They left that place the next day and headed to a district where some friends lived who could take them in. On their way, they were captured by soldiers who made them stand in a bare field under the biting sun and said they’d kill them on the spot. Although all she felt was anger, she cried and cried as though she were afraid because that’s what her aunt had told her to do if something like what was happening right then were to happen. According to her, if they didn’t cry, the men might think they were defying them. It was a form of self-preservation. The aunt would be responsible for begging on all their behalf, for saying, Please don’t hurt us, we’re nobody. We don’t owe anyone anything and we don’t know what’s going on. Even though she did know. It was clear. In her movements, her aunt had not hesitated, nor trembled, and she had been walking in a very particular direction. The girl knew her well and understood that her pleading eyes weren’t real and that her aunt wasn’t one to beg. She begged because it was part of the plan, just as passing her off as her daughter—even though they looked nothing alike—was part of the plan to get her to a safe haven her father had told her about. Swallowing her pride was a small price to pay, and even though all she felt was rage and the urge to hit those men just as she had the girls by the river, she cried out of obligation.
Her cousins, on the other hand, cried for real, especially when the soldiers’ commander, the fattest man they’d ever seen, said he’d take them and raise them as his own. The girls were very young. Their mother hadn’t prepared them for this. She’d taught them how to get by without food, how not to scream at the sound of gunfire, how to hide in the hills if anything happened, but she hadn’t taught them to face death or the possibility of spending the rest of their lives with a man who sweated heavily and hid his eyes behind dark glasses. To the girl, he said he’d rape her, ’cause she was already fine-looking, he added, as if she were a piece of fruit.
She figured it must be a nasty and tense ordeal, because in the days of preparation her aunt had warned her they might threaten to do that to her to pry information from her. She taught her never to tell them a thing, neither the name nor the location of anything they asked about, even if in the end they did do the thing they were threatening to do. She should just cry harder than ever and ask them to please stop. Otherwise the men might think she liked what they were doing and enjoyed being with them. She’d never been with a man, and felt no desire or curiosity to be with one, unlike some of the other girls at school. She had to ask her aunt what rape was and then, when her aunt said it was sex by force, had to ask what sex was because she didn’t know that either. She had to imagine a good part of it because her aunt’s explanation was very terse. Still, it was more illuminating than anything her mother, who’d never discussed such matters, ever said about it. She’d never even warned her about menstruation, or given her any support when it arrived. She’d let her cry on seeing her stained panties, cry because she didn’t know what was going on, keep crying because she thought she’d hollow out and die from all the bleeding, then sort it out on her own.
What stuck with her from that conversation with her aunt was the notion that she should always be careful, that she shouldn’t go to any old place or lose her virginity to someone she didn’t love, like the soldiers’ commander or any of that lot. Then, as she tried to summon up more tears to protect herself, some men came and told the commander they’d found the guerrillas at a farm not far away, which was where she and her aunt had been heading. The man turned to face the soldiers and told them to get moving straightaway. They set off like a pack of hounds. They leveled fences, they leveled rocks, and they forgot all about them.
One of the last to leave came up to them and said, This is when you go. He insisted: Run. Go. They stood still, not because they were paralyzed by fear, but because they couldn’t believe that one of the soldiers might be willing to help. The aunt had warned the girls that they might try and pull this sort of trick, that they might try and get them to believe they were on their side, only to shoot them in the back. She didn’t know if that was more painful than taking a bullet head-on, but it was more humiliating, so she didn’t move. One of the daughters did. Then the other soldier who’d stayed behind told her to stop, drew a line in the dirt with his boot, and said, Step over this this line and your brains stay here.
The first one who’d spoken said, Let them go, it’s your brains that’ll be sprayed here, and turned to them again and said, Come on. The aunt felt confident then and gestured to them to get moving. Without any thanks, without looking back. She led the girls to a different place from the one she’d initially intended, an impromptu shelter. Because the first one had fallen. Then the girl parted ways with her aunt. And it was good that she did. Not long after, the soldiers were on her aunt’s heels. Someone had tipped them off to the fact that she wasn’t her aunt’s daughter but the daughter of one of the men on their wanted list.
She set off to look for him. Nobody had told her where he was, but she figured he might be in the village named after a flower, where he’d been born and often went to speak with other men. She walked to it and there he was, sitting beside the usual men, except now they had firearms slung over their shoulders. He was proud that she was alive. She told him what she’d been through the past few days. His face expressed no shock. She didn’t notice. Her own anguish was enough for the both of them. She said, Father, let’s go. The men eyed each other in silence. One nodded. Then her father said he couldn’t go because they might kill him, and her, too. She should return home and take care of her mother and her siblings. He would stay there to fight and protect them all. He’d joined up and would remain with the group while he had life and strength to. Her aunt’s husband as well. He didn’t ask after her or the girls, not because he didn’t care but because, if he were captured, he didn’t want to know anything that could prove dangerous or harmful to them. But his niece didn’t realize this, so she told him of the hill where they’d stayed and the district they were heading to, should he want to join them.
Her father didn’t keep her any longer. He gave her his blessing and urged her to leave. So she set off to search for her mother and her little brothers and sisters at their house, which was now just a pile of ashes.
First, her mother had gone with everyone else to the hills, to hide out for a few days. Then, like them, she’d returned home, but had been forced to leave again by order of the soldiers. While the girl and her aunt were being followed, the soldiers were herding all those people into one place and telling them, as they’d told her, that they were going to kill them. They wanted the names and whereabouts of their husbands and sons. They wanted to find them and kill them, to put an end to everything right away then go home and live peaceful lives. But they couldn’t give orders. To shoot, they had to wait for permission. They were authorized only to strike them one by one and as many times as they liked, regardless of age, for information. Which is what they did. They asked and they struck. They asked and they swore. They asked and then asked again, struck again, cursed again. No one breathed a word, except for one of her younger brothers, the one who looked most like his father, the one who knew how to read the water and the weather. He said, That’s enough. You’ve done enough damage. If you’re going to kill us, just kill us.
A soldier struck him in the face. He said he wasn’t the one in charge and knocked him to the ground. He said they could kill him whenever they liked. Which was a lie. But they weren’t in charge either. And they weren’t dying to kill children. In fact, some were relieved when they received the order to let the people be and go after the guerrillas that’d been spotted at a farm not far from there. Others felt nothing. It was a way of surviving.
They told them to leave and not come back. The mothers asked where they were meant to go: their homes were there. There was no place else. But soon they wouldn’t have those either. Minutes later, the soldiers set fire to everything. To all the men’s work, all the women’s hours, all the children’s chores, the recently done-up doors, the passed-down walls. Everything they had sowed and that still stood tall after the invasion was turned to the ash she found when she came looking for them.
The only sound in all that silence was her weeping, which she neither faked nor choked down because this time there was no one around to tell her to stop and no one to pretend for. She cried for her father and all they’d lost. She didn’t shed tears for her mother or her little brothers and sisters because she knew, without anyone having to tell her, that they were alive, someplace safe: the house they’d once lived in by the bay. And this is where she went. Alone, she followed the path her father had told her to take if some unimaginable thing were to happen, a thing he hadn’t described so as not to scare her, but which was without a doubt what she was experiencing right then.
Her three older brothers, who’d also hidden in the hills while the helicopters fired at them, arrived along that same path a few days later. Unlike her, they were coming to say goodbye. They were off to join their father in the mountains, where they’d fight and stand up for the people. They wanted their mother to know this and to bless them in case they never saw her again. They also wanted to tell their brave little brother all the ways he could help, and to teach him some stuff they’d learned about working the land so that, from then on, he could take over. Then they left.
Like her father, they didn’t say where they were going, but she knew how to find them. Whenever she wanted to see them, or whenever her mother wanted to send them word, she took the paths her father had told her about and went to their camp. The other men laughed nervously. They said if the national guard had gotten hold of her, they would’ve been lost long ago. She didn’t see what was so funny about it. She didn’t want them to see her as a traitor, not even in jest. They told her that wasn’t the case at all. As proof, they sometimes sent messages to their families through her. On those occasions, she had to go off-track and spend a few nights somewhere else before going home.
Her mother got used to her absences and learned to take advantage of her time at home, getting her to draw plenty of water and do a household chore or two. It would’ve been pointless to make her stay. Once melancholy took hold, she’d walk those paths to be with her father, to sleep by his side, and to horse around with him a bit if he had the time. Just like before the invasion.