CHAPTER 7

Las Acacias

“At first they tell you that you’ll have a family there,” he began. “Food. A place to sleep. People who will look after you. And you believe them, because at that age you believe anyone who promises you something like a home.”

He paused. I said nothing. I understood, even before he went on, that the best thing I could offer him at that moment was silence, not questions.

“But it’s not that. They hand you a rifle that weighs more than you do, and they teach you to carry it before they teach you anything else.”

He stared at a fixed point on the floor, as if there, on the wood of my living room floor, he could project what he was about to tell me.

“There was never enough food. You learned fast to eat whatever there was, whenever there was, because you didn’t know when there would be something again.

We marched for hours and hours through the bush, almost always at night, with broken boots or no boots, never sleeping well.

The tiredness got so deep inside you that you stopped feeling it as tiredness.

It became something else. A kind of permanent fog. ”

“The fear wasn’t of just one thing either,” he went on.

“You were afraid of the Army, of course, of a firefight, of a mine, of a stray bullet. But the most constant fear, the one that wouldn’t let you sleep even when you finally could, was the fear of your own commanders.

There, any mistake was paid for dearly. One comment too many.

A look somebody didn’t like. Falling asleep on guard duty. ”

He lowered his voice, almost to a whisper.

“And not only with beatings, Daniel. There were commanders who felt they owned you in every possible way. Your body too. That… that I prefer not to tell in detail. There are things you learn to put away in a drawer you never open again, because if you open it, you don’t know whether you can close it again. ”

I stayed silent, not knowing what to do with my hands, not daring to ask anything more about that drawer he had just named and, just as quickly, shut again.

“And they didn’t only train us to fight,” he added, after a moment.

“They also gave us talks, almost every night, about who was to blame for everything. That the rich owned everything and everyone. That politicians were a pack of crooks who only defended their own class. That the State was the enemy, and that the only possible justice was the kind you collected yourself with a rifle in your hand. I was an eleven-year-old boy. I believed every word, because no one else was explaining the world to me any other way. And a part of that, though it’s hard for me to admit, I still can’t fully shake off today. ”

“I stopped being a child the very night they took me,” he said, taking up a firmer tone again, like someone deliberately returning to safer ground. “There’s no ceremony or warning. One day you stop playing with marbles, and the next day you’re cleaning a weapon.”

He fell silent for a long while. I said nothing. I waited.

“I lasted almost two years there,” he continued. “Until one night of combat against the Army.”

He closed his eyes for a second, as if he needed to see it again in order to tell it.

“It was all very fast and very slow at the same time, I don’t know how to explain it better. The shooting started about two hundred meters away, and in a moment the whole camp was running, shouting orders nobody could quite hear. Someone yelled at me to take position. I did the opposite. I ran.”

“I didn’t know where to, at first. I ran into the woods, between the trees, crouching, stumbling, with the jungle closing in around me as if it wanted to swallow me, either to protect me or to punish me, I still don’t know which.

I heard the gunfire behind me for what felt like an eternity, until I could no longer tell whether it was real shooting or just my own heart pounding in my ears. ”

He paused, breathing as if he were running again, just from the memory.

“I walked almost two whole days. I didn’t know where, I only knew I had to get away.

At night I hid among the roots of the biggest trees I could find, because someone had once told me animals wouldn’t go there.

I don’t know if it was true. I never fully checked, but it helped me close my eyes for a while.

I ate what I could: some fruit I didn’t know whether was poisonous, water from a stream I probably shouldn’t have drunk.

Several times I thought I was going to die right there, alone, with no one ever finding out what had happened to me. ”

“By the second day I couldn’t feel my legs.

I was walking more from habit than from strength.

That was when I heard voices ahead, and for a moment I thought I had circled back on my own steps, that I’d returned to the very place I’d been fleeing for two days.

I stayed still behind a trunk, barely breathing, until I leaned out enough to see they weren’t uniforms. They were farmers.

A family on their way to a village, with loaded mules. ”

I didn’t dare approach right away. It took me a long while to decide whether to trust them or stay hidden. In the end, hunger and exhaustion decided for me.

They picked me up. They gave me water, something to eat, and took me to a health post in the nearest town. From there they referred me to the Family Welfare Institute, and so, after a lot of paperwork and interviews, I ended up living here in Bogotá.

He made a final pause, shorter than the earlier ones, like someone who can already see the end of a long road and has only the last stretch left to walk.

“That’s how I came to this city. No schooling, nothing but what I was wearing, to rebuild a life on what was left of my childhood.

That’s why I say guys like me see no other way out than enlisting to fight in someone else’s ranks, for a State that always left us forgotten.

And I don’t want to apologize, or play the victim, but it’s what I feel. Not about anyone in particular.”

I was speechless for a moment. I looked at him differently from how I had looked at him until then, as if only now I were seeing the whole of the person in front of me.

“I had no idea it was so…”

I couldn’t finish the sentence.

“Nobody has any idea, Daniel,” he said. “That’s why the State prefers to talk about ‘reintegration’ and statistics instead of talking about us. At least I was lucky enough to escape. Many of my friends from that time didn’t even live to see fifteen.”

“And why did they kill him?” I asked, calmer now, finally sitting down fully across from him.

Sebastián took a deep breath, like someone preparing to carry a weight he knows he can’t set down halfway.

“It’s a long story, but I’ll try to sum it up.

My father worked on the hacienda of someone very important.

One day some men came and proposed that he be an informant, that he work with them by giving them private information about the landowner.

My father said he didn’t know much about him, that the man only came by now and then.

They told him that if he didn’t cooperate, they’d kill him and his family.

My dad, to calm them down, promised to get the information they needed in order to save his family. ”

“I can’t believe it…”

“I’m telling you because I need to get this off my chest,” he went on.

“Unfortunately, one of the workers at the hacienda overheard what they said to my father. And just like that, he called the landowner and told him everything. The following week, the landowner arrived and threw us into the street like dogs, unjustly, without even letting us speak.”

He paused, the longest pause yet.

“On our way out of the hacienda we ran into those same men, the ones who had asked my father for the information. He tried to tell them he didn’t have it yet, but they no longer cared.

He begged them to spare our lives, for my mother, for my little sister…

but they didn’t care. They fired, again and again, until they ended his life. ”

I said nothing. There was nothing to say in the face of something like that.

“And that’s how that stage of my life ended,” he said, his voice now fully broken, “in that place that brings me beautiful and bitter memories at once. The hacienda Las Acacias.”

I froze.

“What did you say? Las Acacias?”

I felt my chest empty of air all at once, as if someone had opened a door that had been shut for twenty years and all the cold from outside came in in a single rush.

“It’s you…”

Sebastián looked at me. Something in his expression changed, as if my voice, saying those two words, had triggered a recognition he too hadn’t completed until that exact moment.

“Yes,” he said, almost breathless. “It’s me… I’m back.”

We embraced. I don’t remember which of us moved first. I only remember the weight of his arms around me, and mine around him, and the strangest sensation of embracing, at the same time, a complete stranger and someone I had known for twenty years.

The lights of that living room went out in my memory long before they went out for real.

What followed that embrace I don’t remember with my eyes, but with something closer to memory itself: loose images, like pencil sketches, of two children running through the fields of a hacienda that I had not yet learned to hate or to miss.

Two children playing marbles on a dirt road.

Two children laughing without knowing fear, without knowing that time had prepared for them a twenty-year separation and a reunion neither could have imagined even in the strangest of dreams.

There are people whom time seems to erase, until destiny decides to bring them back.

That boy I ran through the fields with, the one I laughed with without knowing fear, was still alive. For years I thought I had lost him too. And, without my realizing it, life had crossed our paths again.

Sometimes the best memories don’t disappear. They only wait for the perfect moment to return.