“Pretty good,” Jefferson said. I almost agreed. Her fingers stumbled over each other, the notes clunky, and I could see the awkward girl trying to dance but trapped in her plainness, her powerlessness. And then, a pause, a breath, her fingers lifted off the keys, then back down with force, and the music caught me again. For the rest of the performance, this is how it went. She was not good enough to always play well, but at times she would get it right, and listening would hurt.
She played for a long, long time. When she finished, she looked thinner and frailer than when she sat down. There was a moment of silence. A moment of quiet in the terrified crowd, a moment that had nothing to do with us, with the guns we held, with the man we were about to kill, or even with Luisa, the woman who had played the music.
“Okay, okay,” Jefferson said. “Very fun. Now, up.”
His voice was strange in the silence her music had created, but he seemed oblivious. Had he heard something different from all of us? He dragged Luisa up off her chair, and our hands tightened around our rifles, we squared our shoulders, and the work began.
We tied Sánchez on top of the piano. A chainsaw appeared, and suddenly everyone who had watched, confused and amazed as Luisa played, knew what was about to happen. A certain degree of calm came to the plaza.
Here is what happens when a man is chainsawed in half in the public square of a small village. First, the noise of the chainsaw makes you realize how quiet everything has been. The kick-kick roar of it goes off. The man about to die cries out but his pleas drown in the violence of its sound. Then the sound shifts slightly. It becomes silkier, gentler, as it bites into the flesh and muscles and guts of the abdomen like butter. It sprays blood and flesh and, when it hits the intestines, shit, which is why we urged Javier to stop sawing them in half at the stomach, but he told us, “That’s the reason I do it, to fling the son of a bitch’s shit over everything.” Then the noise becomes grittier, jerkier, coarser, no silkiness now, as it bites through the spine. There’s no sound but the chainsaw by this point. The tip, at the far edge of the stomach, bites into the wood beneath the man and sawdust flies into the air, mixes with the blood, thickening it. The screaming has stopped, Javier is sweating, putting muscle into the work and then, grrrrrr . . . roar, the sound emerges clear, beautiful, unbroken. The spine is severed.
• • •
One death, dramatic and public, and Rioclaro became a ghost town. Uribe won the presidential election, and within a year there were talks with the government about the paramilitary groups disbanding. We were all offered a deal. We could leave the paramilitaries, or “demobilize,” and there would be benefits for us at a “reintegration agency,” and only the paramilitary leaders, like Jefferson, would have to face any jail time, and even that would be light.
Jefferson told me that while he was in jail I should work for him in Venezuela, where there were ways to make amazing amounts of money if you were smart. I told him that I had learned from him not to fight for money, but for God, and he laughed. He let me go. And I stayed in La Vigia, and tried to earn a living like a normal man. I still felt like a ghost, haunting my body rather than living my own life, but over time I decided there was one thing that anchored me to the world. I had saved Luisa.
8
LISETTE 2015
A Canadian photojournalist once told me that nobody should ever go straight to New York after spending time in a war zone. It’s too weird and the anger will just be too intense. He always made a point to go to New Orleans, which he considers a halfway house back to civilization. Me, I go home and then I go to New York to see my old friend Raul, who’s so goddamn New York fancy, and so unapologetic about it, that after enough time with him every ounce of self-righteous anger evaporates, and I move on to a much healthier sadness. But as he chatters, I wonder if something different is going on inside me, if the choice I made to leave Afghanistan and never go back has broken a part of the deal, because I can’t assuage myself with the promise to return to the place where life makes sense, and what I’m doing feels important.
“Big step you’re taking.” Raul grins at me impishly. “Proud of you.”
We’re sitting in the back garden of a little restaurant off the High Line where all the food is served on special little plates, practically miniature sculptures, teardrop-shaped soup bowls and oval dishes with holes in the center and a cheese platter on a tray where actual grass grows through artfully arranged pebbles and the cheese balances on top. I’m smiling at Raul and telling him everything is great—he’s paying—but I feel like a caged ferret. This is also part of the homecoming process—fuck this place, fuck these people, with their wealth and their careers and their comfortable lives—and I’ve gone through it enough times to know how to let it wash over me and then die off in time to enjoy dessert. Yes, indulging in anger feels cathartic. Who doesn’t like to think they’re special? That while everyone else is focusing on money and status you’re focusing on death and destruction and the terrible course of history, on the war. But Raul has heard me give that speech before, and he doesn’t buy it.
“Yeah, I’m done with Afghanistan,” I say. And then I add, with regret, “And Iraq.” What I don’t mention is where I’m going
