only now
being brought in the open. Since
2005, more than 300 mass graves have been found.
There was a training school to teach people the physical and emotional
skills needed to kill, to dismember, to bury alive.
Colombia
has a dirty war that is still in the process of becoming uncovered. The leaders
are right only now being interrogated.
The
people who died were a statistic. No
one seemed to notice the dead. Just like no one seemed to notice that in Bogota
the number of street vendors and beggars increased by the minute. I saw a
mother selling garbage bags with a sign that said I AM A DISPLACED MOTHER OF THE
COUNTRY’S VIOLENCE. I HAVE TO SELL THESE BAGS TO SURVIVE PLEASE COOPERATE.
Seeing
that woman reminded me of a man I had run into on my first week in
Barranquilla. Going from my grandmother’s to my uncle’s house feeling the breeze that
felt like it did when I was a teenager walking those same streets. I saw the
yellow flowers of the tree called Golden Rain fall to the ground and three
aproned young women walking poodles. War changes everything and war changes
nothing I said to myself, not the flowers, not the sidewalks, not even the breed
of dogs.
I
keep walking the dark street when I feel a body bump into mine.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
A man materializes in front of me carrying an iron pipe.
He speaks directly to my face. “I am looking for work he tells me.
Please donita. I will do anything. I’ll cut grass. Paint.”
I told him that I wished I could but I did not live here not feeling very
comfortable at the sight of the pipe. As I told him a plane flew over us. His
eyes grew wider. “Lucky you donita lucky you. No one should have to live
like this. Escape this violence.”
I asked him where he was from. From
his accent I could tell he was not from the coast. He told me he had arrived a
few months ago, “Escaping violence” he said. He explained to me that his
father and his two sisters were killed in front of him, and to save his wife and
his three children he had taken them and just left.
They had walked for days until they reached the outskirts of Barranquilla. A good priest, he told me, had set up tents for the hundreds of families like
his.
I was starting to understand the statistic about the millions of internally
displaced people that I read in the UN reports. And only in UN reports! It needs
a celebrity to get the victims of wars and refugees noticed so since I'm in LA I
should ask. Does anyone know George Clooney or Angelina
Jolie, to ask them to take up the cause of the internally displaced Colombians.
I
know my time is running out but I want to leave you with one more story.
When
I was two years old, my grandfather brought an eight year old girl to live
with us. My sister had just been born and my grandmother thought it was a
good idea to have someone keep me distracted now that my newborn sister was
getting all the attention. She
played with me in my room like my friends, but unlike my friends she knew to put
the toys away when I was done. She
woke me up in the morning and stood by my bedside when I prayed at night. Then
she retired to her cot in the servants’ room with the cook and two maids.
She was sent to school except she didn’t go to the American school with
me. She attended the school that my grandmother called the school for los
ninos pobres. No one told us the rules, but she and I both knew what they
were. She came to my friends’ birthday parties, always wearing the same
yellow dress, and she helped us break the piñata, but she was never allowed to
gather the candy. When I was about
nine years old she disappeared. I came back from school and she was not there,
when I asked the cook she told me se fue ya no esta. Like the women in
Macondo she didn’t leave, she just evaporated.
When
I decided to go back to Colombia
I knew that coming back to find her was an important part of the journey. But I
had no way of knowing how to start to look for her. One afternoon I ask my
grandmother if she remembered the girl that used to live with….”Imeldita”
she said, Of course why?
I
asked her how it was that she came to live in our house.
My grandmother explained matter of factly, like Kafka and Garcia Marquez, that
Imelda is the daughter of one of the trabajadores from the farm. “
I remember as if it was yesterday.” she
said with a sigh. Those to her were the good days, when my grandfather was alive
and they lived on the farm. “We were outside,” she says, “playing chess on
the veranda when a man and wife and about ten children came to the gate. The
boys were stark naked, the girls had on rags. The man asked your grandfather for
work. He said he had walked for days from the interior, escaping the
violence.”
There is that word again. That series of words. Escaping the violence…
The
family stayed in a plot of land and worked for many years. “So when they found out that you were born,” my grandmother says,
“he told us we could have one of his daughters.” She came in the jeep
with the weekly delivery of fresh meat, milk and fruit. My
grandmother sees nothing wrong with this exchange: she would be better fed,
better educated with us in the city she explains and you would have someone to
play with.
One
morning not long after that conversation, I woke to Imelda’s caress.
She was sitting on the edge of my bed. Her dark, oval eyes sparked as
always, and her smile was unchanged, so beautiful that you might think her life
had been as perfect as her teeth.
I
stayed in bed, under the covers, to hide my anxiety. Imelda, effortlessly
resuming the ritual of our past, turned off the air-conditioner, let the shower
run and asked if I needed any ironing. She told me that she had worked, on and
off, as a maid. She said that she was a grandmother and that she lived in a tiny
cement house. Her house, she told me, needed a new roof. With 60,000 pesos she
could replace it and finally keep out the rain and the robbers. Twice thieves
climbed inside and stole the few valuable things she owned. Her son bought her a
new iron, but she hadn’t been able to replace the electric Sanyo fan.
We
sat on the edge of my bed in silence, close to each other, as I searched my bag
for the pink and brown bills that say “10,000 pesos oro.” I gave her six,
the equivalent of $30. “Gracias, Nani,” she said, using an endearment
known only to close family members and servants who knew me back then. She hid
the money under her shirt, and then she asked, “Will you come back to Colombia
so I can live with you again?”
I
didn’t tell her that I couldn’t live in Colombia
anymore. That I had become a different kind of Colombian, one that shied away
from a life of escaping violence.
Labels:
United
Nations, U.N., Silvana
Paternostro, My
Colombian War, Colombia,
Latin America, War,
Magic Realism, Gabriel
Garcia Marquez
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