She said everything flatly, without emotion, but as she described the rape she began punctuating the story with the phrase, “It was horrible,” said in the same flat tone. “Another boy came. It was horrible. I was in so much pain. It was horrible. It was so horrible. I called Osmin but he looked away. It was horrible. It was horrible. It was horrible.”
At the end, Jefferson made Alma thank each one of her rapists for “pleasing her.” This seemed to bother Alma more than any other aspect of the rape. The flat tone shifted to the hateful one. “I looked each one in the eye. Thank you, you pleased me very much. Thank you, that was so good.” She took a breath. “If I looked away, he made me say it again.”
Valencia found this unbearable to listen to. She stared at her hands, ashamed even to be in the same room with this woman. Her lunch, greasy fried pasteles, turned in her stomach. She wanted to vomit.
“What did he say to you?” Luisa asked. “I mean, what did he tell you to say? The words.”
“I told you. He made me . . . I thanked them.”
Luisa asked again, Alma hedged again, Luisa asked her to remember. Valencia nervously stared at her computer screen where the audio wave appeared in mountains and valleys of indifferent data. She thought of Luisa’s demand that during the interviews she give the victims her complete attention, and to not show any pity or shame. She forced herself to stare into Alma’s face, which was blank, unaffected, as if the words were coming from some other person. It was not how she imagined a person would sound, telling such a story. Was there a right way for the story to be told? And was there a right way for the story to be listened to? What should you feel as you hear it? Should you cry? That would be the wrong thing. A disgusting, self-indulgent thing. So what? What do you do with stories like this? Later, she would transcribe it and hope the Colombian state threw Alma some money, though it was not clear the rape constituted a political crime. The other day Sara told her about a woman whose husband had refused to pay the “revolutionary tax” to the FARC, and so he’d been tied to a pole while four FARC raped her in front of him. That was a political rape. Rape as a tool of war. Would Alma’s rape count?
Eventually, Alma settled on a specific phrasing. Jefferson, who did not participate in the rape so much as orchestrate it, stood above her and said: “Tell them they pleased you. Or we can give you more.”
Luisa nodded. “You were smart to do what you did,” she said. “They would have killed you.”
Alma nodded in response to Luisa’s nod, but her face showed she neither understood nor agreed.
“What you did, very hard, after that torture. You’re a berraca.”
Alma, unconvinced, nodded again.
“Believe me,” Luisa said, with that authority she wielded. “I know.”
Then Alma told how she stayed with Osmin after the rape, even though he held it against her, and even beat her, and blamed her for having been with so many men. Osmin told her that girls who did what she did ended up working for Jefferson in a brothel in Cunaviche, but he had protected her, even though she was dirty. Then Osmin got her pregnant, but she miscarried, and he said it was a sign. He left her, and disappeared soon after.
“People said the guerrilla had caught him and tortured him to death,” Alma said. “I heard that and felt nothing. I was like a corpse, then. I was a corpse when he beat me. I was a corpse when he slept with me. And I was a corpse when I became pregnant. Of course the baby died. A corpse can only give birth to dead things.”
Alma told them that she fled to the guerrilla not long after that. There was no life for her in her town, where she was a tainted woman. And she told them how, in the FARC, she began to feel freer, and how there were more opportunities for women, even though the new recruits were also supposed to sleep with their campañeros, which she found difficult at first. As she told of her life in the FARC, her flat tone became inflected with other notes.
“My first combat, I went with the machine-gun detachment,” she said, smiling. “There is no discrimination in the FARC, the women fight in the front. But I only had a pistol. Still, even if I had to go with nothing but my own two hands, I would have gone. I’m not afraid to fight. The smell of it excites me. It’s like nothing else. I’ve never been scared. For me, it’s like going to a party. I would sing and jump and skip because it makes me happy fighting.”
It was, by that point, only mildly surprising to Valencia to hear that Alma was an ex-guerrillera. One of the people she had come here, in a spirit of Christian compassion, to forgive.
Luisa asked Alma why she left the FARC.
“To have children,” she said. “I have two children now,” she said. “My husband and I are very happy. But the corpse, the corpse of the girl I was, many days the corpse reaches up and grabs me, and it is terrible. I would like it to stop.”
Luisa walked
