Slash and Burn E-Book

Claudia Hernández

• Herausgeber: And Other Stories
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 469

Beschreibung

Through war and its aftermaths, a woman fights to keep her daughters safe. As a girl she sees her village sacked and her beloved father and brothers flee. Her life in danger, she joins the rebellion in the hills, where her comrades force her to give up the baby she conceives. Years later, having outlived countless men, she leaves to find her lost daughter, travelling across the Atlantic with meagre resources. She returns to a community riven with distrust, fear and hypocrisy in the wake the revolution. Hernandez' narrators have the level gaze of ordinary women reckoning with extraordinary hardship. Denouncing the ruthless machismo of combat with quiet intelligence, Slash and Burn creates a suspenseful, slow-burning revelation of rural life in the aftermath of political trauma.

Leseprobe

praise forSLASH AND BURN

“Slash and Burn is an incisive look into the lasting wounds of El Salvador’s Civil War. It is a tale of generational healing and resilience centered on its women. Hernández is a calm, cutting voice on how what is broken must be put back together.”

Ryan Gattis

“There is a surreal, dreamlike quality to this challenging story… it abounds with memories of violence told in a third person bordering on the first, both because of the randomness of events depicted and the naivety and warmth of the language that recounts the almost childlike aspects of the war, always through eyes and a voice that are, above all, feminine.”

The Spanish Bookstage, “Weekly Choice”

“Slash and Burn reimagines the country through the voices of mothers, daughters, and wives. The female gaze cuts sharp in this retelling.”

Gabriela Alemán

“Claudia Hernández’s extraordinary novel Slash and Burn has an embattled, unsentimental narrative style, with swift shifts of point of view to voices that are often telling her characters what isn’t possible, and a future tense that dramatizes the (im)possibilities for her and her family. Slash and Burn is destined to become a classic.”

Mauro Javier Cardenas

First published in English in 2020 by And Other Stories Sheffield – London – New Yorkwww.andotherstories.org

Originally published as Roza tumba quema by Laguna Libros, Colombia, in 2017. Copyright © Claudia Hernández, 2017 Translation copyright © Julia Sanches, 2020 Arranged with Casanovas & Lynch Literary Agency SL, Spain.

All rights reserved. The rights of Claudia Hernández to be identified as author of this work and of Julia Sanches to be identified as the translator of this work have been asserted.

ISBN 9781911508823 eBook ISBN 9781911508830

Editor: Annie McDermott; Copy-editor: Gesche Ipsen; Proofreader: Sarah Terry; Typesetting and eBook by Tetragon, London; Cover design: Paola Gaviria.

And Other Stories gratefully acknowledge that our work is supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

Contents

SLASH AND BURNA Translator’s Afterword

‌Slash and Burn

1

She’s never been to Paris. She knows it’s the capital of a very old country because it was a question on a test in her early days of school and she had to ask a classmate for the answer, even though she was scared the teacher would catch her and take away her test paper, send her out of the classroom to see the principal, then call her mother to let her know what her daughter had been doing instead of reading over her notes every day like they’d told her to at the start of the year. They’d said it was wrong to cheat and she knew she shouldn’t, but, after a quick calculation, had decided it’d be worse to have to explain at home why she hadn’t managed the ten her mom had wanted and that she’d committed to getting. She was so nervous about asking for the answer to number seven that her voice barely made a sound. In fact, her classmate had turned toward where she sat not because she’d heard her plea for help but because she’d felt someone’s eyes on her. Once she realized it wasn’t the teacher, she had to ask the girl several times what it was she wanted and then guess what she was asking because she couldn’t hear the girl’s request or even read her lips, which hardly moved.

Feeling sorry for her, the girl started giving her all the answers. But she already knew the rest. She only needed one. The easiest one. The one that anyone in the classroom or on the street could’ve gotten without needing to study because everybody knew it: it was on TV all the time and they were always mentioning it on the radio, as if there were no other capital in the world. Her classmate couldn’t believe she didn’t know. From then on, until the day she graduated, she told everyone time and again how the girl hadn’t known the answer to that question. Paris became the thing she was teased about for her entire school career.

If she’d known how much they’d tease her, she would never have asked. It was a short word. Her classmates wrote in large letters. She could have craned her neck a little and taken the information from the girl to her right, or slid her eyes over to the test of the kid on her left and gotten it from there. If push came to shove, she could have leaned back and asked the girl behind her, who’d have swapped the answer to that question for the one to number eight, leaving no one any the wiser. But she’d thought only of her friend from recess to help her out of that mess, which wasn’t really a mess at all, because the truth was her mom didn’t care whether or not she got a ten. She’d asked her to, in part because it was something all the moms asked of their kids, but above all because the agency they got aid from every month asked for it as well. They wanted proof that her four daughters were studying and getting their shots, as well as evidence they were attending the religious services held weekly for the community by the church that sponsored the aid program.

The grades didn’t matter. The agency never asked if they were genuine or if she’d cheated on that test, or why she kept cheating on the ones that followed. The teachers weren’t interested either. In fact, they couldn’t care less if all the children cheated, however blatantly they did it. The teachers were less missionaries out to save souls than caretakers who opened the door in the morning and closed it at noon, officers who steered the traffic of students from one year to the next, responsible only for delivering report cards to the ministry at the end of each school year. If they wanted to be anything else, or do anything else, they had to move away or enter the private school system, which paid less and demanded more. If they stayed, they had to understand that the local girls and boys weren’t to be troubled with any more than necessary because, no matter what they wanted or what they did, they’d only end up sowing the fields their parents had tilled and looking after the cattle born of their stock—that is, if they didn’t emigrate and end up working in somebody else’s kitchen, or painting another person’s walls, or tending to gardens whose owners would never ask them about the social sciences or blood types, which is why it was best not to pester them with that or insist they improve their handwriting. The girls would bake bread, do their household chores every day, and prepare tamales for special occasions. They’d have kids and spend their whole lives taking care of them in their villages, unless they married or got together with one of the soldiers at the barracks, or with a cop. Then, if their husbands were assigned to new posts, they’d have to move and keep looking after their kids wherever it was they went until eventually they returned to their village, if they ever did. In any case, no one would ask them how they’d done in the years of school they’d completed, or whether they had or hadn’t cheated in an exam. All that mattered was that no one failed, so the country could qualify for new loans and aid from the cooperation agencies. So even if she’d gotten every question wrong that time, or any subsequent time, they would’ve passed her just as they passed the kids who could neither read nor write by the time they finished high school, or who didn’t go to class because they were playing in the square opposite the school. They were so sure they couldn’t change the children’s destinies that if she’d asked if she could skip the test and still get a ten, they’d have let her without batting an eye. Not knowing this, though, she’d strived to get hold of the one answer she was missing and was glad—and a little remorseful—when she got the promised ten and saw her mother’s happiness as she took it, proudly, to the office that gave her aid month after month, where it was simply placed in a stack on a shelf.

Which is why she didn’t need them to explain what Paris was when they announced that her mother might well travel there for a month, or a month and a half. She knew this was good news and, deep down, she was happy for her. That she wasn’t smiling like everyone else had nothing to do with it being that city in particular, of all the cities in the world, but rather because a month or a month and a half was a long time, especially if their mother intended to leave her and her sisters in the care of a señora.

It was too early to tell. Several details had to be ironed out before they could say whether her fears would come true or not. Her mother wasn’t giving any clear answers. All she said was that right then the matter of the señora who’d look after them wasn’t important. Nor did she care much about getting hold of proper clothing to weather that city’s chill, which she couldn’t even imagine because she’d lived all her life in the hottest region of a tropical country. What concerned her was getting hold of the money she’d need for the trip, which even with the discount she was told had been arranged was much, much more than she could come by before the agreed deadline, or even in many years’ time. She figured she could sell the cornmill she’d bought to do her work with after all the chickens she’d raised had died in a single wave of avian flu, but gave up on that idea as soon as the señora who agreed to look after her daughters explained that the mill was her girls’ safety net. If something were to happen to her on this trip—God forbid, and not that she’d ever wish such a thing on her—the girls could still work and have food to eat even if she wasn’t around. She understood where the mother was coming from, but she had to think of the little girls staying behind. She suggested going out to ask for the money, even if she was ashamed to. But not on the street, like the poor, or door to door, like people thereabouts, but at offices, on the radio, or on TV. Maybe if she told her story, if she shared its most sorrowful moments, people would take pity on her and make a donation to help make her dreams possible. It might work. She’d seen people who’d gotten wheelchairs, special beds, and even surgery, without being asked for anything in return. She once saw a little old woman ask for a house to be built for her because the one she lived in might cave in on her head at any moment, and within two weeks a notice was released announcing it was underway. She couldn’t recall if it’d been paid for by one person or if several had deposited money in the account whose number was listed on the screen. The point was that the old woman had gotten what she’d wanted, and the mother could, too. People were generous to those who begged, especially if they were silenced by their tears. Her chances were good since she was always going speechless in the middle of her stories. But she didn’t want to beg. More than that, she didn’t want a bunch of strangers to witness something that didn’t concern them. The circumstances of her personal life belonged only to her, and to the people who’d gotten her into them. She’d contemplated seeking them out to ask for help. They owed her. Even though they claimed not to be responsible and held forth about how the situation was bigger than all of them, they knew. If they saw her sitting in the air-conditioned waiting rooms of their workplaces, they’d agree to anything she asked. But she didn’t want to see them again. Or ask them for anything either.

Better to take out a loan, even one without those financial guarantees banks gave out. She knew about a man thereabouts who lent money easily if you went to him with a recommendation, and she knew someone who could recommend her. She wouldn’t make her look bad. If necessary, she’d clean houses to pay off every last cent. No one doubted it. The problem was that the creditor didn’t give out long-term loans for the amount she was requesting. And in her case, a recommendation didn’t cut it: he wanted more, in case she suddenly discovered Paris was a nicer place to live and ended up staying there for ever. All he asked for was something that would give him peace of mind while she was away: a little parcel of land, a small house, something with a property title to quieten his nerves. He wasn’t a man of much faith, even though he’d have liked to be. Perhaps in another time, in other clothes, under other circumstances. But unfortunately, things were the way they were, and he couldn’t give her what she was asking for. Instead, he suggested she appeal to the television networks. Or to the recently elected mayor. Desperate to cover up the fraud that’d gotten him elected, he thought it pragmatic to give everyone anything they asked for.

In the end, there was no need. Before she agreed to seek him out, she got a phone call from another office sponsored by another church that gave her aid, saying they might have a solution to her money issue: someone had heard her story and wanted to make a donation toward her trip. The only thing the person asked in return was to meet her. They hadn’t asked why, assuming it was just a way to verify everything she’d said was true. If she agreed, they could meet at their offices in the capital or arrange for the person to visit her village. The first option seemed preferable. The person, however, thought it best to go to her. They weren’t the kind who thought they could understand her situation better by walking her paths or glimpsing her walls. They weren’t giving themselves any false hope. It just struck them that if a woman like her had trouble getting hold of enough money to travel someplace else in the world, she would certainly also have trouble making her way to the capital.

The people at the agency explained that she’d have to come to them anyway, since there were no travel agents where she lived. The closest one was in the state capital. If the donor wanted, she could go there to buy the ticket, but the woman would still have to come to the capital to arrange a passport. They were certain she didn’t have one. The donor insisted on going to her and the agency agreed. One day, they took the donor all the way to the woman’s house, without telling her, so that she could see how the woman really lived.

They found her scrubbing baby clothes. She knew that the money she made from all that laundering wouldn’t be enough to cover her trip to the capital, but she did it because every cent counted in the race to collect the full amount. If in the end she didn’t manage it, no one could accuse her of not having tried or of passing up opportunities. The donor asked her if she thought she’d manage. She answered that, if she didn’t manage it this year, she would many years later. The donor asked her if she didn’t trust the offer she had made her, through the agency. She took a moment to answer. She didn’t want to seem rude, but, truth be told, she didn’t. She had learned that people sometimes experience a change of heart. She said that sometimes circumstances don’t allow people to keep their promises or fulfill their intentions. The donor didn’t try to convince her. The people from the agency asked her to stop scrubbing for a moment and show them her house. The donor thought it curious that she didn’t have a Christmas tree. She decided to send the woman one of her own, and presents, too, after the woman’s eldest daughter said that she (gladly) and her sisters (reluctantly) had donated their present money to their mother’s travels. The eldest had also wanted her to use the money that would otherwise pay for the señora to look after them, but her mother refused to leave them unsupervised.

If asked, the donor would have spent New Year’s Eve with them. But she wasn’t asked, because the woman and her daughters thought she would be better off in her comfortable home than there, with them. The donor didn’t ask either. It would have seemed improper. She also didn’t see the inside of the house. As soon as the donor saw what she had come to see, she offered to cover the cost of the passport, too. Embarrassed and moved by the offer, the woman thanked her. Then she went back to scrubbing diapers.

2

Traveling to that other country isn’t her life’s dream or a flight of fancy. She only insists on going, and on finding the means to do so, because she wants to see her daughter. She’s spent years searching for her. She’s never given up. She doesn’t see how a mother could do anything but set off to find her, like her own mother had not, back when they were living on the farm named after a horse, where her maternal grandparents had also been tenant farmers.

She was nine years old. Her mother had sent her to grind corn for tamales which, from that day on, she would never enjoy again eating again. She made her daughter leave before seven in the morning so the girl wouldn’t mess up her plans if she got lost or distracted on the way. She told her which paths to walk and that the first thing she should do on getting there was say good morning and call politely for the mill owner. Then she should say that her mother had asked if they could please grind those kernels and that she’d pay for them with proceeds from the sale. It was a holiday. And holidays were an opportunity to earn a few extra cents. She didn’t want to pass it up. She knew she wasn’t the greatest cook in the area, so she only stood a chance if she set up shop before everybody else. She could save time by having someone else grind the corn. Meanwhile, she’d prepare the other ingredients.

There’d be no need to explain who her mother was: the girl was the spitting image of her. She also shouldn’t beg. If he said no, she had directions to another mill, which was farther away, but where they’d grind the corn on credit because they’d known them a long time and because her dad had helped them when they’d needed it. They owed them. She only hadn’t sent her there from the get-go because she’d make it home more quickly from the first mill. She’d accounted for everything, except for the fact that, when the girl passed by the white-sand beach, she’d start monkeying about in the waves and lose all sense of time before those enchanting waters.

By the time she finally made it home, it was four thirty in the afternoon. Her mother was angry. She wanted to smack her, or at least give her a good telling-off, but instead she just took the container from her and hurried to prepare the tamales. Even if she wasn’t first, she thought, she could still make some money off the people who arrived toward the end of the fiesta and were forced to make do with whatever was left. But she was so downhearted and blinded by her anger that instead of pouring water into the mixture she poured in gas, which was kept in an identical canister.

Thinking back on that episode, what saddened her wasn’t the licking she’d gotten or all the things her mother had yelled, but the fact that she hadn’t come to fetch her, even though she knew that the sea, despite being enormous and beautiful, was dangerous, too, and could have swallowed her up. She’s always wondered why she didn’t come for her. She’s tried to convince herself it was because she had so many children, but she doesn’t buy it: she could’ve had thirty or forty children, and still she’d have dropped everything to go after the one that was missing, even if she were lost in the jungle.

From then on, to keep her from dillydallying, her mother sent her to a mill at the other end of the bay. At low tide, you could cross it with the water below your calves. After a certain point, you had to pay for a boat back. And she never gave her the money for that. The girl always came home at the same time, so her mother thought she was keeping her in check with the water-clock and her empty pockets. But in fact, it was her brother who saw to it that they made it home. He was the one who could read the water and the angle of the sun and who alerted her when it was time to stop playing and head home. His dad had taught him all this when he’d taken him to the fields to sow. Though her mother sent the boy with his sister so that she could help look after him, in the end he was the one who looked after her: he knew where to walk to avoid snakes and where to fetch the best fruit to eat while they waited at the mill.

After a year of going to that mill, she trusted that her daughter had learned her lesson and sent her with one of her little sisters: she needed the boy to lend her a hand with something at home. She needed a man’s strength, even if the man was only a nine-year-old boy.

The episode with the white-sand beach happened all over again because her little sister was as absentminded and playful as she was. This time it was two girls who were riveted by the water and the seashells, lost all sense of time, and found themselves having to cross the bay with the water rising and spilling over everything.

They might have considered passing the time on the shore until the water allowed people to cross on foot again. But her memory of the licking she’d gotten was so strong that, faced with the blue expanse, she thought the only option left was to tell her sister they ought to steel themselves and cross while they still could, difficult as it might be. Their plan was simple: she’d hoist the girl onto her shoulders and hug her legs with all her might while, in exchange, her little sister held the bucket of tamale masa as high as possible and as firmly as she could, especially for the five meters during which she figured the water would cover them completely.

She convinced her sister with a brief account of the beating she’d gotten the year before. There was no time to go into detail. She had to trust her. If they dawdled any longer, the water would carry on rising and turn that opportunity into an impassable stretch. Her little sister was young, but she understood about not having money for the trip back, and about guarding the tamale masa to avoid their mother’s fury. So she shut her eyes and her mouth, just as her older sister told her to, and guarded the bucket more closely than her own life.

When they got out, her heart was beating very hard. She turned to face the enormous body of water and said, Thank you, Lord, even though she didn’t know who the Lord she was thanking was, or if there was any Lord to thank. It felt incredible to be on the other side. Her sister, meanwhile, had started crying, not because she’d choked on any water, but because she’d lost a little bit of masa as they crossed. She thought her mother would punish her for it. The girl convinced her sister that nothing would happen. She was certain her mother wouldn’t notice any masa was missing. And if she did, she’d take the blame for it. She swore to her little sister that their mother would believe her, even though she herself wasn’t convinced. She was sure her mother had keen instincts (although what she actually had was a watch) and that they’d be found out one way or another. So instead of telling her, she told her father, who’d come home early that day.

Days later, they moved away. The official story was that her father didn’t want to keep living on her maternal grandpa’s land now they had their own parcel in a place named after a plant. But she suspected he was trying to protect her: there were no bodies of water to cross around there. She was his little girl, the first of the daughters who’d survived.

In that region, where her dad’s sister also lived, she came across more people who hit her, such as the girls next door. They picked fights with her because she was new and because she was always the first to arrive to fill her earthen pitchers, and always clean and buttoned-up. They called her vain. Then they pulled on her skirt until it fell to her feet, knocked over her pitchers or stuck their muddied hands in them, spoiling all the work she’d done and making her task harder. She wanted to defend herself, but her mother had warned her never to hit anyone. She didn’t want any trouble. She didn’t want her to respond to their attacks, not even with words. If anyone said or did anything to her, she was to take it in silence. If she didn’t, she’d hit her even harder.

One day when her parents were away at a wedding, she decided to confront her attackers. She gathered some very large, very hard guama fruits from the ground and lashed at the girls with them after they knocked her pitcher over so that her mother would scold her. She hit them on the face, the arms, behind the knees, and in all the places that hurt when her mother hit her. She hit them as hard as she had been hit, until they stopped laughing. Then she filled the vessel again and prepared to face the consequences of bringing the pitcher home with a broken lip. She knew she wouldn’t get away with it. She’d once brought home a cracked pitcher, which she’d dropped when a snake jumped out of it and smacked her in the face, and her mother, deaf to all excuses, hit her for not seeing the snake, for not bringing the water, and for breaking the pitcher. Three separate blows. So she’d learn.

The neighbors’ mother also wanted to teach her a lesson, so she waited for her on the way back, knocked her to the ground with a punch to the eye, and kicked her in the belly till she cried. On top of that, she emptied her pitcher so that, once her pain had let up a little, she’d have to return to the river and refill it so as not to go home empty-handed.

Her mother, had she been home, would have hit her even more. But her dad’s sister was there instead. After hearing her story, her aunt grabbed a machete and went after the woman who’d beaten her. She yelled at her to come out, to stop being a coward, and to pick on someone her own size instead of a little girl. Her aunt was so furious that neither the woman nor her husband dared confront her. They shut themselves up at home with their girls and didn’t come out, not even when she finally left, several days later. The image of her aunt circling the house, belting out threats and whacking her machete against the ground, also sent the other neighbors into hiding and ensured that, from then on, none of the kids bothered her niece when she went out to fetch water. Of course, they never told her mother, who couldn’t understand why, all of a sudden, people were going so far as to help her daughter with her task. She wouldn’t have understood.

When she turned thirteen, her dad taught her how to put a gun together, take it apart, and shoot it. When she asked why, he said there were certain things a person ought to know. When she asked why again, he said it was because a time would come when they’d have to leave their house and go away, up the mountain, where they’d face hunger, cold, and sleepless nights. When she asked why again, he said that, for some, life was only a matter of whiling it away, but that they couldn’t afford such luxury. Her older brothers, who’d been in training before her, just told her to shut up and try to hit the bullseye. They were learning to protect themselves. It seemed a bit much to her. Maybe if they were still living on the other farm or if her neighbors had kept pestering her about the water, she’d have found it useful. But there, with her dad and his family watching over her, she didn’t see the need. She did it anyway, because he told her to. And she also went to Sunday school because he told her to, and agreed to run and crawl belly-down on the ground and leap over obstacles and do all kinds of other exercises that the catechists told her to after teaching the gospels.

Though she’d heard rumors of war, she didn’t see how it could have anything to do with what they were up to in buildings, or in fields when the sun was less punishing. She thought they did it because it was good for their health, as they claimed, and because it was fun. There wasn’t much to do for fun around there. If she refused, they’d surely make her do chores at home instead. Or send her off to pray, which she liked even less.

She realizes now that while she only heard acronyms and saw paintings that she never liked or understood, they knew what was going to happen. Her dad was training her brothers for war, he’d moved his wife and littlest children there to keep them safe, and he was coaching her to watch over the house for when neither he nor her older brothers would be around. The catechists were preparing them to resist in the hills, be it to fight or to hide, which is what they did months later, when the army invaded the region.

The day of the attack, neither her dad nor many of the other men in the area were home. The racket and the screaming came from a stampede of women and children, and from the helicopters that followed, spraying them with bullets. She’d been looking after her six younger siblings when it all began; she grabbed hold of them as best she could and ran off in the same direction as the rest of the village. Her mother, at home cooking lunch, didn’t make it out till later.

When she finally did, and reached the place where the daughter, her siblings, and the rest of the villagers were, the girl said: Here, take your kids. I don’t understand what’s going on, so I’m leaving. And she went to the hills. To hide, which is what her guts told her to do. She left with the aunt who’d defended her from her neighbors’ mother, and with her aunt’s daughters, and they took shelter in a gorge. Before she went, her mother, who did understand what was going on, took the kids and said that neither she nor her little brothers and sisters could leave, that they might be killed if they did, but that she should try and save herself if she could. She didn’t wish her luck, didn’t hug her. All she had time to do was take her kids by the hand and give her daughter the only tortilla she’d managed to grab as she’d fled her house.

A tortilla she ate in the gorge lit up by mortars, 60-mm and 105-mm field guns. And which she shared with her aunt and cousins on that endless night.

3

They left that place the next day and headed to a district where some friends lived who could take them in. On their way, they were captured by soldiers who made them stand in a bare field under the biting sun and said they’d kill them on the spot. Although all she felt was anger, she cried and cried as though she were afraid because that’s what her aunt had told her to do if something like what was happening right then were to happen. According to her, if they didn’t cry, the men might think they were defying them. It was a form of self-preservation. The aunt would be responsible for begging on all their behalf, for saying, Please don’t hurt us, we’re nobody. We don’t owe anyone anything and we don’t know what’s going on. Even though she did know. It was clear. In her movements, her aunt had not hesitated, nor trembled, and she had been walking in a very particular direction. The girl knew her well and understood that her pleading eyes weren’t real and that her aunt wasn’t one to beg. She begged because it was part of the plan, just as passing her off as her daughter—even though they looked nothing alike—was part of the plan to get her to a safe haven her father had told her about. Swallowing her pride was a small price to pay, and even though all she felt was rage and the urge to hit those men just as she had the girls by the river, she cried out of obligation.

Her cousins, on the other hand, cried for real, especially when the soldiers’ commander, the fattest man they’d ever seen, said he’d take them and raise them as his own. The girls were very young. Their mother hadn’t prepared them for this. She’d taught them how to get by without food, how not to scream at the sound of gunfire, how to hide in the hills if anything happened, but she hadn’t taught them to face death or the possibility of spending the rest of their lives with a man who sweated heavily and hid his eyes behind dark glasses. To the girl, he said he’d rape her, ’cause she was already fine-looking, he added, as if she were a piece of fruit.

She figured it must be a nasty and tense ordeal, because in the days of preparation her aunt had warned her they might threaten to do that to her to pry information from her. She taught her never to tell them a thing, neither the name nor the location of anything they asked about, even if in the end they did do the thing they were threatening to do. She should just cry harder than ever and ask them to please stop. Otherwise the men might think she liked what they were doing and enjoyed being with them. She’d never been with a man, and felt no desire or curiosity to be with one, unlike some of the other girls at school. She had to ask her aunt what rape was and then, when her aunt said it was sex by force, had to ask what sex was because she didn’t know that either. She had to imagine a good part of it because her aunt’s explanation was very terse. Still, it was more illuminating than anything her mother, who’d never discussed such matters, ever said about it. She’d never even warned her about menstruation, or given her any support when it arrived. She’d let her cry on seeing her stained panties, cry because she didn’t know what was going on, keep crying because she thought she’d hollow out and die from all the bleeding, then sort it out on her own.

What stuck with her from that conversation with her aunt was the notion that she should always be careful, that she shouldn’t go to any old place or lose her virginity to someone she didn’t love, like the soldiers’ commander or any of that lot. Then, as she tried to summon up more tears to protect herself, some men came and told the commander they’d found the guerrillas at a farm not far away, which was where she and her aunt had been heading. The man turned to face the soldiers and told them to get moving straightaway. They set off like a pack of hounds. They leveled fences, they leveled rocks, and they forgot all about them.

One of the last to leave came up to them and said, This is when you go. He insisted: Run. Go. They stood still, not because they were paralyzed by fear, but because they couldn’t believe that one of the soldiers might be willing to help. The aunt had warned the girls that they might try and pull this sort of trick, that they might try and get them to believe they were on their side, only to shoot them in the back. She didn’t know if that was more painful than taking a bullet head-on, but it was more humiliating, so she didn’t move. One of the daughters did. Then the other soldier who’d stayed behind told her to stop, drew a line in the dirt with his boot, and said, Step over this this line and your brains stay here.

The first one who’d spoken said, Let them go, it’s your brains that’ll be sprayed here, and turned to them again and said, Come on. The aunt felt confident then and gestured to them to get moving. Without any thanks, without looking back. She led the girls to a different place from the one she’d initially intended, an impromptu shelter. Because the first one had fallen. Then the girl parted ways with her aunt. And it was good that she did. Not long after, the soldiers were on her aunt’s heels. Someone had tipped them off to the fact that she wasn’t her aunt’s daughter but the daughter of one of the men on their wanted list.

She set off to look for him. Nobody had told her where he was, but she figured he might be in the village named after a flower, where he’d been born and often went to speak with other men. She walked to it and there he was, sitting beside the usual men, except now they had firearms slung over their shoulders. He was proud that she was alive. She told him what she’d been through the past few days. His face expressed no shock. She didn’t notice. Her own anguish was enough for the both of them. She said, Father, let’s go. The men eyed each other in silence. One nodded. Then her father said he couldn’t go because they might kill him, and her, too. She should return home and take care of her mother and her siblings. He would stay there to fight and protect them all. He’d joined up and would remain with the group while he had life and strength to. Her aunt’s husband as well. He didn’t ask after her or the girls, not because he didn’t care but because, if he were captured, he didn’t want to know anything that could prove dangerous or harmful to them. But his niece didn’t realize this, so she told him of the hill where they’d stayed and the district they were heading to, should he want to join them.

Her father didn’t keep her any longer. He gave her his blessing and urged her to leave. So she set off to search for her mother and her little brothers and sisters at their house, which was now just a pile of ashes.

First, her mother had gone with everyone else to the hills, to hide out for a few days. Then, like them, she’d returned home, but had been forced to leave again by order of the soldiers. While the girl and her aunt were being followed, the soldiers were herding all those people into one place and telling them, as they’d told her, that they were going to kill them. They wanted the names and whereabouts of their husbands and sons. They wanted to find them and kill them, to put an end to everything right away then go home and live peaceful lives. But they couldn’t give orders. To shoot, they had to wait for permission. They were authorized only to strike them one by one and as many times as they liked, regardless of age, for information. Which is what they did. They asked and they struck. They asked and they swore. They asked and then asked again, struck again, cursed again. No one breathed a word, except for one of her younger brothers, the one who looked most like his father, the one who knew how to read the water and the weather. He said, That’s enough. You’ve done enough damage. If you’re going to kill us, just kill us.

A soldier struck him in the face. He said he wasn’t the one in charge and knocked him to the ground. He said they could kill him whenever they liked. Which was a lie. But they weren’t in charge either. And they weren’t dying to kill children. In fact, some were relieved when they received the order to let the people be and go after the guerrillas that’d been spotted at a farm not far from there. Others felt nothing. It was a way of surviving.

They told them to leave and not come back. The mothers asked where they were meant to go: their homes were there. There was no place else. But soon they wouldn’t have those either. Minutes later, the soldiers set fire to everything. To all the men’s work, all the women’s hours, all the children’s chores, the recently done-up doors, the passed-down walls. Everything they had sowed and that still stood tall after the invasion was turned to the ash she found when she came looking for them.

The only sound in all that silence was her weeping, which she neither faked nor choked down because this time there was no one around to tell her to stop and no one to pretend for. She cried for her father and all they’d lost. She didn’t shed tears for her mother or her little brothers and sisters because she knew, without anyone having to tell her, that they were alive, someplace safe: the house they’d once lived in by the bay. And this is where she went. Alone, she followed the path her father had told her to take if some unimaginable thing were to happen, a thing he hadn’t described so as not to scare her, but which was without a doubt what she was experiencing right then.

Her three older brothers, who’d also hidden in the hills while the helicopters fired at them, arrived along that same path a few days later. Unlike her, they were coming to say goodbye. They were off to join their father in the mountains, where they’d fight and stand up for the people. They wanted their mother to know this and to bless them in case they never saw her again. They also wanted to tell their brave little brother all the ways he could help, and to teach him some stuff they’d learned about working the land so that, from then on, he could take over. Then they left.

Like her father, they didn’t say where they were going, but she knew how to find them. Whenever she wanted to see them, or whenever her mother wanted to send them word, she took the paths her father had told her about and went to their camp. The other men laughed nervously. They said if the national guard had gotten hold of her, they would’ve been lost long ago. She didn’t see what was so funny about it. She didn’t want them to see her as a traitor, not even in jest. They told her that wasn’t the case at all. As proof, they sometimes sent messages to their families through her. On those occasions, she had to go off-track and spend a few nights somewhere else before going home.

Her mother got used to her absences and learned to take advantage of her time at home, getting her to draw plenty of water and do a household chore or two. It would’ve been pointless to make her stay. Once melancholy took hold, she’d walk those paths to be with her father, to sleep by his side, and to horse around with him a bit if he had the time. Just like before the invasion.

4

When she turned fourteen, three men came for her at her maternal grandmother’s house, with guns. They said her father had sent them to tell her he was ill, near death, and that he wanted to see her. They would take her to where he was.

She recognized one of them, even though he’d shaved his head and his features had hardened since the last time she saw him: a year earlier, he’d been in one of the many camps her father had visited. She’d never seen the others but could place them from the description she’d heard from one of her neighbors. Just three days ago her neighbor had warned her to leave and hide in the hills or the gorges, because there were three guerrillas with rifles wandering the area and raping any women they found. They raped me then asked me where you lived, she said. They asked and I had to tell them.

At the time, she hadn’t believed the girl. She thought it might all be a dirty trick since this was one of the neighbors she’d struck with guamas that time by the river. She couldn’t be sure that this, though long delayed and a bit excessive, wasn’t the girl’s way of getting even. Besides, she had a hard time believing that one of the men who’d organized and gone to the mountains to fight for them could be going around doing a thing like that. To her mind, it was soldiers who raped. They were always the culprits in the stories of assaults that she heard. And yet what her neighbor had said was true, at least partly. The boys had been at the camps. But as soon as they’d earned the guerrillas’ trust and their weapons, they’d set off by themselves to work toward their own ends. They made the most of the fact that everyone was busy running from soldiers and advancing their positions, to go to unprotected zones and take as many women as they could.

They’d take the girls to the hills for three to five days. Then they’d bring them back and take others. They’d rape grown women in their homes and make them cook for them while they raped their young daughters. Later, it became known that one of the boys also raped elderly women. His compañeros abstained, one out of fear it would mean some additional kind of punishment at the final judgment (if it ever arrived) and the other because he found no pleasure in women who had no strength to resist and no future to compromise.

Nor did the boy rape all the elderly women he found, or come down from the hills to search them out. It was more about the circumstances, about wanting something in return for their efforts, and knowing the woman would hate him for it. He’d never touch the girl’s grandmother, for example, because, even after he’d provoked her a little, she didn’t give him the sort of response that inspired him to humiliate. The granddaughter didn’t much interest him either. He recognized that she was pretty, but didn’t find her attractive—unlike his compañero, who hadn’t stopped talking about her since they’d struck out by themselves. She was too skinny for his taste. And he didn’t like her hair or her attitude. Had his compañero not insisted on having her, he would’ve passed her over. But he backed his compañero’s choice, and protected him as he tried to convince the girl to answer her father’s supposed call.

She told them she wouldn’t go. If her father had to die, she said, there was nothing she could do about it. Unless they would do her the favor of bringing him here, to his home, where there was medication to treat him and people to look after him. Impossible, the boy said: she had to be the one to go. It was the right thing to do. Knowing her father was fine because she’d seen him a few days ago, she said she couldn’t, that she was in charge of collecting water for the house and for her grandparents. They’d seen it for themselves. She’d just filled the pitcher when they found her. She’d stopped a moment at her grandmother’s to rest.

When the boy, who’d seen at the camp just how much she loved her father, couldn’t convince her to go to him, he put his rifle to her chest. He’d tried to persuade her, he said, he’d asked nicely, but she left him no choice but to take her by force. He said it was time she went with them, and that there was no need to worry, it would only be a matter of three to five days. They told her it was so she could make them tortillas in the foothills where they were camping, that was all. She refused. She couldn’t make tortillas. Her mom could attest to that. She was always scolding her for it.

She responded calmly, but inside she was shaking. She knew what the boys were plotting, and she wasn’t about to allow it. She also knew she had to keep them entertained for as long as she could because, being deserters, it wasn’t in their interest to spend too long in one place. The punishment for deserters was just as severe as it was for enemies, if not more so. She knew because she’d witnessed it at the camps. She also knew the insurgents weren’t the kind to forgive a person who hurt civilians. She hoped that if she stalled the boys just long enough, someone would tell the guerrillas in the mountains and they’d come down and kill them then and there. But no one budged, either to tell anyone or to defend her. Not her uncles who were present, or the kids nearby, or the women watching from their windows: no one did anything except look on in silence as she resisted what everyone knew was bound to happen, laying out obstacles to all the false explanations they gave her.

The boy who raped elderly women got annoyed. He said they were running out of time and she should cut the nonsense and come with them immediately. He slung his rifle over his shoulder and got ready to grab her. But she threw herself on the ground to make it harder for him, even though, in reality, it wasn’t hard at all—her height and build, short and slight, were no match for the boy. What did complicate matters was the way she clung to the railings, the branches, and anything else she could reach. This gave her grandmother the chance to send a kid they hadn’t noticed before to tell the girl’s mother what was happening. She put up such a fight that her mother had time to reach them, with her six kids clutching her hands and her skirt, and ask what was going on and why they wanted to hurt a girl who’d done nothing to them and could do them no harm.

The boys told her not to fret, to go home and look after her other kids; they’d bring her daughter back soon enough. Her mother asked them to let the daughter go and kill her instead, if it was blood they wanted. And she asked them to please kill all the little ones who were with her while they were at it, because none of them would manage without their mother. There’d be no one to feed them. No one to care for them. No one to watch over them. Best if they all met their end together.

No, they answered. It was her daughter they wanted. No one else. Her mother grew furious when she saw them put the rifle to her daughter’s throat and said something to the boy that made him hold his rifle out to her and say, Go on, lady, take it. Kill me. I can see you’re real angry. You’ll burst if you don’t. Her mother said he’d best give it to her daughter. Seeing as her dad had taught her how to handle guns, she’d figure out how the rifle worked in no time at all and finish him off, even if the other two finished her off as well—that is, if they didn’t get scared and run away like the cowards they were. But he knew who he was giving the gun to. He said he was only giving it to her because she looked angrier than her daughter. He offered it to her again and she decided to take it. Even if she didn’t know how it worked, she could at least use it to hit him. She knew you didn’t need much to kill. She’d done it herself once, long ago. She hadn’t liked it, but she’d do it again if necessary. Then her daughter spoke. She told him to stop. She swallowed her pride like her aunt had taught her you should with certain men and begged them to leave.

You’ve raped all the other women, she said. I owe you nothing, there’s no reason for you to hurt me, too. She was acting, in that moment, like she’d been told to with dogs: showing no fear, even though she could feel it in her fingers. She did what she could to stop her body giving off the smell of terror. She said she knew who they were and what they were up to. She even called the one she knew by his name. His cover blown, he replied that he was sick of fighting for her and that if he couldn’t take her with him, he’d kill her on the spot. He pushed her against the wall and made her spread her arms out in the shape of a cross.