President Pastrana, in spite of his good intentions, would not be able to advance in his quest for peace until he dealt unequivocably with the paramilitaries. And I warned that, should he do so, he ran the risk of dividing the armed forces because it was inexplicable how the paramilitaries could continue to act with the impunity they did. Before I had even submitted the article, I received a present: The Black Book of Communism, a well-known investigative report written by a team from the Paris-based National Scientific Research Center (CNRS), with a somewhat cryptic, handwritten dedication: “History has a special place reserved for those who write it and another for those who distort it.” Three days later, I got another message telling me the paramilitaries could not be “dismantled” as I had insisted they should be. But what could be done—and they were going to do it, the message said—was dismantle the “paraguerrilla,” which had done more harm to the country’s institutions than the guerrillas themselves. In its editorial, El Espectador responded to this: “The objective of the self-defense groups is to silence the voices that criticize them and achieve political recognition in order to gain access to the negotiating table.” The paramilitaries were quick to answer: “We have irrefutable proof that Mr. Molano is a member of the parasubversion, is not an enemy of the self-defense groups but of the nation, and is an intellectual sniper, prejudiced in his judgements and biased in his analysis.” They ended by saying: “Mr. Director, we would like to publicly reiterate our respect for free speech, criticism, and dissent.”
That same night, December 24, I decided to go into exile. The Spanish embassy in Colombia had offered me protection and the possibility of establishing myself in Spain. Although I’d thought about leaving the country since receiving the first threat, it’s difficult to know exactly what made up my mind for me. I felt the danger, although I’d done what I could to hide it, and knew that leaving would mean distancing myself from my children, my friends, and from all the other things a person accumulates and comes to love: a horse, a book, a pair of running shoes. The look in some of my friends’ eyes, however, told me that they, too, felt threatened when they were with me. And when, on seeing me again, one or another of them would say: “What? You’re still alive?” I knew that was that. I had nothing left inside me to respond to a new and offensive letter which arrived, this time unsigned: “The sooner they bury you the better. If you’re a communist, you’re a bandit and that’s the same as being a terrorist, you son-of-a-bitch. Wherever you are, the autodefensas will come for you.”
The next day, without saying goodbye to my children because I am a weak man, I boarded a plane to Spain. I took only a few shirts and some books with me because I didn’t want to put down roots anywhere far from my country. I never want to feel like a stranger here. In spite of all the pain it entails, exile has taught me to look the loneliness that is always with me straight in the eye and to possess no more than the clothes I am wearing so that, at any time or on any day, I’ll be free to return to Colombia. The bitter tastes of being far from home change and sometimes become almost bittersweet although there is an oppressive weight I drag along with me from street to street and from night to night. During the first days of my exile, I couldn’t help but think I was the same little boy who my parents left in the care of one of their lady friends one day, and who, for lunch, began to gobble down sausages so voraciously that it made me squeeze my legs together.
I arrived in Barcelona and found a dark apartment, depressing in the long, grey winter days. I went out only to buy the food I needed, returning to write, and, above all, to use the telephone. I lived forty-eight-hour days, twenty-four in Colombia and twenty-four in Spain. With the first flowers on the cherry trees, life returned to Barceloneta, my barrio, and one morning at dawn, the silence was broken by a cacophony of trumpets and drums. That night everyone dressed in costumes—as fish, tigers, clowns, vampires—and went to the Plaza San Miguel where there was a vacaloca and fireworks. I wasn’t in the mood for parties, though, and went instead to the ocean, the cold ocean—a contradiction I will never get used to—and let it carry me away as the rivers used to do when I was a boy.
The routes you plan out and follow each day in exile are narrow ones. You have the same fear of the abyss the ancient sailors had, a fear that shuts you in and imposes an unbearable redundancy on your steps. I am sure it’s the same sensation colonos feel alone on the mountainside before they begin to dominate it, little by little, with their machetes as they clear the land to plant and, above all, gain a view of the distance so they can see who is coming. Like the colonos, I began to “find myself” and make peace with the walls of my apartment, with the street corners of my barrio, and the streets of Barcelona, until I realized they had never declared war on me.
Then, one afternoon, I felt the urge to eat bananas—even if they weren’t from Urabá—and to buy African yucca and some granadillas from Urrao that I’d seen in a store selling exotic products. I’ve never been very patriotic, at least not like Señor Caro, who for having spent all his time translating Virgila never saw the Magdalena River, but now, from afar, I must confess that I began to find even bambucos appealing. I missed my friends and my travels across the cordilleras and the llanos. I even began to miss my enemies. You have to learn to distinguish between the country, as land and as home, and the political system that has it in the state it is. After repeated efforts to strike up a conversation, sometimes with no answer at all, the barber from the corner and the baker began to talk to me. It was difficult for us to understand each other. To many people, Colombians speak an old-fashioned Spanish, which makes it difficult to guess where we learned it. But the Spaniards, the fine Spanish people, are cheerful, they drink clean wine, take siestas, and haven’t forgotten the gunpowder taste of the lentils they were forced to eat during the terrible Spanish civil war.
Come what may, I will not repeat the history of the Spanish republicans or the Chileans and Argentinians who left saying they’d be back in two weeks and returned—those of them who did return—thirty years later. Washing my underwear in the sink and watching the specks of dust that inhabit old cities float through the sunlit air of my apartment, I have composed love poems in my head that I’ll never write down; passionate discourses against paramilitary crimes and their complicity with the army and police—which I will publish someday; and long and tedious essays with French sociologists and their épigones about the significance of civil society. I won’t say I have rethought the country. But I have come to understand its importance, its very minimal importance, to people in these cold latitudes. To Europeans, for example, La Virgen de los Sicarios, that marvelous movie of that marvelous book, is considered as farfetched and unbelievable, although not nearly as amusing, as Charlie’s Angels. And there is only a small chance that anything thoughtful about Colombia, other than the usual drivel about blood and coca, will be published in the newspapers in Spain, especially when so much space is given to the pop singer Rocio Jurado’s stupid love affair with her bullfighter husband who isn’t even a bullfighter anymore.
Writing about our realities from here is difficult. It means not only daring to acknowledge them—a daily and always painful exercise—but also doing it without living and breathing them. When I read and re-read what I write, it seems dry and full of those traps the magic of words makes it so easy to fall into. But writing about the realities of Europe is even more difficult because almost none of them resonate in the hell that our country has become. How important can Spain’s Hydrological Plan be to me when I know fifty campesinos were killed with machetes by paramilitaries in Chengue? I read the debates about the plan and it’s like they’re talking about some micro-organic fossils that were found a hundred years ago on a meteorite that fell from Mars. Of course, there is news that affects us—the mad cows, the reemergence of racism, and even the future of Barca (the Barcelona soccer team)—but the only news that really means anything to me is that which touches on the solution to our war.
I am convinced that a negotiated solution to the country’s armed conflict—even in the midst of all its ills—is a life or death proposition for me because, apart from meting out justice to people who’ve always been excluded, it is my only hope of going back to Colombia and being able to live without all those shields, which are as hostile as they are useless. It’s my only chance of once again being able to walk along remote country paths without having to look constantly over my shoulder, and, most of all, my only chance of being able to see my grandson grow up. I will never get used