The story begins in the Office of the Prosecutor General in Bogotá on an ordinary Thursday in July, when prosecutor Edilson Jutsiñamuy received a call from one of his most trusted men, Agent René Nicolás Laiseca, notifying him of an incident that had taken place near Tierradentro, in southern Colombia. Early that morning, somebody had called in to the police station in San Andrés de Pisimbalá to (anonymously) report combat with heavy weaponry that had occurred on a rural road the previous evening and night. Though the area was small and very remote, the possible use of “heavy weaponry” and its implications set off alarm bells, and the information was sent up the chain to the national office in Bogotá.
Jutsiñamuy was used to getting this kind of news all the time, so he was somewhat distracted as he listened to the report. Combat with heavy weaponry? Jesus, what now? “Dissidents” again? Who had they been fighting? Had the army gotten involved? How many were dead? A little later, around eleven, he was informed that agents had spoken to a few people who lived nearby and were conducting their initial investigations. In the afternoon, Laiseca gave him an update based on the information coming in, but some of it was contradictory: “There was a violent skirmish with several vehicles and a helicopter,” the anonymous caller had said. “We didn’t hear anything unusual. It was the rainstorm—there was thunder,” said local residents.
Who was right?
Wary now, the prosecutor kept an impatient eye on the telephone, but there were no more calls. Nor any the next day, nor the day after that, which was Saturday. Agents in Inzá—the region’s municipal seat—told Laiseca that it would be best to drop the matter until something more concrete was found. At this strange silence, the prosecutor’s doubts grew. What was in that area? A bit of everything. Cauca Department, with its indigenous communities and humid alpine tundra, had been and still was one of the country’s primary hotbeds of violence.
The weekend passed without further news, but on Monday there was a development: another call in to the Inzá police station, seemingly from the same anonymous person. And once again the same report: there had been fierce combat with large-caliber weapons and several people killed last Wednesday night. The caller even mentioned a bazooka. A military scenario. Laiseca called the prosecutor to let him know.
“So our informant called back in, huh?” Edilson Jutsiñamuy asked, stroking his chin. “All right, well, what’s the caller’s voice like? What did they say?”
“According to the secretary who answered the phone, it may have been a man,” Laiseca said, “or possibly a woman.”
Jutsiñamuy gripped the handset tighter. All hail Captain Obvious, he thought.
“Great observation, Laiseca,” he said sarcastically. “That’ll help us narrow things down. Is there any other sort of living being that would be capable of calling the police?”
There was an uncomfortable silence on the line. After a long while, Laiseca ventured a response. “Of course,” he said.
“Oh, wow, you don’t say. And what sort would that be?”
“A child, boss,” Laiseca said.
That afternoon, Jutsiñamuy decided to follow his wildcat nose. There was something in this, something big. Even if there wasn’t much evidence so far. He decided to call Julieta and Johana to discuss the situation. If they were interested, they could help him figure out what the hell had happened in those chilly mountains and whether it truly required Bogotá’s attention, which would help him avoid butting in from afar, since his colleagues in Popayán were sure to accuse him of snatching local cases from them.
He hunted in his pocket for his cell phone and dialed.
“Well, this is a surprise!” Julieta said when she picked up. “How’s my favorite prosecutor?”
Through the handset she heard a quiet but protracted giggle that reminded her of Bugs Bunny.
“I’ve got a bit of a weird situation, Julieta, very delicate,” Jutsiñamuy said. “There was a gunfight on a backroad near Tierradentro. It could be something big.”
“Soldiers? The ELN? Dissidents? Criminals?”
“Not clear yet,” Jutsiñamuy said, “but I think it’s a matter to be discussed in person.”
They agreed to meet up in their usual spot, and half an hour later they were sitting at a table at the Juan Valdez café on 53rd Street and 7th Avenue. Jutsiñamuy, in keeping with indigenous culture, didn’t drink coffee, not even at eleven A.M. He was a tea drinker.
“It was on the road that goes to San Andrés de Pisimbalá,” he explained, “a narrow mountain road that crosses the Páez River and then, after a lot of twists and turns, ends up in Tierradentro. Have you heard of the place? Decorated tombs, hypogea—you must have seen them on TV. It’s Páez, or Nasa, territory. An anonymous witness says there was gunfire and explosions from a number of cars. Even a helicopter, which is really weird since the army didn’t report engaging in any combat that day. But then something happened and everything suddenly went quiet. Some of the locals claimed the noise was thunder and rain.”
“How did you hear about it?” Julieta asked.
“The police station in San Andrés de Pisimbalá reported the first anonymous call to the headquarters in Inzá, and since they mentioned ‘heavy weaponry,’ it got sent to the Office of the Prosecutor General’s internal network. One of my men saw the report and called to ask about it, but when the officers went to the scene, they said there was nothing there. As if somebody was trying to cover up what happened.”
“Did anybody die?” Johana asked, glancing at her boss for permission to speak.
“Not clear yet because nobody can confirm it,” Jutsiñamuy said, “but the caller said several did. It would be weird if nobody went down in a dustup like that. If it’s what I’m guessing, it could be serious. And if somebody’s trying to cover it up, even worse.”
“Tell me what your guess is, Edilson,” Julieta prodded him. “It’s true sometimes people hear thunder and start concocting conspiracies, but if you’re sitting here in Bogotá worrying about a gunfight in a town in Cauca, it’s because there’s something going on.”
“I’m not positive, though, and that’s why I want you to poke around before I get involved, shall we say, officially. It could be a good story, right? The people in that area are all from the Nasa community and lived through the war. Combat and local color. Remember, it was FARC territory for decades. Johanita can confirm that for us, right?”
She nodded.
“It’s just a matter of finding out what happened,” the prosecutor continued, “if in fact anything did happen. But I think it did—I can smell it from here. Something juicy.”
The roar of a minibus accelerating on 7th Avenue drowned out his last words. Three drops fell on the terrace awning, announcing rain. A sparrow landed on one of the arms of a streetlight.
“I know you wouldn’t have called me otherwise,” Julieta said. “And I appreciate it.”
Jutsiñamuy scratched his chin and peered up at the storm clouds. A plane lurched out from behind Guadalupe Hill. Which city was it coming from? He took a long, slow sip of tea, aware that Julieta and Johana were waiting for him.
“It’s definitely not people from the area,” he said. “If it had been locals fighting, there’d be more information.”
“We’ll have to start by finding the person who made the call,” Johana said. “And look for traces of the combat on the road to confirm it took place.”
“The one thing we never see is God, and we still believe in him,” the prosecutor said. “Everybody else always leaves something behind, even it’s just a bit of thread or a hair. And then the police find it.”
“Is this story worth the trouble?” Julieta asked.
“I called you because I know you, and I know you like getting in on the ground floor,” Jutsiñamuy said. “Let’s work together on this.”
They got up from the table, and the drizzle intensified a bit.
Before they parted ways, out on the sidewalk on 7th Avenue, Jutsiñamuy said, “One last thing, I almost forgot.”
“What?”
“The anonymous caller was a kid.”
“A kid?”
“It could have been a Nasa kid—there are a lot of them in the area. We’d have to look. But it’s odd. The Nasa are shy and don’t put much stock in police authority; they rely on the indigenous warlord instead. Anyway, I wanted to give you that tidbit.”
They returned to the office and Julieta checked her datebook. She didn’t have any important appointments that week, and the truth was she was low on pieces. It was an intriguing story, and she made the decision without much deliberation.
“We’ll head to Tierradentro tomorrow,” she told Johana, “to find out what happened. Something interesting might come out of it. Go ahead and set up the trip.”
She went home and packed a small suitcase. They’d only be gone a couple of days. Then she took the two boys to her ex-husband Joaquín’s apartment, since she didn’t dare leave them alone. They were teenagers, and though she couldn’t stand seeing Joaquín, she had no choice. She hated his stupid smirk. It made her want to slap him.
“If they’re going to go out at night, please tell them not to get a girl pregnant, OK?” she said.
“Don’t be paranoid, Juli,” Joaquín objected. “You’re such a nag about this. There’s a sex ed class at their school—or do you think they’re animals or something?”
She hated it when he called her that, by the shortened form of her name. She detested everything about him.
“Just talk to them,” she said. “For your information, the Anglo has an alarmingly high teen pregnancy rate. Just because they’re preppies doesn’t mean they’re not idiots.”
“You can’t be serious,” Joaquín said.
“Look it up on the internet if you don’t believe me. Bye. And lock up the liquor or at least mark the level of booze in the bottles.”
“You want me to institute the Third Reich in my apartment! I don’t like it when you call our boys preppies, you hear? They have names: Jerónimo and Samuel.”
“I do remember that,” Julieta retorted. “And while we’re on the subject, if you call me Juli one more time, I’ll open that goddamn window and jump.”
“You’d land on the Escobars’ balcony and look like an ass,” Joaquín said. “At most you might break a leg or flatten their grill. They do a mean barbecue.”
“Fine,” Julieta said. “Buy them thin condoms, the ultrasensitive ones, because otherwise they won’t wear them. Ask at the drugstore for condoms for preppy boys. They’re the most expensive ones.”
Joaquín shrugged and gave her a haughty look, as if to say, “My sons are the young kings of the castle, just like their dad. Stop being such a pain.”
On her way back to her car, Julieta thought, I was so stupid and blind to get involved with an asshole like that. In her mind she’d made a list of adjectives that described him: opportunistic, unsophisticated, arrogant, ambitious, self-important, stupid, aggressive, idiotic, selfish, deceitful, boastful, lazy, unscrupulous, intense, dull, ordinary, thoughtless, crude, big-headed, prickish, insolent, spoiled, obtuse, cruel, rat-bastard, dumb as a post . . .
Life was a game of Russian roulette.
As she’d read once, “A person should live a posteriori.” How had she ended up with Joaquín? After three years with a bohemian painter, a drug addict and boozehound, she’d desperately needed something grounding. And then Joaquín had appeared: a lawyer from the University of El Rosario who specialized in suing the capital district of Bogotá, a partner at Los Lagartos, bilingual, knew his way around a wine menu, a good cook (“the kind of guy who knows how to use arugula in salads,” she used to say, back when she still loved him), and to top it off he knew a dozen Bob Dylan songs by heart (“it’s impossible to love somebody who doesn’t know who Bob Dylan is,” she also used to say). They got engaged when she started becoming obsessed with having children, that biological urge that some women feel deep inside, which torments them and blackens their sight. The marriage started off all right, fully dedicated to the reproductive endeavor. But the lengthy pregnancies and the bell jar that descends over every woman newly transformed into a mother contaminated the air: decaffeinated VIP clubbing; trysts on farms in Anapoima; weekends in Aruba or Punta Cana, or worse, in the beach-fringed shopping mall commonly known as Panama; Iranian music concerts at the Teatro Mayor; trips to the Hay Festival in Cartagena; Zacapa rum and cocaine. Gradually poisoned by the Bogotá aristocracy, she swiftly became bored. From then on, everything was contradiction. She hated the Iranian music concerts, the transplanted Sundance Film Festival showings, the visits to world museums at the movie theater on Saturdays. Whereas Joaquín loved the aseptic, important, and buttoned-up literature of AA, she secretly preferred the unruly, cruel, and nocturnal novels of BB.
And that’s how it was with everything.
AA versus BB in movies, in music, in restaurants and bars.
She stopped feeling desire. Maybe it was because of the kids, as one therapist told her. Whatever the case, sex ceased to give her pleasure. What she found most exciting, besides smoking joints in Villa de Leyva and occasionally eating mushrooms, was a heteroflexible group sex experience. Even today, ten years later, she still conjured it up in bed.
It was the best thing she had.
The end came after an epic fight over something that was, oddly, completely trivial (how spicy a dip that they would be serving to friends should be). It was the point of no return, and Joaquín moved out at last. Now free, Julieta threw herself body and soul into rituals. One Saturday she stripped the sheets off her king-size bed and, even though new they’d cost 1,650,000 pesos at Zara Home, burned them at a cousin’s farm near Tabio. An act of purification. Seeing that high-thread-count fabric lapped by flames, fabric in which she’d spent the last seven years, where she’d made her children, and that, even though they were washed regularly, must still contain particles of their bodies—pubic hairs, faint traces of discharge or semen—anyway, as she watched that intimacy go up in smoke, being erased from reality, she took swigs from a box of unsweetened Néctar aguardiente, which Joaquín always viewed as a sign of moral degeneracy.
She felt happy, laughing and pouring shots into the fire in a sort of auto-da-fé.
AA versus BB.
Still not satisfied, she decided to change the entire apartment. She rolled up and gave away the old rugs, got rid of paintings, took down picture frames. Her two sons, Samuel and Jerónimo, watched her go back and forth carrying boxes, unable to believe what they were seeing, saying, “Look, Mom, stop, if this is what you want, we should just move to another place, don’t you think?” She redid the living room with ethnic-inspired decor and changed the vibe with indirect lighting (Joaquín couldn’t stand pseudo-hippie dimness). She bought handicrafts and ordered Indonesian fabrics, started using incense, even bought a menorah in the Jewish section at Pricesmart, not because she was Jewish but to have somewhere to put more candles. Then her transformation obsession shifted to music: no more Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen, but instead her beloved Cuban ballads, which Joaquín deemed lame and outmoded.
Discovering that she was lonely, she started hanging out with her colleagues more, and after a cookout at the home of a Chilean correspondent she ended up kissing and then going to bed with another legal reporter, Víctor Silanpa, and kept seeing him from time to time.
Better a fuck buddy—or several—than another husband.
She put it like this: “I’m bored by the idea of another steady man. You spend all that time getting to know what he likes, meeting his friends, his family, learning his allergies, the things he hates—in politics, religion, soccer—knowing what excites him or pisses him off, not to mention meeting his parents and attempting to get along with them, or having to put up with a spoiled brat sister or niece . . . What a joke. And if he has kids, nightmare territory.”
Silanpa was the one who introduced me to her, which is how I got to know some of her stories in detail—I’m talking files, journals, photos, all the elements that would enable me to tell those stories persuasively and effectively.
But let’s get back to this one.