“I heard terrible news about someone who visited the foundation,” he said, a smile across his face. “I want to assure you, we had nothing to do with it.” He said this in a way to let them know that he had everything to do with it, and left feeling very pleased with himself. Dogs were being brought to heel.
Jefferson had his skills, but his permissiveness had led to his death. When Javier was in charge, he wasn’t going to run things so loose. He’d close La Serpiente de Tierra Caliente, he’d leave that bitch Luisa’s body in a ditch, he’d bring order to the town. It was necessary. It was right. But could he also do what Jefferson had done? Could he make people love him for it?
—
Even though Javier had not said the name of the person they’d killed, Valencia knew, somehow, that it must be Alma. Of all the stories she’d transcribed, Alma’s had been the one that struck her the most powerfully. She wasn’t sure why. Perhaps because of the way she looked, or the way she told the story, or simply because she’d been one of the hated guerrilla and yet Valencia had sympathized with her and even celebrated her story in her mind, the fact that a little chubby woman like that used to go into battle cheerfully inspired her, even though she had gone into battle to kill men like her own father. It had to be Alma.
Luisa told them they would first go to the clinic on their way out of town. “I want you to see,” she said. They were both still denying they had anything to do with the Twitter account and the photo of Jefferson.
Nevertheless, they packed their bags into the van, feeling like the condemned heading to an execution, and made their way to the clinic. And in the clinic Luisa bulldogged her way past the doctor and into a room with a corpse under a sheet. It was a small corpse, Valencia could see that. And then the doctor nodded to Agudelo, and Agudelo gathered the students around the corpse, and the doctor removed the sheet, and Alma’s dead face and crushed body stared up at them.
“It was a road accident,” the doctor said.
Luisa said nothing, but she crossed herself and then reached down and held Alma’s hand. She remained like that, still and silent, while Agudelo shuffled Valencia and Sara back into the van.
Afterward, Agudelo drove back to Cúcuta through the stifling heat. And he ignored Sara when Sara said it was her, it was her fault, it was her idea, not Valencia’s. And Valencia stared at Sara as she accepted the blood guilt, and envied her, envied her courage in speaking those words, the liberation of being able to admit your sins. Yet she stayed silent.
Sara punched the back of the seat in front of her, then punched it again and again until Agudelo told her to stop. Valencia stared at her hands. She wanted to speak but shame suffocated her. She found it difficult to breathe, and then she couldn’t breathe, her breath shallow and quick, the edges of her vision collapsing in, the stifling air too thick to force down her throat, and then Sara was talking to her, calming words, and she fought to control her breathing, but there was this heaviness, this crushing, unmaking pain. Her soul, if she had one, screaming at her in protest of her stupidity, her narcissism, her desire.
There was silence for a long time, but as they crossed over the Tibú River, Agudelo started speaking. He said it was good that they knew they had blood on their hands. That to live in a country like this was to have blood on your hands, that the lives they lived in Bogotá were paid for in blood, and if they wanted to continue in this work it was the most important thing to know. Most people will never get to stare at the corpses of the men and women who die because the elites of this country don’t see it in their interest to fashion a just society, and it is a sight they should always remember, no matter what work they end up in, but especially if they continue working in human rights.
“This is no kind of work for messiahs,” Agudelo said. “This is no kind of work for saviors. We only want the guilty here.”
And then Agudelo waited, as if he thought they’d respond, but what was there to say? And so he added, “You think I haven’t made mistakes? I’ve made mistakes. I’ve never made mistakes this stupid, but that’s your generation. Inventing new ways to be fools.”
Valencia heard nothing, saw nothing but the body, the broken, distorted body lying in the clinic. And God, if there was a God, reached into Valencia’s body, and squeezed her lungs with His large hands, and ran His fingers down her nerves, and breathed hot breath over her eyes, and He tapped her heart once, then twice, as the blood rushed and drained and rushed and drained through her, and then He drew back, leaving a hole behind where air rushed in. If she could have wept tears of blood she would have wept tears of blood, and Agudelo kept speaking, making elliptical statements about this kind of work, and the mistakes he’d made, and what they must learn from it.
Two days later, when she reunited with her father, that feeling had not left. She had not slept, had not done much of anything but trace her guilt. She may not have driven the car that ran Alma down, but she’d taken a shot at a drug lord, in the drug lord’s territory. Of course someone would die as a result. And the fact that it was Alma who
