Instead of love or resources or friends, we have duty. It’s an iron duty, a duty that doesn’t beckon us to glory or to public adulation, a duty whose voice is sometimes so faint, a calling from some other sphere, that we listen to it like the mystics do to the supposed voice of God. A calling only we know, a calling that steels us, that drives us.
But if Mason wants to be friends, we can be friends.
• • •
It is late by the time Mason leaves, and I have an early morning tomorrow, but I make myself some tea, pull out a book by an American economist on the use and misuse of land reform in twentieth-century military campaigns, and sit myself down and pretend to read it. The night went well, I suppose, but I also have a sense of something dislodged within the order of my home. A premonition that something has gone wrong. My instincts in this regard have always been very good, so I’m not surprised when Valencia pokes her head into the room.
“Papá,” she says, and I incline my head slightly in assent, not taking my eyes off the book. She slips into the room and sits down, dressed in her nightgown. My eyes scan the page I’d randomly opened to and fix on the sentence: “In short, MacArthur had ordered the Japanese to do something that was already in the works.” I nod, as if in agreement with a point made by the author, then look up at Vale.
“I had a very nice evening,” she says.
“Good,” I say.
“You said that the rules about talking of war, that they were lifted for . . . the evening.”
“For the dinner,” I say.
“Oh,” she says.
This is not the right way to handle this.
“For the evening,” I say. “It can be for the evening.”
Valencia smiles nervously. “You talked about guerrillas, and narcos, and neoparamilitaries, and paramilitaries. And I know that the government used to work with paramilitaries, that paramilitaries were legal, and then illegal . . .”
“Do you want to know if I ever worked with paramilitaries?” I say.
“No . . .” she says, though of course she must want to know.
“So what do you want to know?”
“I read a book by a journalist, Maria Teresa Ronderos . . .”
I know which book she’s talking about. Probably the best book about the paramilitaries, which means the most thorough, which means the one that details every last ugly thing about them, and about their links to the army. This is what sending your child to university does. It teaches them to distrust. “That’s a very good book,” I say, which makes her very happy to hear. That I approve of it means, perhaps, that I agree with its criticisms, which means I must not be guilty. She smiles and nods.
“It’s very interesting,” she says. I wait a moment, but she’s not sure how to proceed.
“I never worked with paramilitaries,” I say. There are other questions I could answer—did I ever turn a blind eye to social cleansings, take bribes, kill civilians and claim they were guerrilla, drive peasants from their homes, work hand in hand with murderers and drug dealers. Perhaps she has not articulated these questions to herself yet. I am sure, in her heart, the answer to all of them is no. But education has placed the worm of doubt. “Your grandfather, of course, worked with paramilitaries. He trained them, back when it was legal. It was part of his job.”
“Yes,” she says.
“And intelligence sources,” I say, “are often unpleasant people. An officer needs strong character to deal with them in the correct manner.”
“Yes,” she says again.
I wonder how to close off this line of questioning more strongly.
“Let me tell you a story,” I say. I put down my book on the side table. “I was in one of the very first counternarcotics battalions. We were based out of Tres Esquinas, and we had a couple of Huey helicopters, trash helicopters, but . . . helicopters. One day, a police post radioed in. This was early days, so the operation center was full of paper maps and radios and stale coffee and a lot of people milling about when the policemen came on the radio, panicked. We could hear gunfire crackling. Three hundred guerrilla, they thought. The police post had only fourteen men. And there I am, a new lieutenant in air mobile assault, with some of the best men in the Colombian army, twenty minutes away. Twenty minutes . . . by helicopter. On foot, through jungle and mountain, three days away. So what do you think I did?”
“I don’t know,” she says.
“What do you mean you don’t know?” I say. “There I am, twenty minutes away by helicopter, and these fourteen police officers, fourteen brave men, are calling us over the radio, ‘Help us, help us. We need reinforcements. They are surrounding us.’ So what did I do?”
She shakes her head. “The question is a trick, somehow,” she says.
“After ten hours, the calls became desperate. We have only this much ammunition, we have only this many men left, we have taken this many wounded and this many killed. ‘Help us, help us. We need reinforcements.’ After fifteen hours, they were rationing bullets, taking so much care with each shot, trying to prevent the enemy from tightening the circle, only firing when it was absolutely essential, because they knew their bullets couldn’t last. After twenty hours, they knew they were going to die, they knew that the foot patrol my commanding officer sent out would never reach them in time, but over the radio they kept their honor. They told us, ‘When we run out of bullets, we’ll throw sticks and stones.’” After twenty-five hours, they stopped
