Colombia

The Turkish Boat

Toñito was the last child baptized in Father Eustaqui's evangelizing campaign. The proof is that all his younger friends have names that are not Christian such as Bryan, Wilmer and Hayler. The Franciscan priests used to come by every year baptizing the babies and marrying their parents. They hadn't returned since those lands of the Atrato River filled up with people from Medellín who initially set up sawmills and later dedicated themselves to drug trafficking.

Life was never the same as in those days when the women sang the praises to St. Lawrence for the wind to blow and to whisk away the hulls of rice they were cleaning. Toño was brought up on the banks of the Chajeadó River.

He learned to swim before he learned to walk, watching women scrub their clothes on wooden boards because there were no rocks in this land; a rock there is a treasure. He did not go to school because there weren't any schools and no one was interested in learning to read since people had radios. The old folks only knew how to add and subtract because that way they could figure out how much they were owed by the sawmills in Riosucio, three days down the river, where they sold their wood. Neither Toñito nor anyone knew how or why one day people came burning down the houses. He still trembles from fear when he recounts what happened that morning:

I was making a top because I was bored with boats and kites. It wasn't time to harvest the rice yet and so I had time to play. Because when rice is ready to harvest, it comes like the rising river, and there is no time to do anything. The adult men cut the rice with machetes and the women carry it to town. We children do errands and they really keep us busy....

It's hard to make a top because there's nothing to shape it with....That's why I sometimes prefer to make boats and set them floating down the river to find their destiny. I love to go with the boats along the river until they drift out of sight. The motor boats going up the river and the logs floating downstream drown a lot of my boats, but I keep on making them because I hope some of them will make it to the sea. All of the waters go to the sea, my father told me, and my grandfather thought that he would go down to the sea to die. It's true: the river carries everything to the sea...even the garbage that one throws away goes down to the sea....

One day my uncle got into a fight with his bosses at the sawmill because they didn't want to pay him everything that he was owed. He ended up punching out the manager and the police went after him. He got to our house and didn't go out again. But he came here knowing how the lumber business worked. He'd calculate, in Ríosucio, the wood is worth so much and in Río León, it's worth so much, so why isn't it worth hardly anything in Cartagena? My uncle got courageous and started calculating all this and telling the sawyers from the Curvaradó river. That's why they put a contract on his life and that's why they killed him; they drowned him after beating him over the head with a shovel. His body emerged three days down the river, swelled up like a manatee and as white as one of those pale guys from Medellín. My grandfather said that we ought to keep my uncle's death hushed up because vengeance always brings a lot of deaths with it. But no one paid attention to him. There were deaths here and there; corpses appeared here and there, until the lumber business disappeared.

One day the warriors came by here, people who know the mountains and the beasts well. No one knew them here; they were passing through with two injured men, as thin and shriveled up as the Holy Christ of Buchadó. They asked for help. We folks are always wary about people wandering into town, but we always help them out. So they rested, ate, washed their clothes and slept. They seemed nervous about their wounded, who were getting paler by the minute. Nothing was helping: not medicines or curing waters or prayers. They died because they didn't have a lot of blood left. We buried them at the edge of town. The commander told us that we shouldn't say to anyone who had buried their dead there. "If you tell," he said "we'll come back and don't even ask what is going to happen."

Time passed and other times came, and these were bad times indeed. The people from the Curvaradó river region spent three years eating nothing but rice and banana mush because they didn't want to give their lumber away for nothing. And then other people came from Medellín with their backpacks filled with business deals and they made everything seem so very easy. Many people here took their chances and got involved with the coca business that the Medellín people?paisas?made seem so easy. You planted coca, cultivated it and then just put the money in your backpack. There weren't any risks or losses. It all started off great; the outsiders kept their word and paid up. I was taking everything in because I'd always had wanderlust and my dream was to get away from the river, get to Cartagena and look at the sea. That was what I was dreaming. The coca is a business that sucks you in. If people get involved with this bad stuff, things go bad for them. My mom doesn't like this business of always chasing after money, but there were lots of folks who saw a chance to get ahead and bet everything on the coca business. Then one day some buyers showed up with arms and said, "We'll pay such-and-such" which was a lot less than people had been getting paid. Then they threatened, "And if you don't like the price, it desn't matter, because you have been involved with the guerrillas and we're not going to stand for that." My grandfather stood his ground and told them, "That wasn't the agreement; if you don't pay us what you promised, we're not doing business with you any more," and all of the adults supported my grandfather. But the devils insisted, "You are guerrillas, and that's why you are not collaborating with us." They paid the price they wanted to and didn't even say goodbye. We all thought it would end there, without any more fights. "Pure threats," said many. But my grandfather said, "No, these devils are going to come back; it's better that we take shelter in the mountains."

And they came back. My grandfather kept on getting up that night, and I thought he had to relieve himself a lot and that kept him awake because he'd always get up shaking and then go out to the garden and come back all relaxed. But that time was different. Not even the animals were quiet, but I thought, if not even the dogs bark, then no one is coming. Sometime between dark and dawn, the first shouts were heard, "You damn guerrillas, we are going to burn down your ranch; come out so we can see your faces." My grandfather managed to tell me, "Get into the bags of rice and don't make any noise; nothing will happen to you there." He went out of the house. They killed him in the doorway and I couldn't even take give him my hand to keep the memory of his body heat with me.

After that, they were forcing all the adults out of the houses and tying them together as if they were logs to throw into the river. The women were screaming and praying and the children were running all around without knowing where they were going. The head of the devils was shooting off his guns as if we were trogon birds. I couldn't move; I could hardly breathe and if I even started to make a noise, I was dying of fright. Everyone was going this way and that; the town was groaning from pain. As may grandfather had ordered, I ran off toward the mountain. The shots followed us; the devils were shooting like crazy. The dead were left in the patios, in the port, in the houses. If anyone tried to pick them up, they'd kill him with a machete. I don't know how I ran so fast. I was falling down, and it was if someone had thrown me on a mattress; I'd get tangled up in thorny places, and it was if someone had tickled me. I ran and ran until I stopped hearing the screams. I was very far from the river. ...I was so afraid. I had almost never felt cold, and I felt cold because it came accompanied by fear. I was afraid someone would come and I was afraid that no one would come. Afriad of the night and afraid of the tigers. Afraid of the dead they had killed, afraid that they had killed my parents and my brothers. Afraid that they hadn't killed them, but that they were wandering lost in the bogs....

I woke up when the sun was already warming the earth. The fear had been left behind in the night, but now hunger was gnawing at me and my stomach was growling. I said to myself, it's better to die than that they kill me. I won't leave. And I gathered some berries like my grandfather had shown me. But when night came again, the fear returned....

The following morning, I got up and said, it's better to go looking for death than to have death come to me. But where was I going to go if I'd been going around in circles not knowing where I was going? I remembered what my grandfather had said. The waters will take you. I was getting to water that was wider and wider and so, little by little, to the river, and finally, going along the banks back to my town. Everything there was quiet; everything was empty; one couldn't even hear the wind. There was no one there to tell me if anyone had been left alive. There were no bodies of people from the town, but they had dug up the dead guerrillas and the dogs had torn the bodies to pieces. I sat down to cry on the spot where they had killed my grandfather. His body was not there nor any of the bodies of the townsfolk, but bloody tracks led to the river. I cried a lot, a lot, and then I went to the river to see to see if someone would carry me downstream. But there were no boats?big or small?got near to the bank, and I shouted and shouted and waved my hands. No one wanted to knwo what had happened in the town because they would have to testify to the law about what they had seen. Everyone knew and no one wanted to know....

I finally got a boat to take me to Moya. I was not alone. There were people from the town waiting there for three days in a row to see who was coming. The women were praying at an altar they had made to the Miraculous Christ. The men were drinking y and talking softly. Everyone was hoping to find their dead ones to bury them. One of my neighbors, Doña Edelmira, said that the dead who are buried in the water turn into fish. At the end of the day, the body of don Anastasio, the owner of a little store called My Pride, appeared. They got him out of the water. He was totally swollen and he didn't have eyes. They took him out of the water, bit by bit, and they prayed for him. No one could find his family. Then the body of a cousin of mine appeared and I shouted, "He's mine."

They helped me fish him out and they helped me to bury him. And I felt very important because everyine was offerng me sympathy, and I felt sad because he was my own blood. The harvest began at dawn. One body after another appeared, and the holes the people had dug weren't enough to bury all the bodies. I was hearing "this is mine," "this is mine." I was chilled to the bone to see so much death. But my people, whom I was waiting for, did not appear. With every body, I was hoping that it would be my father, my mother, my brothers, so I could bury them. But no. As much as I looked and looked at the bodies arriving on the banks of the river, mine did not arrive....

That afternoon the devils showed up. They told us that it was forbidden to fish for the dead....We left and went to Vigía del Fuerte. The boat left us off there and we could see the police headquarters, the mayor's office, the agrarian bank had all been burnt to the ground and were still sending up smoke. Someone said, "The guerrillas were getting even for what happened in río Chajeadó." No one spoke about it anymore. "My grandfather," I said "was right."
....We finally got to Turbo and I arranged with a boat owner to take me to Cartagena in exchange for washing the boat and helping to bring it to shore.

The Doctor
Toñito arrived at the hospital between life and death. I was on duty in the emergency room, and I received him in a state of coma. He had been in the water for so long that he was almost dying from hypothermia. We revived him and bit by bit, he returned to life. The story is short: Toñito hid himself in a boat on route to New York. The sailors discovered him and the captain ordered them to throw him into the sea...Toñito wasn't afraid of the water because he had been born in it and knew how to get around in the water. But a boat is a boat and that one was a big one. He swallowed a lot of water, but he knew not to resist the waves....The calm returned and he floated for a long time, understanding that by swimming he would never reach the shore.... Some fishermen picked him up, but feared he was dead. They rubbed him down with turtle oil to warm him and gave him coconut water until he began to breathe again. But breathing is not the same as reviving, and so they took him to the hospital. He began to recuperate slowly. At first he would not talk because he was afraid he would be thrown into jail, but he began confiding in me....He told me that he had decided to leave Cartagena for "whereever the wind blew" because he was afraid of being "burnt."

"I lived with a group of kids on the street, and we got by however we could....In the (Cartagena) neighborhood of Mandela, there were thousands of families, all of them fleeing, leaving a path of dead ones behind. But they kept on coming and they had to accept life as it was. Many were from Atrato and quite a few from río Chajeadó. Cartagena has always been like a mother to these rivers, and everyone heads there when things get rough and also when things are going good. When I got to Mandela, the first thing I thought was that the devils had who did away with my town might be there. But I said to myself that it was impossible that here?among so many people?that they would come to kill us again....

The day I arrived in the neighborhood, it was already late, and I ran into don Tato, a cousin of my dad's. He was a well-off old guy and a good person. I was really happy because I thought he was going to give me a place to live, as was the custom in the rivertowns....But don Tato took one look at me and he must have read my mind because he said, "Here it is not like there. Here everyone is on his own." He didn't help me a bit....

I ended up on the streets. One night we got into a sewer, kind of a big hole, and around two in the morning I heard someone talking; the other kids had sniffed glue and they were off in their dreams, but I didn't want to because I had a headache. Before I knew it, we were on fire. I jumped up screaming and as I was the first to wake up, the flames had not gathered force. But in any case, I burned my foot. The others didn't make it out. They died like chicken on a spit. I figured out it was the guy from the store who had ordered the fire because the police came to take out the bodies in big plastic garbage bags so no one would notice. No one knows they died or who ordered their deaths. I said to myself: I'm going, I'm going, I'm going, I'm going whereever the boats go.

And so Toñito left in the Turkish boat.

I've asked permission to adopt the kid and I've filled out all the paperwork. But now the Institute of Family Welfare have come with this business that he's not an orphan because his parents have not legally been declared dead, and they aren't disappeared because no one reported their disappearance to the authorities. So I'll have to wait a good long while to see if someone shows up for him or if his parents show up and claim him from the Institute. Judging from the slowness of the process, Toñito just might grow up before a judge gives me permission to adopt him.

Alfredo Molando is a Colombian writer and a journalist, now living in California. This testimony is based on interviews in Cartagena with a doctor and a child, whose names have been omitted for obvious reasons.