Abel stood up from the desk he had in the back room of his store, a back room that held his bed, a little portable gas burner to heat up food, and several boxes of goods for the store, which he feared might never open again. He doubted that he would unshutter it while Jefferson ran La Vigia. And who could displace Jefferson? Jefferson had all the connections to the Venezuelans—it was how he kept the ELN and the Peludos and even the Urabeños playing nice. It made him untouchable. Immortal, perhaps.
Abel walked out of the back room into the silent, shuttered store, bags of crackers and chicharrónes sitting on shelves, never to be sold. He grabbed a bag of chicharrónes, opened it, and began munching. He walked behind the counter. On a low shelf underneath the register, he knew, was a small cloth pouch. He’d got it the day after meeting with Luisa. Inside was a boiled and dried toad, its forelegs tied together with colorful strings. “Bury it in a place of death,” the bruja had told him, “and say the name of the man you want to ruin.”
He’d been holding on to it ever since, unsure of what to do. What would be the right thing? It wasn’t all bad, his work. When Jefferson lived in a town, he wanted that town to run well. For the people to have housing. The roads to be paved. The schools running. Petty criminals kept in line. “You can have all the money, and all the sicarios you want,” Jefferson had told him once, “but if you don’t have the people’s love, you will never be secure.” Jefferson was a dangerous man, it was true. But most of the work Abel did made things better for the people in La Vigia. Perhaps that’s what really matters.
He was no hero, he knew that. Heroism was what Luisa did. Heroism got towns destroyed, women raped, men tortured and murdered. Perhaps he should burn the list of people going into the foundation. Perhaps he should tell Jefferson to go fuck himself, be tortured to death, and go up to Heaven as a saint. Or perhaps he should take the toad with him to whatever was left of Chepe’s bar, bury it where his life had ended, and whisper Jefferson’s name. That was not just any place of death. It would be powerful. The most powerful place he could complete the spell.
He knelt down, grabbed that cloth pouch from where it was hidden, and held it tightly, feeling the toad’s bound legs with his fingers. Would ruin for Jefferson mean ruin for La Vigia?
—
With some victims, Luisa would ban all men from the room except for Ricardo, who was so small and self-effacing that it was less like having a man in the room than some kind of man-shaped plant, a fern with a sparse black mustache. This generally signified the victim of sexual crimes, usually rapes, though in one case a former guerrillera described her forced abortion at the hands of a FARC doctor. Guerrilleras are supposed to sleep with their comrades, but they’re not supposed to get pregnant, so the FARC doctor induced early labor at six months, took the still-living baby away, and then left it to die slowly in a basket, an event the guerrillera told us was no abortion but “the execution of the son of two revolutionaries.” It was during one of these cases that Valencia first saw Luisa slip.
The victim’s name was Alma, a woman who said she was in her thirties but had a round, childish face, with fat cheeks and a shy, pretty smile. And Alma began telling a story about how when she was young she had a paramilitary boyfriend named Osmin. Osmin was very handsome, she said, and she knew that he had other girlfriends, which made her jealous, but she was only thirteen, and he bought her things, and suggested to her that another life was possible. One day he invited her to a party at one of his boss’s homes, on the river, near Cunaviche.
“Jefferson?” Luisa said, her tone flat, seemingly disinterested. This was her slip. Alma spooked, drawing back and tensing, her whole body defensive and closed off.
“I think this was a mistake,” Alma said.
“No.” Luisa turned to Valencia. “Strike that from the record. Leave it off the transcript.”
She turned back to Alma.
“I know about him. I am from Rioclaro. Do you understand?”
Alma nodded, and started again.
She told her story coldly, robotically. In some ways, she was startlingly ineloquent. Repeating flat phrases. Cursing again and again without emotion, describing the story in a way that made it seem less something that happened to a person than to a thing. The sequences of actions were laid out like a shopping list. Alma goes to the party. Alma sees drugs and people having sex. Alma runs, frightened, to a back room. Alma is found by Jefferson. Jefferson brings in Osmin and a few others. Jefferson gives her some aguardiente. Alma starts crying because she doesn’t want to drink. Jefferson slaps her. Jefferson tells her it is his house and she is very rude. Jefferson laughs while she drinks. Jefferson says, “Look at this fucking whore.” Jefferson says, “Osmin told me you want to become a woman.”
“I was an idiot,” Alma said, her voice suddenly full of life, full of bitterness and hate. “A stupid girl.”
Carefully, but with a series of insistent, methodical questions, Luisa pushed Alma forward in the narrative. Alma told how the rape began, and how Jefferson didn’t take part, but would call in other paras from the party, the youngest ones there, each time calling out, “Hey Jhon, you want
