The night will be long, p.7
The Night Will Be Long, page 7
“You OK?” she asked.
“That kid’s story hit me hard,” Johana said. “We have to find him.”
“Do you know anything? Does the dad’s name sound familiar?” Julieta asked.
“I didn’t know many people’s real names, and I wasn’t in this area at the end of the conflict. Comrades were dying all the time.”
They went down to the church in San Andrés de Pisimbalá, which was still closed, with nobody working on the roof repairs, so they headed over to the archeological museum. Julieta asked to speak to the director.
They were shown into an office that looked out on the San Andrés gorge. A colonial-style house with wide corridors and windows with frames made of orange-hued wood. The director, Jacinto Duque, an anthropologist from Popayán, greeted them. They sat down and were offered coffee.
Julieta explained that they were looking into an armed confrontation that had taken place a few kilometers away. The director knew nothing about it.
“I was in Popayán for a lecture at the University of Cauca last week,” he said apologetically. “Nobody here told me anything. Combat? Where?”
They recounted the boy’s tale. The museum director, surprised, kept repeating that nobody had said anything to him about it.
Next they asked who was in charge of the church.
“It’s a long story,” Duque said. “Because of the delicate situation in keeping public order, they made this an apostolic vicariate. In 1989 Don Germán García Isaza was named prefect, but in 2002 the FARC threatened his life and he had to flee. So because of the problems with the guerrillas, it was given to the Apostolic Missionaries of Yarumal, and Bishop Edgar Tirado was named prefect, but he never comes here. A priest comes on the weekends, but everything else is managed from Inzá. And then there was the church fire—do you know about that?”
“More or less,” Julieta said.
“There was a conflict between the reservation indigenous community and farmers over some issue about education and land, which isn’t at all clear. Honestly, it’s best to leave it alone. The church is being repaired now, even if it’s slow going. It’s an eighteenth-century church! It was constructed by members of the indigenous population. Using their materials, but following the Spanish tradition. Cultural synthesis. Did the boy you’re looking for work there?”
“Yes,” said Julieta. “We talked to him yesterday. He was cleaning the pews with some sort of wax. Today we went up to El Tablazo to look for him at his house, but his grandparents said people came for him yesterday. From the church.”
“They must have been from the church in Inzá,” the anthropologist said. “Definitely, they’re the ones who manage the repairs. You should go and ask there. The parish priest is Father Tomás.”
“When will the restoration be finished?” Johana asked.
“It’s been years, but there’s no money. It’s getting done a little at a time. Like everything good in this country. Did you go to see the hypogea? Do you know about them?”
“Yes,” Julieta said. “I’d love to see them, but we’ve got this other issue to deal with. We need to talk to the boy again.”
“I suggest you go to Inzá, they’ll tell you what’s up. Maybe they took him somewhere else to do some kind of job.”
“It’s strange they didn’t tell his grandparents though,” Julieta said, “don’t you think?”
“People move at a different pace here. Remember, they’re Nasas. At twelve, a boy is already a man.”
“Well,” Julieta said, “I’m sure you’re right. We’ll head to Inzá.”
As they left the museum, Julieta looked around. The image of the motorcyclist was still at the front of her mind, but she didn’t see anything. Everything seemed calm, so they pulled onto the road. Johana kept her eye on the rearview mirror and they stopped a couple of times.
But there was nothing.
Inzá’s parochial church stood on the north end of town, on a leafy square shaded by oaks, palms, and shrubs. A neatly tended garden. The women were impressed by the majestic architecture. The central tower was topped by a cupola of arches. Inside, a nave ran down each side. At the far end they saw a large statue of Christ on the cross, known locally as Our Lord of Guanacas.
The priest, Father Tomás, greeted them with a big smile.
“It’s wonderful that journalists from Bogotá are taking an interest in us,” he said. “What brings you here?”
Julieta cleared her throat and looked at Johana. “We’re here about a boy from Tierradentro, Franklin Vanegas. Do you know him? He works in the church in San Andrés de Pisimbalá.”
“Of course! That’s a lovely church, isn’t it? And it’s looking fantastic too. We’re slowly getting there. Did something happen with Franklin? He works for Francisco, the missionary priest who’s there on weekends.”
“He hasn’t been heard from since yesterday, Father,” Julieta said. “That’s why we’re looking for him. His grandparents say people from the church came by to pick him up, but he didn’t come back today, and nobody knows where he is.”
“From the church? That’s not possible—Francisco was in Popayán yesterday. The grandparents must have misunderstood.”
Julieta and Johana glanced at each other anxiously. Had he been taken because he’d talked to them? They hadn’t been prepared for that, but it was possible. It was also clear that the priest didn’t know a thing.
Julieta started getting impatient. “Forgive me for changing the subject, Father. What do you think of the Christian and Missionary Alliance?” she asked.
The priest shifted around in his chair and for a moment she thought he was going to laugh, but his face took on a grimace.
“Well, that question is . . .” He moved his thick neck against the too-tight collar of his cassock. “You see. They’re our competition, and of course with the resources they have they’ve already got the mayor in their pocket. There’s no point in pussyfooting around it—it’s a fact. They monetize faith, and we frown on that. But I’m saying this in confidence, between us; I’d rather not have them as an enemy.”
“Do you think they could be dangerous?”
“I don’t know that they’d be dangerous the way things are usually dangerous in this country,” the priest said. “Or so I’d like to believe.”
“We need to speak with Father Francisco urgently. Do you have his phone number?”
“Of course, hang on.”
He pulled out his cell phone and scrolled through it. “Here it is, copy this down.”
It was getting dark as they left.
On the way back to Popayán, Julieta called Father Francisco. Once, twice, nothing. “Why does nobody answer the phone in this fucking country?” she fumed.
Johana looked over at her with a mixture of mirth and seriousness. “And it’s no good leaving messages either—nobody listens to them or responds.”
Just then her cell phone rang. “It’s a miracle!” Julieta exclaimed—the priest was calling her back.
“Somebody called from this number?” the voice said.
Julieta introduced herself, gave a brief recap of events, and asked about the boy, but the priest didn’t know anything.
“Nobody from the church sent for him at his home yesterday?”
“No, miss. That’s what I mean. I was in Popayán, so why would I send for him?”
“And you’re the only one who would?”
“Nobody can enter the construction site without my say-so. For starters. Franklin helps out with the cleaning during the week.”
“You know the kid,” Julieta said. “Where do you think he could be?”
The priest reflected a moment. “He loves the internet. Maybe he went to Inzá—there’s a good signal there. But it’s odd he didn’t go home last night. Maybe he stayed with a friend from school.”
“His grandparents said he left because he got a call from the church.”
“He could have made it up so they’d let him go,” the missionary said. “You know kids these days, especially with the internet. They’ll do anything!”
“I’m on my way to Popayán,” Julieta said. Her next question came out more like an order: “Could we meet up when I get there?”
“Of course, absolutely.”
They met in a café cattycorner to Caldas Park. Pochi’s. Fresh-squeezed fruit juices, chilled oat drink, organic orange juice, meat empanadas, gluten-free cassava cheese bread.
Julieta and Johana ordered coffees.
Francisco was an odd-looking man. A scraggly mustache strove, without much success, to disguise a cleft lip that had been sewn up, probably when he was a teenager, which created a strange tension in his mouth and twisted when he spoke. He was skinny and anxious. Instead of coffee, he ordered a glass of the cinnamon oat drink. Julieta guessed that his nerves had destroyed his digestion. Coffee is a powerful irritant. He might have hemorrhoids or reflux. She studied the way he was sitting and noted that in fact he was favoring one side. He couldn’t be older than forty. The clerical collar under a gray zip-up jacket, dark pants, and thick-soled black loafers completed the stereotypical image of a priest on his day off.
“Franklin spends a lot of time in Inzá so he can connect online,” he said. “He has friends from school there. He probably stayed with them. But I don’t know who they are, I’ve never met them.”
“And the people who came for him—could they have been from the Pastoral Alliance?” Julieta asked.
“Well, they do organize a lot of things for kids,” Francisco said, “a way of getting them young and drawing in the parents.”
The coffee cups were empty. Julieta signaled to the barista to bring her another.
“What about you, Father? How did you end up in San Andrés?” Julieta asked.
A very elderly shoeshine man, skinny and hunched from the weight of his box, crossed the street diagonally and came toward the priest, pointing at his shoes, but Francisco wagged his finger no. The last light of evening turned the sky purple behind the lush trees in the plaza: Castille guava, mora, mango, charichuela. The twilight scene, with the beds of hydrangeas and ornamental hedges, evoked the colors in an old engraving.
Let’s see, where do I start? I’m from Madrid, outside of Bogotá. At sixteen I was ordained as a Franciscan. No, actually that was my first vows and investiture. Ordainment came later, when I was eighteen. I joined the order to study—I was determined to get an education one way or another. It would have been dumb not to. If I didn’t join the church I was going to have to work in the fields, on someone else’s land, because my parents didn’t have much. And being poor is tough and miserable, especially in this country, which is so unjust and hard on the poor. You dream and dream, only to get nowhere, and poverty is a tombstone you carry on your back that just gets cold in the night. I don’t want to lie to you, miss.
And I did study, of course. I didn’t manage to travel the world, but I saw Colombia. Ultimately, that’s my world. They sent me to Virrey Solís, the Franciscan school in Bogotá. I was so thrilled to go! I taught Christology, my favorite subject, the life of our Lord. I taught the kids his ideas, but I mixed mine in too, and after a while I started getting warnings from the administration. I was in the doghouse! Don’t say this, and don’t say that, it’s forbidden . . . To avoid conflict I shifted to ministry with the Yarumal Society for the Foreign Missions. I’ve been strong in my life. You have to look out for yourself.
I was there for a while and later was sent to Caquetá, far from the trouble I’d had with the Franciscans. The people there are good, reliable people, strong. The children of poor country folk, indigenous communities, displaced or forgotten people—the dark and invisible people of Colombia. They started coming to listen to me, and I would tell them that I wept with those who wept and felt the pain of those who were in pain; I talked to them about the cross and painted it on their foreheads and in their minds: the cross, †, †, over and over, †, †, and I was a wounded man with the wounded children of war, and an orphan with the orphans, and I wept with the widowed and the mutilated, and if someone was missing a leg, I would draw a cross there, †, and if they were missing an arm, I would draw a cross there, †, and if someone lacked good eyes and a good heart and a good soul, I tried to draw a thousand crosses, †, †, †, †, †, and so I became a distributor of crosses, the cross thrower, because that’s what missionary priests are: they throw crosses. The cross is the pencil with which we sketch on the heavens or on the souls of the wretched.
Forgive me, ladies, I got carried away with my own musings. It happens sometimes. Where was I? Oh, right, in Florencia, Caquetá, in the lost villages, all those gray children and men and women, gray like trees or stones scattered in a field—they’re just there, in their silence, and one day they’re gone, but others arrive, that’s the law of life and of silence in those lonely places; places that may be insignificant to the nation but not to the Lord, and that’s why I was there, struggling in those difficult places, where—forgive me—buttoned-up city priests who freak out when their cassock gets muddy don’t go. The Church has its assholes too, ladies, if you’ll excuse my French. Whereas I am imbued with the sinew of Christ. I am passionate about the word, enamored of the word. I know you want to know about the boy and how I ended up in San Andrés. Well, one day I was in Caquetá when I got a call from the diocese: you’ve got to travel to Medellín immediately, pack up all your things, and I wondered, what have they been hearing about me now? I was resigned, but when I got to Medellín, to my surprise they wanted to transfer me to San Andrés de Pisimbalá, and why me? I asked, and they said the previous priest had been threatened by the guerrillas, and since I was coming from Caquetá, the FARC probably already knew me.
So that’s how I came there, and of course there were problems, but I’ve stuck it out. The Nasa boy started coming to help, Franklin, or Frankitón, as I call him. He was looking for work after school, said his parents were poor and couldn’t afford to give him an allowance—the kid’s obsessed with the internet—and, well, I’ve always thought that work is a way to learn too, so I started paying him a small wage to maintain the church, because since the construction’s going so slow, the floor gets filthy and the pews get infested with beetles; I give him a bit of money and he keeps it all spick-and-span, and when I go there, sometimes on Saturday or sometimes starting on Thursdays, he has everything ready for me.
So he’s disappeared? They came for him from the church? To be honest, he uses that excuse to get away from his grandparents. My bet is he’s at the cybercafé in Inzá or staying at a friend’s house. I’ve been in Popayán, so how would the church be sending for him? The people at the missionary inn can vouch for me. He’s a good kid, but I’m only just starting to teach him. He does like to fib sometimes. I work with him, talk to him about the Creator and the mountains and the sky and the graves of his ancestors, but he looks at me like he’s listening to the rain.
LOOKING FOR MR. F
It was dark when they returned to the hotel. They had something to eat in the restaurant and Johana went up to the room. Julieta stayed downstairs with her notes and ordered a double gin and tonic. She was nervous, anxious about the boy’s fate. Something from their talk with the priest kept nagging at her: what was the gossip that hounded him? Her first thought was the most obvious: sexual abuse. She called Jutsiñamuy’s cell phone.
“Hi, friend,” the prosecutor said, “I’m all ears.”
Julieta told him what they’d found out.
“OK, I’m writing this down. Francisco Berrocal? All right, we’ll see what we’ve got,” Jutsiñamuy said. “We didn’t have anything on that other guy, Fritz Almayer.”
“He doesn’t have a record?”
“He’s cleaner than a porcelain Christ. Not one complaint, not even a ticket for running a red light.”
“Well,” Julieta said, “it’s not for sure it was him anyway. It was just a guess because of the black clothing. We need the boy to confirm.”
“Remember, all priests wear black.”
“Let’s wait a little longer,” Julieta said. “And . . . speaking of tickets, can you find out whether he’s got a car registered to him? Or to his church? Is there a Hummer or some SUVs?”
“That’s good,” the prosecutor said. “I mean the Hummer. Everybody’s got SUVs, you don’t have to be mobbed up for that. But Hummers are a different story.”
“And did you learn anything about why they’re hiding what happened?”
“No, I haven’t looked into that yet—I need a little more meat on the grill first. But I’ll dig around soon.”
They said goodbye.
As she sipped her gin and tonic, her mind started to make strange associations. The missing boy, the man in black, the biker in the tinted helmet, the chatty priest. She doodled several circles and drew some lines. A possible trail emerged:
The man on the motorcycle kidnapped the boy because he saw him talking to us.
The biker works for New Jerusalem. They want to know what exactly the boy saw and what he might have said that would implicate . . . the priest?
Always back to Fritz.
She thought: Thanks to the car rental agreement, they know who I am and what I do, and why I’m here. They know I’m investigating. They have my documents, my address in Bogotá. They’ve been spying on me since the day we went to inspect the road. “Maybe they’re watching me,” she wrote at the bottom of the page. She tapped the table with her index and ring fingers to help herself think. Fritz, Fritz. She drew a larger circle in the center of her page and wrote: “Mr. F. Who is this mysterious person?” From the F she drew an arrow to another bubble, in which she wrote, “Attack on the road to San Andrés.” And from there another arrow to an empty circle where she wrote, “Mr. F’s attacker.”
