It was especially when going back through the transcripts that Valencia had learned to spot the sensitivity and care with which Luisa pulled out details from the participants, helping them build a narrative while clarifying everything Ricardo needed. It was a delicate, almost beautiful process. And Luisa had delicately, beautifully, brought the old man to the heart of what was clearly going to be a very painful story.
“One moment,” Valencia said.
Everything stopped. Luisa’s head swiveled slowly. Valencia walked over, reset the levels, and returned to her spot at the laptop. Luisa said nothing, merely continued the interview.
Afterward, Valencia braced herself for shouting and screaming, but in a way what happened was worse. Luisa sat her down and said quietly, “We have to show these people respect. If you are not capable of that, you need to think very hard about what you are doing here, and what type of person you are.”
Those words weighed on her. She’d come out here to be a different type of person than she was in Bogotá. To experience something different from the comfortable life her parents had provided her, going from one safe space to another. Apartment to car to school. School to car to mall. Mall to car to apartment. Apartment to university to law degree to professional career. That path ahead seemed so very rational and orderly. But she liked to think there was also within her a series of wilder desires. Did she want to secure a place in the world or to change it? Did she believe in miracles? Did she believe in God? Was there something inside her, call it a soul, that could be connected to the brutal life of her country in a way that could not be scoffed at, pushed aside, dismissed as unreal? And what would she have to do to earn such a soul? So far she’d transcribed interview after interview until the tales of suffering lost their uniqueness and blended into the numerically designated categories of the government form. If these stories were a challenge, then she was failing to meet it. And Luisa knew.
That night as she prepared for bed she told Sara what had happened. Sara put a hand on her shoulder and said, “I know Professor Agudelo thinks Luisa is amazing but I think maybe there’s something he doesn’t know.” And when Valencia asked her what that was Sara smiled and said, “Maybe she’s a complete bitch.”
Valencia laughed uncomfortably. Valencia’s father had told her once that a true leader must sometimes show a little cruelty. Your men won’t respect you if you don’t, he claimed. Softness and sentimentality and kindness are no virtues, and men, in their hearts, know they are often deserving of a little cruelty.
“I screwed up. Again. I deserved it.”
“You’re working for free in la quinta porra. And you’re studying law, not electronics. You think Luisa would do better? Without you, she’d be screwing up with the microphones. She should be thanking us every day.”
Sara had a hard kind of prettiness. Angular cheekbones, a tough little nose, dark brown eyes perpetually narrowed, and a small mouth in a perpetual frown. Perhaps she, too, was a true leader.
“I think I get nervous around them,” Valencia said. “The victims.”
“You should,” Sara said. “One of them grabbed my ass the other day.”
“Have you ever heard stories like this?” Valencia asked.
“My father is a journalist,” Sara said. “I’ve heard stories like this all my life.”
How to respond to that? Valencia wished she were back in Bogotá, back in her nice, safe, boring life. At school, sitting in Professor Agudelo’s lecture hall and listening to him preach, she had imagined a heroic role for herself, documenting abuses in one of the poorest and most violent stretches of the country. There was an element of almost Christian witness in it. And sacrifice. When, years ago, he had been attacked by the Black Eagles, they’d fractured his eye socket, broken several ribs, and slashed his arms, chest, and legs. Luisa’s father had been murdered. Even Sara was familiar with this world. What did Valencia have?
—
Abel had people keeping track of each and every soul entering the foundation’s office. He knew about the two students and the professor from Bogotá. He knew about the American journalist. And as the days stretched forward and townspeople and peasants and drunkards and drug addicts and fools made their way across the town square, he began mapping out a network of the people in and around La Vigia who believed in the promise Luisa held out for them. That their sufferings would not go ignored. That justice might be slow, but was coming. That things in this town could get better.
Most of them were harmless people with no power: displaced indios who begged or sold trinkets on the roads outside of town. Subsistence farmers who lived on bits of reclaimed jungle. Madwomen and drunks who dirtied the face of La Vigia at all hours and who would soon, he figured, fall victim to the kinds of “cleansings” he’d once practiced for Jefferson. But there were surprises as well. Fermín, who ran the gas station near Abel’s store. Sebastián, a hunchback who sold rice.
He had pity for them. Come tell your story, the workers at the foundation had said. Come. We’ll have a registrar officer from the Victims’ Unit there. We’ll handle the paperwork for you. The state of Colombia has declared that you are owed reparation. And though the government is the government and so the money does not always come, still. You play the lottery, don’t you? This is no worse.
Fools. And he’d soon be one of them. But not at the foundation’s offices. He’d told Luisa he couldn’t be seen going in. He couldn’t become one of the names on his list. “That’s fine,” she’d said. The national office wanted
