Franklin’s brother Santiago, who was four years older than Abelito and was good at numbers, said he had traveled downriver with his father and they paid more for coca in other places. He worked out that, if they paid this much here and this much at Camaguan, they must pay a lot in Cúcuta, and the paisas should be paying everyone much more, more even than they had originally paid. He went into the jungle to complain to the Carpenter, and the Carpenter slapped him and told him that they knew this was a paraco town, and he was from a paraco family, and he should not complain. Then the guerrilla beat him so badly he could not even walk back home, but his father and his brother had to be called out to the guerrilla camp to carry him home. Two days later, the paisas returned and went to his house, took him to the square, and told everyone he was an enemy of the people. The next week his body, all swollen, floated down the river and the town mourned and Father Eustacio came from Cunaviche for the funeral. Franklin told everyone he’d avenge his brother, but no one believed him. His boasting turned sad and purposeless.
A period of great fear began. Without warning, the evangelical school shut down. Maria told Abelito the guerrilla had taken the teachers and made them pay, or were holding them in the jungle until they paid. She said everyone in Colombia must pay a monthly vaccine to the guerrilla, especially the wealthy, and when people don’t pay it they must be put in prison until it is paid. But the guerrilla do not have prisons, she said, so they took Abelito’s teachers to the thickest parts of the jungle, where there were twenty-foot anacondas that ate men alive, and chained them by the neck to trees. She said they would stay like that, a chain around their necks, until money from America set them free, or they died. But after a time, even this became normal, and the people worked for less money without complaint, and the fear became something in the background, like the heat of summer, something you acknowledge and sometimes even complain about but which you do not expect to change.
When he turned thirteen, Abelito started working coca, which was good, hard work. That same year one of the paisas got Abelito’s mean sister, Mona, pregnant. When Abelito’s father heard of it, he tried to beat her but found he could not even raise his arms to strike his child, so his mother did it for him with a switch. The family became deeply sad. When they asked the paisa if he would marry Mona, the paisa just laughed, and everyone was too afraid to say anything. Mona said it was better this way. She never said the paisa’s name, she just called him “that son of a bitch,” and that she’d rather cut his baby out of her own stomach than be married to him.
Abelito prepared for life to change, for his sister to give birth and for him to help his father and mother and sister with the baby, but everything changed, for everyone in the town, much faster than that, when Franklin finally found the courage he’d spent years searching for.
The Carpenter had been sleeping with many of the girls of the town, but especially Jimena. She was fifteen, and had already birthed one of his children. Franklin waited for the Carpenter to come see her. He followed the Carpenter and caught him alone with Jimena, who was very beautiful, and very timid, and had always spoken kindly to Abelito, and who he loved. Franklin stabbed them all over, in the neck, arms, hands, and head. Franklin told me he had wanted to cut out the Carpenter’s tongue, the tongue that had told the paisas about his brother’s plan, but when he turned the body over and saw his face it had terrified him and he’d run.
Only one man in a hundred will stand up to a true killer, the way Franklin had done. But Franklin only had enough courage in him to do it once. He fled, and his whole family fled with him, while the rest of the town waited like a pig facing the knife.
2
LISETTE 2015
It didn’t begin with the bombings. By which I mean, Kabul was no longer Kabul well before then. There used to be thousands of us Westerners, mostly military and contractors, but also aid workers, missionaries, adventurers, diplomats, and journalists like myself, trying to make our mark or our fortune in the “good war,” Afghanistan, as opposed to the “dumb war,” Iraq. The money we brought kept things kicking in our Kabul, the Westerner’s Kabul, the city within the city that was unaffordable or just plain off-limits to ordinary Afghans. People called it the Kabubble, and the Kabubble meant imported steaks at Boccaccio, bootleg Heinekens on Flower Street, and rooftop parties overlooking the lights that crawl up the sides of the mountains around the city at night. It meant a place you could let your hair down, drink alcohol, and tell strangers the lies you told yourself about why you were there, what you were doing, and what a difference you were making.
By 2015, those days were long gone. Troop levels down from a peak of over a hundred thousand to less than ten thousand, and for all the cheerleading for a military exit I’ve heard from self-righteous European aid workers and twenty-two-year-old journalists seeking to “give voice to the Afghan people,” I couldn’t help noticing that as the American military left, those folks’ numbers thinned out, too. You didn’t see as many correspondents, or NGO administrators, or even heavily armed white dudes in cargo pants on Street 15
