There was much to berate her for. Valencia’s responsibilities included setting up equipment, recording audio during the interviews the foundation was conducting, typing up transcripts, sorting them according to various metrics and which types of atrocities each fell into, loading the information into the foundation’s database, and running any other duties Luisa and her staff could throw at her and at Sara, the other student from Nacional. She barely had time to eat, barely time to think. “The goal is peak efficiency,” Professor Agudelo had explained to them at the outset. This meant, in practice, that Valencia listened to atrocities during the day, typed them up during the night, and ate and slept who knows when. She was tired, and, despite the training on the equipment she’d received back in Bogotá, prone to making mistakes.
On her third day there she had plugged the microphone into the wrong channel, the input set wrong on her control track such that she thought she was recording audio but, in fact, had nothing. In the common room afterward, in front of Sara and in front of Professor Agudelo, Luisa had lost her temper and shouted at her, “When we are interviewing victims, we have to be perfect! You think it’s easy to tell a story like that?”
She didn’t know what to make of Luisa. She knew the stories about Luisa’s past, about her father’s murder and how she’d come to La Vigia a refugee and risen up to be the foundation’s indispensable woman in this region. One of the other workers had told Valencia that Luisa had even helped in the reintegration of ex-paramilitaries directly involved in her father’s death. A few spoke of her as if she were a living saint. Valencia wanted to feel that. Awe. Proximity to a holy person who had dedicated their life to forgiveness and redemption. But when the squat, fat, unattractive woman barked an order at Valencia, some deep, patrician instinct rose up and she found herself quivering with indignant rage. She wasn’t proud of the reaction. She tried to tamp it down with calls to Christian humility. But whenever Luisa barked at her, it stirred. A coiled, angry emotion she didn’t want, but was nevertheless hers.
One day a sleepy-eyed older gentleman arrived to tell the story of his kidnapped daughter, and he seemed so frail, and initially spoke so softly that Valencia had set the levels on the lavalier microphone much higher than usual. It was fine starting out, as the man talked about his business and his family, subjects that would tug a faint smile onto his thin, dry lips, his voice coming out in a whisper. But as he moved on to the changes wrought by the encroaching guerrilla his voice took on a harder, and louder, edge.
“I knew they’d come for me,” he was saying, and over the headphones his voice was distorted, as if there were a bee buzzing in the equipment.
Valencia looked back to Luisa, and behind her to Ricardo, the short, skinny, and unimpressively mustachioed registrar officer who rarely looked up from his papers and who, throughout the process, always did his best to blend in with the cracked, off-white wall behind him. He even wore shirts and pants of a similar color to the wall, and he sat motionless, like an iguana on a rock.
“I got letters, invitations to a funeral with my name as the deceased. Even a Mass card.” The rancher laughed, the noise coming through with that same buzzing noise. “I thought that was nice.”
The only way to fix the levels was to stop the interview and change them on the battery pack for the wireless microphone that she’d attached to the old man’s belt. Which would disrupt the process. And there was an art to the process. Valencia had come to respect that.
Luisa would walk in, hefting her weight around in a kind of powerful, bulldog way that exuded authority, plump herself down, and begin. There were no tears, no hugs, and no expressions of surprise. She’d heard it all before, all of it. If she showed compassion, it wasn’t through a gross parading of emotion, but through careful and attentive listening. She asked probing questions, accepted the gaps and distortions that come with painful memories, but also pushed into those gaps, finding context, making the victim gather up the broken shards of experience into something that could be strung together into a story. As they talked, the registrar would constantly make notes on a lengthy form, only at the very end asking a few targeted questions.
People understand their lives as stories. Or they try to. In the worst cases, cases Professor Agudelo had warned them they’d encounter, people cannot understand. They struggle to turn what happened to them into a coherent whole. And Ricardo’s form, which would be submitted through the Victims’ Unit to the government, was a long series of open and closed questions designed to break apart individual stories into different metrics of victimization relevant to the different categories and benefits they are due. Questions designed to assess eligibility, need, vulnerability, harms suffered. Questions about the perpetrator, questions about criminal versus politically motivated violence. Questions that, by necessity, implied a hierarchy of suffering, and a hierarchy of victims. Questions that produced results that could, in the end, be fed into a computer and compiled into graphs, columns, and pie charts.
To simply follow the questions, going one by one through the form with a victim, would be to subject them to a kind of mental torture. “For the victims,” Professor Agudelo had told them, “it can feel like we’re putting their life through a sausage grinder. We don’t want them to feel that way but we do need
