In the common room, Valencia lingered by the smelly fridge rather than joining Sara and Professor Agudelo at the table. It felt as though something should be said, though more than that it felt as though nothing should be said.
“To work!” Luisa shouted when she popped her head out of her office and saw her like that, useless. As she shook herself free of lethargy, Luisa added, “Tomorrow is easier. We will take a trip to a destroyed village. With a man who was in the paramilitaries. A man who still works for Jefferson.”
Luisa laughed, but no one else said anything. Sara raised her eyebrows slightly.
Professor Agudelo rolled his eyes. “Oh, don’t let her bait you. It’s just the same kind of work. You’ll see.”
And the next morning, they got in a van and drove to a shuttered shop on the road into town, where a man in his late twenties was waiting by the side of the road. He shook their hands, and he told them that he was a victim, and an ex-combatant, and that his name was Abel.
—
The journalist was a woman. Muscular, thin, pale. A face that could have been pretty when she was younger but seemed to have been out too long in the sun. Afghanistan and Iraq, she’d said. Abel figured there was a lot of sun there. And of all the people in the van—the professor, the students—she was the only one who really spoke to him, or gave him a kind glance. He felt an old feeling, shame. It reminded him of when he’d just left the paras. Then, it had spurred him to change his life, to move forward. Maybe it was a good thing.
The first relic they passed was the old missionary school. Simple. Concrete. Also shrunken in the way that all childhood grandeur shrinks under adult eyes.
“This was the school I told you about,” he said.
The journalist seemed to notice something in his voice, some betrayal of feeling, and she turned to the professor and said, “We stop?”
He grimaced and slowed the van down, made a U-turn, and drove back to the abandoned building. The professor nodded to one of the students. “Sara, you’ll want to get this.” And as they all left the van Sara hefted her camera to her shoulder, then walked over to Abel, reached without asking to the battery pack for the microphone the other student had threaded up through his shirt and pinned to his collar, and turned it on. She didn’t ask, she just did it.
“What do you want me to say?”
Sara shrugged.
“What happened here?” the journalist asked.
“People said the guerrilla kidnapped the teachers but it wasn’t true.”
He walked in front of the padlocked doors. The camerawoman moved slowly in, closer and closer to his face. He looked past her, to the professor.
“They left. They’d been threatened by both sides. Guerrilla. Paramilitaries. So they escaped in the middle of the night. Safer that way, but I think we told ourselves they were chained in the jungle so it wouldn’t seem like they’d abandoned us.”
“Were they good teachers?”
“Yes.”
The journalist made a motion with her head toward the doors, with their rusty lock, and then at the three shattered windows on the side of the building.
“Empty rooms,” Abel said.
The journalist snapped a few photos, then they got back in the van.
The next set of ruins was a house with no roof, with trees growing inside and thrusting their branches out of the windows. The professor slowed the van but Abel shook his head.
“No, not here,” he said. “This was abandoned.” He tried to remember the name of the family. Cabrales? Rovira? “Not from the guerrilla.”
“Did you know Luisa when you lived here?” the professor asked.
Abel shook his head. He didn’t think Luisa wanted anyone to know too much about their past.
“Okay,” the professor said. “Take us to where it happened.”
So Abel took them to where it happened. A cluster of abandoned buildings, all overgrown, some with walls knocked down, and the faint outline of what had been Chepe’s bar before the FARC had hustled his family and friends inside and burned them to death. He walked down what had been the main street. Sara filmed him and the journalist photographed him as he knelt down and touched the dirt. He cupped some, and then poured it through his hands. It seemed he had split in two, and there was one Abel who was walking the grounds of his old village, doing the things he was supposed to do, and another Abel watching, wondering what they were thinking that he was thinking, what they were feeling as they watched him and imagined that some great feeling was going on when in fact there was nothing. Nothing inside at all. He walked to the overgrown footprint of Chepe’s bar and pulled shoots of grass from the earth, and let them fall to the ground. There was nothing inside him.
Click click click. He could hear the journalist taking photos. He could feel the weight of the microphone’s battery pack on his belt. Click click click. The only thing that cared less than that reporter about what had happened here, about his parents and sisters, was that camera. Mechanical. Indifferent. Click.
“You told the foundation,” the reporter said, “that . . . was it Gustavo?”
“Gustavo was tortured.”
Sara began taking slow, careful steps toward him, like a cat stalking a bird.
“But you weren’t here. How do you know?”
That was a good question. He couldn’t even remember where he’d first heard what they’d done. He just knew he believed it.
“Torture is very important,” he said. “It was the same in the paracos. Your new fighters are children, but you have to make them men. So when the FARC catch a
