One weekend, I went back to Soacha to see the women who had been demonstrating. Things had changed and it was now common knowledge that the young men had indeed been murdered. The army was announcing a purge. I met with Señora Martha again, the one who had seen me cry the previous time, and said to her, how can I help you? but she said, there’s nothing to be done, they’re going to put some of the soldiers on trial, but everything is slow and difficult and we’re already getting threats, they say we’re with the guerrillas. My voice shook, and my hands shook, and again I felt full of hate. That day I could have killed someone. I went back home on a crowded bus and enjoyed the smell of the students, the poor crowd: those who had to cross the city for a job and then run to a night class and have the strength not to fall asleep over their books. Poor people. Only hope and probably imagination gave them the strength to bear that shitty life. When did something pleasant ever happen to them? Almost never. I was going to be their avenging angel.
The next step was to get involved with the State and its yuppies, with its security apparatus and that gang of macho men, oh so macho behind their rifles and their checkbooks of public money and the complicity of the great alpha male, the supreme asshole of the nation.
Now they would see, the sons of bitches.
I sought them out, Consul. I infiltrated the Secret Service, and how did I do it? I became their whore. I was their whore because I wanted it. I preferred to sell my body rather than my soul, which is what everybody sold in that horrible country. Everybody except me, I did the opposite. I gave them my body. Look at me, I’m pretty and I can be a really attractive chick if I put on high heels, a miniskirt, a low-cut top, and hey, presto. I was told about a bar where people from the Secret Service hung out, so I went there and hooked one of the top guys, whose name was Víctor. He’d go around with a roll of dollars, a bottle of Blue Seal whiskey, and a bag of coke in his car. It all comes from the seizures, sweetheart. We fucked first at the Paracaídas motel, then at the Calera, and then at those in the north. He didn’t like to stick to one in particular, for security reasons. They may be following me, he would say. Evil never sleeps, that was his motto. We often went out with a guy called Piedrahita who was his boss in the Narcotics division, and the parties would end up at the VIP room of the Francachela motel. It was always on the house, thanks to the owners of the motel, they never paid. They hired other whores to do striptease and played around with them, but in the end Víctor would have sex with me and Piedrahita with Mireya, a girl from Choco who looked like a transvestite, and he was crazy about her, in love with her, because he liked them black. Melanin and frizzy hair, that’s how he put it. The parties would last three or four days, until they got a call from headquarters and went off to solve a case. When things went well they’d come back with fresh supplies for the party. We did coke, drank high-class whiskey, ate paella, and watched porn movies; Piedrahita, who must have been around fifty, would get very drunk and sometimes he’d go crazy and do ugly things, he’d give the whores hundred-dollar bills to perform cunnilingus on Mireya right there in front of him, and if one of them refused he’d take out his revolver and slam it down on the table, what’s the matter, girls, don’t you like her? don’t tell me you’re racists? racism is against the constitution! Don’t be like that, darling, Mireya would say in his ear, let’s go to the bedroom, and she’d drag him away. One day a shot went off that ended up in the ceiling and Víctor had to go out with his Secret Service badge to calm the neighbors.
Another night we were in the bedroom and he came and knocked, calling to Víctor: come on, brother, hurry up and get dressed, duty calls, this fucking country won’t let anyone fuck in peace. Víctor went out into the corridor. Wait, let’s get high before we go, Piedrahita said, and prepared four lines of coke, which they snorted. Now, girls, don’t cry for us, when you’re a public servant you have to make sacrifices, I’ll leave you to enjoy yourselves but none of that dyke stuff, all right, my beauties? and he put half a bottle of whiskey, a roll of dollars, and what remained of the coke on the table. Mireya came to the couch and we talked. How is he in bed? I asked. She poured herself some whiskey in a cup of coffee and lit a cigar. What he likes is for me to jerk him off from behind; he takes tons of Viagra but it doesn’t work for him; in the year and a bit that we’ve been together he’s only stuck it in me about ten times, can you believe that? A girl always misses that. But if he finds out I told you he’ll shoot both of us.
Víctor was married with three children. He wasn’t a bad person, but I hated him. He told me he could share the stresses of his work with me, but he never talked to his wife about the atrocities he committed, out of respect for her. Son of a bitch. One night he arrived covered in blood. They had nabbed some dealers in a house in Modelia, young guys, on a tip-off from a former paramilitary who’d turned himself in. They found twenty kilos, three submachine guns, ten pistols, and a bag with two hundred thousand dollars. Piedrahita was high on coke and started slapping one of the guys around, asking him about the stash with the big money, where was it? He’d been told there was a lot more. Víctor tried to calm him down. That’s enough, boss, let’s hand some of it in and we’re done, but Piedrahita went crazy and shot the dealer in the head, and then there was nothing else they could do, he had to shoot the others. There were five of them. Five young guys. Three Secret Service officers took them down to a garage. Víctor was shaking and Piedrahita said to him: let’s load them in the van. He went to speak on the telephone and came back saying, nothing happened here, I’m going to send them to a buddy in the Lanceros battalion, they need them more than we do, and he turned and said to Yesid, the youngest officer, son, take these guys to Commander Suárez, I already talked to him and he’s waiting for them, but be quick about it, and then call me, son, this is just between ourselves, okay?