CHAPTER THREE

the putumayo

1994

The journey by bus from Facatativá to Palos de la Quebrada took over twenty-four hours, traveling on dusty roads. Ignacio had to change buses twice and noticed that the passengers on each bus eyed one another suspiciously. As the hours passed and the Andes faded behind them, leaving the coolness of the mountains painted with emerald hues to enter the metallic-green jungle with its stupefying heat and humidity, Ignacio became covered in sweat and was stung by pertinacious mosquitoes. On both sides of the road, behind the wall of vegetation, lay an inscrutable world. One-horse towns with names like Mocoa, Puerto Asis, and Puerto Leguízamo appeared on the borders of the jungle, breaking up the monotony. The bus crossed bridges over the waters of the Putumayo, Caquetá, Orito, San Miguel, and Macayá rivers. Ignacio was hearing many of these names for the first time. For the first time, too, he saw the Quichuas, Ingas, Sionas, and Vitotos Indians who lived in protected areas. Ignacio had heard at school that these Indian communities welcomed the evangelical missionaries, who competed with the Catholic church in proselytizing the locals. These religious groups, in the absence of government agencies, helped the displaced people who had been forced to abandon their homes in the jungle.

The bus moved past oil refineries that sent up foul jets of smoke, blackening large areas of the sky. The workers lived in wood shacks inside sprawling compounds that were hemmed in by barbed wire and littered with plastic and glass bottles, metal containers, and heaps of garbage where vultures fought for scraps. On sandy clearings along the muddy rivers, Ignacio observed men digging and panning for gold. Sometimes, when rays of sunlight hit the strainers the miners used to sift the metal from the sand and water, golden flashes fleetingly blinded him. In places where the miners had already finished looking for gold, there were yawning craters, as if meteorites had crashed into the earth. Ignacio saw large fields being burned for cultivation or for raising cattle. The bus traveled for many miles before he saw a wild animal crossing the road, or even a bird flying. The emaciated Indians who sold fruit and water on the roadside looked with glazed eyes at the travelers. Occasionally, in the distant mountains, bright green patches of land were visible where the coca plant was cultivated.

The detritus of war was everywhere: rivers choked with crude oil, spilled from pipelines blown up by the guerrillas. Bloated carcasses of animals coursed along the oil-thick waters. The stench of rotting flesh was overpowering. The passengers who stared straight ahead stoically, Ignacio decided, were the locals; the newcomers to the region, like himself, stuck their heads out of the open windows to retch.

During the excruciatingly long hours on the bus, Ignacio reflected on how his life had turned into an ongoing journey with unknown destinations. Where, and when, would his travels stop? Each new geographic move was another step distancing him farther from the world of his parents.

The second day on the bus, as the sun set, the sky for a few minutes turned a bright crimson that made Ignacio think of a ceiling painted with fresh blood. When darkness fell, many passengers took out their rosaries and began to pray. The passengers spoke in whispers; when they talked to someone across the aisle, their voices quavered and their gestures were jumpy. Ignacio wanted to fall asleep and wake up when the bus arrived in Palos de la Quebrada, but his fear of what might happen under the cover of night kept him awake.

As the bus barreled down the road in the darkness, some passengers suddenly cried out and jerked away from their windows, pointing at severed heads hanging from the vegetation that canopied the thoroughfare. Each time the low-hanging heads bumped against the roof of the bus or brushed against the windows, smearing the surface of the glass, the passengers would shriek again.

Despite the terror that gripped him, Ignacio forced himself to keep his eyes closed; eventually, he fell asleep. When he woke up, the sun was rising, and his fellow passengers were quiet, but they looked as if they hadn’t slept all night. To his great relief, the horror of nighttime on the road in the Putumayo had dissipated.

The bus came to a stop in front of a wooden house where people had gathered. Ignacio was the only passenger who got off at Palos de la Quebrada. He had been told before he left Colegio San José that the seminary in the Putumayo had been notified of the day of his arrival. After the conductor handed him his suitcase, Ignacio realized that nobody had come to meet him. The locals stared at him suspiciously, so he made an effort to hide his distress. Ignacio approached a man seated behind a table on the sidewalk. He looked like the person who sold bus tickets. Ignacio smiled and said, “Good morning, sir. Can you point me in the direction of the seminary.” The man’s gaze of hostility abruptly softened and the people around him seemed to accept Ignacio’s presence in the town.

He was pointed toward a path that wandered away from the village. Seemingly impenetrable jungle bordered both sides of the sandy path. He crossed a soccer field strewn with pebbles and prickly nettles. In the distance he could see a wooden church among a scattering of buildings with thatched roofs. Though it was still early in the morning, Ignacio’s shirt was already drenched in sweat, so he walked as fast as he could to reach the place where his vocation would be tested for the next five years.

* * *

The numbing heat that drained his energy, the asphyxiating humidity, being drenched in sweat during the hottest hours of the day, the nightly torment of the mosquitoes—all these took some time getting used to. The twenty-five brothers in the community were friendly and helpful, but there was so much to learn that everything went by in a blur. Other than his chats with Father Daniel, there was nothing Ignacio missed about Colegio San José. He was eager to see what life in Palos would hold for him.

At irregular intervals during the day, and with regularity at night, single gunshots were interspersed with the rattling cacophony of machine guns. The gunfire sounded like it was coming from nearby. Ignacio noticed he was the only one in the seminary who seemed distracted by the sounds. Was the army doing target practice? One afternoon gunfire suddenly went off as he was walking in the yard with Iván, a tall black seminarian who had befriended him. In two more years, Iván would be graduating and leaving the Putumayo.

Iván chuckled when he saw Ignacio shudder. “That, by the way,” he said, “is the soundtrack in this place. Relax—most of the time those aren’t real shots. The guerrillas play tapes of gunfire through loudspeakers hidden in the jungle lest people forget we’re in a war zone. It’s their way of keeping everyone in a state of constant fear.” He paused, letting Ignacio digest this. “But sometimes the machine-gun fire is from the police or the army shooting at the guerrillas. It’s the government’s way of reminding people that the Colombian armed forces are here in the region. After a while you’ll become immune to those sounds and you’ll begin to think of the gunshots as the equivalent of frantic drums in the background during Tarzan movies.”

Ignacio laughed, though he had never seen a Tarzan movie. Iván’s matter-of-fact explanation unsettled him, but remembering Brother Daniel’s advice to speak with caution, he didn’t ask any questions.

* * *

Ignacio followed, to the letter, the strict routines, and soon he found comfort in their numbing mindlessness. He awoke with the first tolling of the bell at four a.m. Sweaty and sticky, he was still half-asleep as he rushed to the communal bathrooms to shower. By five o’clock, refreshed by the cold water, he was dressed and waiting in the chapel for the heavy-eyed dawdlers.

Afterward, on their knees, the community observed a period of silence for an hour. When they left the chapel the tops of the trees were dabbed in the pink light of the rising sun and a riotous chorus of birdsong greeted them. It was Ignacio’s favorite time of day, because it was still cool and the morning music cheered him.

He marched off to attend to his duties, which included watering the vegetable gardens, helping with the milking of four cows, and removing fresh eggs from the chicken coops. He liked that one week he would help to cook, another week he’d sweep the floors, or keep the chapel spotless, or wash and iron clothes, or make sure that the large earthenware jars standing in the cool shady corners of the buildings were filled with water from the well. Twice a day he would poke a stick into the damp corners beneath the water vessels to make sure no scorpions were hiding there. On his parents’ farm there were scorpions everywhere. Since they liked to crawl into shoes at night, Ignacio and his siblings had slept with their shoes on, or placed them under their pillows. After he arrived in Facatativá, he thought he’d never have to deal with scorpions again. But in Palos, every night before he got into bed, he checked for the venomous pests beneath his pillow and blanket.

By the time he’d arrive at the refectory at seven fifteen, Ignacio was weak with hunger. Father Superior sat at the head of the table, with the novitiates taking their assigned seats. A friar would read aloud for ten minutes about the life of a saint. When Father Superior said, “Enough,” they’d recite a prayer of thanks for the day’s food, and then have one cup of café con leche each, a piece of the coarse dry cassava bread that the Indians ate, and some days, as a special treat, a banana. After they had finished their breakfast, Father Superior would remark, “Thank you, God, for the holy hands that prepared our meal.” Ignacio would laugh like everyone else, but he had to struggle not to roll his eyes.

He succeeded in hiding his boredom during the morning classes in liturgy and ornamentation, where they learned about the various objects used for Mass, which linens were considered sacred, how to pour the sacramental wine, and when a certain prayer was said. He dutifully learned everything involved in the Mass ritual, but he looked forward to the classes in theology, the humanities, and philosophy—subjects which the seminary took pride in teaching from a secular point of view. In the afternoons, the seminarians studied psychology, Spanish literature, and Latin, which Ignacio also enjoyed. He decided to throw himself into his studies. The sameness of the days in the seminary was somewhat relieved by the strict academic routines because they made the hours go faster. He found consolation in reminding himself that in a few years he would be able to go to university, perhaps in Bogotá.

A bowl of soup for lunch was followed by an hour-long siesta. At this time of day, the heat was so intense that even the flies dozed off as the jungle fell silent. At five o’clock, when the heat had lessened, classes were over for the day. Then the seminarians were free to play soccer, go for walks, read, and get together to chat and play checkers, Parcheesi, or chess. It was the only time that was all their own. Dinner at five forty-five was invariably rice and red beans, and sometimes fried ripe plantains as well. For dessert they each got a slice of the salty white cheese with guava paste that was made in the seminary. As they ate, the seminarians shared what they had done and learned that day.

Around six thirty villagers would begin arriving to the chapel to say evening prayers, which included reciting the rosary. Afterward, for an hour, the community played tapes of religious music. The music pouring out of the speakers in the bell tower served to momentarily drown out the gunfire echoing in the jungle. Before they went to bed, the seminarians said their prayers, kneeling in front of the altar in the chapel.

Instead of playing games with his classmates during his free hour, Ignacio began to go for short visits to Palos de la Quebrada. It was a dismal place, its inhabitants lethargic, as if crushed by the jungle. The main traffic on the road that crossed the town consisted of mules carrying goods and trucks loaded with timber. A bus stopped in the village every other day in front of the general store to drop off mail and merchandise to be consumed by the locals. Ignacio observed that people used the bus to travel away from Palos; it was a rare occasion when a passenger got off the bus to stay in the village. The townspeople got used to seeing Ignacio wandering about, and he enjoyed the laughter of children playing in the streets. When children called out, “Hello, Brother Ignacio,” he smiled and waved. Sometimes they followed him as he walked around without talking to him. The older men playing dominoes under shady trees tipped their hats when he passed by.

The barefoot, half-naked Indians who traversed the road in both directions, looking as if they were sleepwalking, fascinated him. Their haunted expressions suggested a desperation to hurry out of the jungle, as if they were fleeing a plague. It seemed the only plan they had was to keep walking, until they had left the region behind.

Ignacio was cautious of the fully armed people wearing fatigues that crisscrossed the town’s main street on mules. Whether they were guerrillas or paramilitaries, it was hard to tell. The Paleros regarded them all with fear. The strangers acted as if he were invisible; when they did take notice of him it was with a hostile stare.

In the company of other seminarians and teachers, Ignacio began to venture beyond Palos. He fell under the spell of the exuberance and beauty of the Putumayo region: the purling streams, their currents slowed by deep pools of still water; the roaring waterfalls, at the bottom of which lay ponds of cool transparent water, in which you could see fish as clearly as in an aquarium; the turbulent dark waters of the rivers, which hid treacherous currents; the flesh-eating fish and reptiles. Gigantic mesas (which the locals called tepuis) were the main features of this land: they rose up toward the sky like landing platforms for spacecraft. Everything in the jungle gave the appearance of being under a magnifying glass. The beauty of nature sometimes made him forget the unrelenting bugs, the parasites and worms in the water, and the poisonous vermin.

During the first weeks, the symphony of birdsong and calls—which began at dawn and reached its highest pitch around noon when the jungle seemed to burn silently in invisible flames—kept Ignacio in a daze. Frequently, clouds of confetti-colored birds crossed the sky in eerie silence. But a blue, cloudless sky could turn ominous in seconds. Torrential rains poured down without warning, forcing people and animals to seek refuge, sometimes for hours and sometimes for entire days.

It was harder to get used to the clatter of army helicopters hovering over the rooftops. From them, flyers rained down that said, If you befriend a guerrilla or give them shelter, you’ll be punished. The most common flyers promised the Paleros monetary rewards for any guerrilla they turned in. Other flyers said, Be a patriot. Denounce the guerrillas hiding among you. Join the army.

One night, as Ignacio and the brothers were filing out of the refectory, the sound of barking dogs could be heard coming from Palos; cries of terror followed. The seminarians ran outside. What looked like balloons of fire fell from the helicopters; wherever they landed—on the trees, on a field, on the thatched roofs of homes—a voracious fire was ignited.

Ignacio stood petrified, bewildered by the spectacle of these globes of flame that kept falling from the sky. The frenzied barking of the dogs and the frightened cries of children, and people whose homes had been hit, punctured the silence of the night jungle.

* * *

During his walks alone, Ignacio experienced enough peace of mind to question the life he had chosen. He was waiting for some kind of religious awakening that would show him he was on the right path. Thus far the only convincing reason he could find for choosing to become a priest was that it was a way out of his parents’ world of ignorance and poverty.

On one of his daily walks with Iván, Ignacio told him about seeing the photo of the massacre near Palos. “You can imagine the terror I felt when Father Superior at Colegio San José announced I was being sent here.”

Iván remained silent, but Ignacio was determined to have at least one of his questions answered. “I tell you this because you’re my friend. I knew very little else about life in the Putumayo. What’s happening here?”

“Where have you been all your life?” Iván snorted. “How could you be so ignorant about what’s going on in Colombia? You weren’t living in a cave in the jungle.”

“My parents couldn’t read,” Ignacio replied angrily. “There was no electricity on the farm, so I never watched television or listened to the radio. At Colegio San José news of the outside world was banned. And here we are isolated too.”

“Ignacio, everyone in Colombia knows that the guerrillas and the paramilitaries levy ‘taxes’ on the peasants and Indians in exchange for a promise to protect their crops. Otherwise, the farmers have to sell their coca and poppy harvests to the cartels, who pay the lowest prices.” Iván sighed, rolling his eyes. “Peasants get chicken feed, barely enough to keep them from starvation. In other words, the weak get screwed one way or another. You understand it now?”

For the first time in his life Ignacio began to question seriously what it meant to him to be a Barí Indian. Dressed as a seminarian he still looked Indian, but at least he was treated with a respect that the semi-naked Indians he saw in the Putumayo didn’t get from the authorities or the whites and mestizos. Ignacio was well aware that this was because he had acquired the manners of an educated white man and spoke Spanish without an accent.

When he observed the Indians who went through Palos de la Quebrada and those in the communities he came across in the jungle, he was aware of the differences between himself and the natives whose contact with white people was limited. The indigenous people who had recently settled among whites regarded him with suspicion, if not outright mistrust, as if they considered him a man who had betrayed his own people and behaved as if he were superior to them.

Ignacio’s family had left the remote settlements in the mountains just a few generations before he was born, to move closer to the schools, churches, hospitals, and jobs the whites could offer them. In turn, the Colombians, as the Barís referred to them, bought their agricultural products, the highly priced cacao in particular. They also purchased the crafts the Barís made, especially the women’s embroidered cotton fabrics and the strings of colorful stones that they wrapped around their necks and wrists; these trinkets were popular souvenirs for foreigners who visited Colombia.

The Barís Ignacio had known growing up wanted their children to attend school, to learn the ways of the whites, to understand how their world worked. The Barís had always used ancestral remedies when they fell ill, but now they knew to seek treatment from white doctors if they did not recover. Yet, no matter how much he adopted the ways of the whites and mestizos, Ignacio felt that he could still only know them from the outside. And though it was forbidden by law to abuse the indigenous population or discriminate against them, Ignacio’s people were seen as unknowable, incapable of assimilating fully into white Colombian culture. It was a painful conclusion for Ignacio.

Now and then he felt homesick for the Barí festivals, when families would gather in the countryside to dance, sing, get drunk on chicha, tell stories about their ancestors, and seek the advice of the curanderos, the medicine men who were revered because of the knowledge they had accumulated traveling from one horizon to the next.

Often the Barís sang songs that were simply lists of words they remembered in their language. Ignacio had vivid memories of the elders drinking potions made from hallucinogenic mushrooms and roots, and then sharing their visions around a bonfire.

In the month of August, his parents would bury offerings of flowers, fruit, candies, incense, aromatic woods, and rabbits and kid goats slaughtered in honor of Pachamama, the Earth Mother goddess. Later, Ignacio read that Pachamama was worshipped in the High Andes in Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, and Chile; but in Colombia, only in the mountains in Norte de Santander where he grew up. These mountains were the last stretch of the Andes before the cordillera ended in Venezuela. In secrecy, as if they were afraid of still being considered savages, Ignacio’s people had dotted the forested parts of their small farms with shrines made of rocks, feathers, animal bones, eggs, and bead necklaces, to appease and give thanks to the powerful deities who lived in the trees, rivers, ponds, streams, and under the ground.

Aside from those special occasions, Ignacio’s parents were devout Catholics who went to Mass on Sunday, confessed, took communion, and baptized their children with Christian names. During the month of May, they honored the Virgin Mary, and the Virgin of Chiquinquirá, who was half Virgin Mary, half Pachamama.

After he went to study in Facatativá, Ignacio seldom thought about the Barí religion, not because he was ashamed of his family’s Indian customs, but because he did not believe in their magical beings, just as he did not believe there was a God. And yet he couldn’t deny he felt something like the presence of God in nature, in the moon and the sun, in the elements of fire and water, and especially in the wind. Though the Barí beliefs had become diluted over the centuries, he did not reject the notion that people lived in a middle level—the one called Earth. In this middle level, the most feared deity was Old Man Wind, because He was responsible—when He was angry—for sweeping away the clouds and creating periods of near starvation from drought. Old Man Wind was also responsible for bringing new people into the middle level, and for relocating those who needed to move on to another life beyond the horizon. There, the rules of life were the same as in the world they had just left, and they were given a chance to begin again and avoid the mistakes they had made in the last world. However, those who had learned their lessons in the first world would not have to move on to the next.

Ignacio came to accept that he would forever be divided this way, so he determined to put behind the notions of his childhood and live like a white man. He vowed not to be ashamed of his Barí origins, but at the same time accept that the world belonged to white people, and to the mestizos, but that the Indians—of whatever ethnic group—would always be seen as inferior.

Though it pained him not to know his own people, Ignacio made it a point to stop looking at them as ignorant, uncivilized creatures, and to see them, instead, as a tragically doomed people who were on the verge of disappearing and—worse, in his view—forgetting who they had been.

* * *

Two years went by, years that seemed exact replicas of each other due to the ongoing violence in the Putumayo. In order not to explode from anger, Ignacio closed his eyes to the widespread suffering. The days passed in jungle time, the hours dragging by like the sloths he saw inching up and down the high trees. His future graduation as a seminarian would be his only escape from the Putumayo.

Ignacio went to Mass, prayed, meditated, and kept silent when required. He hated that he did all these things mechanically—like brushing his teeth in the mornings. He tried hard to conform, not to voice his discontent, and to get along with everyone. Still, it was hard for him to feel kinship with his fellow novitiates, with their sheepish resignation and unquestioning minds.

He began to believe that every day he was at risk of being buried alive in a green chamber choked with vegetable matter and giant worms. To combat these feelings his first priority was to focus on the subjects that were essential to his education as a seminarian, and his scholarly discipline was reflected in his good grades. Although he tried hard to restrain his tongue—it had already gotten him into trouble at Colegio San José—his intellectual rebelliousness would not abate. Despite his best intentions not to draw attention to himself or to make enemies, he continued to pose questions that his teachers could not answer to his satisfaction.

For example, one day in theology class he asked, “Where did Jesus say that women could not become priests? In the beginning of the church, St. Peter was married. That was the norm when the church was founded. When and why did the church hierarchy decide marriage was detrimental to the religious life?”

Whereas at Colegio San José he had been reprimanded for asking these kinds of questions, in Palos de la Quebrada his theology teacher responded, “Ignacio, maybe you’ll be a famous theologian.”

What Ignacio liked best about the seminary was that, for the first time in his life, he did not have to hide his homosexuality. There were cliques of openly gay novitiates. Shortly after his arrival he’d noticed that many priests and seminarians in Palos were coupled, and no one censored them. No one at the seminary was in danger of being expelled because of his sexual preference. Father Superior, he learned from Iván, regularly met in his office with the chief of police of Palos for trysts of his own.

Ignacio stopped feeling guilty for being sexually attracted to men. He came to the conclusion that Christianity had never dealt with the homoerotic conundrum at the heart of the story of Christ and His disciples. However, he decided to keep this conclusion to himself, even though the homoerotic—and sadomasochistic—implications of the image of Christ, half-naked and nailed to a cross, disturbed him. Ignacio decided not to share these thoughts with anyone, not even Iván.

After he’d arrived in Palos, Ignacio could not bring himself to write to Father Daniel because he was afraid of stirring his romantic feelings toward his former teacher. But now he was ready to contact him. Ignacio wrote a letter asking if he would be willing to engage in a correspondence about doubts that still troubled him.

Father Daniel replied by return mail: “I’m happy to hear from you. You can always write to me and I’ll reply, if I can.” In a second letter, in answer to Ignacio’s questions about homosexuality and the church, he wrote back:

 

I want you to know that the life I live in Colegio San José is no longer satisfactory to me. I haven’t made a final decision yet about staying or leaving the organized church, but I will keep you posted about what I decide. In the meantime, I’m going to send you by separate mail a packet with some printed matter about a group of priests in Colombia who have joined the guerrillas to fight the government. After you read these materials, please destroy them. If they are found by the wrong people, you could get in trouble.

 

A fat envelope arrived two days later. Ignacio waited for his afternoon walk to open it. Before doing so, he pressed it against his chest, as if it still carried the warmth of Father Daniel’s hands. Sitting under the gigantic ceiba tree near the village, Ignacio’s heart raced as he read, and his hands trembled so much that the words went out of focus. He was doing something that his teachers would most likely not approve of and which could get him in trouble. Yet he was desperate to understand the position of the church regarding the genocidal conflict in the Putumayo. He read as quickly as he could because he didn’t want to be late for dinner and arouse any suspicions.

In the bulky envelope were a few pamphlets about two Spanish priests who had come to Colombia inspired by Father Camilo Torres, who had been killed in combat with government troops in 1966. Ignacio was familiar with the name of this man, who had died when he was thirty-three. A teacher in Ignacio’s mountain village school once mentioned that a priest named Camilo Torres had said, “Revolution is not only allowed but obligatory for all real Christians.” Though he was eleven years old then, Ignacio became infatuated with the man who had uttered those unsettling words. Later, when he went to study in Facatativá, whenever a student mentioned Father Torres’s name he was immediately forbidden to do so again. In the library at the colegio, Ignacio found a photograph of Camilo Torres in a book about 1960s Colombian history. Ignacio decided that when the day came that he had access to information that was not filtered through priests at the colegio, he would learn more about Torres. Yet the yellow mimeographed pamphlets from Father Daniel were not about Torres but about two Spanish priests, Fathers Domingo Laín and Manuel Pérez Martínez, who had come to Colombia from Spain. Father Pérez was known as El Cura Pérez. Upon his arrival in Colombia, Father Laín had been the parish priest of Meissen, one of the poorest barrios in Bogotá. He had found employment in a brickmaking factory in order to experience, as he explained in a newspaper interview, “in my own flesh, the exploitation and misery under which most Colombians live.”

Ignacio decided the best way to hide the pamphlets, until he was ready to destroy them, was in plain view. He stuck them between some dusty Latin books on a shelf in the library. So desperate was he to read the rest of the packet’s contents that he couldn’t sleep that night. The following day, in Latin class, Ignacio was so distracted that the teacher asked him whether he was feeling well.

That afternoon, he read about Father Laín, and how he had joined a group of priests also interested in social justice, which had led to his being expelled from Colombia. In 1969, he’d slipped back into the country accompanied by Father Manuel Pérez. Among the pronouncements made by Father Laín, Ignacio liked one in particular referring to injustice in Colombia: “Once you know that situation, you cannot remain on the margins. You have to insert yourself in the fight against that situation if you really want to live in peace with your conscience.” But the statement that made Ignacio shake, and which he read over and over, was, “You cannot flee. The world is full of hunger and poverty and you must bear witness to that reality.”

Ignacio was mesmerized by the photos of Father Domingo Laín who, like Camilo Torres, was handsome and wore dark glasses. The pamphlets contained only the essentials of his life, and Ignacio was left with a hunger to know more about how Laín had died in a military skirmish with government forces in 1974, a few years before Ignacio was born. Ignacio was angry that he’d had to wait until he was in the seminary to learn about this. What else did he not know?

The next afternoon Ignacio read about Father Manuel Pérez, who for many years had been one of the leaders of the ELN guerrillas, an arm of which was still active in the Putumayo. Father Pérez had been excommunicated from the church in 1986 for involvement in the death of the Bishop of Araucas. Ignacio did not feel as drawn to Father Pérez as he had been to Father Laín: after all, Pérez was a man of war who had been involved in many bloody acts.

Ignacio wrote back to Father Daniel, thanking him for the clippings and articles. “I’ve read everything,” he began. “Here we don’t discuss politics; it’s hard to know who’s responsible for what. We have almost no news about what’s happening in the rest of Colombia. Though the seminary is liberal when it comes to the life of homosexual priests in the church, we are discouraged from discussing national politics.” Father Daniel had never said or done anything that would indicate he was gay, but Ignacio hoped that he would understand his need to talk about the feelings that tormented him. He added, “I think of you as my mentor, and what you believe about the life of the priesthood is important to me.”

They kept corresponding with regular frequency, but Father Daniel never addressed at length Ignacio’s questions about homosexuality. On the other hand, he did not discourage Ignacio from asking questions about the subject.

Ignacio mentioned Fathers Laín and Pérez to Iván on their next walk together. Iván halted, glancing behind them to make sure no one was within hearing distance, and said, “You’re very young. At your age, in the village where I grew up, I didn’t know anything about politics except what I heard on the radio. My teachers at school never criticized the government or the church—probably for fear of losing their jobs or getting killed by the paramilitaries. When my father and his miner friends got drunk in our backyard they cursed the Colombian government. They were uneducated men, so I learned little about life outside our village.” He frowned and shook his head. “For your own good, I advise you to keep your interests in the Spanish priests to yourself. Here in the Putumayo, people can get killed just for being curious. Wait till you leave the seminary; when you’re far from here, you’ll be able to learn about all that without risking your skin.”

Father Daniel’s next letter to Ignacio announced that he was leaving the religious life:

 

I’m not sure what I want to do next. What I do know is that I can’t bear to stay in Colegio San José any longer, and I do not wish to be transferred to another Catholic school. While a part of me longs to become a man of action, another part wants to be a regular person in the outside world. As your friend, I pray that you will find the path that’s best for you. I will not be writing to you again for a while. May God bless you.

 

With warm affection,

Daniel

 

The sudden end of their correspondence hurt Ignacio, but the pain was familiar to him. Though the circumstances were different, and it was now a few years since Lucas had ended their friendship so abruptly, the rejection still stung. Father Daniel, however, had been kinder—he had offered an explanation.

* * *

The seminarians in Palos did not get involved in political matters—they were influenced by the ideas of post–Vatican II. Doing good works was known as a charisma. Pairs of seminarians were sent into the jungle, with a mission to help the Indians, who lived in isolated communities where there were no Catholic churches or schools. Despite the danger, the seminarians went with their rosaries as their only weapons. A seminarian who was one year away from graduating would be paired with a younger seminarian. Iván asked for permission to train Ignacio.

Sometimes they walked for days, on the open road or on paths that curled and dipped and rose in the sunless, insect-choked jungle. Sometimes they traveled by bus, or on the back of open trucks, or on rivers in tiny canoes that were often on the verge of toppling over, or flooding, or going under dark roaring currents, or even smashing against the massive rocks that appeared to have been placed there when the river was created.

In the villages deep in the jungle, they found sick and undernourished Indians who subsisted on the yucca and bananas they cultivated in tiny patches of soil carved out of the forest. Or they found what remained of a settlement: heaps of ashes indicating where huts had once stood. Strewn about were shards of clay vessels, and feathers and bones of animals the Indians had hunted.

“Look,” Iván said at one of these ghost settlements, “the blackened bones you see scattered are of the people who were killed and burned.” He sighed heavily. “It’s obvious the rest left in a hurry and never returned to bury their dead.”

Ignacio seethed with rage, but Iván was stoic, having seen this horrific tableau many times before.

After a while explanations were unnecessary: the FARC, or the ELN, or the paramilitaries armed with powerful weapons—demanding their share of the trade of the coca plant and poppies—were responsible for the butchery. The people Ignacio and Iván saw walking the open roads that led to the cities were the survivors. “The lucky ones,” Iván remarked one day, “are those who fled deep into the jungle, where the white man’s greed cannot follow them.”

There were times when Iván and Ignacio returned to the seminary without having made contact with any native people. On these occasions, Ignacio was grateful for having been spared one more appalling sight.

* * *

After their year of missionary work together, Iván graduated from the seminary and left Palos to attend university in Medellín. Ignacio, who persisted in his habit of not socializing, was then as lonely as he had ever been. He had gotten used to Iván’s company and couldn’t have asked for a kinder teacher. He now had a desperate need for the company of another person who was kind to him and with whom he could share friendship. After seeing so much misery firsthand, it was hard to remain optimistic about the nature of man. But Ignacio knew that if he succumbed to despair he would have to leave the seminary.

He had written to his parents a couple of times a year, whenever guilt prompted him to do so. His parents had to ask his sisters to write for them, and their brief letters of reply were impersonal. His family began to seem like characters in a discolored, silent dream. He was aware that they would reject him if they knew how he felt about the church, about God, and, especially, if they knew about his homosexuality. One day he mourned to himself aloud, “There’s no one in the world who cares whether I live or die.”

Ignacio had asked himself whether he should follow the example of Father Daniel and leave the seminary to join a guerrilla group to fight against the government. But having seen the wreckage created by the war, becoming a guerrilla no longer impressed him as a noble ideal. Besides, he had to admit that the prospect of living in the jungle did not appeal to him. He was not interested in trading the life of the mind and learning for a life of fighting, always being on the run, and killing. What had shaken him most deeply was discovering that there were no good people in the war, that the guerrillas, as well as the government and the paramilitaries, were interested not in justice but in spilling blood and enriching themselves.

Ignacio threw himself deeper into his studies. In another year he would be able to go to university, perhaps in Bogotá, which had been his cherished dream. It would be then, when he had left the jungle behind for good, that he would truly know himself, and his real life’s work would begin.

Father Daniel had said to Ignacio before he was sent to the Putumayo, “Perhaps you’ll never have faith. But that’s not an insurmountable problem for a priest, if you can still be of use to God.” Sensing Ignacio’s ambivalence, he had added, “Try to improve the lives of those who suffer, and you’ll be rewarded when you see their transformation—even if it’s short-lived. Any moment of grace we humans can achieve, that’s the greatest blessing.”

In the Putumayo, Ignacio finally understood the meaning of Father Daniel’s words.

* * *

Then Lucas entered Ignacio’s life again. In Facatativá, fear had made him repress his feelings for Lucas, but in the Putumayo he had learned that inside the church everything was permitted, and everything was forgiven, as long as it was handled with discretion. Ignacio ached to have physical contact with another man; but he hadn’t acted on his desires yet because the wounds opened by Lucas’s rejection were still painful. Besides, he thought of himself as unattractive because of his Indian looks. He was afraid to flirt with other men for fear of being rejected or ridiculed.

As soon as Ignacio laid eyes on Lucas, when he was introduced at dinner as the new seminarian in the community, he had to admit to himself that the whole time he had been in the Putumayo, Lucas had never been far from his thoughts. They sat across from each other at the table. When his eyes caught Lucas’s, Ignacio smiled shyly, hoping his expression showed the happiness he felt to see him again. Lucas smiled back and waved almost imperceptibly, slightly lifting the hand that was resting on the table.

Lucas had grown into a young man. In Facatativá, Lucas had seemed almost unaware of his beauty. Now he had the air of someone who, despite his modesty, understood the effect his physical attributes and charming manners had on others. It was hard not to look at him. In a room with many gay men, Lucas’s presence was causing a quiet disturbance. His presence electrified the atmosphere in the dining room. The tips of Ignacio’s fingers ached to caress Lucas’s copious and lustrous chestnut hair. He felt an urge to stroke Lucas’s neck, lock his arms around him, press him firmly against his chest, press his lips on his friend’s mouth. He felt alarmingly helpless and vulnerable, unable to escape the enchantment cast by Lucas’s golden-brown pupils. Ignacio clasped his hands under the table to stop himself from reaching across the table to touch him.

When the meal was over and they got up from the table, Ignacio saw that though Lucas had grown taller, his movements still had the nimbleness of a dancer. Ignacio touched his own forehead and thought he had a low-burning fever.

Just as when they first met, Lucas looked at Ignacio unguardedly, as if he saw no reason to conceal his thoughts. Ignacio remembered how charming Lucas’s halting speech was, as if he couldn’t think too far ahead of what he was saying. He could listen so attentively, as if he understood the things Ignacio couldn’t quite articulate. Ignacio wanted to undress and ravish him. The need to touch his skin was so powerful that when Ignacio went to bed that night, he couldn’t sleep.

The next day during recess Ignacio saw Lucas in the yard talking to another seminarian. During the hours he’d lain awake, he had acknowledged that he still couldn’t forgive Lucas completely for dropping him the way he had. With great apprehension, he approached his old friend. Lucas hurriedly broke off his conversation with the seminarian and rushed toward Ignacio. He ignored the hand Ignacio extended to him and hugged him hard. Ignacio’s hands trembled when Lucas’s moist lips brushed his cheek and the stubble on his chin pressed against Ignacio’s forehead.

As he finally pulled away Lucas said, “I was hoping you’d still be in the Putumayo.”

Ignacio tried to regain his composure. “Why are you here in Palos?” he asked. “It’s considered a punishment to be sent to this place.”

Lucas blushed. “The Father Superior in Facatativá fancied me, but I didn’t want to be his boy. The repulsive toad.” He shuddered and then gave a nervous laugh. “So here I am.”

“Well, welcome,” Ignacio said. He was still afraid of showing Lucas how happy he was to see him again.

“I thought you’d still be mad at me because I shunned you without giving you an explanation,” Lucas said. “They told me that unless I ended our friendship, I’d be sent back to my mother.”

From that moment on they walked together every day, immersed in conversation—just as they had done in the past. Suddenly, Ignacio wanted nothing more from life than to see Lucas every day and spend time alone with him. Maybe we will end up living together, working in the same parish, he often thought.

* * *

Since his arrival at Palos, Ignacio’s sleep had been fitful. Even during lulls in the gunfire that punctuated the night hours, he couldn’t expel from his mind the screams, the chilling pleas of “No! For the love of God! No!” Other nights, even the innocent barking of the village dogs was enough to keep him awake until sunrise. The Paleros claimed the dogs barked because they saw the souls of the dead roaming the streets of the hamlet, hoping to see their loved ones. Ignacio was not superstitious, so he wondered whether the dogs barked because there were guerrillas or paramilitaries nearby. He knew that just because he was living in a community of religious people it was no guarantee that the seminary would not be attacked. When he felt most scared, Ignacio prayed that if his death were imminent, he would pass in his sleep.

After the seminarian who’d slept in the bed next to Ignacio’s left for university in Cali, Lucas quickly moved his things to that spot, and no one said anything. To have Lucas sleeping so close to him was both reassuring and perplexing. After the lights went out, and the noises quieted, Ignacio longed to cross the few inches separating their beds and crawl under the sheets with Lucas. He burned with the desire to hold his friend naked in his arms, kiss his lips, and enter him. It was routine that sex took place at night in the dormitory where all the seminarians slept. The steady stirring of beds, the muffled cries of pain or ecstasy, the pungent smells that burst forth in the middle of the night—like the sweetly rotten carnal smell jungle flowers release to lure insects—were proof of that. However, Ignacio did not want to make the first move for fear of rejection.

Ignacio and Lucas reverted to being best friends, as if there had been no break in time; they were alone every chance they got. In the Putumayo, no one seemed to disapprove of their intimacy. Ignacio sensed that the other students gossiped about them, and many seminarians and priests looked at Lucas with lust, and perhaps envy, yet their closeness was not frowned upon.

By this time, Ignacio was a veteran of going into the jungle to carry out the message to the Indian communities. He asked the Father Superior to allow him to mentor Lucas, and permission was given. So once a week, Lucas and Ignacio would leave the seminary at dawn and spend two or three days on the road—sometimes longer, depending on the distance they had to travel, or the conditions of the roads in the rainy season, or the safety in the areas that were controlled by any of the groups involved in the war. Ignacio knew that every time seminarians went to proselytize in the jungle, it could be the last day of their lives, but he kept this knowledge from Lucas at first. Ignacio’s consolation was that if they were kidnapped or killed, at least he would die accompanied by the person he cared about most.

Sometimes they went to villages within walking distance of Palos. When they we were heading to more remote parts of the jungle, they’d travel some of the way by bus; sometimes they’d go by canoe to isolated settlements on the shores of the Orito River, where there were no schools or churches. When they traveled farther than usual and got caught in torrential rains, they would spend the night in an Indian village, where they were usually welcomed and given a hut to sleep in. The following day, they’d raise a palm roof on four poles. That space would become their classroom, where they taught the indigenous people the ABCs. On return visits, when they had gained the trust of the villagers, Ignacio and Lucas began to teach them the catechism.

Late one afternoon, they were sitting under a tall ceiba tree near the soccer field. There was nobody in their vicinity, so Ignacio thought the time was propitious to share some of the things he had wanted to say for so long. But he still hesitated because he had always felt unattractive compared to Lucas and had used this as an excuse to repress his sexual feelings. However, since Lucas’s arrival at the seminary in Palos they had talked about homosexuality openly and the old fear that his friend could expose him was gone. Still, Ignacio wondered whether Lucas would think reciprocating his feeling was tantamount to betraying his love for Jesus.

His palms got clammy but he was determined to speak now. “You know,” Ignacio began, “I . . .” but the words abandoned him.

Lucas grabbed his hand. It was almost cold. Lucas let go of it; and Ignacio kept quiet. Finally, with a twinge of exasperation, Lucas said, “I think I know what you’re going to say. By now you should know that homosexuality is a nonissue for me. For a long time, I struggled mightily with my feelings for men, and prayed not to be gay. Then one day I told myself I had been made this way—which could only mean that God approved of me.”

After this conversation, Ignacio’s desire for Lucas became so overwhelming that in his classes he heard the voices of his teachers as if they were speaking to him from continents away, or in languages he could not comprehend. He would forget to sweep a floor that he was scheduled to clean, or he would sweep it twice in the same day. When he was saying the rosary in the company of other seminarians, he would often lose his place.

One night in an Indian village hut, Ignacio lay next to Lucas on their straw mat and told himself that if he didn’t let go of his inhibitions he would go mad. He placed his hand on Lucas’s shoulder, then immediately wanted to withdraw it. Ignacio’s entire body froze; he stopped breathing.

Softly, Lucas said, “Leave your hand there. I like it.” Then he turned to face Ignacio with a smile. Lucas stretched out his arm, slipped his hand under the band of Ignacio’s underwear, and grabbed his hard cock. They clasped each other in a tight embrace, leaving no space between their sweating bodies. They kissed with open lips, with a hunger that Ignacio found almost frightening. As they kissed, their hands explored each other’s faces, hair, the back of their necks, shoulders, cupping and clasping each other’s buttocks, pulling gently on each other’s testicles. Ignacio had never been with a man before, so he knew he didn’t have AIDS. For fear of breaking the perfection of the moment, he didn’t dare ask Lucas if he’d been with a man before. Lucas’s tears fell on Ignacio’s face.

“What is it?” Ignacio asked. “Should I stop?”

“I’m crying out of happiness,” Lucas whispered. “I’m still a virgin.” Then he added, “I wanted you to be the first man to penetrate me.”

After they finished making love, they slept in each other’s arms, sweating in the sticky jungle air, the semen they had spilled on each other acting as an adhesive between their bodies. Now and then, the buzzing of the mosquitoes outside the netting would awaken Ignacio, and he would find Lucas holding him, his chest pressed against his back, his nose so close to his ear that he could feel whenever Lucas took the faintest breath. His exhale smelled of sweet basil.

When Ignacio awoke in the morning, Lucas held Ignacio’s lower lip with his own lips.

Ignacio pulled back gently. “Good morning, Lucas,” he said, and with those words realized that a new, hitherto unknown life was beginning for him.

Lucas leaned forward and pressed his open lips on Ignacio’s and did not remove them until Ignacio yielded and they made love again.

They left the Indian village as the sun was still rising, before the heat of the day baked the soil. They walked in silence for hours, crossing wooden bridges, passing by other Indian villages, stopping at a hut only to ask for a drink of water. At one point, they were alone on a solitary stretch of the road when Lucas brushed his shoulder against Ignacio and then grabbed his hand.

“What are you doing?” Ignacio snapped, pulling his hand away. “Are you crazy? Don’t ever do that in public again. You know how much trouble we could get in if people saw us?”

Lucas reached out and grabbed his hand again, tightly this time, and refused to let go as they walked in silence on deserted paths the rest of the day.

* * *

Years later, Ignacio would remember the period when he and Lucas trekked from village to village as the happiest time in his life. Each new morning he awoke excited to be alive. As they hiked on the red-dust trails of the jungle, Lucas often held a rosary in his right hand. To Ignacio it seemed as if Lucas derived sensual pleasure from rubbing the worn-out spheres of cedar. From the constant handling, the beads had turned black and acquired a waxy, varnished glow. Lucas found the monotonous repetitions comforting, and Ignacio envied his simple faith. In less charitable moments he’d think that for Lucas praying replaced thinking. Praying seemed to free Lucas from the self-doubt Ignacio struggled with all the time. Lucas was not a tormented soul like he: instead, Lucas found joy in the simplest activities. As time passed, Ignacio began to wonder if that was what it meant to live in the light of grace.

On one of their treks, passing an opening on the side of the road, Lucas said, “It looks like nobody has gone down there in a long time.” With his usual puppy-dog eagerness, he added, “Let’s find out.”

Lucas pushed aside a thicket of branches that obscured the path. He made enough room with his bare hands to forge ahead; apprehensive, Ignacio followed him. The narrow overgrown path became wilder and thicker as they proceeded. Ignacio was much less curious than Lucas when it came to exploring new places. Sometimes, during their travels in the jungle—after making sure there was no one coming in either direction—they would stop to kiss or hide behind a tree for oral sex. Lucas was not as shy as Ignacio when it came to initiating sex in the jungle.

Lucas kept forging ahead. The wild vegetation had almost completely reclaimed the trail, and daylight hardly reached the soil. Ignacio was about to tell Lucas they should go back. According to his calculations, they were still several hours from their destination, a village of Siona Indians, and the jungle was full of dangers at night. But Lucas was like a child looking for treasure. As Ignacio opened his mouth to protest, Lucas pushed aside a heavy branch concealing an opening, full of light, and an eerily quiet lagoon. No birds sang or flew over it; no butterflies whirled about; no monkeys hollered in the fruit trees. Even the ever-present blood-crazed insects seemed absent. The trees surrounding the lagoon were as still as if they were made of clay.

They arrived at a clearing on a sliver of sandy beach. The clear lagoon was fed by a waterfall that flowed over a rock higher than the top of the tallest tree. Lucas screamed in delight, dumped his backpack, stripped naked, and dove into the still pool.

“Come in,” he shouted as he surfaced. “It’s refreshing.”

“Are you crazy?” Ignacio yelled back. “There could be snakes in there, or caymans. And it’s full of leeches.”

Lucas was already swimming away with powerful stokes. Ignacio was angry—Lucas knew he couldn’t swim. In the mountains where he grew up, there were no lagoons or rivers—just streams that swelled and became dangerous during the rainy season. The Barís only bathed in those streams during the dry season, when they were not deep enough for swimming.

Suddenly, seeing Lucas swimming naked, his perfectly shaped buttocks, the muscles of his shoulders and his back gleaming in the sunlight, his shapely arms striking the surface of the water with confidence, Ignacio knew that what he was most afraid of was not being unable to swim, but of becoming a prisoner of his lust for Lucas.

Ignacio sat on the burning sand, feeling dizzy. He was relieved not to see the nasty red ants that tore at one’s flesh. As he closed his eyes, his head on his raised knees, he had a sensation of déjà vu: he knew that lagoon; he knew its shape—it was the image that had haunted his dreams since he was ten years old. This was the lagoon where the FARC had massacred the forty-eight boys. Ignacio started to shake, afraid to open his eyes, terrified that he’d see the lagoon covered with the bloated rotten corpses of the children. “No wonder the trail was so overgrown,” he murmured to himself. It was a place where something so horrible had happened that the people of the region had decided to let the jungle reclaim it.

Ignacio didn’t believe in ghosts or spirits of the forest as his parents did. But suddenly he felt suffocated by a powerful force trying to crush his lungs. His heart pumped so loudly he jumped to his feet. He took a step and stumbled toward the water. He heard Lucas call, “Are you okay?” Ignacio turned around, and ran from the lagoon as fast as his shaking legs would permit. He heard Lucas shouting after him. Eventually, he heard nothing but the sound of his own galloping heart and his feet breaking twigs as they hit the ground.

Ignacio finally reached the road, where he collapsed, gasping. He lay on his back on the open path, paralyzed. His eyes were the only part of his body that moved. Ignacio had had dreams in which he saw himself in a coffin, and everyone around him thought he was dead, and he wanted to open his eyes and scream, but couldn’t.

Lucas arrived panting, half-dressed, soaked. He dropped their backpacks on the road, kneeled down, and gently cradled Ignacio’s head on his lap. “What’s the matter? Are you all right?” he asked. Lucas looked around frantically; nobody was coming in their direction.

At that moment, Ignacio saw how much Lucas loved him. Slowly, Ignacio began to feel a tingling in his arms, and in his legs, and with great effort he was able to move his head from side to side, gingerly. I’m alive, he thought. But he still couldn’t speak.

Gently, Lucas kissed his forehead over and over. “You scared me so much. What happened back there, Ignacio?”

How could he begin to explain? He mumbled, “I’ll tell you later . . . Let’s go.”

Lucas helped him to his feet. Ignacio broke into a fast walk, dragging his backpack in the red dust. Lucas ran after him, wrapped his arms around him to make him stop, and said, almost with desperation, “I love you, Ignacio. Trust me. I love you.”

Ignacio turned around to face him, and wept on Lucas’s shoulder.

* * *

In the weeks and months that followed their admission of love for each other, Ignacio felt as if a slab of granite in his chest had been removed; he felt less alone, and there were moments when, thinking about Lucas and dreaming about a relationship he hoped would last for the rest of their lives, he experienced a joy and peace entirely new to him. Ignacio was still tormented because, unlike Lucas, he couldn’t turn his love into something spiritual. What he felt for Lucas was carnal, of the flesh, telluric.

Ignacio had always despised those seminarians who chose the religious life because they could not face being openly homosexual in the world. He did not want to end up hating himself because his life was a hypocritical lie. Yet he had no choice but to ask for guidance from the God he didn’t believe in. Just send me a sign, he implored, wondering all the time whether God could even hear him. The answer never came; or, if it came, he never knew.

It was no secret that Father Humberto, his confessor, was in love with a seminarian, so Ignacio decided to discuss his feelings for Lucas during his weekly confession.

“I’m glad you’re being honest with me,” Father Humberto said, without a hint of disapproval in his voice. “As you know, if we omit confessing the truth, we’re still lying.” He paused. “Ignacio, I don’t believe it’s a sin to be a priest and to love a man. The two things are not incompatible. What you have to be clear about always is that you cannot let your love for a man replace your love for Jesus Christ. Our love for our Lord should always come first. All the other loves are of a lesser order. As long as you do that, there’s no reason for you not to become a good priest.”

Even after this conversation, Ignacio wasn’t completely reassured. If he was too cowardly to do anything else but become a priest, then he wanted to make sure that he could at least have a useful life. He told himself that there had to be more he could do besides teaching the Indians to read and converting them to Christianity. He rehashed his discussions with Father Daniel at school in Facatativá about liberation theology. Father Daniel had said, “The poor need medicine, running water, schools, food, more than they need to learn the Gospels.” Ignacio had seen the people of the Putumayo malnourished, ravaged by disease, massacred by the army and the guerrillas, and he was ashamed to admit that the seminary was not doing much to relieve their misery. “We can’t talk to people just about their souls and forget that they live in their bodies,” Father Daniel had told him. These words continued to ring in Ignacio’s ears.

* * *

After four years in the seminary, Ignacio’s and Lucas’s training was coming to an end. In those years, life in Palos had become increasingly dangerous. Violence had escalated and no one was safe. The situation was aggravated when two men from the village came to the seminary for sanctuary. The FARC demanded that Father Superior turn the two men over to them. The guerrillas gave him twenty-four hours before they would storm the seminary and take them by force. That night the two men managed to leave the compound undetected and disappeared into the dark jungle. No one heard from them again. But that was not the end of it: the men’s children were taken by the FARC and their wives and daughters were raped.

A few months after this incident, two seminarians disappeared in the jungle while they were evangelizing. No one claimed responsibility. Leaving the seminary, even to go into town, became unsafe.

Ignacio recognized that for the forces fighting in this war, both Indians and peasants were expendable because there was a seemingly endless supply of them. The peasants were inconvenient pests who stood in the way of the guerrillas, the paramilitaries, and the narco-traffickers who wanted control over the cocaine and heroin trade. It was as if the fertility of the land, its rich mineral resources, the variety of the fauna, were not a blessing to the people of the Putumayo, but a curse.

Ignacio had talked to Lucas about leaving the seminary before he finished his education and entering university, joining the thousands of villagers who were abandoning their plots of land to move to the cities. Lucas didn’t like the idea, so Ignacio decided to stay. He would not leave without Lucas.

Then Lucas and Ignacio received word that they had both been awarded scholarships to Javeriana University in Bogotá. There they would spend the next three years studying theology and preparing to be ordained.

Ignacio was eager to be ordained and devote himself to helping the kind of people Jesus Christ had cared about. He still had doubts about the God they were taught to believe in, but he hoped that, as a priest, he could make a difference in the lives of others. Having Lucas go with him as he entered this new phase of their life was reassuring. By this time, Ignacio had come to think of Lucas as his partner for life. He couldn’t imagine life without him.

He left the seminary in Palos de la Quebrada still troubled because he could not emulate Lucas’s simplicity in believing in the existence or goodness of God. But as he was getting ready to say his goodbyes to the Putumayo, he took time to slow down and revel in the beauty of this place where he had found his mission in life—and love. He contemplated the irrepressible way everything in nature grew and continuously renewed itself, witnessed the mighty currents of the rivers sweep away anything in their path, and he concluded that only an all-powerful God could have created such relentless energy, beauty, chaos, and terror, and have all of them coexist. Nature by itself could not have been capable of creating it; nature, he had come to believe, thrived on anarchy. But as he stood under the immense ceiba trees to say goodbye to them, the trees of life, as the natives called them, seemed as durable and powerful as marble columns in an ancient Mesopotamian city. He observed how at their top the ceibas fanned out into a vast green cup that served as a nursery and sheltered so many disparate creatures, providing fruit for the indigenous people as well as the monkeys and birds the Indians ate, and the bees that produced the honey with which they sweetened their brews and their harsh lives. Ignacio marveled once more at the dazzling kaleidoscopic bands of brilliant macaws and parrots, which used the trees as rest stations, gathering to feed and exchange news of the jungle, to gossip joyously.

Ignacio noticed simple phenomena for the last time—how the clouds, for example, blew in one direction and the rivers flowed in the opposite. He thus concluded that natural selection by itself could not have created such an organizing principle and perfected such a sense of equilibrium; it became clear to him that nature itself had no interest in humanity. This led to his next conclusion: that the God who had created life was neither good nor bad, but more like an insatiably curious scientist who, drunk on his infinite inventiveness, loved to try out all of his ideas on his creations, including the human species, just to see what would happen. So, natural disasters, beastly creatures, the cruelty of man, awesome beauty, and abundance—all these things just happened of their own volition, once God had set the whole machinery in motion.

After so many years of studying and living the so-called religious life, the best Ignacio could come up with by way of explaining everything that distressed and frightened him was to admit how helpless people are to control the powerful forces unleashed by nature. Humanity had had no recourse but to invent the idea of God to justify the seeming futility of human endeavor, especially when humans tried, fruitlessly, to peer into the mystery of what happened after the flesh rotted and went back to become part of the earth. So human beings took the next step forward and imagined an afterlife where things made sense; they invented religions so they could convince themselves that God had indeed sent His only son as a sign that He felt remorseful for the fragility of the people and the world He had created. It was therefore up to humans to give hope to others who were suffering, to help them in whichever small ways they could, if for no other reason than that all of God’s creations needed to be cared for and longed to be consoled. The priesthood, Ignacio told himself, was as good a way as any to help assuage the pain of life.

Ignacio left Palos convinced that no matter how hard he tried, he could never believe in God. But maybe, just maybe, regardless of his beliefs or lack of them, he could help those who needed the idea of a God, guiding and encouraging them as they searched for Him.