Then we all gathered our weapons and gear and followed Jefferson’s paracos to a gathering outside a river town. On a small stage, a faggot was dancing in front of an audience of about fifteen or twenty. The dancing faggot’s jeans were cut open at the crotch to show his underwear, which was red. We surrounded the men, who looked scared, and Jefferson went on stage, where the faggot in jeans was frozen in terror. “Look, he’s got earrings,” he said. And then he hit him in the face with the butt of his rifle and stood over him and used pliers to tear the earrings out of his ears. I thought of the woman we’d helped, who’d been attacked by thieves.
The red faggot shrieked, then cried. Jefferson walked to the front of the stage and began a speech about how the faggot life came from America and that for a man to fuck another man is to kneel to imperialism. “We must stay true to our Colombian identity,” he told the audience, “unblemished, unmixed, uncorrupted.” I had never considered my identity, Colombian or otherwise, but I would learn this was Jefferson’s way. Before doing violence, he’d talk nonsense to confuse and to justify.
Jefferson also said that no women were allowed to wear miniskirts, though there were no women there to hear the news. Miniskirts, he said, began in Europe, which he made sound even more disgusting than America. Then we fired into the air and moved in, hitting the faggots with our rifles as they squirmed and crawled away. It feels good, to hit someone with a rifle, especially someone who is like a man, but not.
One of the faggots in the middle of the pack, a skinny man with short hair and a rugby shirt tucked into his jeans, went down on his knees and began to pray to the Virgin Mary. This made it hard to hit him. So in the middle of squirming, shrieking bodies, groans and cries, there was this one little man, on his knees, reciting, “Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners . . .” with a circle of protection around him. When he reached the end of his prayer, Iván hit him before he could start again, and he fell to the ground with blood coming from a gash above his right eye.
Once the faggots were beaten, Jefferson made a sign and we walked away in two single-file lines, Jefferson’s group and ours. But as we left the town Jefferson stopped and had us turn around. We found the men tending each other’s wounds, a sight that was disturbing to me, and changed my feelings about what we’d just done. Jefferson took the man in the red underwear and we marched him out of town, and Jefferson and two of his men raped him and then shot him in the head and left the body in the road. Osmin told us that the flame of war burns strong in Jefferson. It is what makes him such a powerful leader.
• • •
About a week later, Osmin told me he never wanted to be a warrior, he wanted to be a civil engineer. “Let’s be builders, we two.” He told me this at night, by the river, when we were alone, and then he laughed, as if he knew it was ridiculous to want such a life and not to accept the only life we had. But here was a chance to change things, because after the killing of the man in red underwear Jefferson had taken Osmin aside and told him he would give him money to build a soccer field, and some one-story houses for the poor, so that it wouldn’t just be the ordinary people and the businesspeople who liked us for the way we handled crime and kept order, but everyone.
“Jefferson says you start with fear, but fear is not enough.” Osmin sat close to me as he told me this. He was so different from his comandante. Osmin had long limbs and a soft face. Jefferson was shaped like a square. Jefferson’s hands were thick, with short stubby fingers. Osmin’s palms were calloused, yes, but the veins ran across the small bones on the back of his hands in a delicate way. These were builder’s hands, he wanted me to believe.
I liked the idea of building, so construction became my special responsibility. “Because you are smart, and know mathematics,” Osmin told me. He even got me an engineering textbook, which we didn’t need. We had money to pay men who knew their work, and the textbook didn’t have anything to do with building simple houses or community centers or soccer fields. It had a dark purple cover, was titled Analysis of Structures with Dynamic Loads—Volume II: Systems of Multiple Degrees of Freedom, and seemed to only involve versions of math that I had never been taught.
“I will learn this by heart,” I told Osmin, and I believed it at the time, but then I only got three or four pages in before giving it up. “I need the first volume, then it’ll all make sense,” I said.
My first project was a soccer field in La Vigia. The contractor I found was a kind man who liked me because I was young. He let me stay by his side, and taught me how to keep books for a project, how to invoice correctly, and how to know when workers were taking advantage. For the next project, the housing, I found ways to save and didn’t use all of the money—returning the leftover to Osmin, who gave it to Jefferson, who seemed confused
