Antonio Ungar
Translated from the Spanish by Hannah Kauders
from Eva and the Beasts
The bullet struck her just below the collarbone, but Eva didn’t feel any pain. She only heard tearing flesh, the sound of her body collapsing. She looked at her shoulder and noticed nothing until her chest and back grew wet. She thought it might be the water in the bottom of the canoe, but it was too hot. She managed to lift her head a few inches, just enough, and the pain hit her the moment she saw the blood. It was unlike any pain she’d felt before: too strong for screaming, too strong for tears, it froze her and threatened to suffocate her. Almost as if she weren’t even there, as if the pain had expelled her from her own body, she found herself wondering if the bullet had pierced her heart or punctured an artery. Maybe, she thought, this is how it all ends. Maybe this was her death: lying in a puddle of blood in the bottom of a canoe, adrift in the remotest reaches of the Orinoco jungle. Then, just before she lost consciousness, a sweet calm washed over her as she remembered the breezy high of her first heroin trip. She laughed aloud. Her first heroin trip. Hearing herself laugh made her laugh even harder. And then, she let herself go.
No one in Puerto Inírida knew his first name. He went by Ochoa, he was fat, and he’d declared himself ambassador of the gold dredges on the Atabato, Inírida, and Guainía rivers. One Thursday afternoon, under the last drops of a merciless downpour, he appeared, panting and limping, on the steps of the clinic. His plan from the start had been to feign a vague but all-encompassing sort of malaise, which sounded similar to a real illness that existed in the tropics, though in truth all he had was a desperate, vertiginous, unprecedented need to make the acquaintance of a woman. A particular living woman who was, at that very moment, breathing within the four walls of the clinic.
The nurse, Eva—also known as Vale, Titi, or Ti—had arrived in Puerto Inírida nine months earlier. She hadn’t met any men since, nor had she made friends. She went straight from work to the little bungalow she rented near the port, which had only a kitchen, a bathroom, and a hammock. She didn’t go out except to buy necessities, and she used her only time off to go every Saturday, at the same time each week, to Caney, the only bar in town. There she could be seen dancing alone, almost floating, high above what Ochoa perceived as the cruelty of married women and the naivety of single ones.
She had a kind of grit Ochoa had never before seen in a prim and proper city woman. And yet, she appeared to have committed herself fully to the inescapability of her destiny, and to have done so with a kind of heroism so uncommon Ochoa found it touching. She seemed utterly poised to die of grief over her past life and to disappear, with neither shame nor glory, into the farthest corner of that damp, dark jungle.
The first thing Ochoa did was fake malaria fevers, just so he could see her up close and in private. She seemed much prettier than she had in the bar. She moved about with the steadiness of a well-trained nurse, devoted to her work with the self-seriousness of a little girl playing an important game. So deeply moved was Ochoa that, after just ten minutes, as he balanced on the scale, he suddenly confessed. He wasn’t actually sick, nothing at all was the matter with him, he’d just made up the fever so he could talk to her.
She looked him over with a scornful smile that reminded Ochoa who he was: a fat old fifty-something, boring, desperate, and alone. But he wouldn’t let himself be intimidated. He told Eva he’d spent every Saturday night for two months drinking at Caney, dreaming of asking her to dance. But, alas, he’d never had the guts. He’d only lied about being sick because he wanted to meet her. He asked her out for dinner and dancing that night in the port’s only restaurant, which was typically reserved for bureaucrats and marina members.
She answered immediately. She warned him she was a nurse, not an idiot or a whore, and unless he actually got sick, he shouldn’t come looking for her again. Of course Ochoa did exactly the opposite. Their first interaction taught him he’d only win her over if he could make her laugh, or if he could use his inordinate persistence to inspire her pity. And so, three times a week for seven weeks, he waited for her at seven sharp in front of the clinic. Each time, he cried out the words of a love-drunk teenager, the kind you hear in the worst kind of telenovela (and which matched neither his appearance nor his trade): he’d been trying all week to come down with something, but the only sickness he had was lovesickness, and if he couldn’t see Eva, it wasn’t worth living even until the end of the day.
Ochoa, otherwise known as El Gordo, was loved and feared in equal parts, though everyone in Puerto Inírida and every other port in the Southeast knew that his business’ best asset—the immense Guaviare River—didn’t belong to his bosses, but rather to a paramilitary named Víctor Carriazo. Before Carriazo, who was nicknamed El Minero after the miner bird, took over a fifth of the cattle land in the Eastern Plains—along with the cocaine trade in the foothills of the eastern Andes, the arms trade, and taxation of oil companies—he had been the boss of the highly prosperous emerald mines on the high plateau.
The gold dredges were the spoils of Carriazo’s most recent conquest. He oversaw them with the same cunning and iron fist he’d used to gain control of everything else. He had twelve dredges on the Guaviare River—only the very best ones, of course—and the remaining thirteen had other owners. The dredges, used to extract gold from small tributaries and quiet streams deep in the jungle, belonged to whomever felt prepared to risk everything for negligible profits. They were operated by young miners with nothing to lose, who’d been lured into the jungle with the promise of food and nothing more.
El Gordo didn’t work for Carriazo but for two brothers from the Caribbean nicknamed Los Lindos. The brothers silently oversaw gas smuggling over the eastern border, extortions of truck drivers in the north and east, large gold dredges in the Darién Gap, and smaller dredges in the Inírida River. Occasionally they invested in major shipments of cocaine to Mexico by way of the Pacific. Los Lindos were as crafty as El Minero and had an army almost as large, though it was split into smaller units and scattered across the south and east of Colombia.
El Gordo was born in one of the very few peaceful villages in the Central Andes and had worked for Los Lindos all his life. He fled an abusive father at thirteen and was carried by his thirst for adventure all the way to the Eastern Plains, where he worked his way up from the bottom rung, beginning as a lowly assistant to gangs in charge of roughing up truck drivers. Thanks to his charisma, his taste for danger, and his charm, he was soon promoted to foreman of oil dredges in Chocó, then logistics coordinator of gasoline heists on the eastern border.
Like all who make it in the underground economy, Los Lindos had a keen territorial sensibility. They never dared cross El Minero or enter areas controlled by guerillas. They would always hand over land when paramilitary troops demanded it, and they paid soldiers and police whatever they wanted. They avoided the most powerful mafiosos, and their only involvement in drug trafficking was the occasional and always anonymous investment, through a front man, in shipments that were particularly profitable and prudent.
Buying off the necessary politicians, Los Lindos built a well-contained and extremely low-profile criminal dynasty that remained undiscovered by the press. They were known only for their victims and remained cleverly hidden in all the nooks and crannies the state couldn’t reach. As a reward for his survival instinct and how impeccably he handled gasoline heists, Ochoa was promoted to overseer of mining operations in the three most profitable rivers in the Orinoco basin, just fifteen years after he started working for Los Lindos. On top of his already high salary, he started to get generous bonuses whenever production exceeded expectations.
During the eighth week, when Ochoa was about to abandon his wooing once and for all, he decided to tell Eva that, unless she agreed to go out with him, he’d have no choice but to stab himself. He could discern the trace of a smile on her face and decided to make good on his word. The following Monday, at six in the morning, with the same ease and purpose with which he did absolutely everything, he proceeded to drive a small knife into his thigh. Thanks to the trials and tribulations of warfare, he was well-versed in human anatomy and managed to avoid damaging any tendons or ligaments, and so the knife stayed lodged in his leg, its handle protruding from the bloody wound. To complete the look, he’d already put on the shorts he wore as pajamas, and out he went: shorts, pistol at his hip, belly out, and the same sly, rabbitlike smile as always, despite the pain and the limp.
More serious and more irritated than ever, Eva had no choice but to lay him down on a gurney, take his revolver and pull out the knife while he lay cackling in agony, still hoping to catch her eye. That night, he made his intentions known and, finally, he forced her hand. Either she’d have dinner and go dancing with him on Friday, or next he’d stab himself in the neck, and you could kiss goodbye to the greatest man in the Orinoco jungle. She didn’t laugh or pause what she was doing, and she certainly didn’t look him in the eye. But she did respond, almost as if carrying out a legal transaction, that she accepted, but only because her duty as a nurse bound her to protect all human life, even if the life in question was that of a crazy gordo.
Her comment was a joke, of course. The serious joke of a woman who had endured far too much pain for someone so young, but a joke nonetheless. Ochoa left the clinic beaming, only to return five minutes later with an enormous bouquet of the only flowers in the Orinoco, rare Inírida wildflowers, red like burning coals.
The next Friday at seven, Ochoa picked Eva up from her bungalow. He asked about her daughter, Abril, and with a nurse’s circumspection, Eva told him it was none of his business, though she then responded as if it were: Abril was asleep, Abril was old enough to stay home alone, the woman next door was a friend. And they headed out, El Gordo donning his best dress shirt and trousers, Eva in jeans and a faded t-shirt. Her choice of clothing seemed to convey that she didn’t take any of it seriously, she was only going out with him to spare herself yet another wounded body in the emergency room. In Ochoa’s eyes, Eva was the most beautiful woman in the world, and so she had no need for expensive clothes, not then, not ever. When he told her this, all she gave him in return was a scornful little smile.
He took this as a good sign. As they walked to Caney, instead of waiting to get to know her better or until they were drunk, Ochoa broke a long silence to tell her what he thought of his existence. Life isn’t easy for anyone, Eva, but it’s even worse in my line of work. A drunk guerilla macheted by best friend to death. My most loyal employees were tortured and shot by paramilitaries in a village plaza while their families watched. They were just a couple of kids. The only wife I’ve ever had was raped and thrown alive into the Vichada River. We never found out who did it or why. Never showing your face is the easy way out, the way of cowards.
After delivering this atrocious sentence with no context whatsoever, Ochoa made himself a bet as the lights of Caney began to illuminate their faces: If I can’t convince her to come out of her shell in a month, I’m leaving this town once and for all.
The seduction lasted exactly the month Ochoa had projected. In the final five days, he felt certain he’d lost. Eva’s willpower—the quality he most admired in her—seemed intent on being her ruin, and so on the last day, in the shower, as he got ready to go dancing, he asked himself if he’d really have it in him to let her get away, the resolve never to see her again.
When he realized, applying his cologne and straightening the neck of his only good shirt, that he was truly frightened for the first time in his life, he understood he hadn’t only failed to convince Eva to open herself up to the world and choose to live. In the process of trying to save her, he had also fallen in love. And now, as he looked in the mirror, he couldn’t even laugh anymore (at himself, at Eva’s tragic determination, at his own telenovela-style infatuation).
As he walked to Caney imagining Eva—skinny, sweaty, somewhat drunk at the usual table—he suddenly understood he could no longer escape. What had once seemed a challenge befitting of a woman like her had morphed into a trap from which he could no longer escape unscathed.
When El Gordo arrived at Caney, he sat down alone at a table and ordered a bottle of white rum. Half an hour later, he’d rejected invitations to join three other tables, confronted the mischievous gazes of curious onlookers, and set several deadlines by which he vowed, and then failed, to leave. Eva was nowhere to be found. At eleven, a group of miners arrived who had recently disembarked from their boats. They weren’t with Los Lindos. Their loud, grubby mass took over three tables, from which they watched all the other drunks with a mix of hatred and curiosity.
The boys had been drinking under Caney’s massive palm roof and listening to the miners’ stories for half an hour when the girls started arriving. The boys wanted to go to bed with them, no matter which, no matter how. Like them, the girls were fifteen or sixteen and also virgins, and therefore unattainable, but they were the only available bodies, and the boys were convinced that by the end of the year, they’d know what it was like to be inside a woman.
The girls—always serious, always silent—knew they boys wanted them, as did all men in town of mating age. In Puerto Inírida, as in all of the South (not to mention in mines in the Andes, mobsters’ kitchens, guerillas’ tents, paramilitary camps, the outskirts of barracks, and settlers’ compounds), everywhere but a few blind neighborhoods in the cities, a woman was of age when she was old enough to reproduce.
The girls, these Puerto Inírida girls who seemed so much like seasoned older women, were not easy. They were growing up thousands of kilometers from civilization, confronting boredom, their families, the jungle—every imaginable predator—and they were convinced, though of course it was seldom true, that they could defend themselves without help.
By midnight, the boys were getting sloppy. The one who seemed youngest asked the miners to tell more of their tales, to describe everything, all the while standing a little too close to their faces and their knives. These boys, emboldened as they were by drink, had just enough discipline not to blurt it out: the miners should quit lying, everyone knew working on a gold dredge was the worst job in the whole world, it was like scooping shit out of the bottom of a well. They should just admit it: they’d been stuck deep in the jungle for four months, working twelve hour shifts underwater, their skin peeling off in shreds, breathing through a tube in the darkness, being eaten alive by parasites and deafened by the motors that spewed mud all day and night. They should fess up, if they were so talkative: now, after their four-month shift, they’d receive a small fortune, sure, but only as the prize for having survived where others had perished. They should admit it, if they even knew, that the owners of the mines—the same guys who ferried them in motor boats around the river’s most treacherous curves and who handed them the wad of cash and the ten grams of gold when the work was done—were the same people who owned the only three pool halls and the grocery stores where the cash would be spent, down to the very last penny (until there was nothing left to spend, until the miners were so desperate, they had no choice but to return to the living hell that was work on the dredges).
Despite the drunks and the sound of the vallenato blasting in the pavilion, everyone was calm by the time Eva arrived. The boys had paid for their drinks and made it to midnight without any fights, the miners hadn’t attacked anyone, and the prize arrived in the form of Eva Díaz, practically floating above the cement staircase.
As always, she danced alone for a while before sitting down at El Gordo’s table. Then they spent almost half an hour in silence, looking at the students and the boatmen and the miners dancing with their little partners. And drinking. First, half a bottle of rum, then another half and a few beers.
By then, El Gordo was in the throes of drunkenness, considering whether he should go to bed or walk Eva to her door, on this night that might very well be their last one together, when suddenly he felt her hand, which was light as a bird and miniscule, perched atop his own. They danced. To the song that was playing, and then another. And another after that. First stumbling from their drunkenness, then gazing into each other’s eyes. After the third song, Eva returned to their table without letting go of his hand, slipped the right number of bills under the ashtray, and led him to the steps of the port.
She sat and waited for him to do the same. Then she placed the lightest of hands at the nape of his neck, pulled him toward her as though she were the fifty-year-old man and he the sad young girl, and kissed him slowly. Perplexed and numbed by the alcohol, he could only hold still, open his mouth a little, and let her. After the kiss, which was long and very sweet, she released him, turned her head toward the black waters of the river, and spoke the words without looking at him.
They would be together. Her nursing contract was up in six months. If she hadn’t fallen in love with him by then, she’d take her daughter and leave the jungle for the mountains or the Caribbean or the Pacific. If the opposite occurred, they would live together. It was too soon to say what would happen after that. And so she fell silent and they sat, motionless, gazing out at the moonless sky, the river, and the black silhouette of the jungle without touching, without opening their mouths, knowing the shared silence was sealing the agreement, and this was good.
What they didn’t yet know (and would know soon, but when it was already too late) was that their destiny depended on people they’d never met: on the marksmanship of a paramilitary, a magnanimous governor, a child who dreamed of becoming a mobster, a pimp disguised as a kind-hearted grandma. Nor did they know that, much to their misfortune, the only thing standing between them and death was a murmur, the worst of all murmurs, that rumbled in the jungle’s shadows, threatening to leap out and tear to pieces all the fragile rules of reality as they knew it.
This is an excerpt from a novel, which is based on real events that took place in Puerto Inírida, Colombia, from November 17–21, 1999.