“It was not a victory of patriots over royalists: it was a hideous misunderstanding that Bolívar, who should have resolved it, brought about; he was unable to pluck the thorn of Bomboná from his ludicrous, wounded pride.”
“This is the point at which Benito Boves flees with his posse of priests and Spaniards to the Putumayo, never to return. Agualongo, who was from Pasto, would fall back to the mountains with his captains, to draw strength from the craggy landscape. He little suspected that the people of Pasto, without militiamen to defend them anymore (the last fell before incoming forces that were ever more numerous), would end up burned alive; he never imagined the mercy that he did grant the defeated would not be granted to women, children and the elderly.”
“It would be the first major example of barbarism in the history of Colombia: the first major massacre of many that would follow.”
“The stuff of every day,” the bishop said. He spoke for the first time.
“This is also where we hear for the first time about Hilaria Ocampo and Fátima Hurtado, ancestors of Polina Agrado, may she rest in peace. It’s here we begin to learn of her tragedy, passed down like a fable from one teller to the next, here ‘in the horrid butchery that followed, in which soldiers and civilians, men and women were promiscuously slaughtered,’ as O’Leary points out. But is it right to say ‘soldiers?’ Only the defenceless — women and children — remained in the city. Sucre continued the assault on them, and followed Bolívar’s orders.”
“Historians who speak of Sucre, his thinking, the dazzling clarity of his actions, doubt he participated in the massacre. No doubt he closed his eyes and carried out orders, because this business of ‘carrying out orders’ was and remains the universal excuse when it comes to butchery. Even if Sucre did not enter the city during the slaughter, he did send in the chief of assassins, a certain Sanders. Bolívar’s orders were irrevocable, and the Rifles and Dragoons must have turned themselves into animals to carry them out.”
“Polina Agrado’s forebears were not in the least bit wealthy, unlike Belencito Jojoa’s, isn’t that ironic? Here’s Belencito, a carpenter: there stands his Santacruz ancestor, rich and influential. Here’s Polina Agrado, a fine lady with a three-storey house on Santiago Square: there are her ancestors, obscure, battle-hardened mountain people, and above all that forthright and resourceful grandmother, the widow Hilaria Ocampo. Her own loved ones had already gone off to fight and she had heard no news of them for weeks; only she and her granddaughter were still in Pasto. If she had not been ill, she would surely have gone to fight too, but she also had to look after Fátima, her fourteen-year-old granddaughter who ‘struggled with words,’ as the family put it: it was hard for her to get them out, and, when she did, she directed them to her grandmother alone. What language was she speaking? It was a muttered gibberish that only grandma could decipher; her grandmother was the one person Fátima trusted: she laughed with her; they slept in the same bed; they went to Mass together every morning; the grandmother herself used to say: ‘She has faith only in me.’ But she also said that sooner or later Fátima would come to believe in others too, for good or for ill, and that she must be given time.”
“For a long time Fátima’s beauty had been startling; it was just that her loveliness, paired with the mental fog that shut her in (‘She seems an odd girl,’ ‘She’s virtually dead’), meant it was no sooner noticed than forgotten; it was something everybody had got used to, the extraordinary beauty that blazed just for an instant, because it was immediately overwhelmed by the certainty of a gentle, absent madness.”
“They stayed inside their house, on the outskirts of Pasto, at the mercy of fate and war. The River Chapalito ran nearby, crossed by a stone bridge where granddaughter and grandmother sometimes went, and waited. The grandmother despaired of the time spent without news: months before her illness (her right arm was paralyzed, they said it was bewitched) she took an active part in the fighting, and for this very reason the tale that’s been passed down commemorates her. From his pulpit, the vicar of Pasto had already given her just cause: to defend the king was to defend God. With this holy blessing behind her, the widow not only took charge of cooking for the militia but at times, in the clamour of the fight, abandoned the stove and ran to help, body and soul, wherever she might be most needed. When she was forced to resign herself to the paralysis in her arm, she symbolically handed in her kitchen knife to Estanislao Merchancano, colonel of the Invincible Squadron. And now, instead of a knife she carried a sharpened eucalyptus stick, hidden in her bodice, which she surely used more than once, with her one good arm, the day Bolívar’s Rifles entered Pasto: one Liberator or another could have fallen to its point, but the fable passed down by word of mouth records its use just one single time.”
“A single time?”
“Hilaria Ocampo was a redoubtable lady: a giant of a woman around six feet tall, but with the face of a kindly grandma, the face old women have who were once beautiful. She was not Fátima Hurtado’s grandmother for nothing: ‘As lovely as she is sick,’ the soldiers would say of Fátima when they discovered and chose her for Bolívar, ‘but lovely still.’”
“The widow had fought against Bolívar at Bomboná, that Sunday, the seventh of April, Feast of Flowers; she found herself shoulder to shoulder with the six hundred Pasto militiamen who crossed the Cariaco ravine not fearing enemy bullets, climbed the steep sides, entered the encampment of the Vargas and Bogotá battalions, stripped them of flags, arms and munitions, and after leaving most of the troops in a bad way and the principal patriot commanders injured, returned to their own camp taking many prisoners with them: she took along four herself and kept them safe until it was decided to return them unharmed, with the others, to Bolívar. The Pastusos in the Invincible Squadron called for her; their leader, Estanislao Merchancano, said she brought them luck. Now, with such perfidious paralysis, she could not fight against Zambo, and stayed in Pasto, with Fátima, waiting. That December twenty-fourth, during Black Christmas, she had not managed to find any of her loved ones in the confusion of the slaughter, and she felt afraid: they might be dead already, dead beneath the dead.”
“When Agualongo’s men left the city, she believed, like most people, that since the resistance had faltered, the killing would also stop, that Pasto had been captured and peace would once more ensue: restrictive, but peace after all, settling for whatever was to come — the republic? — so be it, this was something she and everyone else were already resigning themselves to. What she did not anticipate was the subsequent actions of murderers in the Rifles on the undefended city: ‘the killing of men, women and children went on even though they took refuge in the churches, and the streets ended up filled with corpses; so that the time of the Rifles is an expression which has stuck in Pasto to mean this gory catastrophe,’ Sañudo tells us.”
“That battalion had a very bad name even among Bolívar’s own troops. Under the command of that man Sanders, the Rifles foretold days of bloodshed that were coming not just for Pasto but for the whole of Colombia, from that time onwards, for years and years that are still without end.”
“After that Black Christmas, four hundred civilian corpses of all ages lay in the streets of Pasto, not counting the militiamen lost in combat, and the carnage would continue for three more days, with the acquiescence of General Sucre, who ‘was carrying out orders.’”