Despite my hopes, she did have a pretty face. Not beautiful or exceptional, and not with the deep and piercing eyes in my dreams, but the face of a normal young woman of Medellín. Prettier than the average Colombian, but standard for this city. When my father introduced us, she smiled a big smile that shocked me somehow. Perhaps I thought that a woman with such wounds would never smile. Or that she’d only smile looking at her baby, not at the outside world and the people you meet there.
“You have such a handsome son,” she said, and I bristled. She turned so that little Harold faced me, his eyes closed and his face peaceful. “Say hello, Harold. One day you’ll be big, like Juan.”
I didn’t eat much at breakfast, even though my mother made arepa de chocolo, which I loved. I was too confused by this ordinary woman who should not be ordinary, who should be weeping in fear or in joy at the gift of life, who should have been visibly overcoming her horrific past through indomitable will, but who mostly just chatted with my father and the officer from the B2 about the food on base getting better, and how she’d started reading the book the officer from the B2 gave her and she thought the author was better even than Mutis.
Then, since it turned out my mother and Juana had grown up in the same neighborhoods, they began talking about the people there—the grocer who let so many people get by on credit that when he retired there was a line of people down the street to pay off debts, my mother’s cousins who had worked in a factory making T-shirts, and the bad kids who hung out on the corner when they were both little girls. “I think, maybe,” Juana said, “they smoked marijuana,” a comment that made both my father and the intelligence officer laugh. Other than that, nothing that she said was especially remarkable.
Years later, in an attempt to exorcise the impression she made on my young mind, I would write a series of terrible poems about her in which she was an idealized figure, an eternal image of Colombia, a scarred goddess displaying her wounds and bringing forth unblemished new life, and so on. The more airy my descriptive language became, the more it jarred against my memories of this breakfast, during which she was too ordinary and lively to be reduced to a goddess of Colombia. I gave up, deciding she was an image of nothing. Or she was the image of a living and breathing woman who had been brutally attacked, survived, and went on to give birth and live her life. Which is enough poetry for anyone to endure.
As the breakfast finished up, though, she caught me staring at her scars, and she asked, “Would you like to hear the story?”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I said, ashamed to be caught.
“No, it’s good,” she said. “Telling the story is good. I learned that from your father. Though he says you tell these kind of stories with soldiers, and aguardiente.”
“I didn’t . . .” my father began to say, but then stopped. I don’t think I’d ever seen him embarrassed before. My mother shook her head, but said nothing.
“And you tell them over and over,” Juana said, “because it is your story. Right, Colonel?” My father gave an almost imperceptible nod, and then she gritted her jaw, the lightness of her manner disappearing for a second, before she flung her head back, giving me a better view of the scars on her neck.
“I walk the earth by the grace of the Lord’s Prayer and a leather jacket,” she said. There was a stiffness to how she spoke, the words sounding rehearsed, a ritual. But as she continued she relaxed into the story.
“Four of my colleagues at the Department of Security and Control . . . Saúl Londoño, Fernando Tenorio, Augosto Posada, as well as Luis Veléz, who is the son of a whore, and I apologize for using that word, but if I used a nicer word I’d be telling a lie. They asked me to come with them in a van. I trusted them, because I worked with them, and because . . .” She cocked her head and looked down at little sleeping Harold. “I trusted them for many reasons,” she said.
She explained how silent it was in the van, how Luis wouldn’t even look at her, how she refused to accept what was about to happen to her, even though she knew what happened had happened to so many others at the hands of the Department of Security and Control.
“I only accepted it when the van stopped,” she said. “Then I knew, I was about to die. They threw me out of the van, but I fought. I was wearing a black leather jacket, and Luis had a hand on it and it pulled up over my head as I fell to the ground, covering my face so I could not see. And then I felt the first strike of a hatchet.”
She slapped her hands on the table. “Boom,” she said. And then she tilted her head so her hair fell down to the side, and she parted her long, dark hair—quite beautiful hair, in fact—revealing a hidden scar on the side of her skull.
“I started to pray the Our Father,” she said. “I only got to ‘blessed be thy name,’ and, boom! Another strike of the hatchet. I started again. ‘Our Father, who art—’ boom. I kept praying, and they kept hitting me, and every time they hit me I started again.”
She nodded, as if in agreement with what she was saying.
“Thirty-five times, they hit me,” she said, “or they hit my jacket, thanks to God. Thirty-five times I tried to pray the
