She stares at me silently, as if daring me to take my words back. I keep my expression neutral.
“I know the leader of Los Mil Jesúses,” she eventually says. “His real name.”
That surprises me.
“Jefferson Paúl López Quesada. Used to be in the paramilitaries. I knew him then. He’s a crazy man. Mischievous and evil and charming. Used to be handsome, in an ugly way. I have heard he’s gotten fat.”
“Heard from who?”
She dips her finger in her water glass. “All my life, we have had little groups.” She taps her finger on the wooden table, leaving a little dot of water. “FARC here.” She taps it again, next to the first dot, and keeps tapping, creating little dots of water in the space between us. “Paras here. Police here. Narcos here. Peasant union here. And they’ve learned to live with each other. They have to. Drugs growing in one place, laboratories in another, shipment routes everywhere. There’s too much money at stake not to cooperate, so they’ve learned to operate like little countries, not getting too big, not causing so much violence that the police feel like they need to go in. But of course some countries are good little countries, like Switzerland, or Chile, and they maintain order, punish the bad, build a little infrastructure, even impose taxes. And some are annoying and dysfunctional little countries, like Argentina. And then there are your Urabeños, your Saddam Husseins.” She lifts up her water glass, and starts carefully pouring a thin stream of water, forming a pool that spreads and conquers the other dots.
She looks sadly at the table in front of us, holding her water glass over the small puddle surrounded by a few dots of water. It’s not a bad demonstration of ink-spot theory, I think, or whatever you might call the criminal gang variant of ink spot.
“Too big. Men always want to be too big. I know I can’t stop the army from moving in. But if you’re only going to kill the leadership so Los Mil Jesúses can move into the vacuum . . .”
She flips the water glass upside down, dumping the water on the table.
“Shit!” I say, pushing back from the table as the water spills everywhere. There’s water on my pants. I breathe slowly to calm myself as de Salva removes the wet napkin from across her mostly dry lap. She’s acting a fool, keeping me off balance with these antics, but I know that anyone who has risen up the way she has is a very serious person. I take my napkin and begin mopping up the water, putting things back in order.
“Please,” I say, “enough. What do you want?”
“I can make it hard for you,” she says. “You know, I have a friend at Semana who covered the Soacha murders. Imagine if the press found out that you were linked to neoparamilitary groups. Or perhaps you don’t have to imagine. You’ve seen them go after your family before. Your daughter can have the same experience you did. Reading her father’s shame in the press. What’s your daughter’s name? Valencia?”
My first impulse is to reach across the table and slap her face. I resist. My second impulse is to say something absurd, out of a telenovela—Say my daughter’s name again and I’ll cut that filthy tongue from your mouth—but I’m not stupid. And neither is she.
I sigh, to let her know I have no time for threats. “You’re overplaying your hand,” I say. “This is unnecessary. This is silly.”
She smiles. “I know, when you move in there must be winners and losers. The Urabeños will lose, and that is fine. But I want you to know you’re working with a very dangerous, unstable criminal. The kind who creates chaos. If the Urabeños are Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, then Jefferson and his Mil Jesúses are ISIS. You understand?”
I keep my face very still. “Of course,” I say. “If the army takes over Agamemnon, then clearly, I will keep you informed of any developments related to your department. And I will be very interested in any information you have that could help shape operations.”
She settles back into her chair.
“Good,” she says. “I don’t just want to know how you will manage the Urabeños. I want to know how you will manage Los Mil Jesúses.”
• • •
When I emerge into the sunlight, it’s only a quarter to two. The meal went fast, and now I have time to think about what to tell General Cabrales, and more importantly, what not to tell him.
I am a representative who represents, de Salva had said. And for all the times I’ve found myself in godforsaken villages and towns where the heart of the people pumped red, socialist blood, it has never occurred to me before that representing your people and your state might be different things. To do what I do, you must accept that the true will of the people aligns with whatever the central government believes. So if the people side with the despotism promised by the FARC and reject democratic freedom, then they must be forced to be free.
Still, if you consider Colombia a democracy, which I do, then Representative de Salva represents a problem. The state, it is true, is a Leviathan whose body is structured by institutions and laws and markets and churches, but at the cellular level the Leviathan’s body is composed of nothing more than individual people. And no Leviathan is blessed with smooth skin, an unblemished body that glides soundlessly through the waters of the world. No Leviathan truly holds the monopoly on violence, which is the only reason it exists.
So it must be admitted that though most of the people in our Leviathan are cells in healthy organs—pumping blood, processing oxygen—some are cells in cancerous tumors, or in rotted flesh. This makes them no different from the people in any other Leviathan, whatever the pretensions of your Denmarks and your Swedens, from whom we
