After that, other projects quickly followed. I loved two things most of all, watching the workmen breaking ground, and then coming back long after the project was done to watch what I’d made in use. It was like the feeling I had the first time I held a gun, but it didn’t fade. There was something about seeing children playing on a field I’d leveled, or seeing a family eating dinner in a one-room house I’d built.
One night I walked through the section of poor homes we built on the edge of Cunaviche, simple, ugly houses with misshapen bricks made of sand and cement, and corrugated metal roofs that might blow away in a strong wind. Children ran through the street in front of me, shrieking. Around a corner I saw a small fire where they had tossed their scavenged things—an old tire, broken branches, a wet cardboard box pouring thick curtains of smoke into the sky. I looked through a window that was really just a hole, no glass. The mother inside cooked on a kerosene burner, and a little boy played in the corner, picking up scraps of paper and moving them from one spot to another. I stepped closer to the window, my eyes on the mother’s face. She looked Motilon—there were some markings on her nose. Possibly, she was here, cooking in a home for the poor, because of us. Jefferson had made a deal with a group of guerrilla to carve up some Motilon lands in the north, lands that grew opium but which the Motilon had tried to keep from both of us, wanting to stay out of the conflict. Between the two groups, guerrilla and paramilitaries together, the tribe was crushed, and many fled.
I felt warmth toward the woman, and happiness that she had shelter. During my animal days, I had seen women like her, begging with their children by their sides, squatting on colorful rags they brought from wherever they’d come from, and I knew that to the whole world a homeless mother is prey. She turned to look out the window, and I ran. Dealing too closely with the people we helped frightened me.
Jefferson was different. He would make people come and beg him if they wanted to live in the houses he built. Undoubtedly, that woman had come with her children and offered him prayers. Undoubtedly, she kissed his hands, maybe even his feet. She’d made her little boy do the same. Jefferson always made them grovel in front of God and all. “They need to know,” he said.
I never needed any kisses or prayers. I had the building itself.
• • •
Jefferson liked the way I worked, and he liked that I was quiet, respectful. So he told Osmin I would work with him more often, handling some of the civic work for our bloc, and he had one of his men give me a uniform like his paracos wore. He also told me my wage would go up, from four thousand pesos a day to eight. It was a promotion.
There were only six towns within the area of Osmin’s responsibility, but Jefferson had a much wider area, where he didn’t just hand out money for charity projects but also money for roads and schools, for neighborhood associations and local candidates. These were cities and towns that our bloc had firmly in control, a control coming from far more than fear or even love, which was the point of Jefferson’s little projects. We wanted them to think our money paved their roads, educated their children, healed them when they were sick, gave them everything that the state was supposed to but never had, and everything the guerrillas promised but never provided. That’s why when the government money came in we’d meet with the mayors and let them know they could not do anything without us. We would protect the projects as long as we received compensation and as long as the people were told the projects came from us. For the people in those towns, betraying us would thus seem like betraying themselves, removing us from the community like removing one’s own backbone.
Most of these projects were handled by civilians, but Jefferson wanted to change things so that a uniformed paraco would always be involved, even if only to be seen. “With you there, in uniform,” he said, “they will never be able to pretend the money comes from somewhere else.”
This became my responsibility—to remind people of what they owed us. I would stand by Jefferson and take notes as he met with mayors and businesspeople and ranchers. Together we would determine what the town needed—assigning people to houses of collaborators who’d been pushed from their land, making judgments on disagreements over land, or reducing the delinquents and the viciosos. If there was money for building, Jefferson would send me out to handle all the details, to meet with the builders and suppliers, to negotiate prices, and to keep track of the construction. Jefferson was often not around—he traveled back and forth to Venezuela constantly—and even when he was around he didn’t care at all about the projects except to make sure he was there when they finished, and that everyone knew he had paid for them, so handling all this quickly became a large undertaking.
I managed well. The men I worked with were decades older than me but they knew I had Jefferson’s trust and Jefferson’s money. They were honest with me, and spoke to me with respect, especially as time went on and I showed that I was good at the work, and attentive to the details, arriving at a site and complaining about poor foundations, or demanding refunds for a failure to
