We arrived at the abandoned camp. At the hastily assembled shelters. In a hurry. Clearly in a hurry. With that nervous haste of women, even soldiers. I rushed into the shelter that served as a library. I have a frantic need for books, and there were piles of them there. All the authors you could wish for, and all abandoned. I discovered Stefan Zweig. Ah, The World of Yesterday! I picked it up immediately and, like a card shark, I turned the pages, which seemed like a deck of cards. Then, from inside, a letter fell out, floating down unexpectedly. An unfinished letter…
May 29, 1988
Dear Juan:
I am writing to you from the South. We have set up camp in the jungle. Better still, we have occupied an abandoned camp. Underground shelters because of the danger of bombing, say the bosses. We are retreating because peace is up in smoke, but we still have to be careful. It would be so sad to die now. Like Dolores, the girl from Camagüey.
We live in fear. I confess. The other day it was obvious, because a frog, something as ridiculous as a frog, terrified us and caused panic in the camp. However, we have seen death up close, which is worse than a frog. We have seen bombs tear many friends to pieces. Unrecognizable. We have been in a shelter under incessant shelling. So much so that the earth from the roof fell down on us, hot. We fell into a kind of collective hysteria.
And they even had to slap us two or three times. I started laughing. I laughed and laughed uncontrollably until I wet myself like a little girl. What are we doing here? Here, where it doesn’t matter if you’re ugly. When a man has been in Africa for a year or two months in the mountains, the ugliest woman, the one he would never look at in a normal situation, becomes someone desirable and indispensable. I’m not talking about myself. You know I’ve got my charms.
After we arrived, at the welcome party they threw for us, I caught the eye of a general who, despite his age, was still a handsome man. He was also extremely kind. He kept me in the capital as long as he could, coming up with many, many excuses, but in the end he had to let me go. I’m a soldier and my regiment had already been in the war zone for a long time. So we said goodbye on good terms, and he sent me to the camp in a plane.
I arrived at the camp, where my female colleagues looked at me mischievously, and I quickly realized that I would have problems with the major, the head of the unit. He is one of those people who you dislike just by looking at him. When I presented my papers, he said, “So you’re the favorite of… diseases.” Well, this is the unit. Since then, he started harassing me because he actually wants me and I detest him. He even went so far as to list my colleagues’ relationships with other officers and soldiers in the regiment and the constant changes of partners that took place, and when that didn’t work, he yelled at me to stop being so prissy, that everyone knew about me.
But I despise him. Since I arrived, I’ve only had eyes for Carlos. A gunner. Quiet and different from the others. He has loved me like no one else ever has, and one day, unable to take any more of “Carlos, go and pick up the leftovers, you have experience in that,” he cursed his mother in the middle of the dining room and they raked through the weapons and everything.
People intervened and the rope broke on the weakest side. Although they couldn’t do anything to him, because the humiliations we both suffered were too many and too obvious, they transferred him to the rear (which, as we are retreating, is now the front) more than a fortnight ago and I haven’t heard anything from him. He’s hundreds of miles away. There, the fighting continues, and I live in fear of receiving news that I don’t know if I can bear. Just as Dolores, the woman from Camagüey, couldn’t bear it. She couldn’t bear this war. The distant news from home. The belated news of the death of her mother, whom she believed to be alive and to whom she wrote letters when she had in fact been dead for a long time. And one day, she woke up to the sound of the gunshot with which she took her own life.
The life that is leaving us. The youth that is leaving us in this war that began when I was seven years old and playing with dolls, and in which I am now involved thirteen years later. I, who when I was told the name of this country did not know where it was (and still do not know very well).
Now they’re sounding an alarm, one more. Every minute, every day they’re sounding an alarm, I don’t know until when, I’ll see what it is and then I’ll continue telling you…
[Story from the book Indicaciones para divorciar a un hombre, 2018]
Cover image: African mask (Wikipedia).
