I wasn’t sure what to say. I went with, “It’s a miracle.”
Juana smiled indulgently. “Luis is Harold’s father,” she said. “Or was. I think if you try to murder your son and his mother, you are no longer a father. Harold is a child of God now. Which is why we are all here today.”
• • •
At the baptism I wore white robes not so different from Harold’s baptismal gown. I was nervous, trying to work myself up to a sense of religious devotion, but mainly struck with horror at what Juana and Harold had survived, and shame at my secret history with her. Harold woke up midway through the sacrament and started screaming. “He’s going to sing opera,” the officer from B2 whispered. The priest poured water over Harold’s head, anointing him. A child of God, I thought, remembering Juana’s words. Throughout I kept sneaking glances at Juana’s face. I wondered how many children had been baptized in such circumstances, how many children whose mothers barely survived to bring their children into the world. There must be many. Many even at that very moment, women threatened by the drug business, by the political struggle, by angry, jealous, crazy men, desperate men, drunken men, cruel men. Juana Peréz could not have been the first to crawl bloody out of the mountains, or jungles, or ditches, or alleyways, or broken homes. Most women like her die, I knew, but against all odds, some live.
I looked around at the participants. Juana’s role was obviously closed to me, and I didn’t think much of the father’s contribution. Even the priest seemed peripheral, a mere conduit. My father, though, in his uniform, a representative of another ancient order, was not peripheral at all. His ancient order did not just anoint. They had received and protected Juana, entering into her history in a way that seemed profound.
For the remainder of my visit to Medellín I observed my father through an entirely different lens. His days had a monastic rhythm, given not by an eternal structure of prayer but by staff meetings, regular reporting requirements, and the rigid timelines of military operations. His days had a monastic austerity, missing meals and sleep to work and enduring time on patrols full of such physical danger and hardship it bordered on mortification of the flesh. And his days had a monastic hierarchal structure, with conscripts in place of novitiates and General Harold Bedoya in place of an abbot. Everything operated in terms of traditions, moral codes, regulations, and trained responses, just the same as in an order, except that in a monastery all this revolves around the awestruck contemplation of a God existing outside of history, and in the military it revolves around the work of violence, which is what makes history happen.
I did not make the decision then, but as time passed, as the memory of the presence of God faded and as Medellín became habitable again, a place I could walk through without fear, I became more and more drawn to the way in which my father’s work impacted the lives of real people, saving lives and creating a space for life to flourish. His wasn’t a life centered on money or things, the shallow currencies of the external world, but on people and duty. There seemed something sacred about such work, or if not sacred then something like it, and by the time I was eighteen I knew.
Thus began my second failed love, one that filled me not with the wonder and gratitude toward existence I’d felt in my little monastic cell as a child, but with a painfully sharp sense of duty toward a broken, evil world. I finished university, I went through training, I was commissioned. I spoke the words, completed the rituals, and received not God’s saving grace but responsibility over the life and death of thirty-two young Colombians. The responsibility puffed me up with an unearned sense of self-importance, which, especially in the early days of my marriage to Sofia, made me almost unbearable in the company of civilians. Though it was a moral duty I was fulfilling, not a sacred one, in its intensity it seemed to rise to a religious level. Standing in starlit fields with instant coffee packed into our lips like tobacco to keep us awake, hiding in ditches by the side of remote roads, patrolling through ruined towns—the war was more than my job. It was the dark star around which the entirety of my existence orbited, to which family and friends and loved ones and sex and money and God seemed like weak abstractions, insubstantial against the weight of the madness we were fighting.
This is enough to give a young man a sense of purpose. No more is necessary.
And since my father made general the year I became an officer, my career was charmed,
